Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [287]
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Yes, she is well. A little surgical for comfort, but that’s my fault, not hers. She’s back in Stirling, tired of prevaricating, and quite willing, I think, to tell Julius anything he might want to know.’
‘Which would be disastrous?’ Gelis said. ‘To you? To us? To the world?’
‘No. It would just be sad,’ Nicholas said. ‘Otherwise, it’s of no importance whatever. Bel knows of nothing that will show me to be of legitimate birth. No one does.’
‘Oh. Good,’ said Gelis. She willed him to begin to laugh, and he did. Then she willed him to jump up, and he did that, too.
BY THE TIME Julius came back from the Borders, the fighting at Berwick had stopped, and all that was going on was the usual exchange of vicious raiding by the normal denizens of each side of the frontier, which continued into the New Year and increased the hardship already caused by bad harvests. Being Julius, he had a large, fresh fund of personal gossip, but no actual news of what Sandy Albany was up to in France. Nor had anybody else.
To please the King and themselves, Nicholas and Willie Roger filled the weeks before Christmas with the preparation of several small musical plays, aimed chiefly at children, and one large liturgical work by Whistle Willie, with the voices of his friends as his instruments of experiment. As at the time of the great play they once created together, the houses of the various friends and associated members of the projects became littered with paint and paper and illogical artefacts, and untrustworthy artisans such as Big Tam Cochrane and John le Grant and Nicholas himself were to be found in corners with heaps of wire, whistling and cursing.
The differences between now and ten years before were, however, also impressive. Then, they lived in houses that were chiefly offices, and occupied by their lessees or owners for only a few months at a time. They were ornamental and reasonably comfortable: suitable for entertaining and for meetings, and with room for a family. But someone who lived here for five years, and came to spend time in other homes, to frequent centres of learning, and to keep company with men of literary or artistic or musical interests, would gather about himself the products of all these encounters; would have to find room for books, and for pictures and for instruments, and a workshop or office for his own experiments, as well as a table he would not be ashamed to offer his guests. A man who hunted and shot with his friends would have hounds, and horses, and birds. A family man, whether in business or not, would require clerks who paid his debts and collected his income, together with the great circle of his suppliers: the builders, the merchants, the fleshers, the bakers; the water-carriers, the smiths and the lorimers. He would know by name or by sight everyone who lived in his town, and in business, in sport or at his fireside, would rub shoulders daily with most of them.
All the men who had once belonged to the House of Niccolò, including its former owner, now lived in homes which possessed a permanence which the peripatetic life in Flanders had never encouraged. The exception was Anselm Adorne, whose beautiful Hôtel Jerusalem in Bruges had been a testament to generations of culture, and was paralleled by nothing he had attempted in Scotland. Either he did not wish to try; or else his busy life was sufficiently served by his homes in Linlithgow and Edinburgh and Blackness, which were handsome enough, and his use of the Berecrofts house in the Canongate. And certainly, within these parameters, his entertainment was princely; as he himself was entertained, as he always had been, by men of consequence. His daughter, a silent, merry four-year-old, flourished in Haddington.
Nicholas saw his own twelve-year-old daily, but the other son not at all, until the time he took delivery of his new ship at Leith, on a lowering day of wild weather which had frightened off pirates and allowed the Jordan, in all its three-masted glory, to plunge round the coast and come to rock