Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [57]
Now she was almost ready to strike fully south for the Ghent Gate. She lingered, listening. This was an area where the streets were deserted of folk, and the winter dirt on the paving was crisp and whitening under her feet, with few lights about within the rows of huddled, dark houses. The sky, which had seemed full of snow, lay on the roof-tops like lead on a casket, and the occasional voice, from a window or yard, piped like the cry of a bird. Behind her, too, the shouting had dulled to the sound of a rookery, broken by small stabs of sound: someone was issuing orders through the Belfry’s official speaking-trumpet. She had sallied forth like a ship giving battle, and there was nothing for her to do. The mob was being contained. When her cousin came, with his orderly troop, the people would quieten, and tomorrow would send their elect to the bargaining table.
She hesitated, but being set on her course, decided to finish it. Louis should be told what was happening, and the Gate, now, should be easy to pass. On her way, she could still check on the two arsenals, the first at the Hospital of St John, where Dr Andreas once used to serve. The other was farther on, at the Abbey of Eckhout, better known for the great processions of May, when the White Bear jousters marched from the Abbey. Adorne had won the Horn from the Duchess one year, and Breydel the Spear. She hardly needed to visit either place, except that they lay on her road to the Gate. If there had been any trouble, she would be able to hear it from here.
She had almost come to the Hospital when she realised that there was a change in the air, but that it came from behind, not ahead. The faint sound of the rookery had altered. Straining to listen, it seemed to her that it had become uneven, and louder, as if it had found some sort of focus; had become an expression even of panic as well as rage. She turned, her heart beating, facing the quiet streets, her back to the vast hooded doorway of the Hospital complex. Then she gasped, for someone laid hands on her shoulders. Whirling, she saw that the door behind now stood partly open, and that Arnaud, one of the younger sons of Anselm Adorne, had her in his grasp, and was trying to hustle her towards it. He spoke breathlessly. ‘I saw you from above. Come quickly. In here. Someone has warned the crowd that Gruuthuse is coming. They’ll man the gates, look for arms. Will you come?’
The noise had swelled. Gelis ran, and the great doors of the Hospital slammed shut behind them.
Nearly four hundred years old, this was a hospital for the poor sick of both sexes, accommodated in clean, spartan halls tended by nuns of the Augustinian Order and brethren of the Knights Hospitalier of St John. It accommodated, from time to time, wounded soldiers. And because it was thick-walled and ancient, it had become, like all sacred buildings, a safe place to store arms. It was, after all, in the Order’s tradition to defend the Christian right. And Anselm Adorne had close connections with this particular place: thirty years ago, the Hospital’s guardian had been his father Pieter Adorne, Receiver-General of Flanders and Artois.
Arnaud had a young wife and a daughter born only last year. Phemie Dunbar had come from Scotland to care for them. Gelis said, ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ and he smiled and said, ‘Do you think I would have brought you in, if there had been an alternative? There isn’t time to go anywhere else. Listen.’
And now the roaring was loud.
She said, ‘Will you let them have what they want? There are sick people to think of.’
She had always thought of Adorne’s family as curiously ineffectual: from the eldest, a church lawyer in Rome, to the adolescents who had made their way, one by one, to this convent or that monastery. Two sons and two