Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [260]
And now she knew. The loving, easy-going ways of the boy-apprentice in Bruges, taking his joy where he found it, and giving it, too. She said, ‘Esota.’
‘Jaak’s wife,’ said Tobie. ‘As crazed as her husband, but different. The love she gave Nicholas was the same as his mother’s, but with carnal happiness added, or a version of it which he accepted unquestioningly as he accepted the love of his mother, who had abandoned him and the unfeeling world at the same time. Esota was quite deranged by the time that I met her, but she must have been a feather bed of warmth to him in that cold household. Later, of course, he would grow to understand what had happened, but he must always have remembered how it was, then. I can’t imagine how he felt, the day they told him she was dead, and because of something he had done.’ He stopped and said, with an unexpected change of tone that was almost petulant, ‘Now I shall have to tell Kathi.’ And, a moment later, ‘And she will ask me, yet again, how I could have left him.’
‘No, she won’t,’ Gelis said curtly. ‘This time, it was done for a reason.’ For a moment she struggled. Then she said, ‘But such a childhood — would it not unite a boy and girl who suffered through it together? Would they not want to find one another?’
‘They were five and seven,’ Father Moriz said quietly. ‘Neither would realise what was happening at the time. But to the girl, it must have seemed that she was always the rejected one. Her mother died, and she was reared by her own grown-up half-sister Sophie who, however kind-hearted she was, must always have loved her little son Nicholas better. Then Sophie died, and Nicholas went straight to the arms of Esota, who was also Adelina’s rival for Jaak. Of course, there is an affinity there: the affinity of blood, and experience. But there is also, I fear, the possibility of something much worse. After all, Adelina and Jaak were niece and uncle. She had learned, I think, to love Jaak’s attentions. I believe she may try to force the same unnatural bond upon Nicholas. Fortunately Nicholas is a generation away from the taint.’
No one spoke. Gelis’s spurt of anger over Tobie’s deceit had already faded. He had been protecting Nicholas. And he had not discouraged the theories that Kathi and she herself had begun to entertain about the wise, considerate woman who was to be a sister to Nicholas. And now the whole tragedy was truly in the open.
Gelis said to Father Moriz, ‘So you think — so we all think —— that Thibault’s daughter Adelina is Anna von Hanseyck.’
‘It seems very likely,’ said Father Moriz. His face, full of pity, told how accurately he had noted the new waves of dread that engulfed her.
‘And I have told Nicholas not to come home,’ Gelis said. ‘Because of David de Salmeton, I have locked these two together in Moscow, as they were in Geneva.’
Chapter 36
IF COWARDICE COULD reveal itself, as had been shown, in a man’s reluctance to exert himself for his own wife and family, then Nicholas maintained his dubious reputation in the following weeks, and did nothing that could be misinterpreted as courageous.
By exerting extraordinary caution, he succeeded in preserving his skin in a wild and dangerous land, where the frozen hardships of winter gave way to the creaking ice and scouring torrents of spring, and the breathless profusion of summer brought with it other ravening dangers, human and feral.
He achieved it largely by staying indoors with Fioravanti. When Julius, increasingly impatient with his self-limiting business, called to summon him to a race, or a bear-fight, or a fowling foray, Nicholas was always deep in consultation with a metal-founder, or required at a briefing for masons, or was expected to be in attendance on the Grand Duchess at the castle. He knew Julius was weary of Russia. He knew that on one of these hunting expeditions he would find himself tied to his horse, being conveyed, with the utmost good humour, in the direction of Bruges. He stayed indoors.
His engagements were not exclusively spurious. Because of his knowledge