Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [419]
Nicholas said, ‘How do you know he didn’t question her?’ He didn’t want to be in the same room.
‘Because nothing happened,’ Bonne said. ‘If I had no claim, he would have made sure, these latter years, that I knew. If I had, he would have tried to get rid of me. Although, in a convent, that isn’t easy.’
‘So you knew what he was like,’ Nicholas said. ‘You didn’t think to warn anyone? If I had died, would he have supported you?’
‘What do you mean? I didn’t know anything,’ the girl said. ‘No one could prove that I did. Of course, if I had had some evidence against him, I could count on his support in the long term. As it was, it was simply a case of waiting to see who would win: you or Julius.’
‘You didn’t mind which,’ Nicholas said.
She considered. ‘Personally? Julius was handsome, but not very clever. You are quite a kind man. Reflect, if you will, on who gave Mistress Bel the information that sent your friends to help you at North Berwick.’
He met her eyes. She did not look away. He said, ‘Because, of course, you were going to need funds for a dowry.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
He didn’t want to talk to her any more. He said, ‘Where do you think you will live?’
She laughed. ‘You won’t have to meet me. John’s uncle had friends in the East. In Rhodes and Zakynthos. Is that sufficiently far?’
For him, it was. Leaving, he forced himself to think of her, and to persuade himself that she might have grown differently, in different hands. But she wasn’t like Henry. It had taken more than a mismanaged childhood to produce Bonne von Hanseyck. And he did not have the skill, or the desire, to put it right.
STANDING IN THE High Street after that, with the thatch and the orchard-twigs flying, and the wind twisting his cloak, Nicholas did not want to go to Swift’s office to see Andro Wodman; and especially he did not want to go, after that, to Kilmirren. He wished he had no sense of duty. He remembered, painfully, what had just happened and resolved to do the best he could, this time at least.
He saw Wodman alone, and accepted ale, and talked about Adorne, who had saved Andro’s life, as well as his, by Castle Heaton. From there, Nicholas went on to speak of Jordan de St Pol.
‘You know him, Andro. He risked his own life, it seemed, to save my son from being shot at North Berwick. I haven’t thanked him, partly because I’m not sure that he’d wish me to, and partly because I’m not sure that I could. It seems to me, from what I heard recently, that I myself owe him remarkably little. I might enjoy telling him so, but it would only cause pain to Bel.’
Wodman was drinking ale from a chopin. He put it down. ‘What have you heard? Something you didn’t know? Who could tell you something new, now?’
And so Nicholas told him what Julius had said.
At the end, the Archer was quiet. Then he said, ‘I heard all that. I don’t know much more. I can tell you something of his loathing of Jaak; and of anything to do with men’s relationships with each other, or with children. It was an obsession that pursued him all his life, because of his beauty. Maybe you can still see what he was, beneath all that bulk. The fat is protective. Whether he invited it deliberately or not, I don’t know. But before he put on weight, he was as handsome as Simon, with twice the intelligence. Some of the Archers are married, but it is a closed community, as armies tend to be, and he was constantly pestered.
‘He also reacted too strongly. I don’t know, but I suspect he had already experienced something like it at home. I never met Alan, his brother. It became a competition, to try and captivate the magnificent Jordan, or tempt him at least. Even after he left the Guards,