Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [235]
It was, he supposed, beautiful. Julius, stripped to the waist, was lying on the other side of the cave on a pallet. Although the cloth round his diaphragm was stained with red, his eyes were open. They were open, and soft, and gazing up into the eyes of his wife, the Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck, who knelt at his side. She looked up and over to Nicholas. ‘God is good,’ she said simply. ‘He has brought you both safely back to me.’ Her voice shook a little, as might be expected.
‘See. She is alive,’ Julius said. And after a moment, smiling, ‘You are as stunned as I was! Have you nothing to say?’
His head throbbed. ‘No. Yes,’ Nicholas said. His weighted lids, descending, concentrated his gaze on the place where it had last rested in Caffa: where her gown opened, or was pulled fully open. In Anna’s white face, thin with privation, a flush rose. Nicholas added blearily, ‘God is good.’
‘You’re half awake, man,’ Julius said. ‘Well, you’d better get yourself some rest. We’re getting out of the Crimea. We’re going back to the Baltic. We’re going as far as Moscow with Dymitr here.’
‘You’re hurt?’ Nicholas said.
‘Some billy-goat shot me last year, and another banged me on the wound. It’s nothing,’ Julius said. ‘They’ve got horses coming. They say we can travel by the end of the week.’
It was not a good idea. Nicholas spoke to Dymitr. ‘No. We’ll reduce your chances.’
As he expected, Julius’s irritated disclaimer clashed with Dymitr’s. The Russian said, ‘It will make little difference.’
‘Then let us split into two parties,’ Nicholas said. He said it with difficulty, because his teeth wanted to chatter. He wished someone would light a fire.
Again, Dymitr’s voice spoke in tandem with that of Julius. There was a long way to travel. They would go together.
‘But—’ Nicholas said, and got no further. He heard a movement, and understood that Julius had got himself up, and was bending over him.
‘What?’ Dymitr was saying. Nicholas looked up at him soulfully.
‘He’s got marsh-fever,’ said Julius irritably. ‘We’ll have to wait for him.’
But in the end, they left separately after all, because the symptoms Nicholas developed were not entirely those of marsh-fever, but appeared to have quite a lot in common with the complaint of the Magnifico Messer Ambrogio Contarini, which might or might not have been the flux. The main body of the Russians left with Anna and Julius, the latter carefully strapped on his horse, and issuing worried and angry directions to Dymitr who remained, with three other bold souls, to care for Nicholas.
Half a day later Nicholas, who did have marsh-fever but did not have the flux, left in the same direction but by a different route, in a wagon drawn by two camels, with the four Russians riding grinning beside him. ‘Although why you cannot tell the poor man that you are being seduced by his wife, I do not know,’ Dymitr said. ‘If she offers herself to you, take her! If you want to marry her, tell your friend! Or are you a man with tastes you have not told us? Did you create these interesting drawings on the walls?’
But fortunately Nicholas, shaking and sweating, was excused from answering. Indeed, having forced himself to make the necessary arrangements, he saw very little of his departure from the Crimea, from the land of the Genoese and the Tartars, where three hundred and fifty years of Italian trading had ended, because of a mother’s blind championship of her son.
He saw something of the journey, for marsh-fever has its own clock, and between bouts he was sane for a while. He knew when Dymitr told him that Julius and his friends had been overtaken, although, asleep in some humble monastery, they did not know it. When the deep snow came, he survived in his wagon, wrapped in furs like the rest, and he was well enough to ride his own horse when the forests parted, and he saw for the first time the carpet of snow-capped wooden cabins, the glimpse of grey river-ice, the slivers of yellow-grey walls enclosing the modest mound of stouter buildings that represented the Kremlin, the princely