Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [52]
‘Oh,’ said Nicholas. He sat down.
‘Well, it’s what I expected him to do,’ Wodman said. ‘He didn’t. It makes you feel anxious, doesn’t it? Whatever he’s planning, it’ll be a lot worse than that.’
‘You bastard,’ said Nicholas, and got up. It was as difficult as he had expected. Bed, when he got there, was blissful. He was almost asleep when he remembered his saddlebags, and a passing impression, as he emptied them, that something was missing. He lay for a moment, swore, sat up, and then stood. By the dying light of the brazier, he could see something that he hadn’t noticed before, pinned on the wall. A square of paper.
A letter.
No, a drawing. A careful drawing, beautifully done in two colours, of a fox and a hare and two dogs.
‘I thought,’ said Henry’s voice from the door, ‘that you liked to look at it, maybe, at bedtime. You sleep better, don’t you, with a little something from home? I have an old bit of blanket, myself. Good night, Uncle. Sweet dreams.’
The door shut. Nicholas crossed over and looked at the drawing, then took it down. Apart from the pin-holes, it was perfectly smooth and intact. For a moment, he had an impulse to crush it; then sensibly didn’t.
He had been going—he was still going—to Leith, to send it tomorrow, along with the other letter, which was next to his skin and had never left there. The letter, in Phemie’s level writing, to Anselm Adorne.
TO GELIS VAN BORSELEN, looking back to the halcyon years, Bruges had seemed a fine place to rear a child, with its ranks of handsome brown and red houses, ribboned with silvery water and knotted with bridges and wreathed about with its churches, its abbeys, its gardens. Warm and compact and thronged; full of vigour; full of surprises; the richest and most cosmopolitan small business town in the world, Bruges flowered all through the year, but never more so than in September, at the coming of the Venetian galleys, and at Carnival-time, just before Lent. The two marvels of a child’s year; of Gelis’s year, when she was small. There, up on the Belfry, was the platform from which the speaking-trumpet announced the results of the lottery. There, on the Minnewater, once filled with laughing, tumbling skaters, was where she, a fat child, had first met and been enchanted by Claes the apprentice, soon to be Nicholas.
There, within the walls of the Hôtel Jerusalem, was the lovely church built by the Adornes, where Nicholas, brave and young, had entered into his first marriage, with Marian de Charetty. And there, in the great Palace of Louis de Gruuthuse and his van Borselen wife were the rooms where her own wedding contract to Nicholas had been signed, just a few streets away from where Gelis’s sister Katelina had wilfully made him her lover, in the hapless affair that had ended in the birth of a child.
Katelina had died in Cyprus, long before Gelis’s own marriage to Nicholas, blighted for eight years, but now mended. Katelina’s child had another name, in another country, and believed himself to be another man’s son. It was small Jordan, born to Gelis and Nicholas, who should be growing up here as his parents had done, revelling in the whole noisy life of the town: the clack of the looms and the chime of the work-bell; the chanting of children and fullers; the barking of dogs and the cry of the moneychanger wheeling his cart. The rattle of horses bearing officials and merchants about their business. The thunder of wagons and carriages crossing the drawbridges and entering the various portals. The creak and splash of the mills on the water; the rickety chorus of the mills on the walls. The market smells of fish and fruit and butcher-meat. The odour of paint from the book-stalls and the workshops and Colard Mansion’s window, and of ink where the printing-presses had been set up. A town of merchants and artisans. A town where children lived with their parents. A family town.
It should have been like that, but the Duke’s death had brought Lent in Epiphany. Mourning did not enter into it: every municipality, every province with whom the late Duke had been at odds