Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [150]
He heard it close. After a while, he moved from his chair and, lighting the lamp, locked away the money he had brought from Qirq-yer, which was now so irrelevant. Presumably someone had unpacked and seen to his animals. Presumably some story had been told to explain his abnormal arrival: he was fatigued from the journey, or sick. That, at least, was not far from the truth. He did not know who the man was who had whirled like a lunatic in this room only hours ago. The same man whose grandfather had thought to write him a letter.
He read it again on his bed, the door locked this time, and the chamber lit. He knew it mostly by heart. ‘Sois tolérant à l’égard des caprices d’un vieux …’ It was a long time since someone had tutoyé’d him in that brand of French. The handwriting, once elegant, was now cramped with age, or weakness, or pain. The intelligence was not cramped at all. The man he had always thought senile had a mind as clear as his own. Clearer, probably. That had been the shock, not what he had had to say. Or one of the shocks.
Gelis had been there.
It did not matter to him, really, that Gelis had been there, or that Anna, reading this letter (and hence Julius — and hence all the world), should know the excuse, the explanation to which his mother had clung, when a second child had followed a still-birth, during her husband’s long absence.
Such a sweet child! his grandfather had written of his daughter Sophie. You would have adored her — I mean as a man: you did adore her, of course, as a child. Simon, a beautiful, lascivious boy, was sufficiently dazzled to get her with child. Her passion for him never died, but a forced marriage cured his at once: he stayed long enough to please his father, then left her. She never recovered, silly girl. The loss of the first child sent her crazy: she did not realise another was coming until it was born prematurely, during the festivities for St Nicholas’ Day. There was no disguising what had happened, and no explaining it either. Well-disposed persons suggested that she had been ravished while out of her mind, and hence could not remember it. Considering my condition, this was deemed not unlikely: clearly, mindlessness ran in the family. Only later, based on hearsay and old women’s tales, did a different theory emerge. You may know it. I did not feel it my place to mention it to the delightful lady your wife.
It was, of course, the story his mother had told: the explanation Nicholas had adhered to all these years until, an apprentice of eighteen at Sluys, he had come face to face with the same beautiful, lascivious boy, now an exquisite man. He had hoped for kindness from Simon, and Simon, cornered, had riposted, in the end, with cold steel.
Yet the theory was well-founded enough. When twins are conceived, it sometimes happens that one will miscarry quite soon, while the other will persist and survive. The infant boy who had died had been twin as well as brother to Nicholas. And his own puny birth, far from premature, had taken place at full term or beyond.
It was a good theory, had there been any proof. His grandfather thought so, as well. The vicomte mentioned it as if viewing the case from afar, as indeed he seemed to view his own illness and its consequence; and the actions of his brother; and of Nicholas in taking vengeance on Jaak. He referred to his second daughter, Adelina, only in the context of her half-sister Sophie’s goodness in rearing her, and the kindness of the convent which had embraced her, a furious beauty, at eight. It was the solitary lapse Nicholas noticed, for Adelina had left Jaak de Fleury’s home when she was six. But the vicomte Thibault, then helpless, would hardly register dates.
The oddity was that, in reading about them, Nicholas also found himself questioning how much it mattered, all these pains of the past. Of his own life of agony, Thibault had said remarkably little. He left it to be assumed that, unable to speak, slipping in and out of full consciousness, he had been unable to arrange or endorse or forbid what had happened to Nicholas.