Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [15]
The caprice and repetition of domestic plot, Adelina’s plan to ruin Nicholas as Gelis had also attempted to do, is more than matched by the caprice of princes and the sickening replication of political immaturity which wastes both soldiers and civilians in military adventurism. Nicholas had learned the horrors of war in the sieges of Trebizond and Famagusta. Now, unable to stem the caprices of Charles the Bold, he watches the phantom kingdom of Burgundy disappear from the European stage in the death of its Duke and the wreck of its army in the siege of Nancy. At book’s end he is restored to both his private and his business families, and they to him.
But the fading of a potential public life in the East, or in the now leaderless land of his mother, makes him look to the land of the man he believes is his father, and to the questions remaining for him, and Lady Dunnett, to answer in this last volume of the series: as an adult how does one choose a country and foster it, and what is the meaning of ‘patriotism’ in such a context? If Nicholas is as he now believes the survivor of twin sons born to Sophie de Fleury and Simon de St Pol, what will this mean for the lives of his own so different sons, Henry de St Pol and Jordan de Fleury, as all come together in Scotland? And how will the answers to these questions illuminate the meaning of those shafts of insight and foresight hinting at a link between this fifteenth-century story and the sixteenth-century story of Francis Crawford of Lymond?
Judith Wilt
Boston, 1999
Sum in-till hunting has thar hale delyte
And uthersum ane nother appetit
That gladlie gois and in-to romanis reidis
Of halynes and of armes the deidis.
Sum lykis wele to heir of menstraly
And sum the talk of honest company,
And uthersum thar langing for to les
Gois to the riall sporting of the ches,
Of the quhilk quha prentis wele in mynd
The circumstance, the figur and the kynd,
And followis it, he sall of werteu be.
The chapter-head verse in this novel is from The Buke of the Chess, a Middle Scots version by a 15th c. Edinburgh notary of the Ludus Scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis. The original work was also the basis for William Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse. This text, edited by Catherine van Buuren, is published by The Scottish Text Society, 27 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At the end of this series, I should like to pay tribute once more to the many libraries which have made this work possible, and especially to the librarians of the National Library of Scotland and the London Library. Similarly, of the generous editorial directors who have given me their time and their counsel, I owe special thanks to Robert Gottlieb and Susan Ralston in New York, and Susan Watt and Richenda Todd in London. And lastly, the friendship and support of Anne McDermid and Vivienne Schuster of Curtis Brown have been invaluable in steering this ship into port.
Part I
First rewle thi-self and of thi-self be lord,
Syne rewll thi folk and so it sall accord.
Chapter 1
For euery man desyris naturally
To leir and knaw and heir of novelté
FROM VENICE TO Caffa, from Antwerp to the Gold Coast of Africa, merchants anchored their ships and unloaded their cannon and flipped open their ledgers as if in twenty years nothing had changed, and nothing was about to change now. As if old men did not die, or younger ones grow up, eventually. There was no fool in Europe, these days, who treated trade as a joke. All that sort were long sobered, or dead. Or were temporarily unavailable like Nicholas de Fleury, who had removed himself to the kingdom