Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
They had. The crowd was too interested to do so, and she was glad to accept the demoiselle’s invitation to enter the town house of the Priory of Haddington. Master Archie came with them. The nuns, fussing, took off her wet cloak and went to fetch wine. She straightened her cap. Master Archie said, ‘You are a brave lady, Mistress Clémence. But you mustna walk out on your lane.’
‘Are we to be prisoners?’ said Mistress Clémence crossly. She had refused an escort. And Pasque was too scared to go out.
The girl Kathi said, ‘What do you mean?’ and the young man looked at her.
‘The lady of Beltrees and the bairn. They’re being secretly hounded by yon fool St Pol of Kilmirren. His fushionless brat ran into trouble in Zeeland, and Nicholas tanned him – Robin wrote me – instead of making it known to the law. And now Simon thinks he can make his wife and wean pay for it.’
‘Where is Lord Beltrees?’ said Kathi.
Mistress Clémence looked at her with approval. ‘He is coming. The Lady expected him here before now.’
‘The Lady doesna allow for evil and contrary winds,’ said the man. ‘It might be a good week or more before he comes. And until then, mistress, you should walk tentily.’
‘Archie,’ said the girl. He looked at her. They seemed to know each other very well. She said, ‘Don’t you think it will be a lot worse after Nicholas comes? If Simon wants to punish Gelis, he’ll want her husband to see it. I think men-at-arms aren’t enough. I think they need the best kind of protection. Don’t you have some of the Holyrood clergy living beside you?’
‘That’s so. All our land belongs to the Abbey.’
‘So they could put Gelis’s business discreetly before the lord Abbot?’
‘Archibald Crawford? Of course.’
‘All of it?’
‘He likely kens,’ Berecrofts said.
‘And he’s worldly-wise. And he owes us all something for the Nativity Play. Couldn’t he make it clear that, whatever Gelis has done, the Church has exonerated her? And couldn’t he suggest to the Countess of Arran and the King that she resumes her old post with the Princess Mary? She’d be safe, surely, at Haddington,’ the girl said. ‘They all would. Anyone who touched them after that would be really in trouble.’
Mistress Clémence’s admiration increased. She said, ‘May I say I think it an excellent idea. So long as one bears in mind that the behaviour of the family de St Pol cannot always be regarded as rational.’
The clear eyes regarded her, and then beamed. ‘So it ought to be quite interesting when the sieur de Fleury gets back,’ Kathi said.
They escorted her back when she had recovered. They found the household in an uproar: the garden had been discovered to be full of black rats and Jordan had barely been pulled indoors in time.
Within two days, they were all installed in the Cistercian Priory of Haddington.
It amused Simon de St Pol when he heard, returning home rather drunk from what had begun as a royal hunting-party. The whore was scared: good. Perhaps she didn’t know he had land in Dunbar.
He was about to send for his own private agent when Martin of the Vatachino was announced. But for the note he sent in, Simon wouldn’t have seen him. He had lost too many business deals through the sharp practices of the Vatachino, and so had the vicomte his father. They were unpleasant rivals. That they were equally vicious opponents of the Banco di Niccolò was the only point in their favour. It was the name of de Fleury which had leaped at him out of that note.
He did not propose to treat the fellow, however, as other than
popolo minuto
. He left him standing and asked him his business. When the man took off his cap, the straight red hair was extraordinarily thick and coarse; his face, despite his colouring, had a southern fleshiness, and his build was squat. He spoke French with a hint of Catalan in it.
The man said, ‘They tell me you are doing well, my lord. I came to congratulate you, and suggest how you might do even better.’
‘You are resigning from business?’ said Simon.
‘I could,’ said the other. ‘I have wealth enough. But the firm I represent has made a suggestion. The St Pol and the Vatachino and the Banco di Niccolò comprise three well-established companies, each with a modest share of the market. Would it not be even better if there were only two?’
‘I am listening,’ said Simon.
‘You are gracious. I am not – we are not sufficiently simple to imagine you would concede us the field. You will develop, you will flourish. Were you our only rivals, we should not object. As it is –’
‘I have an appointment,’ said Simon.
‘Forgive me. Of course. I shall be brief. As it is, we should be disposed to embark on a rather more unfriendly policy than heretofore, had an alternative not presented itself. You dislike Nicholas de Fleury.’
‘Who does not?’ Simon said.
‘But especially, you have embarked on a personal campaign against him and his wife and his son?’
‘Indeed?’ Simon said. ‘One wonders how such gossip becomes general.’
‘In which case,’ said the man, ‘would it offend you if I suggested that the Vatachino would be interested in joining you in this project? In lending you all our specialised assistance? Indeed, in performing whatever final acts you may have had in mind?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Simon, ‘you would care to sit down?’
The second week passed, and the third, and Nicholas did not come, while the storms stopped all news from the south. October began.
Reared in a convent, Mistress Clémence had no objection to the Cistercian life of the cloister. The Prioress was a lady of some authority, although the Rule was in many ways lax, as tended to occur in poor countries, where the nearest well-founded buildings had to serve not only as convents but as mints and meeting-halls and national guest-houses, and as nurseries and retirement homes for the
great. A well-run abbey or priory was little less than a city, with the swell and surge of the liturgical calendar married to the seasonal management of a great agricultural domain, its products, and its inhabitants.
There were sometimes more men than women in Haddington Priory, and the chambers resounded to secular music and laughter as often as they echoed with Lauds. It was, however, a good place for the young, at least below the onset of puberty. After that, it was an equally good place for concealing the results.
The child liked it almost too well; it required some application to maintain the standards of rearing to which Clémence subscribed. In many ways it was comparable to the conditions at Dean Castle the previous year. The Countess’s children were indulged, but Mistress Betha had sense, and Mistress Phemie was as gentle as ever, although a little withdrawn, and seemed to have relinquished her music. The young Sersanders girl, Katelijne, was often to be heard trying to tempt her to accompany her in some piece or other, but she only succeeded when Master Roger came to teach singing, when the whole Priory seemed to glitter into the air, like a birthing of fireflies. Even Jodi, thumb in mouth, had found his way to some of these sessions and Master Roger had allowed him to stay, sometimes setting him on his knee while he played and letting him tug at the strings.
But mostly, Jodi was directly cared for by herself, for the lady Gelis had to see to the needs of the Countess, helping with her correspondence and interviewing her tradesmen, and attending her, well escorted, when she went out. And as at Dean, the girl Kathi seldom visited Jordan, although Mistress Clémence saw her watching the child now and then. But then, Katelijne herself had other occupations. With the death of her aunt, the necessity of arranging a marriage seemed at last to have been officially enjoined on the Prioress.
Katelijne was eighteen years of age, lively, and possessed of good prospects, and it should not take long. The young men all seemed reasonably pleasant, the older ones even more so. It had been a mystery to Mistress Clémence that a niece of Anselm Adorne should have been so neglected. It led to misjudgements or worse, like the unfortunate voyage to Iceland. The girl was patently innocent, but it was time that such freedom was stopped.
The autumn weather was kind. The children played around the broom-park, the homesteads, the grange; ran to follow the fowler; pretended to assist with the cutting of peats; helped to count the Abbot of Melrose’s wedders; visited the swine; were shown how to beat the kirns in the dairy and peered wide-eyed into the eel-tank.
They were chased out of the brew-house and wished, but were not allowed, to carry ash and dung to the midden.
They were guarded night and day: nothing happened. It seemed either that the foolish man Simon had been outwitted, or that he was waiting for his real target, his audience. It made Mistress Clémence privately uneasy to notice the growing preoccupation of the lady Gelis, and of the girl Katelijne in particular, as October wore through, and still there was no word from the child’s father.
He had been going to the Loire. By now, Mistress Clémence knew him a little, although she did not trust him: she trusted few men. She knew at least enough to be sure that his care for the child Jodi was not superficial. He would go to Coulanges.
There he would find nothing that he was not already aware of, except perhaps the comeliness of the Cisse. There were fat cattle, too, by the Loire; the grain would be sheaved; the vines would be weeping with sweetness. Perhaps, like his son, he had been seduced by the joy of the season, and not by the occult.
She had heard it whispered that he possessed powers of divining, and had used them in the Tyrol and Scotland, but she had seen no such dark side in all the weeks he had spent on shipboard in that strange idyll with Jodi, and the mysteries of Hesdin had been mechanical. Master Nostradamus had left the Loire, she had heard, and Dr Andreas was here. Yet the lady Gelis, departing so suddenly, had seemed confident that her lord would somehow know and follow immediately. And then he had not come.
The news broke through, finally, at the end of October, but not to Haddington. It came to Simon in Edinburgh because his man, riding hard from Dunbar, pre-empted the arrival of a battered vessel struggling against wind and tide to reach Leith. And although he longed to proclaim what he knew, Simon had sense enough to keep quiet. The Priory was still uninformed the next day, when Willie Roger, tired of incense and discordant noises, led his class of young adults and children out into the sun for their music, and stayed to join in their games.
Jodi was there, and the Countess’s infants, although the Countess herself was at Court with her sister. There were also some of the choristers from the church of the Trinity, including a handsome man referred to by Roger as the Angel of the Annunciation, who also brought his two children. They had been given carriage from Edinburgh in the wagon-train of a merchant. The merchant had gone, but one of his wagons stood at the top of the field, full of the seed corn to be unloaded tomorrow.
The sun was bright, but the salt breeze was fresh. The little ones,
wrapped in shawls, had been marshalled by Master Roger into a circle and were jumping about, shrieking words to his whistle while the older children wove a pattern around them. Every now and then they fell down. It was when the whistle broke off that Mistress Clémence first heard the squeak of the wheels, and looked up.
The wain at the top of the short slope was moving. The incline was bumpy, and at first the cart seemed to be coming quite slowly, its solid wood wheels knocking against outcrops of stone. There were more of these lower down, but the descent also got steeper, so that the heavy sacks in the wagon started to jump and to topple, and then to hurl themselves out, and bound and roll down the decline towards the children. A wheel came off and shot into the air, while the cart itself careered springing onwards towards them. The children started to scream.
Clémence seized Jodi under one arm and Mary’s son under the other and ran. Roger laid hands on another two and did the same, pushing shrieking children before him. Clémence looked over her shoulder. A sack, bursting beside her, nearly knocked her off her feet and Jodi squealed in renewed anguish; the other child was rhythmically hooting, and her apron was soaked with his urine. She saw the wheel hit the ground and strike a young girl, bouncing over her. The cart crashed down where the circle had been and began to slow, its bags scattered about it. Another wheel juddered free and rolled off, and the carcass came to a halt.
There were three children lying still on the grass, and the screaming was thin and continuous, like the sound of gulls over a shoal. She let the two children down on the grass, and began to run back.
Roger was running before her. A tall man passed her, shouting. ‘John! Muriella!’
She said, ‘They are safe. They stayed in the garden.’
She was kneeling by the first silent heap when a man threw himself down and, thrusting her aside, began to talk to the child. She did not know all the fathers: she could sympathise, but in an emergency there was no time for niceties. She said, ‘Please get back. This girl is hurt. She needs a doctor.’
‘I am a doctor,’ he said.
He didn’t look like one. His coat was crusted with salt and his cap, knocked askew, showed a wing of insubstantial pale hair and a section of cranium. She drew breath to object, and saw what his hands were doing. He was a doctor. She got up and left.
The second child was crying, thank God, and seemed to have only bruises. She took her head on her shoulder and let her weep, her eyes following the musician as he flung himself down by the third victim.
It was not a child but a boy in his teens, one of the prebends from the church of the Trinity. He was lying perfectly quiet. Clémence spoke to the girl and, leaving her, went to join Roger. She could see, over the hill, help was coming. Among the running figures, she recognised Phemie.
Roger said, ‘I think he is dead.’
‘No,’ said a voice. The unknown doctor, kneeling beside them. He said to Clémence, ‘Go to that child. Tell them no one is to move her till I come back. The other one is all right. Do you know of a Jordan de Fleury?’
All the time, he was examining the boy on the grass. She said, ‘Lord Beltrees’s son? I am his nurse.’