Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [193]
She could not tell whether he was serious. She supposed that he was, and thanked him. She felt a faint scorn, in the midst of her torment, that a man of God should be so little aware of human desires, and human fallibility.
NICHOLAS HAD GONE from Caffa when the letter from Brother Huon arrived at the Franciscans’. By that time, which was the third week in March, even the Patriarch had departed; but the German Contessa still held court in the town, and was pleased to take charge of the message, promising that Signor Niccolò would receive it as soon as he returned from his business in Persia. Then she presented the dazzled Brother with a little silver for the good of his house. He thought she looked sad.
At about the same date, late in March, a letter from the Abbot of the monastery of Montello found its way, along with four boxes, to the residence of Egidia van Borselen at Spangnaerts Street, Bruges. Having taken delivery, Gelis sat for a long time alone in her room with the letter, which informed her, with regret, of the death of the noble vicomte Thibault de Fleury. The brethren (it continued) would pray for his soul, and Brother Huon and the monastery remained the grateful beneficiaries of the family’s generosity. The boxes, which contained all the vicomte’s belongings, had been sent to her upon instructions conveyed by the vicomte in the last days of his life. He had died at peace in the Lord.
She wondered if he had. Then she laid hands on the chests, and unpacked them.
It took a long time. When at last it was done, Gelis van Borselen called her servants and had them replace and put into store the worldly possessions, superb in quality but no longer new, of the late Burgundian nobleman. Along with the doublets and cloaks, the gloves, the boots, the fine shirts and the jewels, the magnificent old-fashioned saddle and the silver harness stamped with his crest, she placed cartons of papers, neatly packaged and labelled in Brother Huon’s precise script, and containing the cream of his master’s correspondence over the years of his partial recovery — all of it scholarly, and relating, as she now knew to expect, to matters musical, mathematical, and philosophical. There was the battered script of a play. There were no family documents.
Except, that is, for the most recent packet of all, which was addressed in her husband’s handwriting to Monseigneur le vicomte de Fleury, and which she set aside, and reopened when her servants had left her.
The letter from Nicholas to his grandfather had arrived in time to be read. He had written it the day after receiving the message it answered, and had sent it by post: by a chain of couriers who, changing riders and horses, had taken it across Europe, in winter, in half the time necessary for a man on his own. She could not imagine what it had cost, or how he had paid for it.
Enclosed with his letter, Nicholas had sent to Montello a tract of music in two different inks, and a sheet containing a delicate puzzle which was clearly not of his authorship. This miracle of penmanship, circular in design, had nothing in common with the coded snippets that Nicholas sent her, dealing with practical matters. This was a work of art, elegant, poetic, mischievous even, for it contained words and phrases and fragments of verse which contributed by their shape to the picture, even though the whole made no sense. Then she turned the sheet over, and saw that Nicholas, setting his mind to follow his grandfather’s, had drawn and sent him the resolution, in identical form. The translation began at the heart, as the smallest writing had done, and unfurled to the outermost edges. Beyond that, there was a space, and then a sheaf of words which were not in translation at all, but in the form of the original puzzle, which Nicholas had taken and used to add something of his own.
She thought at first that it was beyond her. The complexity of the puzzle