Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [30]
‘It still sounds quite grand,’ Kathi said. ‘Anyway, I shan’t let you sniff at the Scottish orders of chivalry. My uncle likes being a Knight of the Unicorn, and I suspect Nicholas doesn’t mind all that much. If he thinks about it at all.’
‘I don’t know what he thinks about,’ Gelis said. ‘He is so used to being alone.’
Kathi was silent. Until a few months ago, Gelis too had lived behind ramparts. Then the defences had been broached. And now she talked, with moving honesty, of what she cared about. But the reticence Gelis had shown had been different in origin, surely, from the fierce and solitary silence of Nicholas, which could be dissolved sometimes by awe, but not significantly by physical pain or euphoria. Wherever he was, no one would know, would really know what he was thinking, unless he wished them to. Or, rarely, it would happen by chance, as when one accurate note resonates with another. But then there would be no need of words.
They talked. Kathi had chopped up and painted something for Jodi: a miniature tabard to wear in the jousting-field. Nicholas had been amused, in the few days he had been at home, at his son’s addiction to military training, and even Gelis tended, laughing, to sigh. But Kathi knew, as Nicholas probably did, that it arose from hero-worship: adoration of his large, fond, magnificent father, who fought against Turks; and love of Robin, the mischievous playmate who invaded his house in the Canongate, and who laughed and fought like a dancer. Jodi had never really taken to Kathi, who had stolen his Robin and married him. When Kathi left gifts for Jodi, they were always in Robin’s name.
Gelis put down the tabard and held out a kerchief. ‘What brought this on? Don’t tell me. I’m avoiding Jodi just now because he reminds me too much of Nicholas. Would you like to talk about weddings? Paul and Catherine have drawn up a contract, but have to wait for a dispensation from Rome. Weeks, in this kind of weather. Children could be born, if Catherine weren’t so prudish.’
Kathi laughed, blowing her nose. There was some nominal kinship, for sure. Catherine de Charetty was related by marriage to Nicholas, and Paul was son to Gelis’s cousin. Dispensation would come, but Catherine, who once flouted every convention, would behave until then like a nun.
‘Poor Paul,’ Kathi said. Then she remembered that Paul himself was not exactly legitimate, which might very well tend to make him as cautious as Catherine. She thought it all rather a shame.
SHE WENT HOME soon after that, and saw by the bustle that the baron her uncle was home. She was on her way to her room when he sent for her.
Anselm Adorne sat at his desk, in the finely wainscoted room splashed with colour from the armorial glass in the windows and pinned benignly with unicorn heads. Just before leaving, Nicholas had attended several meetings here with her uncle and the late Duke’s advisers, debating how to handle this turbulent interim; how to prevent all that was good in the past from being swept away before the grand marriage came, which would throw what was left of Burgundy into the hands of the Duchess’s future husband, whoever he was.
Nicholas had once served the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, and carried intelligence of many countries, near and remote; at such meetings, he made his own contribution to the state that had reared him. Furthermore, in what time he had left, he had taken Diniz aside and taught him what he needed to know, so that, whatever happened, the business would survive. It should be safe. The new régime would need merchants. And with Catherine’s marriage, it would have the support of the van Borselen family of Veere, whom no one offended.
Now Kathi walked in, and sat, and saw the change in her uncle’s eyes. She said, ‘What has happened?’
And Anselm Adorne rubbed his face and said, ‘I’m sorry, child. Someone will tell you, and you had better hear it first from me. It’s Ghent. Ghent again. Do you remember in Scotland—you were a little maid only—when the news came of the destruction of Liège, and of how the