Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [421]
‘Go and see him,’ Wodman said. ‘He won’t change his mind. He’ll never confess to the truth now. But if you want to punish him, show him finally what he has lost by repudiating you.’
Nicholas said, ‘Julius said much the same. I might be assured that I was Simon’s son, but there was no proof, and St Pol would never admit it.’
‘Does it matter?’ said Wodman. ‘Monseigneur knows who you are. So do you. You have no need of his name or his property. Go and see him. Tell him what you think of him: why not? But keep in mind how it started. It took a lot of misery to bend a man’s nature like that.’ He stopped. He said, ‘You are very like him, you know. The way he should have been, maybe.’
‘So I have been told. I am trying not to believe it,’ Nicholas said. He thought of Bonne. He wished this day would end.
BEL OF CUTHILGURDY opened the door, when he crossed the road to the house of his grandfather, and he hesitated, even though he had been prepared. Within, Mistress Bel stood in her hall, arms almost folded, and snapped.
‘I hear it was Katelinje that made ye face Julius. So you might as weel ken it was me that sent Tobie to help. Adorne might be alive if I hadn’t.’
‘No,’ Nicholas said. ‘They were going to kill us both anyway. Because you sent the army, I escaped.’ Because of Bonne.
‘But not wee Margaret, and not Julius,’ she said. ‘Andro told ye that Jordan is dying?’ The she added quickly, ‘My Jordan, not yours.’
Now that the child-name Jodi was shed, he found it odd that both his son and his grandfather should answer to Jordan. It was Gelis who had so named their son, during the war Nicholas and she had then waged. He had thought she meant only to hurt, but he had been wrong about her again. When no one else did, she had believed that Nicholas was a St Pol.
Nicholas said, ‘Is he too ill for a visitor? Should I trouble him?’
‘Nicol,’ she said. ‘He’ll injure you sooner than you’ll injure him.’ Which was true. He went in.
A beauty like Simon’s, he had been told. You could only look for it in the symmetry of the features within the gross folds of fat; in the breadth of shoulder pressed into the pillows, and the length of the body beneath the handsome coverlet. Now that St Pol wore plain head-linen, you could see the line of white hair on his brow, of the purity that comes from golden fairness. Nicholas’s own beard, when he grew it, was yellow. His eyes were grey. St Pol’s were blue, as Simon’s and Henry’s had been.
Bel had followed him in. She said, ‘Here’s Nicholas come to tell ye how his son does. He’s not to stay long. Ye havena finished your drink.’
‘And I’m not going to,’ said the old man. ‘Go away.’ She had nursed his wife for years. She had nursed his wife, and helped to look after Lucia. Nicholas supposed she knew now how Julius had driven Lucia into the river at Berecrofts, thinking that she was her brother. He remembered begging Adorne not to let Simon leave on his own, certain that Julius would kill him outside. He remembered having to use his sword on Adorne, in his anguish.
The skin on St Pol’s face was mottled, and his lips were a cold-looking blue. He said, ‘Young men don’t pay calls, these days, to thank their benefactors? Next time he can suffer the arrow.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Nicholas said. ‘We have been in Linlithgow. I am here to thank you on his behalf. Is the wound very painful?’
‘No. Or I should not be lying back as I am. I have no desire for a visit by you. Send the boy.’
‘Why?’ said Nicholas.
It was Bel who answered, from her chair in the corner. ‘Because St Pol has an offer to make.’
‘Dear me!’ the fat man said. ‘Did I ask for an audience? No. I asked you to go away.’
‘Then this is me refusing,’ said Bel. ‘Go on, Nicholas. Ask him what it is.’
‘I don’t know if I want to,’ Nicholas said. ‘In any case, if he had one, he’d have to make it to me. Jordan is in his minority.’
The gross face appeared bored. ‘I had noticed.