Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [281]
‘Why? Do you believe it?’ said Gelis.
‘There are intemperate men,’ Clémence said. She completed a plait and pinned it up. ‘Your husband may be one. But his remorse over the wounding of Master Julius would more than deter him from seducing his wife. The story was an invention.’ She paused. ‘As you say, they are quite convinced that your husband is dead. They say that his cavalcade, leaving Moscow, was set upon by a party of brigands close to a hamlet. All were killed, and an accident set the timber houses on fire, so that the bodies were hardly identifiable. They knew him by his dress.’
Gelis said, ‘You are saying that, believing Nicholas dead, Anna will now turn her hand against me. And that my instinct that he is alive may be wrong?’
Clémence de Coulanges finished pinning the second plait and rose gently. She said, ‘Your husband is a man unlike others. Mine is less extraordinary, perhaps. But if I can tell you, as I can, that Tobias is at this moment alive, although not necessarily well, or comfortably quartered, or happy, then I am certain that you can do as much for your Nicholas. If you say so, then he lives.’
She was smiling. She held out her arm, as she had done so often to Jodi, and Gelis got up, and crossed it with her own, bringing her close, temple to temple, so that she rested, eyes closed, against the clean hair and the scrubbed, scentless skin.
THE COLD, at the same time, had begun to descend upon the besieging army of the Duke of Burgundy in Lorraine. Nothing momentous was happening, unless you counted the irritating frequency of enemy forays: well-organised bands from little garrison towns which fell upon the Duke’s foraging parties, killing them to a man; which shadowed outlying patrols and cut their throats while they slept; which infiltrated, on one fearful occasion, the fringes of the Duke’s siege camp before Nancy, and captured a large number of horses. The Duke’s comments on that had not been pleasant.
Nothing positive was happening, because both sides had run out of soldiers and money. The Duke, possessed of all the Moselle valley from Dieulouard to Thionville, with a lifeline to Metz and his arsenal and treasury stationed at Luxembourg, still had too few men to take Nancy. Duke René, aged twenty-six, and adhering obstinately to his land to the south, had likewise too few men to dislodge him. René (or L’Enfant, as the Duke chose to call him) had provisioned Nancy for two months and gone off to beg help from Alsace and the Swiss. Duke Charles, ignoring all advice to withdraw and re-form over the winter, was awaiting what troops his Duchess and others might send.
Captain Astorre and his hundred lances, with the unexpected bonus of Dr Tobias and the polite young lad Berecrofts, took his share of the drills and the foraging, organised games, conferred with other captains and greatly enjoyed, of an evening, relating to Tobie and Robin all the tales that Thomas and John had stopped listening to. The new, good quarters made out of boarding, replacing the huts lost at Grandson, resounded to Astorre’s opinions of the Duke, and his mercenary band of four hundred Italian lances, led by the famous Niccolò de Montfort, Count of Campobasso (real name Gambatesta), already flung out of Naples for supporting the old man, King René, and now, in the view of Captain Astorre, responsible for losing the Duke’s Nancy in the first place, by advancing so slowly that it had to surrender to young René the grandson. The Count of Campobasso, Astorre said, was surreptitiously back in Angevin pay, mark his words. He was then reminded of the days when he himself had fought in Naples, on the opposite side, and the trouble he had had with that damned mercenary Piccinino.
The boy, Robin, would always ask then for more information, while John would be sitting morosely in a corner, filing down something that had fallen short of perfection, and Thomas snored, and the doctor got up, like as not, and went to tramp round the camp. Astorre hoped he wouldn’t find himself run through by a pack of deserters. Cold and boredom