Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [309]
He said, ‘We are not the same as we were.’
‘We shouldn’t deserve each other if we were,’ Gelis said. ‘It’s not given to many people to choose again after eight years.’ She paused and said, ‘I want no one else. I never will.’
He hesitated. ‘But you weren’t sure?’ he said at last.
She flushed. The colour spread from her cheeks to her throat and below, where the sheet had fallen away. She said, ‘I was sure of my feelings. But what if I am not the right person for you? Perhaps there is someone better.’
He rose to his feet, looking down at her. Her hands dropped from his arms and she sank back on the pillows, a smile fixed on her lips. She had exceptional courage. He had always known that.
Nicholas bent, and taking the sheet by the edge, turned it slowly back to the foot of the bed. Gelis said nothing and neither did he, as the light followed his hand, and his eyes travelled, too, over the veined breasts and delicate rib-arch and curved belly and thighs. He pulled the sheet free of the slender shin bones and narrow feet and let it drop.
She lay trembling and, looking down at her, he knew that he had come to the end of a long road. He said, ‘There is no one better. I have what I want. Sweetheart, do I have leave?’
And then the smile was a real one, and her relief and her tears were the same as his own as she joined him on the step and said, ‘Stop shaking. Yes, of course. Let me help you.’
His clothes, fortunately, were in tatters, and easily shed, and the sheet was already turned back. She stepped up, and then leaned out and brought him beside her.
It was eight years ago, and he was walking the streets, drunk with happiness, exploding with lust, on his way to bed the fierce lover who was now truly his bride. Don’t let go all at once, she had cried to him then.
He must have said the words aloud, for Gelis repeated them now, in his arms, and then revoked them in the same breath.
‘Let go now. Let go, Nicholas. You are home.’
He could not sing, with his labouring breath, but he remembered the song of that night, and whispered the words before thought and reason both fled.
Crions, chantons …
Bien vienne.
Chapter 42
JULIUS OF BOLOGNA arrived, thrashing a lathered horse, late the following day, attended by Diniz Vasquez and a hard-riding escort I from the Hof Charetty-Niccolò, Bruges.
Julius had ridden to Bruges to find Nicholas gone. Worse, they had taken him aside, in the familiar house where he had worked for Marian de Charetty, and told him a tale about Anna, his wife. He had received the so-called revelation with an ashen horror which escalated into paroxysms of angry disbelief, and had now borne that incredulous fury all the way back to Ghent. Reaching the Gruuthuse mansion, he demanded his wife be set free, and obscenely derided the claim that she did not want to see him. Removed, with apologetic restraint, by Diniz’s men, Julius had next demanded to be taken to Nicholas de Fleury.
It had been inevitable. Wodman had agreed — had indeed, told Diniz where to go. The hammering on the front door of the Sersanders house should not have been unexpected, unless to a dreaming man in the arms of his lover, claimed by sleep after a night which had begun at the dark edge of day, and had moved from term to term in different conditions of happiness, the greatest happiness being that there were so many as yet untried.
Nicholas had risen, at one point, to descend and speak to Adorne’s housekeeper. He had returned, a little flushed, with beer and bread and some fruit. He had sent a message to the Hof Ten Walle, to satisfy Clémence that Jodi’s mother would soon be returning, and his father, as well. She would know, of course, from Wodman and Marguerite van Borselen what had happened. She would not know what had happened today.
Then the banging came to the door.
Someone woke him with a snowfall of kisses. He ignored the banging, in the modest surge of reviving ideas.
‘No,’ said Gelis. ‘No. No. It