Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [116]
Perhaps it was as well. The span remaining to Thibault de Fleury was short — shorter than he had let Huon think; and a life-long invalid deserved peace at the close. Today had been their first and last chance to learn something, and for his grandson, half a world distant, there was no chance at all.
Tobias Beventini heard again the sounds of Montello as they had accompanied his departure: the tessitura of leaves and the lowing of cattle and the syncopated drone of responses and prayer from the monastery. And remote behind these, the singing voice of one man lulling another to sleep. A melodious voice in its day, that of Huon; and pleasing to Thibault de Fleury, as he lay speechless under the vine leaves, never knowing the incomparable voice he had missed.
Chapter 16
DO THAT once more,’ said the Lady, ‘and I shall have you thrashed.
Why shall I have you thrashed?’
‘Because I didn’t come when you called,’ said Nicholas miserably. He stood drooping, his prayer mat half rolled in his fists.
‘What?’ said Anna von Hanseyck.
‘Khatun. Because, Khatun, I didn’t come when you called,’ said Nicholas hurriedly. He knew, without looking, that there was a gleam in her eye. It had been there ever since they had left the fondaco at Bielogrod and adopted their present guise of woman trader and Mameluke secretary. It was (Anna decreed) how they must now appear, up to their arrival in Caffa and all through their stay there. She was not in danger, being German, but he was. They had been three weeks on the road, and were at best three-quarters of the way to their destination.
Not unaccustomed to travelling with piquant, competent women, Nicholas had still found the journey surprising. It had begun, for him, with a sense of turmoil: the parting with Julius and the proximity of Anna and the black confusion which obscured the future. He had not been present, of course, at the leave-taking between Anna and Julius, but his own had been relatively easy: Julius, weak but no longer voiceless, had given him the tongue-lashing he deserved and had informed him that if he laid a finger on Anna he would kill him. He had then given him an amiable farewell, in the expectation of following them, once he could travel. Julius, the survivor, had survived.
The subsequent journey across Greater Poland had been eventful and strenuous enough, but the heat of July had been tempered by the green shade of the forests they passed through, and they had travelled in convoy, picking up motley bands of churchmen and smiths, dish-sellers and traders and horse-dealers passing from one hamlet or town to the next and, armed with letters from Straube, unloading their wagon of mattresses at those houses where Julius’s agent was known. Once, led astray, they all had to camp in the open, with guards to keep off wild beasts and marauders. And once they had lodged very grandly indeed, in the Archbishop’s palace at Dunajow, where Gregory of Sanok, professor of Italian literature and earliest patron in Poland of Filippo Buonaccorsi, sat surrounded by poets and scholars and exacted an intellectual fee for his hospitality.
Here, dressed as befitted her rank, Anna bestowed on the company all that store of wise charm which had smoothed their journey from Thorn, but had excused herself, with wicked modesty, from the cut and thrust of the debate. Nicholas, stranded, had hoped to do likewise: he had no wish to put up a performance for Anna or anyone else, and found the Archbishop’s insistence all the more tiresome since he suspected its source. So far as he remembered, indeed, he