Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [305]
He said impatiently, ‘Well, use your head.’
‘I am!’ said Gelis indignantly. Anna made a stroke at her and she countered, sobered. The staple and Nicholas were just behind her. The man she had knocked down was stirring, and an ominous splashing could be heard from the tank. Anna drove forward again, this time towards Nicholas. Gelis knocked the blade aside, and it fell. Nicholas said, ‘Sweetheart, date stones.’
Without the endearment, it was a very old code between them. He saw Gelis stop, and glimpsed the curve of her cheek as she smiled. Then she ducked, and as Anna came forward again, Gelis picked up first one bucket, then another, and threw them, hard.
The pails were of leather, and heavy. They smashed into both lanterns, plunging them all into a darkness full of blundering figures. A person with whose shape he was intimately acquainted fell into his arms and sadly, out of them again, attended by a clatter of metal. His shackles fell off. He caught and kissed the nearest bare part of his rescuer and heard her breathlessly laugh. Then he and Gelis were fighting their way side by side in the dark to the steps. Fighting with fists and shoulders and elbows, for there was no place in this darkness for swords. He heard Gelis use, viciously, a word of Astorre’s, and was swamped again with pain and with love.
They had the stairs at their back, when Nicholas heard the thud of many feet up above, and the barge sluggishly tilted. About him, the grasping hands slackened. Nicholas realised that the wounded man had fallen back, and that the other had stopped, apprehensive. Then came the rush of scent and the slither of silk and he sensed, since he could not see, that Anna had found a weapon, and was going to use it. Nicholas took his wife by the hand and pulled her, fast, up the steps, throwing up the hatch lid at the top. He did not know whom he was going to meet. It might be David de Salmeton.
He stepped out first; then drew Gelis up after him. Her hand was sinewy, and sweaty, and what he could only describe as protective. He wondered if she would think he was shaking from fear. Around them was freezing air, and darkness, and fog, and a circle of brands, glimmering in the grasp of a shadowy troop of armed men. There was nothing to show whose they were.
The hatch creaked, and another figure stepped into the thick, swimming light. Her hair gleamed red and gold, and her face was that of a ghost. ‘Help me,’ said Adelina de Fleury. ‘This is my attacker, who has followed me all the way from Russia. And his wife, as perverted as he is. Help me, whoever you are.’
A man stepped forward. ‘Me, I’m called Andro Wodman,’ he said. ‘Gentleman, and Conservator of Scots Privileges in Bruges. And this is the private militia of my lord Louis de Gruuthuse, Governor of Holland, whose wife, you may recollect, is a van Borselen. Our orders are to let your men go, and to take you to my lord’s house in Ghent, where you may stay in a safe place until you are called to answer for what you have done. Pray to come forward. It is not our purpose to harm you.’
‘What!’ said the woman. She said a great deal more, but no one replied. Nicholas drew Gelis back as Adelina de Fleury was led respectfully past, and did not move when she struggled to face and revile him. When he did not reply, she fell silent, and allowed herself to be taken onwards again. Her footsteps descended, and faded. Only then did he heave a long, shaking sigh, and look at Wodman.
‘The galoppini,’ he said. ‘You took your bloody time.’
‘You obviously managed,’ Wodman said. ‘What are you whining for this time?’
THE MANSION OF Louis de Gruuthuse in Ghent was nothing near the size of his palace in Bruges, but it possessed secure rooms, and the kind of household which could both serve and guard anyone kept there. By the time the Scots Conservator and his two companions arrived there, Adelina de Fleury was not to be seen, and only