Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [9]
The duel between husband and wife finds them evenly matched in business acumen and foresightful intrigue, tragically equal in their capacity to detect the places of the other’s deepest hurt and vulnerability. But Nicholas is the more experienced of the two, and wields in addition, or is wielded by, a deep and dangerous power. One part of that power makes him a “diviner,” who vibrates to the presence of water or precious metals under the earth, his body receiving also, by way of personal talismans, the signals through space of a desperately sought living object, his newborn son. The other part of the power whirls him periodically into the currents of time, his mind aflame with the sights and sounds of another life whose focus is in his name, the name he has abandoned—the vander Poele/St Pol surname whose Scottish form, Semple, is startlingly familiar to readers of the Lymond Chronicles, Dorothy Dunnett’s first historical series.
The professionals Nicholas has assembled around him have always tried to control their leader’s mental and psychic powers; now a new group of acute and prescient friends strives to fathom and to guard him, from his enemies and from his own cleverness. Chief among these new friends is the fourteen-year-old niece of Anselm Adorne, the needle-witted and compassionate Katelijne Sersanders, who finds some way to share all his pilgrimages as she pushes adventurously past the barriers of her age and gender. The musician Willie Roger, the metallurgical priest Father Moriz, and the enigmatic physician and mystic Dr Andreas of Vesalia add their fascinated and critical advice as Nicholas pursues his gold and his son through the intricate course, beckoning and thwarting, prepared by Gelis van Borselen. In the endgame, as Venetian carnivale reaches its height, this devoted father, moving the one necessary step ahead of the mother’s game, finds, takes, and disappears with the child-pawn whose face, seen at last, is the image of his own.
Yet there is a Lenten edge to this thundering Martidi Grasso success. Why has Nicholas turned his back on the politics of the crusade in the East to pursue projects in Burgundy and Scotland? Who directs the activities of the Vatachino mercantile company, whose agents have brought Nicholas close to death more than once? Have we still more ambiguous things to learn about the knightly pilgrim and ruthless competitor Anselm Adorne? What secrets, even in her defeat, is the complexly embittered Gelis still withholding? Above all, what atonements can avert the fatalities we see gathering around the fathers and sons, bound in a knot of briars, of the house of St Pol?
VOLUME VI: To Lie With Lions
Nicholas de Fleury goes from success to success, expertly operating large structures by the nice application of invisible pressure, as the craftsmen do in the miracle plays in which he has from time to time taken part. Within the theatre of family he has produced the convincing illusion of harmony between himself and Gelis, his estranged wife, for the sake of their beloved, acknowledgeable son Jodi. Within the circus of statecraft, where the lions of Burgundy and France, Venice and Cyprus, England and Scotland, Islam and Christendom stalk and snarl, the Banco de Niccolò wields a valued whip. Its padrone is a cosmopolitan, virtually stateless man, intellectually drawn to the puzzle of history in the making, but not visibly compelled by the roots of race—although, to be sure, some of his enemies think him motivated mainly by the passion of revenge on his own family.
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