Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [219]
At which John had stared at her in genuine derision and said, ‘You think they could stop Katelijne Sersanders if she wanted to leave? Dinna fret. She’ll tell them all she knows, and they’ll be the first to send them to safety. They’re a tough old crew, the merchants of Berecrofts. If de Salmeton wants a trade war, he’ll get one.’
‘If the warning comes in time,’ Gelis said.
Neither of them had so far discussed de Salmeton’s affluence and, in his stubborn soul, John was glad to kick the subject aside. Two months ago, he had been present in Neuss when, returned blanched and stiff from a long absence, Gelis had found and opened the promised missive from Nicholas. Except that it had not been from Nicholas: the message was not in his writing, nor in code, and had arrived by no recondite path of the mind. It had come redirected from Bruges, and before that from Venice. Inform John and Moriz that the enterprise sadly is void. They should not speak of it.
Nicholas had had to send the first message direct: if he died, the information was important. Now it was no longer important, and he hadn’t troubled to write.
For Gelis, that was the blight; not the contents of the message, about which it was possible to be philosophic: endeavours did fail. Yet John had been surprised to notice how soon she recovered. It was as if her feelings were no longer engaged, or were differently focused, or as if she were armed by some unimaginable talisman. He wondered if she would have shown as much fear if Nicholas were in danger, not Jodi. Then he thought, ashamed, that she probably would, because he himself would. You didn’t need to be someone’s husband or wife to admire them, and be concerned for them, and desire to know they were safe. He wished he had the detachment of Nicholas; and then remembered, uncomfortably, the tales he had resurrected for Gelis which made the opposite point. A man who did not care for his fellows would have resented and shed them. Only an idiot would shower them with helpful statistics. He forced himself to remember, belatedly, just what Nicholas had done in Scotland, and to Julius, and why he deserved all that had happened to him.
He looked at Gelis and said shortly, ‘It’s all right. We’ll hear from him soon.’
IN EDINBURGH, where the month opened less warmly, Katelijne Sersanders, lady of Berecrofts, had no premonition of her uncle’s warning racing towards her, being satisfactorily immersed in a promising young household. Her greatest problem had lain in the handling of Jodi, Nicholas’s small son and her husband Robin’s disciple and critic. Her own care, above all, had been to refrain from replacing Gelis: to preserve, against all her inclinations, a demeanour towards Gelis’s son which was friendly, but not over-close: that of a sensible aunt. Her greatest triumph, had she been asked to name it, lay in the fact that Jodi had grown to be decently tolerant of his five-month-old co-habitant Margaret, who after all was only a girl, and not allowed to go hunting.
It compensated for the professional friction between Jodi’s new master-at-arms and Raffo, his bodyguard. A brawny, middle-aged mercenary with spectacular scars, Raffo had been one of the two men engaged to look after Gelis and Jodi. Jodi was proud to be the pupil of Captain Cuthbert, but Raffo, eighteen months at his side, was his friend. This, since his parents were missing, and Clémence and Tobie were in the absent-minded stage of betrothal, appeared to Kathi to be extremely convenient. A boy needed someone to teach him how to kill things, and Clémence had reached her limit in that direction, now she had Tobie.
In any case, Kathi had Bel. In a city of stout-hearted, strong-willed old women, Bel of Cuthilgurdy had had more than most to do with Nicholas