Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [177]
Soon after that, Andro Wodman had come to take him away. He must have acquired the bowl then, or just after. Nicholas said, ‘Nostradamus let you have the bowl? Why?’
Wodman said, ‘He is an astrologer. Perhaps he knew that it would save Kathi’s husband one day.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Nicholas said. ‘Why should he care? He had never seen me before, and would never see me again. And it was of no advantage to the King.’
Wodman said, ‘It might have been. Margaret of Anjou is his daughter, and she spent some time in Scotland. But you are probably right. What he saw in his charts may have surprised Nostradamus in some other way. At least he was intrigued enough to follow your movements. And you did meet again, although you may not remember it. When you dwined away by the river at Trèves, it was Nostradamus who tended you.’
Nicholas stared at him. Trèves, and the grand meeting between the Emperor and Burgundy, at which he had been present with Gelis and Jodi. And Anna. And Julius. When he was cornered: when he was compelled to admit, at last, all the devastation he had been planning for Scotland. When there had been a fight, and Jordan de St Pol had run him through.
Someone had carried him to the river. Someone had placed him, later, on the state barge which would take him to Germany.
Nicholas said, ‘How do you know?’
And Wodman said, ‘Well, how do you think? Or don’t you remember even who sent for help, and got you out of the house? I thought she’d tell you. It was Clémence, of course.’
There was no time for more. Wodman left, and Nicholas returned to Adorne, where the private conversation took place that he knew, from Kathi, to be necessary. He left soon after that for his own house and, seeing a lamp in the parlour, entered slowly.
Gelis was alone. She looked up, beginning to smile, and then rose and took his hand, and led him to sit beside her. ‘Can you tell me?’
‘I am not sure,’ he said, ‘when I became wholly transparent, but it does save a lot of trouble. I have just been told by Adorne what you probably know already.’
‘It wasn’t my secret,’ she said. ‘I hoped he’d tell you. Except that it means they are now sure. Was he very distressed?’
Anselm Adorne had been distressed, but his voice had been steady, and his composure had been unbroken from beginning to end.
‘You know my daughter Euphemia is at Haddington now? It seemed better for her to have company. And there is some reason, sadly, for her to have special care. It has taken some months to be sure, but it now seems that her condition is not temporary. Euphemia can hear nothing, not even the loudest of sounds. She is deaf.’
And Nicholas had said, ‘I am so sorry. What would Phemie have done?’
‘It is what I have asked myself,’ Adorne had said. ‘Euphemia is whole; she is beautiful; she has no other flaw. I have everything to be thankful for, and I shall not allow this one circumstance to affect me, or affect her more than it must. If she cannot hear, she cannot learn to speak, but there are other ways of communicating. Dr Tobie is advising me. Your own mother’s father, he tells me, spoke with his fingers at the last.’
Thibault, vicomte de Fleury, the grandfather whom Nicholas had never met, lying paralysed in his monastery of retreat outside Venice, and visited by Tobie and Gelis and, before that, by Adorne and his son. And later, they had been told, by Adorne’s servant who, you would think, might have observed and reported the finger-talking.
Nicholas had asked, but Adorne had not recalled, he said, sending anyone. Compared with this, it was of no importance, and Nicholas did not refer to it now. He spoke instead of the child, and all the measures the doctors were taking. The royal physicians were accustomed to deafness. Joanna, the third of the King’s six aunts, had been sent to find