Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [8]
On the way to his marriage bed, the climax and reward of years of struggle, Nicholas is stunned by two blows which will undermine all the spiritual balance he has achieved in his African journey. He learns that Umar—his teacher, his other self—is dead in primitive battle, together with most of the gentle scholars of Timbuktu and their children. And on the heels of that news his bride Gelis, fierce, unreadable, looses the punishment she has prepared for him all these months: she tells him how she has deliberately conceived a child with Nicholas’ enemy Simon, to duplicate in reverse—out of what hatred he cannot conceive—the tragedy of Katelina. As the novel closes, we know that he is planning to accept the child as his own, and that he is going to Scotland.
How Nicholas will be affected by the double betrayal—the involuntary death, the act of willful cruelty—is not yet clear. There is a shield half in place, but Umar, the man of faith who helped him create it, is gone. Nicholas’ own spiritual experience, deeply guarded, has had to do with the intersection of mathematics and beauty, with the mind-cleansing horizons of sea and sky and desert, and with the display in friend and foe alike of the compelling qualities of valor and joy and empathy: the spiritual maturity with which he accepts the blows of fate here may be real, but he has taken his revenge in devious ways before. More mysteriously still, the maturity is accompanied by a curious susceptibility he cannot yet understand, a gift or a disability which teases his mind with unknown events, unvisited places, thoughts that are not his. As much as his markets, his politics, or his half-hidden domestic desires, these thoughts seem to draw him North.
VOLUME V: The Unicorn Hunt
Thinner, preoccupied, dressed in a suave and expensive black pitched between melodrama and satire, between grief and devilry, our protagonist enters his family’s homeland bearing his mother’s name. Now Nicholas de Fleury, he comes to Scotland with two projects in hand: to recover the child his pregnant wife says is Simon’s and to build in that energetic and unpredictable northern backwater a new edifice of cultural, political, and economic power. Nicholas brings artists and craftsmen to Scotland as well as money and entrepreneurial skill, making himself indispensable to yet another royal James. But are his productions there—the splendid wedding feasts and frolics for James III and Danish Margaret, the escape of the king’s sister with the traitor Thomas Boyd, the skillful exploitation of natural resources—the glory they seem? Or are they the hand-set maggot mound, buzzing with destruction, of Gregorio’s inexplicable first vision of Nicholas’ handsome estate of Beltrees? Is Nicholas the vulnerable and magical beast whose image he wins in knightly combat—or the ruthless hunter of the Unicorn?
The priest Father Godscalc, for one, fears Nicholas’ purposes in Scotland. Loving Nicholas and Gelis, knowing the secret of Katelina van Borselen’s child, guessing the cruel punishment which her sister has planned for Nicholas, the dying Godscalc brings Nicholas back to Bruges and extracts a promise that he will stay out of Scotland for two years, and so remove himself from the morally perilous proximity of Simon, the father-figure whom he seeks to punish, and Henry, the secret son who hates him more with every effort he makes to help him. Nicholas agrees, and turns to other business, mining silver and alum in the Tyrol, settling the eastern arm of his banking business in Alexandria, tracking a large missing shipment of gold from the African adventure from Cairo