Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
He knew the musicians who played for the feast, but Whistle Willie
was there as a guest, with others – Arnot, Malloch – he remembered from Trinity. Established, pensioned, entrusted with the funds to create his magnificent Chapel Royal, Willie’s fortunes also had changed, but the man had not. He sat glaring at Nicholas, defying him, forbidding him to leave the country he had adopted.
And lastly, the King and his brothers. Rebellious John of Mar, bored and sullen, who had once goaded Henry so cruelly. Sandy, whose dreams he had listened to, and who had turned to him in the last year, sitting late at night in the Canongate house with Jamie Liddell beside him, questioning, arguing, conjecturing. He had never spoken of these meetings to the King, for James could be jealous.
And James? They sat next to one another this time, Nicholas and James, in doublets and robes of identical richness, with identical chains crossing their shoulders, the unicorns glinting: the experienced man; the young King. Some things were different, some were not. This was not now a callow youth, but a man and a father, diligent, fretful, pinned by Fate and by pride to the long hours at the council table, in the assembly hall, or the chamber of state.
His mother had been a strong woman, conscientious, religious, who had ruled alone for three years, and had died when James was eleven. Her officers were around him still, reminding him of his duties. His rebellion, unlike that of Mars, was to throw aside work for the hunting-field, and withdraw from the problems of government to create for himself the courtly world of his aunts and his uncles, and the chivalrous world of his ancestors.
His grandfather had just died, but James had not mourned: it was a chance to renew all his claims to the duchy of Guelders. He had just made truce with England, but planned to break it if Louis would give him the money he wanted. He was secretly planning again to relieve Louis of the county of Saintonge. He had a son of less than three weeks whose marriage he was already considering.
Unlike Burgundy, James wanted more children and quickly, for all the alliances he must make. For many, many reasons he did not want Nicholas to leave. Towards Gelis, seated not quite so near, the King’s manner was that of an understanding physician.
One gave a performance, under such circumstances, and Nicholas was a good actor. At the end, he was asked to step down and receive, on the King’s behalf, a parting gift. It was a standing cup, made of gold set with stones, and fashioned in Paris. The King had not used the services of Wilhelm, although Wilhelm was now a royal servant, by a contract just agreed. Nicholas thanked his host on one knee, and
wondered why all the noise in the chamber had stopped. Then the King said, ‘We have another gift we have prepared for you.’
He should have noticed that Willie had gone, and the singers. He should have been aware of the sounds from outside, the gleams of light through the windows, the murmurs drowned by the animation indoors. He should have been prepared for what he saw, when the Queen led him out through the doors and into the courtyard; and then for what he heard.
They had not tried to assemble the clouds, or the moving lights or the Secrets. Joseph and Mary wore their own gowns, as did the Magi, and the children were barefoot in their shirts. Below the platform, Willie stood stripped to his pourpoint, with great anxious patches of sweat under the armpits. Then the music began, and nothing about it was makeshift.
The same sky received it, the same clouds, the same hills. Below, the resonating chamber was deeper, primed by time and remembrance. Remembrance of the birth of Anselm Adorne’s child, loving gift of his wife; conceived to bring him at last the bright warrior son his heart craved. An infant cried once: the newborn prince in the Queen’s arms. It was a small audience this time: only the people of the Court, and the Abbey, and those who were thought to be his intimate friends. No one moved.
Nicholas watched, re-created before him, the one selfless thing he had ever done. The great, solemn sweep of the work had been concentrated, salt upon salt, to a morsel of its full length. They had remembered their studies. The clear voices spoke, and the close-textured difficult harmonies lingered and surged once again, rising and falling, lovingly captured.
Such intensity of emotion, so compressed, could overpower a choir. The singers’ eyes were fastened to Roger, who offered no comfort, no coaxing, but lashed the music out of their throats so that they sang without weakening, as if angry. Only at the end, when the music burgeoned, beginning its climb, and from north, south, east and west the silver trumpets suddenly spoke, and the four organs added their thunder, did his own face fill with what he felt for them. Then there came the silence, as happened before, and then the storm broke.
This time nothing stood between Nicholas and the warmth: not Kathi; not Gelis. Willie Roger appeared, punched him angrily in the stomach and then locked him in an incoherent embrace. The Queen, the child asleep in her arms, reached up her wet face and kissed them both. He went through the proper form of thanks to the King, and to Sandy and to all those he knew must have devised this; and then
excused himself in order to climb the steps and speak to the singers, the actors, the musicians. Caught in rising euphoria, they wanted him to come with them now, and were mutinous when he had to return to the King. It was harder still to disengage from Willie.
Gelis had waited, Kathi beside her. Bel wasn’t there, although he knew she was in town. He was glad she wasn’t there. He had enough to contend with, without Bel.
Kathi said, ‘So how did you like your present?’ She was dry-eyed and smiling, but her kerchief was soaked.
He said, ‘I saw you. You were singing.’
‘But you didn’t hear me,’ she said flatly.
Gelis said something, and he automatically turned to her, smiling. Kathi was right: he had heard almost nothing. The effort of hearing almost nothing had given him an acute headache, but he had solved several unusual mathematical problems, devised a poem and run through many more while avoiding the pale stare of Tobie, who had never heard the performance before and was sitting as if axed on the head.
Gelis said, ‘I don’t remember if I congratulated you last time.’
Nicholas said, ‘I’m sure you did congratulate me. Anyway, this wasn’t my doing: it’s Willie’s night.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Kathi said. ‘Did you see Bel?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘She came late. She must have gone away as soon as it finished.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t the last night of our lives. I’m not taking the habit. We’ll all continue to meet, I hope, outside Scotland.’
‘I expect we shall,’ Kathi said. She hesitated and then said, ‘The King is waiting. I don’t want to keep you. I only wanted to speak of the music’
They watched her go, and turned to rejoin the royal party back in the hall. He had been looking at Gelis all night because she was wearing court dress, with jewels he had never seen round her throat and latticing the wings of her white, floating headgear. The King had been watching her as well. Nicholas said, ‘This shouldn’t take long. The Queen will want to retire. Then we take our leave. Then we go out through the gardens and walk by the back path to the Canongate house. Then we talk.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Every trader has to set dates, or starve. I am to rejoice in the palace of my master.’
‘Let us say,’ Nicholas said, ‘that we have enough on the board for a deal. Rejoicing would stretch it too far. So, to the Canongate?’
‘My poor Nicholas,’ Gelis said. ‘By the back path? Through the
gardens? Do you imagine for one moment that you are going to escape all those people outside?’
He had persuaded himself that he would. Such was his determination that the illusion stayed with him all through his last audience and past the moment when the Abbot, amiably conspiratorial, had them shown to a postern and he and Gelis slipped through. For one more moment, the Abbey garden seemed deserted and quiet. Then the glare of twenty lanterns struck him in the face, and his ears were ringing to the whoops, the catcalls, the bawling of ten times that number of people, and the saucy rattle of kettledrums.
They had caught him. They had caught them both. The crowd of his companions marched them up to Willie Roger’s and there was no escape. None at all.
He got drunk very quickly, because he meant to. Gelis, who had never been there before, seemed to his vague surprise to conform easily to the new habitat, in the same way that she had come to terms with tough seamen off the African coast: in the mode of a cool, amused
donna di governo
. It was strange, because Gelis was here and not Kathi. Roger had never asked Kathi to enter this warm vinous world of music and gossip and badinage. It was not right for an unmarried girl. And, Nicholas guessed, he saw that it would have been unfair for a girl who must marry. The distaff should not have to compete against this bright, boisterous masculine world, or with the music. Luckily, they sang only ditties, obscene ones, so that he too could float, a wanton bladder, above the dead anchor-weight of his purpose. He did not remember going home.
He woke alone in his own room in the Ca’ Niccolò and was amused, briefly, at the confidence implied by her absence. She required no advantages. He made, with the help of Alonse, a ponderous toilet, and eventually sent to ask her to see him. Then he entered her room, his lids protesting against the brilliant light, and said, ‘Behold the winged lion. Your eyes are open. You were drinking as well. I saw you.’
‘I paused now and then,’ Gelis said.
Her voice was patient rather than tolerant. This time, however, he was not being received by the charming young girl in loose silks. She wore no elaborate jewels, but she was dressed as formally as for the previous night, and her hair was bound under stiff voile.
Noli tangere
.
She added coolly, ‘Alonse put you to bed.’
He wondered if he had attempted to touch her and was immediately and painfully convinced that he had not. If anything in this world could be sure, it was that. He sat down and said, ‘Well, we have something to talk about. You begin.’
‘No apology?’ Gelis said.
‘No, Lady Better-than-Good. Let all receive thy pity, none thy hate. You begin.’
‘Are we to have a discussion?’ Gelis said. ‘I thought you had submitted one simple question to answer.’
‘That is the great disadvantage of being a woman,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you come to the conference table in that mood, you will lose. This is your Alnwick, your St Omer. I have proposed a date for the cessation of hostilities. That is, a time by which one side will have won or be about to win, or by which it will be apparent that neither can reasonably prevail.’
‘Reasonably?’ she queried.
‘Without demanding a fight of such length, or so destructive, that the victory would be worthless to either. Pyrrhic. Puerile.’
‘You are afraid of losing,’ she said.
‘Not at all. I am afraid of not recognising when I have won. In war, each should know the other’s objective. We have come to the place where I need to know yours.’
‘I know yours,’ she said. She sat with her hands clasped before her, her expression watchful, attentive. He had seen her thus when faced with other problems of innovative complexity – when preparing the Play, for example. His hatred for Willie Roger, for all of them, welled.
She said, ‘I have known your objective from the beginning. To live with me as with Katelina, except that I should bear your numberless children in wedlock.’
‘How shaming for you,’ he said.
‘Do you deny it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That will do, to begin with. So what did you really want?’
‘I shall tell you,’ she said, ‘when I have won.’
He closed his eyes. It didn’t help. He opened them. ‘Tell me now. Isn’t it your objective?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It is my reward. My objective is so to reduce you that my life will be as I wish, and whatever happens, you can never change it.’
He said, ‘I might agree to all you ask now.’
‘You might,’ she said. ‘But you see, I cannot trust you. Nicholas, you cannot even trust yourself.’
‘And how shall I know when you have reduced me?’ he said.
She said, ‘When you beg me to stop.’
‘How optimistic of you,’ he said. After a moment he added, facetiously, ‘I might be quite happy, as on a recent occasion, to invite you to continue.’
She didn’t reply. He said quickly, ‘There is really no need to anguish over mistakes with
la cauza doussana
. I don’t.’
He waited again. He knew she understood.
That sweet thing
which she had engaged in with Simon, had nearly shared with a King; in which Nicholas himself had been so profligate, was debased: there was no need to repine over that. That union, sweet beyond imagining, which once had been theirs was still inviolate, waiting. Thunder for God, if you please. But nothing lasted for ever.
He said, ‘Do you hear what I am saying? If we deny ourselves very much longer, even that may have gone. There will be nothing worth having.’
She said, ‘I was about to tell you. I agree. There are eight months between now and the end of December, and by that time, one of us will have outwitted, shamed, prevailed over the other. The loser submits: the victor should have the right to direct what is to happen thereafter. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
‘You haven’t asked my objective,’ Nicholas said.
She exclaimed, ‘You didn’t deny –’
‘I said it would do, to begin with. But suppose we regard it, in your words, as a reward. Then my objective must be the same as yours, mustn’t it? To outwit you, until you have to submit. Unless, of course, you would like to accept my terms now? A child a year? I’m sure I could trust you.’
She said, ‘You haven’t talked to your wooden-legged friend.’
His mind clouded with ale, he looked at her, puzzled. She continued. ‘Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, the noble Florentine oracle. I heard he appeared with young Nerio in Rome. I thought I told you I once met him in Florence. He instructed that you were to have no more progeny. Your posterity is already secure.’