Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [14]
He has carried out this plan because he could: he could not draw back from it because it was his. In this final spectacle, the work of an angry child, of an obsessed artist, even his friends believe they see the death of Nicholas’s soul, and desert him. Stunned by his own dire success, Nicholas agrees with them: as the novel ends and the abandoned and pitiless banker allows himself to be carried East by the newly ascendant Emperor of Germany, he seems ready for burial. Or, possibly, resurrection.
VOLUME VII: Caprice and Rondo
Nicholas seeks another life in the violent and irresponsible company of his old sea-mate Pauel Benecke, but the quest-shapes of his life are printed too deeply for denial. Already he has set in motion another search for that lost African gold used so cruelly to deceive him in his search for his child. And the worldwide network of correspondence he maintains guarantees that counsellors for the Polish King will come seeking him, that new business projects will tempt him, that the religious and political leaders who have been using him as a bridge between West and East for decades will compel him to responsibility again.
Three times before Nicholas has been propelled East: to Trebizond, to Cyprus, to Sinai. Now three forces converge to send him East again. Anselm Adorne and Ludovico da Bologna’s overt agenda is care of Christian interests in the East, Julius and the clever Countess Anna’s spoken mission is to increase their business, but these groups also have covert reasons for drafting Nicholas in to help. And Nicholas’s cadets and soulmates from the Icelandic adventure, Kathi Sersanders and Robin of Berecrofts, now married and starting their own family, recognise that he needs a difficult and penitential enterprise to precipitate self-recognition and redemption, and urge him to go.
Meanwhile, those at home who had expelled Nicholas as a congenital ‘wrecker’ recover their economic and emotional balance, and, impelled to understand him better, turn to trace the mysteries of his birth and early history. The Scottish St Pols who deny his paternity are sequestered in Portugal. Now the maternal de Fleury ancestry comes into focus: the loving and terrified mother Sophie, who bore a dead son and then many months later a live one rejected as a bastard; the uncle Jaak de Fleury, who took the boy into his household at age seven as a menial dependent and subjected him to brutalizing contempt; the young ‘aunt’, Adelina, who came also to the cruel and sensual Jaak in childhood, to be in her turn abused and abandoned. And the grandfather, Thibault de Fleury, long rumored imbecile, whom Gelis and Tobie discover still exercising, despite paralysis and disease, those supreme gifts for mathematics and music, for witty puzzles and detached analysis, which Nicholas has inherited.
Nicholas meets his grandfather spirit to spirit, in an exchange of letter-puzzles, only once before Thibault dies. The dangerous bond between Nicholas and another de Fleury, however, twists slowly and fatally into sight as the long and frustrating journey of Nicholas and Anna into the East and back parallels the increasing illumination of the searching, speculating families at home. The adored wife of Julius, the formidable Countess Anna with the numeracy to run a business and a desire—cold, calculated, yet ultimately intense—to seduce Nicholas, is actually his grandfather’s child, his fellow sufferer in the abusive grasp of Jaak de Fleury, Adelina herself.
The obsessed woman plans to unravel not just Nicholas’s commercial and political world, but his marriage and the whole structure of his adult life, freezing the two of them in a tableau designed to end in the outlawry of incest before she brings about