Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [275]
‘I wouldn’t marry him!’ said Muriella.
‘Then I shall tell them exactly why it is necessary,’ Nicholas said. ‘I shall tell them in any case, if Henry comes near you again. Henry, you will leave here tonight. I don’t care what excuse you invent. Muriella, you are coming north with Bonne and myself, and you will stay in whatever convent your father may choose. The excuse will be the war, but by the time the war ends, you will be married. Do you hear?’
‘Who are you? Who are you to say so?’ said Muriella. She was weeping again.
‘A goat,’ shouted Henry. ‘An old rutting bastard who can’t bear to see young people getting more than he does.’
‘I thought the premise was that I was getting too much,’ Nicholas said. ‘Never mind. Put me down as someone who happens to know what this kind of thing leads to, and who is going to stop it, whatever you do. And Muriella: you will not meet Henry again. You will not expect to meet Jordan either.’
She was scarlet, her face swollen, her voice choked, but she still managed to speak. ‘There isn’t any point, is there?’ she said. ‘If he’s just a stupid boy who can’t do anything yet.’
BY THE TIME Nicholas appeared downstairs, and made small talk, and bought himself time to walk down to the river, the sun had almost gone, and he felt as drained as the landscape in the withdrawing light. The wind had dropped, so that the sound of the water was clear and level and soothing. As he walked down through the grass, a grazing horse lifted its head and watched him, and a rookery at the top of some trees lobbed out some brickbats of sound, and fell silent again. A jaundiced line of swans trundled from one bank to the other, as if pulled on a wire. Jordan was sitting, low on the bank, watching the water. When Nicholas dropped at his side, he didn’t speak.
Neither did Nicholas. He hadn’t even thought what he was going to say, or not say. He didn’t have the gall to compare this exhaustion, this access of mental paralysis, with what was Robin’s daily portion.
In the end, it was Jordan who spoke. He said, ‘It’s all right. I know it’s not true.’ After a moment he turned fully round and repeated it, touching Nicholas’s hand where it lay on his updrawn knee. ‘Father?’
It was not a form of address Jordan used very much now. Generally he called him nothing at all, unless formal custom required it. To everyone else, his father was Nicol. Jordan said, ‘Father, you can’t do everything for everyone. It’s all right.’
Nicholas looked at him. It came to him that all the time he had been agonising over what Jordan had heard, Jordan himself had been fretting over what he, Nicholas, must be feeling. To Jordan, whether or not Henry had spoken the truth hardly mattered. His father had been vilified, and he wanted to comfort him.
Nicholas took the hand and lay back on the grass, carrying it with him in both of his own. Jordan dropped back beside him. His hair, which was long and brown, lay flattened under his wide, sunburned cheek. His eyes were on Nicholas.
Nicholas said, ‘It’s all right for me, too. People say silly things. You don’t need to heed them. I was troubled about you and Muriella.’
Jordan’s brow wrinkled, in a fine little print under his hair. He said, ‘I was silly there. She belongs to Henry, doesn’t she? She was just using me to make him feel jealous.’
Nicholas smoothed and bent the flat fingers. He said, ‘I think she likes you both, but there was something of that in it, yes. In any case, she’s too young to be serious. She’ll go off to finish her training, and then her father will choose her a husband. By that time, you should have met twenty more. The world is full of nice girls. That’s one of the good things about it.’
‘I like Margaret of Berecrofts,’ Jordan said.
‘I know. So do I,’ Nicholas said. ‘And remember, I’m a fountain of wisdom on girls. Anything you want to know, or to tell me, just come.’