Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [249]
Gelis, welcoming news of that birth, had found it hard to equal his flippancy, even though the pang it concealed was his, and not hers. Katelina van Borselen her sister had also named her child Henry—Nicholas’s child, whom she had carried to Simon. There was no reason, of course, why there should not be another so called.
He had reassured Gelis, he hoped; she had enough to contend with for his sake. But for him, she would not be here, working day and night in the cause of a country to which she, at least, owed no debt. Jodi would not be here, freed from the royal household since the Princess Mary’s bereavement and acting, ferociously, as combined henchman and runner to Robin. It was necessary to remind himself that, for most of the time, they were both exultantly happy. As was he.
In March, the power shifted again, when there came such news from France that all Europe shivered—some with delight, but many with dumb apprehension.
The Great Spider, Louis of France, had been struck down by a fit, and for a space had been mindless and speechless. He had overcome it, they said, but some day he would be seized by another. Louis, who couldn’t bear fools, had been touched by a curse that could make a clod of a genius. And the Dauphin his heir was a boy.
From London, King Edward reminded the world that his army intended for Scotland could be quite as easily deployed against France. His sister the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy had not wasted her summer in England.
To Adorne, as to Nicholas, personal considerations faded to nothing during these packed, breathless months. Adorne’s family were perplexed. From their various religious retreats, his sons and daughters lamented their father’s continuing absence from the house and tomb of his beloved lady their mother. His oldest son Jan, now a canon of Lille like Antoon, had actually left Rome in the expectation of a welcome at Bruges, and had been mortified to find the family home empty, and his brother Arnaud in Ghent, distracted by grief for his wife, and for his newest loss, the death of the baby Aerendtken.
Adorne wrote to them all, and tried not to take pleasure in his visits to the Priory at Haddington where his little deaf daughter, aged three, was the sunny heart of the nursery.
It was, too, where Nicholas had met Bonne von Hanseyck during her brief stay the previous autumn.
He had been busy, as they all were without cease, but he made time to call, and indeed had gone first to the noisiest part of the Priory where, as anyone could wincingly hear, Will Roger and his drums were entertaining the same small Efemie who stood, her round cheek buried in the buzzing drumskins, shrieking with delight. Now she could lip-read, Nicholas was teaching her patter-words.
Bonne, when he reached her, had been judicial. ‘Poor child. One wonders, though, how the Sisters can concentrate. We shall not be sorry to leave.’
They were going to the smaller Priory at Eccles, which to his mind was rather close to the Borders, but which should be safe enough this side of spring. The placement had been arranged by the Cistercians at Tart, partly because Bonne’s late mother had had links with the Priory. As Tobie had so cleverly found out, Sister Ysabeau of Eccles had had a sister married to Thibault de Fleury. Not that Bonne or anyone would learn much about all that now. Sister Ysabeau, now dead, had been too old and deaf in her later years to communicate much about the de Fleury family.
At any rate, the girl Bonne had been determined to make her