Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [18]
Yare said, ‘What have you heard?’
Wodman glanced at his fellow passenger, but said nothing. De Fleury said, ‘Only what reached Bruges before the end of the year. The King’s brothers and sisters are young, and occasionally wilful. Sometimes merchants and even envoys find it better to speak first to the older men of the Council, who can then choose the right time to debate the issue with King James or his brothers. But I may have heard wrongly.’
‘No,’ said Yare. He was aware that he had been spared an explanation he would not have wanted to give. He was bailie of Berwick, but he was also one of the small circle—Scheves, the Prestons, the Sinclairs—who supplied personal service to the royal household; whose ships brought in baby night coats and wine-barrels and salmon, while some of their houses in Edinburgh were grand enough to lodge envoys. He heard a lot of personal gossip and, of course, used it. But he was careful to whom he imparted it.
Now he said, ‘What you heard is true. It is a young Court, as you say. The Duke of Burgundy’s death raises complex issues which the King’s advisers will want to consider.’
‘So that perhaps I should see them initially,’ de Fleury said. ‘But if the King summons me first, there is not much I can do.’
‘No,’ said Yare. ‘Once he knows that you’ve landed, that is. But you could be sorely held up. It’s a bad beat sometimes, north, in this wind.’
‘And Mick Crackbene, as we all know, can’t set a course. Yes, that’s true,’ de Fleury said, lifting a brow at his shipmaster.
‘If you say so,’ the big fair man said blandly. And to Yare: ‘I didn’t tell you. We’ve brought your tombstones. Lovely, they are. One for you, one for your lady. Come and see when we get them ashore.’
He promised. As the talk turned to more everyday channels, it occurred to Tom Yare that there was a piece of gossip he should give to Nicol de Fleury. Something heard by Yare’s brother the friar, who lived near the Priory that taught the King’s youngest sister in Haddington. He would tell de Fleury, in private.
BACK ON BOARD: ‘He didn’t notice the chip in the marble,’ Nicholas said.
The ship heaved. Wodman said, ‘He wasn’t really thinking of tombstones. He was trying to work out how fast he could get a message to Edinburgh. Whom will he send the news to? The guilds?’
The ship pitched. Nicholas said, ‘Christ, Mick: you have rigged the sails badly. No. The guilds will come second. First, he’ll send to the Lords Three.’ They both knew whom he meant. Avandale, Whitelaw and Argyll led the inner council that supported the King. That supported young James and his little wife and the four royal brothers and sisters about whom Tom Yare knew so much that was disquieting.
Mick Crackbene said, ‘You mean he’ll send to the Council, who will then tell the King that the Duke of Burgundy’s dead, and suggest what to do about it? Is that what Yare told you?’
And Nicholas answered, ‘As good as. You heard him.’ He wished sometimes that Mick were less observant. For many years, the shipmaster had worked, off and on, for Nicholas de Fleury, and sometimes against him, as Wodman had done. But what Yare had said, in that brief aside noticed by Crackbene, had been for no one but Nicholas himself.
Yare had given him news—no, a piece of scandal, which Nicholas was compelled to believe, however unwillingly. He would have to deal with it personally: there was nobody else. But first, he had a weightier errand: to report to the policy-makers of Scotland the facts of the Duke of Burgundy’s death. He did not know how long all that would take, or when he could set in train what he had come for, which was not to pick up a cargo. He was not, in fact, perfectly fit; but that would mend. His injuries had been nothing to Robin’s.
Landing in Berwick that wild, February day, Nicholas de Fleury had known that he was mad to come back to Scotland, but that it had to be done. And since he had made a computation, as he always did, of all the possible risks, he concluded that the