Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [255]
‘The first,’ Tobie said.
‘And how did she take it?’
‘The same way as you,’ Tobie said. ‘Sensible questions, and big, silly tears. So, show me the children. According to Clémence, they are still surprisingly normal.’
AFTER THAT, Kathi waited for Gelis to come. It would not be, she knew, for several days; they were not young, impetuous girls, although, Heaven knew, they were not old. Their occasional meetings, of which Robin was not necessarily aware, did not even mean they were confidantes, never mind bosom friends. She did not know how to describe the rapprochement between them, except to say that they were two sides of the triangle, and that the third side was Nicholas. And jealousy did not enter into it. If Gelis was envious of Kathi, it would be because she was properly married, with a loving husband and children. And Kathi could not be jealous of Nicholas’s wife, for what she had, Kathi did not have, or want to have.
Kathi knew, as did Tobie, the story of the boxes from Montello. With gentle hands, she had helped Gelis finally turn out the contents, and had studied the pages of harmony. There was no doubt, now, where Nicholas’s gift of music had come from. A coded message, it seemed, had also passed between Thibault and his grandson, but was now in Gelis’s keeping. Gelis referred to it, smiling, but did not offer to produce it, and Kathi was careful not to ask. It had brought happiness in some way, she could see, and she was thankful.
They spoke of Moscow, and Wodman, and David de Salmeton. Gelis used measured tones, even when speaking of the exquisite, sardonic man who had cheated her, and brought about the refined torture Nicholas had suffered in Cairo and, more than once, his near-death. She said, ‘You realise that if we know where Nicholas is, so does David. Now his threats against us will reach Moscow.’
Kathi said, ‘If we can see through his motives, so can Nicholas. We are guarded. We know who the enemy is. Nicholas would gain nothing by coming.’
‘I have told him,’ Gelis said. ‘I have written to Moscow, telling Nicholas not to come back.’
She fell silent, and Kathi said nothing, for she thought, given the courage, that she would have done the same. Then Gelis said, still looking down, ‘Father Moriz ought to be here very soon. By now he should have spoken to Bonne. Since he went back to Germany, I think he has begun to feel, too, that he would like to know more about her and her mother. So does Tobie, I think.’
‘The truth can hurt,’ Kathi said. ‘Worse than death, for some people.’
‘I know,’ Gelis said. She gave a half-laugh and exclaimed, in a shaken voice, ‘Father Ludovico!’
‘Never underestimate the Church,’ Kathi said.
A TENSE SPRING evolved into an overstrained summer, during which no news of moment reached Bruges from Russia except for the concerted wails of displaced Genoese on their way home to their relatives. Robin, exiled from Scotland, tried to concentrate on building his business, but was visibly restless. The same was true of Gelis, hitherto single-minded in her devotion to the wellbeing of the Bank. It was as if, having explored every possibility and set in train every project she could think of, she had found herself sated, or had reached the margins of her interest and perhaps of her considerable ability. Certainly, she had accomplished what she had set out to do. With some small help from Nicholas himself, the Bank stood where it was before he had plundered it.
It was true also that, although she possessed friends, Gelis was more solitary than once she had been. Jodi, aged between seven and eight, divided his time between his various tutors, and had found playmates among the polyglot children of the Bruges merchant community, as his father had done, in the moments he could spare from the dyeyard. But Jodi, sturdy though he was, was not impressed by the impertinent wildness of the common apprentices, and would never, in years to come, find himself haled before Anselm Adorne, or beaten and locked in the