Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [129]
‘Something for you to play. Music for Jodi.’
His feet returned flat to floor, and his palms to his knees. Then he said, ‘I didn’t know you made music. Who taught you? Your parents?’
‘My parents died before I grew up,’ Anna said. Then she said, ‘Have I said something?’
Nicholas smiled at her. ‘No. I misunderstood. I thought Julius had said that he met them.’
‘He sometimes said that,’ Anna said. ‘Just as he liked to say that I was wealthy. I was, of course, once. If Julius cares too much about show, it is only because he himself was a foundling. The Church paid for his legal course at Bologna. He was better off, I think, than he knew. No one sent you to be educated, except as an apprentice. And look how far you have come.’
‘Penniless to Caffa, disguised as a Mameluke servant. But see what company I can boast,’ Nicholas said. He looked down at the paper she had given him: his son’s verses with musical notes written above them. They sang themselves in his head, the words he had committed to memory, like a crime, in his room in Thorn. The tune was simple and charming and clever, and he couldn’t speak.
Then he said, ‘I’m sorry. It took me by surprise. I’m sentimental about Jodi. You may have noticed.’
She said, ‘If you hadn’t cared, I wouldn’t have troubled. Do you want to talk about him?’
‘No,’ said Nicholas.
‘But you can hear the tune? You know what it is?’
‘Oh yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘It is perfect. It should be sung with a flute.’
‘Or another voice,’ Anna said.
‘Yes,’ he said. He got up slowly. ‘May I have it? We could talk of it later?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Anna said.
HE KNEW, naturally, that he should have stayed. But music — his greatest skill, his deepest pleasure — was the last of the possessions which he had set out to jettison, and he had not faced that yet. It struck him that his record so far was not especially impressive. He had believed, quite some time ago, that he had reduced all his relationships to manageable ciphers, and then had found that Jodi escaped him. Now he had a chance to excise two weaknesses at the same time, through a child’s terrible verse and a jingle.
So the diviner’s will, at least, had it. The diviner’s spirit, as before, contradicted. The verse, however childish, however broken, was still endearing, even enchanting. The music matched it exactly.
He hadn’t known of this gift. His image of Anna had been incomplete; the burning image he had carried ever since he first saw her, and every step of the long journey here. He had never touched her, so far. He had not wooed her, except by being different from Julius. He had taken great care.
And now, this.
But when, later, she tapped on his door, he rose at once and opened it and said, ‘Of course, the time has come for a performance. You have a flute?’
And Anna said, ‘Is the voice not enough, or are you too grand?’ Then, because this was hardly an occupation for a Saracen servant, she led him outside, to the kiosk under the fig trees. The house and small garden were empty: Brygidy had gone to church, and they would be unheard; or so she said. She had a dish of cherries, and her hair, loosely knotted, drifted in wisps at her ears above her usual plain, high-necked gown. She set the cherries down, placed him on a bench by the thin, woven wall and, seating herself, took the paper from his hand and studied it, smiling.
Her voice was so soft that he did not immediately realise that she was not speaking, but was singing the words of his son, to her music. It unfolded; he sat in silence, watching and listening. Feeling his attention, she crinkled her eyes and allowed her voice to expand. It was as smooth as syrup, and dark, and flowed from one register to the next without flaw. Primaflora had had a schooled voice like this, and a young woman called Phemie in Scotland. Kathi’s voice, high and free, was a freak of nature as was his own, recently given some semblance of art by a man in Scotland who thought he loved them both, and was right