Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [423]
St Pol was staring beyond him. He said, in an angry voice, ‘Help her.’
Her?
Nicholas whirled round.
The small woman had slipped from her chair, her face blanched, her brow contorted with pain. She said, ‘Henry, Nicol? Ah, not Henry!’
She knew so much. She hadn’t known Henry was his. She lay, half on the floor, gazing up at him, and he dropped to his knees. He had gathered her like this in Africa. He had carried her, sick and ill and valiant, and sung to her, and helped make her well. Love and music. Bel? Bel? Don’t go. Listen?
He held her. She was not fully conscious. He held her, and followed a thread of song in his mind, as if he could induce her to hear it. Her hair was thick and grey under the gauze, and her face was round still, and still bonny. She had a daughter in France, and a grandchild. They were not going to lose her. Nor was he. He spoke to her, in a murmur. He spoke about Henry.
‘Come along, Bel. Come, Bel. It’s over. It was Simon he loved, and his grandfather, and now he’s at peace. We remember him, and so does his brother. They were halfway to becoming friends, Henry and Jordan. It wasn’t all loss.’
Her eyes were open on his. Presently she shook her head, and attempted to smile, and he drew her up into the chair. She was cold, so he laid his jacket around her, and turned to the bed-chest for a blanket.
The coverlet was upset. The fustian wool hangings were as neat as before, and the carpet laid on the steps, and the table set to one side with its tin flagon of physic and cups. But the coverlet was crumpled, and one of the pillows tumbled askew; and half sunk in its depths was the frozen face of Jordan St Pol, caught as it was when he dropped, wild with frustration, at the height of his effort to rise. His mouth was a little open and his eyes reflected the light as Henry’s had done; but no one had held him as he died.
SENT FOR, TOBIE brought Gelis with him. By then, the staff of the household had come and ordered the room, while Nicholas took Bel away. She wouldn’t go to her room, but sat with him in the parlour, where Nicholas had first met his son Henry, the golden child, and the golden man he thought was his father. Then Tobie came, and went to the bedchamber, while Gelis walked in and kissed Bel and sat beside her, her hand at her back. Bel was weeping, her face immobile; the tears running ceaselessly into her kerchief. Nicholas, without very much colour, moved quietly about, responding to questions, giving low orders to the same servants who, six months before, must have witnessed his struggle with Julius. Now they simply obeyed.
Presently, Tobie came to sit with Bel and Gelis, and Nicholas joined them, and answered his questions as well. He might have kept something back, but Bel had a mind of her own. Discovering that the others knew about Henry, she questioned them steadily. Then, against Nicholas’s silent resistance, she brought in the name of his living son, Jordan.
It was over, what had been said in that bedroom. No one had to know, least of all Gelis, that St Pol had wanted to make Jordan his heir. Nicholas sat, looking at no one, while Bel told all that had happened.
At the end, he glanced up, and found her watching him grimly. ‘I told him ye wouldna. I told him ye’d be too thrawn to take it, even if it was for the bairn.’
‘It was too late to make amends,’ Nicholas said. Gelis said nothing.
Tobie frowned. ‘But he saved Jordan. Didn’t that count? The gift was for Jordan.’
‘It was for the succession,’ Nicholas said. ‘It was why