Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [359]
ADORNE SAID, ‘YOU wanted to see me?’ The day after the feast, it was the first opportunity he had had to ride to Stirling.
Bel said, ‘Aye, I did. There’s something I want you to know. There’s something needs doing, and I don’t know who else to turn to. Forbye, it’s in your own interests.’
Adorne said, ‘You don’t need to say that, Mistress Bel. You only need to say, as I am sure you can, that it is for Nicholas.’
Later, leaving the house, he thought to call on the young lady Bonne, placed these several months in the august home of the late Sir William Charteris. His widow, by birth a Stewart, was perhaps too well connected to produce husbands for impecunious foreigners, and none had so far appeared. The nun, Sister Monika, was permanently settled in Elcho, and had washed her hands of the whole affair. The girl Muriella, a handful, was now with Malloch cousins in Edinburgh, in a bleak farm on the far side of the Nor’ Loch. She had sung, with her brother, in the memorial service held in the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity for Will Roger. Adorne had been there. So had Kathi. So had Nicholas.
Thinking of it, Adorne found himself again moved, as he had been moved to tears by that glorious, unbearable ceremony. And if he felt so, he could not imagine how Nicholas had felt. Years ago, lost in the toils of his miserable plot, Nicholas had sat there, in that beautiful church, and denied the music that Will Roger had made for him. Then Roger had forced him out of his isolation, and had given him in return a burnished talent, and a pass-key to happiness. Next had come the great Marian work they had created together, and after that, alone or with Nicholas, Roger had been spurred to compositions, from sacred to lyrical, that he would never have troubled to create on his own, enriching the lives of all his hearers, whoever they were. If much of the inspiration for the church had been Flemish—through Bonkle, through vander Goes, through Adorne and his friends—then much of what had followed was owed to Will Roger. The foundress, the Dowager Queen lying in her Trinity tomb, had died too soon to know it; but in the north aisle lay someone who did—Bishop Spens, who had also built nearby, and had become one of the sardonic circle of Will Roger’s admirers.
All those living were there, although only some, like Nicholas standing apart, were able to offer the dead not only their grief and their love but their voices, floating aloft, traces of the mind of God in the sky. They had sung the ‘Stirps Jesse’ again, from Willie’s marvellous responsory, and all the other music was his. At the end Nicholas, adopted into the body of singers, had disappeared in their company, leaving unexplained the last piece of music, performed with John Ramsay and written, you would say, with all the beauty of Nicholas’s voice and that of young Johnnie in mind. The text was not elegiac, nor was the singing, which was triumphant.
Now, in visiting Bonne, Adorne was minded to perform a service for Nicholas de Fleury if he could. They had been at odds in the past, with good reason; but now, all that was done. He braced himself a little.
Bonne, the subject of dutiful visits from M. de Fleury, but few from her stepfather Julius, was flatteringly grateful to have the company of a well-born, worldly-wise man who could speak of Flanders and Germany. ‘Would you prefer to go back?’ Adorne asked.
Encountered outside the cloister, Bonne von Hanseyck was a handsome girl, solidly built, with well-brushed brown hair and a sharp blue gaze which might disconcert