Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [345]
No one liked this reply. The English command objected for a long time. But in the end, they agreed to the meeting.
RIDING HOME, QUIVERING with emotion, Marchmont rehearsed their triumph over and over. ‘They agreed! Twenty thousand men, unopposed in enemy territory, with the King cut off from his army, his ministers, his Parliament, and the King’s brother and potential successor in their hands! And they agreed to stop attacking and parley!’
‘We were very persuasive,’ de Fleury said. He had always been a very jolly fellow up north, but had been disappointingly quiet on this trip. He was quite right, though, with that sardonic remark. After all, Gloucester had really been bound to agree. He was not in the strong position he seemed. He couldn’t stay long. He couldn’t get the King out. There were few short-term benefits to be had. If he wanted Albany as a puppet, he would be unwise to wreck the lands of his friends. If he was willing to be bribed, he shouldn’t offend the princes, ecclesiastical or mercantile, who might arrange it for him. He was vulnerable. The Scots were anxious. If they wanted a meeting, it was obvious that a bargain of some sort was in the wind. If they followed the mild double-talk of de Fleury, they could now at least guess at its nature. Provided his own safety was assured, and it was, Gloucester had nothing to lose.
Marchmont said, ‘You must have been glad not to be alone in the dark with poor Sandy. I think he’s going the same way as Mar. Anyway, you can present yourself in correct style another time. The Unicorn is a valuable honour. I don’t like not wearing my tabard, myself. I shan’t be happy until the King is out of there, and we can follow proper practice again.’
It was good, then, to find de Fleury smiling suddenly, in the old companionable manner, and saying, ‘It won’t be long. We took the first step towards it today. Are you as thirsty as I am? There’s a tavern.’
Marchmont protested a trifle, for they ought to return as fast as they could. But he found the idea appealing, and he was pleased with what they’d done, and he was cheered, too, to find that he liked the man after all. Nicol. Nicol, he took to calling him. And the title. He should use the title, a clever man like that, bowing in the Burgundian style.
GELIS SAID, ‘I expected you sooner. Drew Avandale received this peculiar message, urgently dispatched from an ale-house in Yester. The brewster who brought it swore he had been told to say just one word: Yes. Or Yesh, I gather it was.’
‘That’s why I was late,’ Nicholas said. ‘I had to tell Drew what Yesh meant.’
They were in their own house, in their own room and nearly in their own bed. It had been rather precipitate. She said, ‘Gloucester agreed? You’ve got what you wanted?’
‘Not yet,’ said Nicholas crossly.
‘From Gloucester.’ She couldn’t breathe. Her anxieties fled.
‘He wouldn’t have been any good,’ Nicholas explained. ‘He doesn’t have those little—’
‘The meeting?’ she said. But she was just teasing now, and was punished for it. At the indisputable end of the tournament, when all the turbulent contestants had left, he roused from a long, waking dream to ask something. ‘Where is Jordan? When can I see him?’
Jordan, the man of the future; not Jodi.
‘He’s with Robin in Adorne’s house,’ she said. ‘Waiting to see you.’
She had been anxious. When he reached to kiss her damp eyes without words, she knew he understood why. But although she waited, he didn’t bring his losses into the open; either then, or when they moved, later, downstairs.
The great wound, the deaths of Simon and Henry, was beyond touching at present; but she had expected, by now, to hear him speak of the others, about the friends who had been close to them all. Yet, although she was given a detailed account of the political consequences of Lauder, he didn’t mention Big Tam, or Whistle Willie, or Leithie. It was like dealing with the survivors of Nancy again, except that Nicholas was very different