Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [297]
Enchantment of a different kind was supplied, over the season, by the Court’s personal entertainment industry, headed by the Master of Music and his acolytes. The playlets they devised were performed everywhere: at Holyrood and at Trinity, at Greenside and at Orchardfield and the Netherbow, and induced children to laugh and their elders to hug them and each other. The great choral responsory devised by Will Roger alone was performed before hundreds in the burgh’s own High Kirk of St Giles, with the guilds and their flags standing each before its own altar. Dr Andreas arrayed himself with his flock before the glittering shrine of St Crispin, and for part of the ceremony, Anselm Adorne came to stand at his side, his eyes never leaving the master, or the choir beneath his two hands. Among the singers, robed and remote, were Adorne’s niece Katelinje, and the man for whose great, solitary voice the anthem had been written.
Full of love, Adorne prayed for them both.
THEN CAME THE enemy sun; and it was spring.
Chapter 38
‘Wnder the pane,’ said he, ‘to heid or hang
Thai ar commandit to revele it nocht.’
JUST BEFORE THE war began, Nicholas called on William Knollys, Lord Preceptor in Scotland of the Knights Hospitaller of St John. He went not to the Order’s Edinburgh hospice, but to the grand old Preceptory at Torphichen, which lay to the west, halfway between Bathgate and Linlithgow. He took John le Grant with him. There, in the Preceptor’s chamber, they were welcomed, seated and offered a choice of Rhenish, Gascon or Candian wine by Lord St John himself, in his robust, meticulous Scots. Then he asked, genially, if they had come to measure his shields, or to expose yet again—who would ever deceive an ex-banker?—some cataclysmic deceit over salmon?
To which Nicholas merely said, Neither: he wanted to talk about Alexander of Albany.
The wine pouring slowed. ‘Ah,’ said Sir William. ‘Deputed by whom?’
‘I volunteered,’ Nicholas said. ‘There is a possibility that France and England may collude to install his grace of Albany in place of his brother. An English army would bring him. King James has not yet been told, and you will, I am sure, keep it secret. The Council simply asks for advice. If Albany came, would many support him?’
The Preceptor set out the cups. Done without servants, it looked friendly. His round Scots voice sounded friendly. Regarding his height and military bearing, men were reminded quite often of England’s King Edward, although the Preceptor was five years older, and his hair was black and not fair. But both had the same middle-aged corpulence and the same appetite, evidently, for food and wine and sensual pleasures.
Only, in the Preceptor’s case, the style was deceptive. William Knollys had never seen service on the island of Rhodes: his appointment had required special dispensation because of it. There was no army of Knights at Torphichen: there had rarely ever been more than one or two, and now there was none but himself, and the vast cohorts of his lay administrators and servants. He courted women and bred children, duly legitimised; but it was done for a purpose: from Aberdeen to the Borders there were men of his name—uncle, brother, four sons—who would act as his henchmen in business and as procurators in his innumerable law cases.
For the affable manner was misleading, too. To administer the vast network of the Hospitallers’ properties; to collect his dues; to run his fleet; to sit in Parliament and on the Council of Judges; to please the King; and keep the Order in check with regular responsions required something more than the simple attributes of a soldier. William Knollys was formidable.
Now he sat down, saluted, drank, and said, ‘Would I support Sandy Albany? No. Would others raise him an army? Only a small one. Am I in touch with him? Yes. I have learned nothing of interest but the fact you have just mentioned. England have sent him an invitation. I have advised him to refuse it. I have told no one else about it.