Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
‘But,’ he said, ‘Bruges is not the only market in Flanders. May I help you with that?’
Her fingers fell away from her gown as he settled it. He smoothed her sleeves and stood back to admire them. He said, ‘The van Borselens have very good taste. It was really quite a coup to marry into them … Did I say I was selling in Bruges? Did I say indeed that our house would be in Bruges? Perhaps you didn’t know that I had a bureau in Antwerp?’
‘No,’ she said. She backed and sat on a cushioned chest, frowning.
‘And a small staff, and a warehouse, and a bodyguard. I arranged to deliver my stockfish to Antwerp. The buyers are waiting. Ships will move them to France and to Spain, and will come back with wine and salt, some of it mine. And meantime, the
Merrybuttocks
will return, to be transformed into
The Lion.’
He saw her seeking wildly for the flaw. She said, ‘He couldn’t pay for it. The King couldn’t pay for it now.’
‘So he has just told me,’ he said.
‘And so?’
Watching her, he was sorry, but not greatly sorry. She knew him well. She already understood, without knowing how, that he had eluded her. He could read her, as she could read him. He said, ‘He paid me in lands and a title. Beltrees is a barony.’
There was a long silence. She said, ‘From when?’
‘There will be a ceremony. You will take part. So will Jordan.’
She said, ‘Bel said you would do that.’
‘Bel might well guess. She dissipated all my liquid assets. Isn’t it lucky,’ Nicholas said, ‘that you didn’t divorce me? Now look what has happened.’
She stood up. ‘I won’t stop,’ she said.
‘Of course you won’t,’ Nicholas said. ‘That is why I came back.’
The safe, mediocre span in the middle, which didn’t tear you to pieces. Neither of them would stop, however minor the tussle might seem on some scales. At the same time, even though it was minor, he felt the wrench, as he always did, when he left.
The ceremony he had spoken of took place before the end of the month, on the day that his new ship from Danzig sailed into Leith roads. She was the size and weight of the
Unicorn
and the
Pruss Maiden
and more modern than either. Her name, as Jordan spelled out, was the
Fleury
.
Her owner boarded her bearing a different name: Nicholas de Fleury, Lord Beltrees. The formal ceremony of investiture at the Abbey merged, later, into the informal ceremony at sea of christening and departure. John had the honour of taking her out as her first master, and Moriz sailed as her chaplain. They lost a tide, because the young royals could not be persuaded to leave.
In the end, they tumbled into the boats as the
Fleury
prepared to raise sail. Willie Roger lingered behind.
Nicholas said, ‘I’m not taking you. I’ll be back in the autumn. For God’s sake, I’ll keep telling you all I hear about your Chapel Royal money and Coldingham.’
Roger said, ‘It isn’t that. I’ve talked to Moriz and John. You’re taking Robin.’
‘Well?’ Nicholas said. He was taking Robin, because he wouldn’t inflict on Robin the mortal wound of leaving him behind. He was taking Gelis and the child and his nurses. He did not need to concern himself with Kathi, for she had already left Scotland, and before that she had been ill, and under the jealous guardianship of the Prioress. Halfway through April, word had come that Sersanders had found a ship to take him from Bessastadir straight home to Bruges. A few days later, she had got herself a passage to Flanders, and the Priory had reluctantly released her. She had only been waiting to hear from her brother.
Willie Roger said, ‘You are all together. You’ll all be together in Flanders. It’s bad. You need to get rid of Iceland.’
‘What?’ Nicholas said.
‘Or you’ll let it blunt you, like Africa. I thought we’d write plays together,’ said Willie.
‘You did. Well, get in some better beer, and I might. What makes you think I don’t want to?’ said Nicholas. Luckily, Roger never knew when he was lying. He didn’t want music. He was plagued enough by the sounds in his head. Gunnar, chanting from inside his burial mound. The voice of Thorfinn on the wind:
a better sailor than any of us
. Old loyalties, old battles, old dreams.
He pushed Willie along to the steps. ‘Get off, or they’ll rescind all your sinecures. I’m not going to Flanders to mourn over Iceland. I’m going to fight for Duke Charles, and tell King Louis how lucky he is, and persuade Henne Memling he’s got a picture all wrong, and arrange a welcome for Julius.’
Gelis had heard him. ‘Julius is coming to Bruges?’
‘I hope so,’ said Nicholas. ‘Bringing with him the widowed Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck, part-owner of the vessel on which we now stand. Iceland is forgotten. Why should a man visit Iceland, unless to sift through the shades of the underworld, looking for his next incarnation?’
‘You’re drunk,’ Willie said.
‘I am. But not as drunk,’ Nicholas said, ‘as I’m going to be.’
Chapter 31
I
N THE FIRST
days of May, Margriet van der Banck, dame de Cortachy, loved and loving wife of Anselm Adorne, died in her home at the Hôtel Jerusalem, Bruges, in a chamber filled with her children. Her oldest son, Jan, summoned from Genoa, was by turns desolate and furious, blaming his lady mother for succumbing at all, and especially for being so thoughtless as to die before his arrival. Even the very grand funeral was already over, and the guests and kinsfolk departed, with the exception of the nuns, friends of his sisters, who were staying to look after the children and order the household; and Jan’s two Sersanders cousins with whom he had never seen eye to eye.
The house was stinking with incense. On the day of his arrival, he went to pay his respects in the crypt and found himself in the company of two weeping servants and someone from the Dry Tree praying in front of the altar. He entered, with some trepidation, upon his first meeting alone with his father, who seemed worn and pale; but the initial constraint melted before the warmth of the Baron’s welcome. They embraced each other, and Jan wept. Later, his father was ready to hear a little about Jan’s shameful treatment at the hands of the Curia, and the preposterous position he had been placed in,
vis à vis
the Bishop of St Andrews in Rome. He noticed after a while that his father’s attention was slackening and, breaking off, advised him kindly to rest.
It surprised Jan next day to find his father had left the house for the first time, it was said, for many weeks; and that he was remaining abroad, evidently with the intention of dining at the home of a friend. Dr Andreas was also elsewhere. Jan left his brothers and sisters and, changed into a rather fine gown, went to call on a few friends himself.
The town of Antwerp was flat. To Gelis van Borselen, brought up in the low lands of her name-country, it should have appeared reassuringly
familiar: a relief from the spiny ridges of Edinburgh, the funnelled views, the shrill winds. Instead, she found herself established in her new home with a reluctance which became apprehension, for it was only mid-May, and Nicholas was no longer consistently present. And soon, when he rejoined his army, he would be elsewhere for weeks at a time.
She had already endured his five-week absence in Iceland, but that was a single project, now finished. For half a year before that, their daily lives had been shared. She knew where he was, and she heard what he was doing. In some things, they had even acted together: in the ceremonial visits to Court; in the social life of the merchant community; in the making of the Play, which had seemed, at first, to offer such a manifest opportunity, and then had been revealed as the greatest threat, perhaps, she had yet faced.
While he was there, she could create her planning around him; when they were apart, his unpredictability baffled her. You would think, from the tales he freely told, that he had been perfectly candid about his voyage to Iceland. Only she noticed the lacunae: the parts which none of them ever discussed or explained. The girl Kathi, sometimes helpful, could not be reached. Archie had extracted what little he could from young Robin, but the boy had been reluctant and awkward. If there had been a dark side to that visit, a romantic young page was unlikely to know.
It fretted her, this impenetrable barrier. She was reminded of the swift, merry stream they all talked of, usefully busy, until suddenly the wholesome rock splits and the scalding marrow spurts forth. She was made anxious by any untoward influences – those of Africa, of Sinai, of the Play – that threatened to move Nicholas to another dimension; that had the power to replace logic with something more powerful. She did not want an emotional crisis of that sort again. Or not until she was ready.
Visitors came to the house. It was built of red brick, one of a row in a narrow street to the west of the Cathedral and not far from the river upon which Antwerp lay. It was smaller than the great house in Spangnaerts Street, but sufficient for herself and the child and the nurses and household attendants. There had been an agent, Jooris, occupying the upper floor, who had discreetly moved out to the riverside, where the counting-house and the packhouses were.
She knew why she had been settled here, because Nicholas had told her quite frankly: to avoid repeating the experience she had already had, living as an object of curiosity in the Bruges house run by Diniz and Tilde. She had brought that upon herself by her connection with Simon, and Nicholas showed little sympathy.
The other reason she understood even better. Simon’s heir Henry was now a page with her van Borselen cousins, living either in Bruges, or at their castle sixty miles north of Antwerp at Veere. And if the handsome Simon, at forty-seven, had cause to dislike her, she knew without doubt that this boy of eleven held her and her child in abhorrence. Mistress Clémence had been warned never to take Jordan to Bruges or to Veere, nor to allow him to be taken.
There was no harm, of course, in Wolfaert van Borselen and his wife calling on Gelis at Antwerp, provided Henry did not come with them. Indeed, they came sooner than she had expected to congratulate her on her new status. Nicholas, who was there at the time, received them solemnly, and the charming docility of Jordan transfixed them. Mistress Clémence, presented, described him as a sweet-natured child, and later found herself drawn into gracious conversation with the lady Charlotte de Bourbon, married for four years to Wolfaert, and now expecting her third. Pasque was presented.
Gelis, smiling continuously, found that she had caught her own husband’s eye, and freed it immediately, to quash any suggestion of conjugal conspiracy. She averted her gaze after that, aware now that his amused gaze seldom left her. For a moment it felt like last summer: herself a shadow, an echo, and Nicholas her invisible watcher. When their visitors left, and when, later, he himself departed to Bruges, Gelis even experienced some relief. She wished him well, cynically, of his business, and then felt a pang, for he was also going, of course, to condole with Anselm Adorne on his loss.
Nicholas had not been in Bruges for three years; not since another death, the death of his friend Father Godscalc. After that had come his work far afield: in the Tyrol and Egypt, Cyprus and Venice, Scotland and Ultima Thule. Throughout, he had never deliberately lost touch, save for the time of his disappearance with Jordan. Now, arriving at Bruges, he had called first at the Hôtel Jerusalem and found Adorne and his eldest son absent; and next at his own house in Spangnaerts Street from where, although pleased to embrace and admire his step-daughter Tilde and her baby, he had continued almost at once, to seek Diniz and all the élite of the town at a feast of the White Bear Society.
Nicholas de Fleury, burgher of Bruges, had long since been admitted to this, its most prestigious club, whose bulk shadowed the bridge of the great merchant quarter, and whose emblem, the
het beertje van der logie
, gazed from its niche towards the opening of Spangnaerts Street. A merchant prince and a baron himself, the head of the Banco di Niccolò had no difficulty entering here. Indeed, the moment he
sent in his message, young Diniz came bursting into the hall, to hug him and drag him into the banquet.
Adorne was present. It was the first thing Nicholas saw as he was welcomed into the chamber, where the songs had begun although half the food still remained on the table, and a willing place was being found as they crowded about him.
Adorne wore black and looked blanched; in his eyes was a record of a long and wretched vigil. The others fell back as he came forward. He said, ‘Nicholas? I have to congratulate you and thank you. You deserve the honour, and I am glad of it. My nephew will thank you in person. But I owe you more than I can say for what you did for Anselm and Katelijne in Iceland. Come, sit with me.’
‘That is generous of you,’ Nicholas said. ‘I came to speak to you: to say we have no words, Gelis and I, for your loss. It is mine, too. I shall never forget her.’
‘Thank you,’ Adorne said. ‘I should not be here, but Jan must leave for Rome again very soon, and I wished to present him here first. There he is.’
There he was. Unlike those who had jumped up to greet Nicholas – the famous faces of Gruuthuse and Metteneye, de Walle and Reyphin, Vasquez and Bonkle and Cant – the eldest son of Anselm Adorne had remained firmly seated, deep in talk with someone unknown bending over him. It was not unexpected. The last time they had met was in Venice, during Jan’s brutal teasing by Nerio, the young Greek beauty disguised as a girl. Unfortunately, the seat now offered Nicholas lay between Anselm Adorne and his son.
Sighing invisibly, Nicholas sat. Jan looked round. Before he could speak, the singing had started again. It was the custom, after a feast, to call on each guest to perform, and Nicholas de Fleury was known for his fiendish ability to reduce a room to wails of painful enjoyment. He was invited to entertain almost immediately and did so. He was a natural mimic, and it came easily. After that, others obliged, and he had time to eat and drink, and look round.