Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
As he was doing.
He said, ‘So, you see, there is no proof of the pregnancy, and everything points to it being untrue. What astonishes me is not that you believe it, but how and when you decided to tell me. That, from your point of view, was a mastercard – the last, it might be. So why play it? Why throw it away?’
‘I spoiled your Play for you,’ she said.
‘A moment’s gratification, for that price?’
‘I don’t know.’ She affected to ponder. ‘I deserve some amusement, don’t you think? And I did have a reason. I should prefer your whole
attention, Nicholas. The quest for beatification is all very well, but first of all you have to clear me from your way.’
‘I am quite content to have you where you are,’ Nicholas said. ‘In my house, with our excellent child. If you impede me, I shall tell you.’
She gazed at him. She said, ‘You really think, don’t you, that you are omnipotent? There is no proof, you say. Did you ask me? No, you assumed it. So why not ask me now?’
His throat had dried. He took his time, and said, ‘I am asking you.’
She smiled. Her hair, wheat-coloured, strayed over her cheek and her skin was polished like ivory. She said, ‘Then here is my gift to you. You spoke of Abul the physician. He nursed my sister, with Diniz to help him. He could not keep the complications of her condition from Diniz, young as he was. Diniz knew she was bearing your child. He was forbidden to tell you.’
‘But he told you?’ Nicholas said. The boy Diniz, now a grown man. The hesitations, the compassionate gaze, the unexpected tenderness now and then.
It was true. And Diniz had known.
She was hesitating. ‘Ask Diniz,’ she said at last.
He said, ‘Perhaps I can guess, without asking. Diniz told you what he didn’t tell anyone else – not me, not Tilde, not even Tobie or Godscalc. He told you that Katelina was pregnant, but that she insisted I should never be told. And if that is not a lie, at least it confirms that she wanted to spare me; that there was nothing but affection between us. She died smiling, Gelis. She chose to come to me; she chose later to do what she did. I would have stopped her from going to Cyprus. But she didn’t give me the chance.’
He could see her breathing, long and slow, with a shudder. She spoke abruptly. ‘So you were the love of her life, and she died for you. Is this, then, how you take the news, with your damned reasoned arguments?
She died for you!
Isn’t she worth a pang, a single sign that you cared? Why show nothing for her, when you can make thousands weep over a play-show with tinsel and dummies?’
‘Because you are here,’ Nicholas said.
‘Without which you would be rocked by contrition?’
‘Without which I might have the memory that she meant me to have. Of an idyll. Of an idyll now spoiled, as you spoiled the Play of the Nativity.’
‘Was
it: an idyll?’ she said.
‘Under a waterfall. You remember. I talked in my fever, and you memorised every word. Katelina was frightened of butterflies. And one of my other friends – one of my wives, at the time – had upset
her. It was the least I could do, to console her. Really,’ said Nicholas, ‘the butterfly episode was truly quite charming. She was wearing –’
‘No,’ Gelis said.
‘That is, she was fully clothed when I saw her first. Then –’
‘No,’ Gelis repeated.
‘But you wanted to know,’ Nicholas said. ‘When I came in, you begged me to tell you. Exactly how did she excel? Be explicit, you said. Why not show me?’
‘You never stop,’ she said. ‘You never know when to stop. Sometimes you fill me with horror.’
‘Good,’ he said.
Outside the room a child shouted, and the voice of Mistress Clémence could be heard, and the cackle of Pasque. Someone knocked on the door.
Nicholas rose. After a moment, Gelis stood also. She said, ‘You are taking Jordan to Bel. With Clémence? Or not?’
‘With, I think,’ Nicholas said. ‘I shan’t keep him too long. I am glad we talked.’
‘Are you?’ she said. ‘We must do it again. And meantime, which house are you planning to live in?’
He showed his surprise. ‘Where else but here? Unless you don’t want me?’
‘Never that,’ Gelis said.
The house of Jordan de Ribérac was quite close: between the top of the High Street and the Castle itself. To reach it, Nicholas had to traverse the busiest width of the road, including the graveyard and King’s park of the church of St Giles, and the houses of well-doing burgesses, all of whom knew Nicol de Fleury, and most of whom were inclined to fall into step with him as he passed. Mistress Clémence held the boy by the hand, and saw that he responded politely to all the introductions, without which he would have paid a great deal more attention to the dogs and the pigs and the gulls.
Nicholas conversed smiling with everyone, one hand to his hat, his heavy cloak swirled by the wind. Once before he had come to meet Bel of Cuthilgurdy at this house, his thoughts chaotic as now. Then, he had known he was going to meet his wife’s lover, and to see for the first time his unacknowledged son Henry, the handsome, spoiled child of Simon’s wife Katelina. Now, a greater irony, he was deliberately presenting to Bel his undoubted son by Gelis, Katelina’s young sister.
There was no danger that Henry would be here; the two children, half-brothers and cousins at once, would never meet, if he could help
it. And even if they did, they would appear less alike than most cousins were: Henry tall and blue-eyed and fair at eleven; Jordan brown-haired and chubby at three, with two remarkable dimples to Henry’s one.
Two sons. Now he knew there might have been three. But what he had just learned he had to obliterate from his mind, together with all emotion. He remembered talking of bastards to Gelis.
You may have made a better start than you know
, she had remarked. She had nearly told him after the ball-game, but had waited. Despite what he had said, Gelis played her cards well.
He conducted Mistress Clémence to the door. He had informed her about the vicomte de Ribérac who owned a castle in Scotland and enjoyed an estate and high office in France. He had explained that the vicomte’s Kilmirren was not far from his own place of Beltrees. He had further explained that Mistress Bel, the widowed lady within, had been a friend of de Ribérac’s family, and had travelled to Africa with M. de Fleury himself and his wife. Nicholas said, ‘She would have made a better man of young Henry than his father and grandfather have done. She is a good person to turn to in trouble, even though her tongue can be sharp.’
‘I shall remember,’ said Mistress Clémence, whose linen headgear nothing ever dared disarrange. She glanced at the child. ‘I dare say she knows all about parrots, as well.’
‘There is very little about parrots she does not know,’ said Nicholas seriously, and knocked.
He had sent young Robin to say he was coming. Belatedly he had reviewed his choice of that particular messenger, and cursed himself quietly. There was a stage between obsession and idiocy. As an antidote, he had chosen to bring Mistress Clémence along with the child. An upper servant from Kilmirren opened the door, and they were shown into Bel’s chamber.
She looked the same at just over fifty as she had when they had quarrelled more than two years before at Kilmirren. He had bought Lucia’s land, and Bel had professed to think that she, too, was homeless. She had kept her house. It had been a way of warning him, he thought, that he could not necessarily count on her. She needn’t have troubled. He saw, amused, the two women exchange stares as he introduced them: Mistress Clémence upright, composed; and Bel blunt-featured and squat, with her grey hair bundled up in a napkin. Next, Bel lifted her eyes and ran them over Nicholas, much as his armourer did. Then she looked at the child. ‘Eh,’ she said. ‘Eh, the wee man.’
Nicholas said, ‘He understands a little Scots.’ Mistress Clémence
said nothing at all but, drawing off Jordan’s great hat, flicked his hair and crossed her wrists, the hat dangling.
‘Never tell me!’ said Bel of Cuthilgurdy, laying a hand to her lips. She took it away. ‘And French as well? They tell me the bairn can speak French?’
Mistress Clémence looked surprised and then brushed the child’s ear with one finger.
‘Madame demande …’
The child interrupted, smiling with confidence at the old lady.
‘Oui, madame
,’ he said. ‘Aye, mistress. God strake him, he’s near chowed aff ma prick.’
His eyes sparkled with triumph. Bel flung back her head with a shriek. She was laughing. Mistress Clémence said, ‘Forgive him. I am afraid …’
‘I speak Scots,’ Jordan said.
‘And you have a parrot,’ said Bel. She spoke in French.
‘Un méchant, oui. ’Suis alloui,’
continued the linguist, with the same unalloyed confidence.
‘Jordan!’ said Mistress Clémence.
‘Oh, never heed, never heed!’ said their hostess, switching tongues. ‘Weans and wames are near the same word, with guid reason. And if ye canna understand that, the lad’s father will tell ye. Is he allowed a piece of marchpane?’
‘Me?’ said Nicholas.
‘You? It would turn black on your tongue. I was about to ask Mistress Clémence if she would like to take the wee man to the parlour. There’s something there for him to see.’
‘Quoi? Quoi done?’
said Jordan. His hair curled like a terrier’s round his neck, and his cheeks had turned crimson with pleasure.
‘Tiens! Tiens! Comme c’est gars bachique! Va-t-en, tu l’ verras,’
said Bel. The child ran off with his nurse, and she watched him. The door closed. She said, ‘I’ve fair amazed ye. How d’you think I kept an eye on young Henry there, travelling to Ribérac? What tongue d’ye think I spoke, living in Lagos? What tongue do you ken that I dinna ken?’ She turned back. Her eyes were still brilliant.
‘You can’t swear in Greek,’ Nicholas said.
‘I can so,’ she said. ‘From the same source. And if I had the beak, I’d take a lesson or two in emasculation forbye. D’ye want this child?’
‘I took a lot of trouble to get him,’ Nicholas said. He sat down.
‘I heard,’ she said. ‘Show me your hand.’
It puzzled him for a moment; then he remembered Dr Andreas. He held out his right hand, thumb and forefinger uppermost, his eyebrows raised. There was nothing to see. He had watched Gelis glance at it also. ‘They told me you were divining,’ Bel said.
‘It was easy this time,’ he said. And keeping his eyes on her face: ‘Of course I want him. I want him to live with his parents. I brought Gelis back.’
‘Henry lived with his parents,’ Bel said. ‘And none could be prouder than Simon. So what spoiled Henry, and how will Jordan be different?’
He could display, when he liked, a masterly lack of involvement. ‘Jordan
is
different. Ask Gelis.’
Bel folded her arms, not an easy convolution and therefore all the more positive. She said, ‘Well, well. Was that what ye wanted to know? I havena spoken to Gelis since ye brought her to Scotland. I didna see her in Bruges: she’d left for the Holy Land with Anselm Adorne. I wasna in Venice. I spent time with her here, when she served the lady Mary afore you and she married. And I remember the pair of ye before that: never a kind word between ye in Africa, and never a sheet between you – or time for speech – when ye came back.’ She paused. ‘They say that lust burns itself out.’
‘You remember a lot,’ Nicholas said. ‘Do you remember that she slept with Simon, and tried to pass off Jordan as his?’
‘But you’ve forgiven her,’ the old woman said. ‘As you told me, you went and brought the lass back. Jordan is to grow up different from Henry, oh aye. Gelis has changed, oh aye aye. So have you, wha could deny it? That’s why wee Robin was sent me:
Here’s a nice, fresh little lad who admires the new Nicol de Fleury
. The de’il kens what harm you’ll dae him. And now Mistress Clémence de Coulanges is brought:
Here’s an upstanding, principled woman who would only work for an upstanding, principled man
. For shame! Ye’d mak God himself gnap on his thumbnail.’
‘What do you want?’ Nicholas said.
‘I thought I had it,’ she said. ‘I saw your Play.’
He did not immediately answer. ‘But?’ he said eventually.
She never avoided his eyes. Hers were round and clear; insignificant in colour; set on either side of a turnip of nose, in a shapeless face blanketed by a creamy, powdery skin with no lustre. From the paleness of her brows, she had once been fair.
She said, ‘I have no need to tell you. I hoped you’d leave Scotland.’
‘So that the vicomte and Simon may come back without risk?’
‘Without risk to whom? They willna keep off for ever,’ she said. ‘Take Gelis with you. Take Jordan.’
‘And abandon Beltrees?’ he said. ‘After all the gold you have squandered there on my behalf? I forgot to thank you for that.’
She didn’t answer. He said, ‘You know, I take it, who brought Jordan to me in Venice. Katelijne knows too.’
‘You were meant to stay clear of Scotland,’ she said. Her voice, which could grate, was low and curt.
‘I don’t always do what others want,’ Nicholas said. ‘It must be my upbringing. How sad. At least I shall spend the summers away. I have to be in Artois by June. But I am afraid I shall be back. And Gelis. And Jordan. Do you think they will approve of my Beltrees? Or your Beltrees, ought I to say?’
She thought, turning over his answer. Then she said, ‘You havena taken them there?’
‘I haven’t had time. But Oliver Semple has to go back in February. He could take them. And if you were at home, you could explain all its extravagant pleasures.’
‘You’re speiring at me to spend time with Gelis? Why?’
‘With Gelis and Jordan,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she repeated.
‘For Godscalc,’ he said.
She unfolded her arms. After a moment she got to her feet with deliberation and set the door open, after which she came back. He had risen. She said, ‘Gin ye were a wean, I wad strike ye for that. Nicholas, Nicholas … what path are ye set on? What would Godscalc feel but heartsick if he saw you? Is this all his agonising was worth? Or your own?’
He returned her gaze. His face, he knew, contained no trace of apology, or appeal, or indecision. In the distance, the child’s voice could be heard approaching. This time he did not trouble to smile. ‘Entertain her at Beltrees,’ he said. ‘Or you might regret it one day.’