Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [215]
She tried not to think of him, or of the letter he had promised to send about an enterprise of which she had heard nothing more. As far as she knew, Nicholas was still in Caffa with Anna and now, presumably, Julius. From Julius and Anna, returning, the Bank could no doubt expect some news; but not before the end of the summer. Then, of course, there would arise this proposed betrothal between Jodi and Bonne.
She still could not understand it. Nor, she knew, could John. He talked of Nicholas now and then, usually when reminded by some unfortunate event on the battlefield. She had not realised, until then, how much fighting the two men had seen together, dovetailing their skills: setting traps for the Turks at Trebizond; mining, tunnelling, designing, casting cannon. Guns required numeracy; so did navigation, and hydraulics, and toys. She heard about their mechanical elephant, and the carnival at Florence where they met. Nicholas had come hunting for the engineer who had almost saved Constantinople, and John had been with him, more or less, ever since.
‘And come to regret it,’ Gelis said; and he had nodded.
‘He’s a wrecker. I told you. And an innocent at the same time, what’s worse.’
‘An innocent!’ Gelis had said; and he had looked at her, russet brows raised.
‘You didn’t see him at Trebizond. Not just in retrieving that silly wee bitch from Doria, but plunging into hopeless dilemmas. Which to rescue; which to kill; which to betray. Good and bad, right and wrong; duty; loyalty. In the Tyrol as well. And in Cyprus.’ He broke off and said, ‘I bubbled, myself, at Famagusta. You don’t know a man until you know what makes him greet. An innocent. No grasp of reality.’
‘He saved your life,’ she said. Astorre had said that.
‘Oh, aye. As Julius saved his. We made a good team.’
It was only later that she discovered that the silly wee bitch was Catherine de Charetty, the younger sister in Bruges who was going to marry her own second cousin. It was very much later that she found out what le Grant had meant about Famagusta. It had nothing to do with her sister, who had died there, but she was charitable enough to suppose that Nicholas had been affected by that as well.
She had not seen Nicholas in Trebizond, but she had watched him in Africa, where a simple voyage for profit had also turned into a trial of character and a testing-place for beliefs. She understood, for the first time, what John le Grant might mean by innocent; and, not for the first time, how alike he and Nicholas were. She had begun to realise, ever since Edinburgh, that these men and women were Nicholas’s family, as much as she or Jodi or Marian de Charetty could ever be or have been. And she realised that the act by which he had divorced himself from them was wholly hapless.
Nicholas had ruined his own life for nothing; because of a simple refusal to school his own talents, and a level of undiluted physical energy that made him excessively hard to control. Only Kathi, sometimes, had been able to manage that. And of course she herself had a key, but had vowed not to apply it. Passion was not enough, as her sister would have discovered. The question was … The question increasingly was, whether it was better than nothing.
As April approached, it seemed to Gelis that she had been separated from her son for long enough. She wrote to Scotland, asking with affection after the infant Margaret of Berecrofts, and enquiring what her parents’ plans might be for the summer. She also