Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [148]
In Berwick-upon-Tweed, having called on Lauder of Bass at the castle, they repaired to the Browns’ roomy mansion in St Margaret’s, and got Sandy’s bard to perform while they ate. It had surprised Nicholas, in the past, to find that Henry de St Pol had ever heard of a blind poet called Harry, since that particular bard was unwelcome at Court. It had not surprised him, subsequently, to discover that the minstrel, an acerbic veteran best met in the open air, had been adopted by Sandy for parading in taverns and among certain types of patriotic society. He had even, in Nicholas’s presence, got the old man to recite the bloodier bits of The Wallace for Meg, his unmarried sister, who had burst into tears. Nicholas had felt like bursting into tears himself, but for different reasons. He had no objection to the fifteen contradictory versions of the life of Sir William Wallace, great Scottish hero and martyr, whose left arm had ended up nailed to a gateway in Berwick, any more than he objected to the fifteen lives of Alexander the Great or Robin Hood or King Arthur. He did, however, become disenchanted with Jamie Liddell’s deep compulsion to verify facts, which doubled the length of the sessions.
‘Where did you hear that? I’ve never heard that.’
And the old man would bridle. Encased in lid-leather, his eyes looked like pigs’ knuckles. ‘What would you know? That was a Latin book, that was from.’
‘Then the Latin book was by some idiot romancer who didn’t know his Ayr from his Alva. Shall I tell you what really happened?’
‘Don’t,’ Nicholas would beg. ‘Just don’t.’
But he always did.
That night, it was the Lord Clerk Register, Alex Inglis, who entered the room just as Harry was vicariously slaying an Englishman:
Wallace tharwith has tane him on the croune,
Throuch bukler, hand, and the harnpan also,
To the schulderis, the scharp suerd gert he go.
Lychtly raturnd till his awne men agayne.
The women cryede; ‘Our bukler player is slaine.’
The man was dede; quhat nedis wordis mair?
The bard broke off. Alex Inglis remarked, ‘Good evening, my lord. I see we are preparing to contribute to the peace in our usual fashion.’
Sandy looked furious. It was customary for a representative of central government to accompany the Warden on his visits, which was partly why so many had lodgings in Berwick: the Clerk Register lived in Hide-hill in style, as befitted a man who expected a bishopric. The said Clerk Register, at the moment, was suppressing much the same annoyance as Sandy, since he was supposed to be working in Edinburgh, and indeed had been, before Nicholas rousted him out and advised him to speed down to Berwick.
Nicholas caught Liddell’s eye, and they began hastily to mend the situation, with partial success. When they all left for Upsettlington and Melrose, Alex Inglis was still with them; but so was Blind Harry.
BACK IN EDINBURGH, Nicholas called first on Anselm Adorne, even before he went home to Gelis. It was safe: Sandy had gone to the Castle and Liddell and Inglis to the Cowgate; Nicholas slipped into Adorne’s house in the dark. Adorne was the friend of the King and the Queen and the Knights of St John. Nicholas was a fellow Burgundian, but not a recognised courtier. He was Sandy’s friend.
Adorne was there, springing up from a card game with Andro Wodman, who rose also to greet him with what might even have been satisfaction on his broken-nosed face. Nicholas himself didn’t want to eat or drink: he didn’t even want to be given a chair, but sat on the step of a prie-dieu in his rubbed boots and travel-stained doublet, listening as Adorne told him that Gelis was back, and the gist of her news and his own.
Since the storms of the previous year, news from Flanders had not been cut off, and Adorne was the recipient, as was Nicholas, of many quiet dispatches from unusual sources. They knew that the Medici outpost in Bruges had now closed, and that London was closing. Tommaso Portinari was still in Milan, from which city Adorne