Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [323]
Pain returned while he was speaking, and he began to shiver, and they brought him something to drink, and a rough shirt, and a cloak. He went through what he had to say twice, and then everyone vanished, and he was alone. The courier would leave now. The rest of them had gone to uncover the boats and prepare to cross while the Tweed was still running high, and the Till’s flooding upstream held the soldiers’ attention. Once across, Nicholas would be given means to take him to Kelso where, with fitting reverence, the crypt of the Abbey would receive Simon and Henry de St Pol for the interim, and where he could stay, if he wished. It was only an hour’s ride away.
Adorne would not be with him. Adorne was to follow his courier north, taking Andro, for there were twenty thousand enemies at the door, and the King’s brother leading them. Nicholas, said Adorne, had done enough.
Adorne would not greatly mourn Simon, who had been cavalier with his own son, and whose weaknesses he despised. Equally, he had had small time for Henry’s undisciplined wielding of steel, although he had observed, perhaps, Nicholas’s forbearance. Adorne’s compassion was for Nicholas, and was rooted in those first days in Bruges when—to general derision—Nicholas had not only claimed the name of St Pol, but appeared to believe in the claim. Adorne had always been a humane judge. However baseless the contention, he was honouring it. For—he would argue—if Nicholas held it to be true, he was suffering today the loss of a father in Simon, and a half-brother and nephew in Henry.
He did not know more than that.
To an outsider, Nicholas had little cause to mourn Simon, a man who had shown him nothing but violence; who had stabbed and hounded him as a boy; who had, fatally, sent a man to oppose him in Trebizond; who had first sided with Gelis in her misery and then, persecuting her and Jodi, had come near to causing their deaths. Who had found it easy to blame Nicholas for the death of Lucia, Simon’s sister, and had done his best to kill him just before, in an agonising fight stopped by Adorne. Who had hoped to see Nicholas die in Madeira, and had taught Henry then, and ever after, to hate and despise him. So that Henry, too, over and over, had tried to cause harm to Nicholas, and to Jodi his cousin.
So an outsider would say. But a son would try—had always tried—to understand Simon, a man of divine looks and all the physical attributes of knighthood, whose rearing had been blighted by the lazarhouse that was his home; by his hated, too-early marriage; and, above all, by the brilliant, absent, acerbic father who mocked his intellectual shortcomings and dispatched him rejected to Scotland, away from the golden arena of France.
And a father would feel love and pride and agonising pity for Henry, so alone and afraid, and beyond all but the most tentative touch of the lunatic happiness: the stupid, profligate de Fleury happiness that might have been his if he, Nicholas, had had the imagination to step out of his role and care for Katelina, study her, strive to understand her as he had learned to do, finally, with Gelis.
He had given Katelina happiness, too, in the end. Then she had died. I leave you my soul and my son.
He had tried. Because of this implacable feud, his path and Henry’s had lain mostly apart. When they met, Nicholas had protected him as best he could, and tried to guide him a little, and staked his own life, as was only fair, in the process. It had not been sufficient. Henry would have been better with a father wiser than Nicholas, or more ruthless. The truth was that no rescue was possible while Simon lived, and his father. From these two, loved and hated and feared, Henry derived his coherent being: they represented all that he was, all he wanted to be. Subtracted from the St Pols, Henry would have found no highway to happiness. He would have ceased to exist.
He had ceased to