Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [204]
He said, ‘What do you want?’
She stopped. ‘Now there,’ she said, ‘is a question I have never been asked before.’
‘So you have had a long time to think of the answer. What would you have said to your mother,’ Nicholas said, ‘had she asked you that, now?’
‘She never asked me that either,’ the girl said, and began walking again. ‘I thought you knew her. She was a nobody. A selfish, ambitious nobody.’
‘And who are you, Bonne?’ Nicholas asked.
‘The Graf’s daughter,’ she said.
‘No,’ Nicholas said.
She rounded on him. ‘You have proof? Do show me.’
‘I am told there is proof,’ Nicholas said. ‘But perhaps it would be enough to ask how often the Graf’s family come to visit you? Did you tell them your mother was dead? Did they reply?’
‘I think the Abbess will be expecting us,’ the girl said. Her voice shook. ‘Is this how you usually court a bride? With aspersions on her birth?’ The cause of the tremble was fury.
‘Most husbands will expect either candour or a well-documented lie. I am sure you are mistress of both, but I am rather short of time. Discarding myself as an applicant,’ Nicholas said, ‘do you wish to be married, to be independent, or to continue in the embraces of Christ?’
‘I do not wish to be sold off to an unknown,’ she said. ‘But since you are so short of time, I shall not try to explain why.’
‘Perhaps it is just as well,’ Nicholas said. ‘When you have a clear-cut plan, speak to Moriz. Or one of the nuns would be prepared to advise you, I am sure.’
She glared at him.
He smiled. ‘Bonne. Don’t be silly. It’s not hard to guess how you feel, but you must stop sulking sometime, and think of your future. We are only here to help you, and you shall marry, if you wish to marry, only someone who has your approval. I may not come again, but you can reach me through Father Moriz. Does that seem reasonable?’
Her cheeks were scarlet. ‘Oh, it seems reasonable,’ she said. ‘You are paid to broker my marriage, and when I have been sold off, my costs here will cease. You don’t really wish to know what I want.’
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘To be a superior prostitute, like my mother,’ she said.
This time, Nicholas stopped. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That is not allowed. One, because it is not true. And two, because she is dead.’
‘What difference does that make? She was always dead to me,’ Bonne said.
He spoke to the Abbess, and left the convent without talking further to Bonne: child of unknown parentage; alleged daughter of Adelina de Fleury, who was barren, and someone unknown.
He did not believe she was his child and Marian’s. Meeting her, he had been conscious of nothing but pity mixed with impatience. He felt responsibility, because Adelina had reared her. He hoped that Julius would recover and take some interest in her future as well. He sensed nothing else: not the tender warmth that had been there from his first moments with Jodi, nor the ache that stayed with him still, through all his agonising dealings with Henry. He would deal with Bonne with his head, not his heart.
Returning to Paris, he paid a call to a monastery just outside Brussels, and another to a religious complex in Lille, by which time his baggage horse was carrying a very large crate. In between, he made his last visit to Bruges.
It was hard, in the end, to tear himself away from the Hof Charetty. It was hardest of all, perhaps, to take leave of Gregorio, who had witnessed Marian’s marriage with such cynicism, and had stayed to see her buried with such love. The unskilled swordsman Gregorio, who had once fought Simon for him; whose wife had cared with compassion for Jodi; who—in his precise legal way—had weighed up Nicholas with greater accuracy than anyone else now in Bruges.
Nicholas had said nothing to Gregorio of coming to Venice, and Gregorio himself did not refer to it. Applying Father Ludovico’s theory, Nicholas preferred to think that Gregorio would have acted the same way whether he had been happily married or not. Gregorio was older than Diniz. Gregorio, regardless of self, did not approve of