Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [285]
None of the womenfolk of Anselm Adorne had attempted to alter this mandate. Quiet, aristocratic Phemie, that rare friend from Scotland, kept her thoughts to herself, and saw to the smooth running of the household and the care of the children. Katelijne Sersanders filled her days and often her nights with accurately executed projects, and found herself unable to eat. Rankin objected.
The men, of course, were the first to know when the trap was activated. Since the birth of Arnaud’s weak child, Dr Andreas had remained in the house, with the man Bel had sent. It was the physician who came to find her. ‘He is coming. Your uncle wishes you to be there, but no others.’
She had not dared propose it. She had forgotten how shrewd a man her uncle was. Adorne was a magistrate, and had spent half his life administering justice. He also believed that, because of this man, he himself had been recalled from Poland. Seated in a tall wooden chair, not far from the desk of her uncle, Kathi Sersanders jumped as the door opened, and wished Robin were here, and then was thankful that he was not.
The room was high-ceilinged and grand, but the man who came in was in harmony with it, both in his height and his carriage, and even his looks, once he had deliberately divested himself of all the muffling clothes and stood before his captor and judge. Nicholas de Fleury of Beltrees, at the end of a journey from Russia to Flanders, and a recent one, imposed upon him, from Ghent. He made two formal bows: one to Anselm Adorne, one to herself. But, entering, he had already cast a glance round the room, and she had caught the single, bright spark as he found her. To her fevered imagination, it conveyed something explosive and foreign — Elzbiete’s clarion summons in Danzig: Katarzynka! Then it had gone.
‘My lord,’ he said to Adorne. He had been given no chance to remove the dirt of the journey. The familiar dimples were grooves, the eye-sockets trenches, and there was a sharp, thin line between his brows. He looked pre-occupied, rather than angry or nervous.
Adorne surveyed him, his fastidious hands on his desk, his heavy robe severe over his doublet, his embroidered cap set on the greying fair hair. He said, ‘What! No recriminations?’
‘Your captain gave me your message,’ his prisoner said. ‘My wife and child are safe in the palace at Ghent; the man de Salmeton has not arrived yet; and you wished to interrogate me.’
‘Yet I am told you tried to resist,’ Adorne said.
‘You would probably have done so yourself. No free man enjoys coercion, my lord.’
‘No man of sense courts it, unless for a reason. I wish to know, first, what your intentions are.’
‘The same as your own, I am sure. To make sure that David de Salmeton, when he arrives, is rendered harmless. Then I leave, without engaging in business.’
‘Leave for where?’ Adorne said. After thirty miles on the road, any other man would have been invited to sit, but Nicholas de Fleury was not. He appeared not to notice, standing on the other side of the desk with the air, Kathi thought, of a courteous younger commander come to confer with an elder of equal intelligence. It was the first marked change Kathi noticed in him.
Nicholas de Fleury said, ‘I shall tell you when I know, and see that it meets with your approval. I am not attempting to change the agreement we have already reached.’
‘We shall see,’ Adorne said. ‘But meanwhile, you have not been entirely frank, have you? You brushed aside your persistence at Ghent, but you had another reason, had you not, for wishing to enter? A somewhat discreditable dispute, I am told, with your former friend Julius.’
Still the other man did not move. He said, ‘Certainly, I was hoping to find out where Julius was. There has been a misunderstanding. It is personal, and affects a lady’s honour. I propose to deal with it myself.’
Adorne’s face reflected a weary distaste. ‘The story runs that you injured the lady in Russia, and that her