Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [58]
‘Don’t you want to see him?’ Kathi asked.
‘Nicholas? No. I can wait. And yes, I know what he’s done. A foot-soldier of Satan, and a fit tool for any man’s hand.’
‘I’m sure you are right. So why do you really think he is here?’ Kathi said.
‘Why ask me? You didn’t like my first answer. The woman Anna might suggest something different. Or he may simply have fallen out with Paúel Benecke. If so, you might even know why.’
She returned the Patriarch’s stare without answering. He was absently massaging his chest through his habit. She said, ‘A foot-soldier of Satan. But you would use him?’
‘God would use him,’ the Patriarch said. ‘If I am to make one parchment Bible, I need the skins of three hundred sheep.’
‘But you don’t consult the sheep,’ Kathi said.
‘I don’t need to,’ said the Patriarch patiently. ‘They do what they’re told, and go directly to Paradise.’
ANNA VON HANSEYCK presented herself quietly at the door the following morning, rather earlier than her hostess would have chosen, but with otherwise impeccable timing, for Kathi was alone. The Burgundian and papal ambassadors, with Robin in attendance, were in the process of being formally received in the Burgh Halls opposite, and it was Adorne’s understanding that they would remain to welcome the royal party when it arrived. Kathi hoped that he was right.
Robin had called Julius’s wife a pretty woman, but many women were pretty without possessing the qualities that made the Gräfin so singular. In build, she was slim and well proportioned, but the clear bright skin against the profusion of charcoal-black hair was more Irish than German, and her principal features were not these at all, but the steadiness of the violet-blue eyes and her tranquil manner, touched with amusement. She was intelligent. Kathi who, without being vain, knew herself to be both quick-witted and mature for her years, yet recognised that here was a calm, a gentle detachment she would never possess. Fortunately, Robin had both, and lent them to her, as once he had tried to serve Nicholas.
Anna was younger than Nicholas, and considerably younger than her second husband. Indeed, her marriage to Julius represented, in Kami’s view, a mystery only to be accounted for by the blindness of passion. At any event, in the year that had followed, Anna had made her husband’s circle her own. Consistently deft in her relations with Nicholas, she had also made friends with his wife and their child. Seemingly, these warmhearted relations continued, even though Anna knew what had happened in Scotland. Kathi wondered if Anna, more subtle than Julius, had come to share his hearty tolerance, or would look harder and further, seeking the middle road between that and rejection. She hoped so. Kathi did not hold the illusion that she or anyone else could or should direct the future of Nicholas. But Paúel Benecke’s daughter had observed that he needed a Gerta, and that was Kathi’s view also. More accurately it was Kathi’s view that Nicholas needed a wife, and preferably the one he was losing. In the meantime, almost anyone of good sense would do.
It was therefore with some approval that Kathi heard her visitor’s first words on the subject, once the friendly preliminaries were done, and Anna was sitting divested of her wet cloak, her hands restfully folded. ‘Katelijne, I want to ask your advice about —’ She broke off and laughed. ‘I’m sorry. It is natural to you, but I still feel it a presumption to call him Nicholas.’
‘Try Colà,’ Kathi said. ‘Or Nikolás, maybe. He’s had so many names that he’d answer to anything, really. What about him?’
‘Two things only,’ Anna said. ‘He is the last person to want to be managed: I am only afraid of doing something wrong. Julius would like him to join our part of the Bank, working east of the Oder. Would this be good? As you know, he has