Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [259]
‘You might not be wrong,’ the priest said. ‘Human nature being what it is. But there is something more there than simple congruity. I went to see Bonne.’
The tall, demure girl in the convent, whose submissive manner had proved to cloak something that might have been hatred. Gelis said, ‘She didn’t talk?’
‘More, I think, than she did when you saw her,’ said the priest. ‘She is tired of being immured, and whatever her mother has promised her, it will not hold her in subjection much longer. She would not give her away, but on the other hand there is genuinely little she can remember of her earliest childhood, beyond being with Anna, and then in the house of the Graf. I did learn one thing, by trickery.’
‘You?’ said Tobie, pallidly sardonic.
‘A matter of birth dates and arithmetic. Bonne is two years older than we have been led to believe.’
‘In order to claim the paternity of the Graf?’ It was Diniz who spoke. Gelis could not have found breath for a question. She heard Tobie shift, and made the slightest of gestures to reassure him. She did not look at him. She didn’t want to see his expression. She could feel Father Moriz watching them both.
Father Moriz said, ‘I assume so. Tobie: when you went to see the vicomte de Fleury, and later to Eccles, what did you learn about the vicomte’s late-born little daughter Adelina?’
Now Gelis caught Tobie’s gaze. He said slowly, ‘That she was brought up in convents. That she cut herself off from the family.’
‘That she had red hair?’ the priest said.
‘Yes,’ said Tobie. He did not move. Neither did Gelis.
The priest said, ‘For although Bonne told me little, I found a nun who knew, by accident, more than she did. She remembered Bonne’s mother, she said, as a young girl in a convent in Burgundy. The strange thing was that her name then was different. And that her hair had not been black, but bright red.’
‘Dear Christ,’ Tobie said. He said it quite slowly, and his eyes, equally slowly, came to rest on the priest’s face as if his despair and his knowledge could somehow pass unspoken between them.
But of course, it could not. So Father Moriz had to say, gently, ‘I see that you know more of this girl, this red-headed girl of whom the vicomte was speaking. She would be, then — Diniz will correct me — the pretty child-aunt of Nicholas, two years his junior, who was reared in the same home by his mother, and shared his first years in the house of Jaak de Fleury? Then if you know more, I think you must tell us.’
‘No,’ said Gelis. She saw that Diniz, too, had become very pale.
‘I agree,’ Diniz said. ‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘I commend you both,’ the priest said. ‘You are both concerned for the reputation and privacy of Nicholas. I am sure Tobie respects those as well. But I also fear that it will serve Nicholas better, in the end, if this particular seal of his childhood is broken. Am I right?’
Tobie did not answer, or observe any of the niceties. He sat, his neck bent, his hands spread on the unstained stretch of robe at his knees, and considered. When he spoke, it was in a slow measured voice, without passion. ‘Jaak de Fleury was a man who abused children. Adelina was five. He kept her for a year in his house, and another two years, unknown to anyone else at the time, in a secret house outside Geneva. During that time he not only taught her to behave like a lover, he taught her to love him. Then the affair was discovered, and Adelina was separated from Jaak without explanation. She never saw him again.’
It was Father Moriz who asked, in a quieter voice than Gelis had ever heard him use before: ‘And Nicholas?’
It was from Tasse, of course, that: Tobie had all this knowledge: the knowledge he had withheld from Gelis herself on the only other occasion this had been mentioned. Tobie said, ‘Jaak only liked girl children. He beat Nicholas and starved him, and threatened him, but Nicholas didn’t mind, for he understood that he deserved most of it. And anyway,