Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [281]
‘No,’ said Bel. ‘If he’d meant you to be dead, you’d be dead. I jalouse he wanted you taught a lesson, or held up, or both, and someone exceeded their orders.’
‘And,’ Nicholas said, ‘does the same apply to Simon and Henry? I have just antagonised them both to the point where one or other will certainly try to commit murder, and Monseigneur will probably let them, perceiving my usefulness finished. I suppose I ought to go back to Flanders.’
He thought she would take him up on that, but she didn’t. The battle light left her face, and she exclaimed. ‘Ah, no, no, Nicol. Is that what all this is about? Henry? I’m mortally sorry. Simon should never have been sent for.’
‘He had to come back some time,’ Nicholas said. ‘And Henry had to deal with it some time. I just didn’t want other issues dragged in to confuse matters. Now, as you say, perhaps it doesn’t matter what people know.’
‘Because Henry’s opinion of you won’t alter now?’
Nicholas looked at her. He said, ‘Bel: what in God’s name do you think Henry’s opinion of me matters? Nothing matters to Henry but the approval of Simon’s father and Simon. There were other ways he might have earned that, but they’re gone. Now, if he can only obtain it by attacking me, then he will. Hence, I do see, an exposé of his family by you, or by me, or by Julius can’t make anything worse.’
‘It could unite them,’ she said. ‘It would unite them, of course, for all the worst reasons, but that’s maybe better than nothing. Or don’t you think so?’
He was silent. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Bel. ‘Even you can’t quite think through that one. But loneliness, I have to tell you, is a terrible thing. A man alone will do from a whim what a tribe of villains would rarely do, even for profit. A tribe of adventurers will survive, but very few men can face fear and self-hatred on their own.’
She wasn’t talking of Henry; she was talking of the fat, solitary man who was his grandfather. Nicholas said, ‘I really don’t know, Bel. I want the same thing for them that you do, but I can’t do much more. I won’t have my family hurt.’
She smiled. She said, ‘They won’t be. I have seldom seen any family as secure as the one you have made, Nicholas. I have to pray that nothing dissolves it. But if you didn’t take risks, the boy wouldn’t worship you as he does.’
‘So that I am really here to impress Jodi,’ Nicholas said. ‘That is what you are supposed to be doing: appealing to me to place my dashing services at the small Danish feet of the Queen?’
‘No. I knew you would do it,’ said Bel. ‘You didn’t come here for that. You came to find out how I can stomach a man who does what Jordan does, and love you as well.’ She stopped, presumably reading his face. She said, ‘Did I have to put that into words?’
‘It helps,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘I hoped you knew I felt the same. But I couldn’t pretend to want to be as close as you are to Simon or his father. Long ago, perhaps; but not now.’
‘Then I’ve not properly explained what I feel for them,’ Bel said. ‘It’s not what you’d call unalloyed love or respect. It’s more the same feeling, I jalouse, that you have. You’ve been harsh with them, as they have with you. In spite of everything, you still feel protective. They’re your family. I feel the same, in a different way. I can carry the burden. So can you. Just so’s ye ken, as we were saying, that you’re not on your own.’
Someone else had said that, when it mattered. The miracle was, he had long since realised, that he had never been alone; even in Poland. You tried to safeguard other people, and, all the time, the lifeline was working both ways.
Chapter 36
A quene