Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [303]
‘I have your mistress,’ Nicholas said. ‘Do as I say, and I’ll double your money. Don’t, and I’ll kill her.’ His voice continued, unemotionally issuing instructions. The two men ran down the stairs, unbuckling their belts, and threw down their swords. Anna’s face had become suffused, and her body began to grow lax.
Nicholas said, ‘One of you unshackle that lady.’
One of the men crossed to Gelis. Gripping Anna, Nicholas watched him intently. It was possible to guess from his manner that this was not a common hireling, content to be purchased. Anna had the kind of beauty that quickly found slaves, and slaves would not let her die. In his present mood, Nicholas would not place himself in quite the same category. As Gelis was freed, Nicholas deliberately tightened his garrotting grip to render Anna unconscious. Then Gelis said, ‘Nicholas!’ and he saw, looking down, that his fingers for once had obeyed his emotions instead of his brain. Anna’s eyes were shut, her colour altered, her whole body frighteningly limp.
Nicholas loosened his hands. Beneath them, Anna’s throat worked, drawing in air like a scream. Her eyes opened, wide and alert. Her hands, darting upwards, clawed at his skin and the chain, while she hurled her body aside, kicking and thrusting. He closed his arm round her neck, but her hands were both free, and a few raucous snatches of air allowed her enough strength to use them before he could again press her into submission. It gave her bodyguards just time enough. While he fought her, the two men flung themselves on him, and dragged their mistress free.
Gelis cast a single calculating glance at Nicholas, and plunged to the foot of the steps. She had swept up one of the scabbards when it was wrenched out of her hand, and she was pinioned by the arms. The second soldier snatched up the other, and unsheathed his sword with a whine, looking at Anna. Adelina de Fleury leaned gasping against the bulwark of the barge, one hand to her throat. Her hair, incandescent in the lamplight, mantled her torn and soiled gown, and there was a great, swollen ridge at her neck, where her skin was as fair as John le Grant’s, with a suggestion of freckles. Nicholas sat untidily where he had been chained, panting and dizzy, but capable of thinking, at least. He trusted no one would notice that the knife was no longer where he had kicked it.
One of the two men lifted his sword. ‘Now we kill them, Gräfin?’
He had been right. Slaves, not hirelings. The van Borselen name would make no difference here.
Adelina said, ‘Now we kill them. But with cunning, my friend. The woman drowns. The man is beaten to death by footpads. Let him watch the woman die, first.’
Gelis said, ‘Just now, he had the chance to strangle you, and didn’t.’
‘You distracted him,’ Anna said. ‘That is all. How sad your little son is going to be. But Bonne will comfort him, and I shall be an excellent guardian, having care for all his great inheritance, those precious shares in the Bank; perhaps even the Fleury estates, restored, one of these days. What a pity my father could not have lived to see how his scheme failed. He did not destroy me after all.’
Gelis, held fast, could not have spoken, but Nicholas did. ‘It was not his fault,’ he said. ‘It was terrible, but it was not the fault of Thibault de Fleury, or of anyone else. There is no reason to do such harm. You will have to be on your guard for the rest of your life. You will weary.’
‘I shall revel in it,’ Anna said.
There was a water tank, in another compartment of the hold. They harnessed Gelis again to her staple while the two men went off to fetch it. Anna walked with them, holding the lantern. There were buckets to fill it with. Reduced to one source of light,