Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [68]
He had been kneeling at the altar, alone. He raised his head with composure and turned. Then he said, ‘Ah Gelis, my dear,’ and rose to his feet.
He did not look very different. The fine bones of the face were perhaps starker than usual, and the amusement gone from his mouth and his eyes. But the well-cut doublet in rich, sober cloth, the velvet cap on the crisp silver-fair hair were the choice of a well-born man of authority, not a self-seeking petty official. He wore none of the emblems of the King of Scotland or the Doges of Genoa, but only a crucifix. And he knelt in the church whose foundation stone he had laid as a child, before the bonewhite sculpture of the Passion; beside the rectangles on the floor where his wife’s sarcophagus and his own would eventually lie, if mob rule did not first destroy both his home and his church.
Gelis said, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. Forgive me.’
‘No. Stay,’ he said. ‘You have come to be with Kathi? I am glad. But it is dangerous outside. You might have been better in Scotland after all. Although I still think that Nicholas took the right decision. He must deal with those who have threatened you, or who would use you and your son as a weapon. And here, anyone from Veere will be safe. Have you heard from Nicholas?’
There was a cross-stool by the wall which he held for her, before taking another himself. He was not booted, like a man about to ride far: his calf and thigh, extended in the fine hose, were shapely. She wondered how often Kathi was brought up now by something as trivial. Robin, loose-limbed and agile, would never wear fine hose again. She said, ‘Nicholas? No. But they will tell me if a ship comes with a letter.’
‘It might come into Veere,’ Adorne said. ‘Send to Wolfaert. He will make sure the message comes quickly, no matter what’s happening. You wouldn’t go to Nicholas then?’
‘No,’ Gelis said. ‘It would only make it less easy for him. And I want to be here.’
‘I’m glad you are,’ he said again. He had been listening. ‘But now—’
Behind her, the door had opened again, to the sound of booted feet. It must have been what he was waiting for when she came. A man started to speak. Adorne rose. He said, ‘I know why you are here. I am coming. Only let me take leave of my niece. The lady with me is leaving.’
She stood beside Kathi and watched as he left. She said, ‘He will be back. They will let him go. Nicholas will come and plough Flanders with salt if they don’t.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Kathi said. ‘It is what I was thinking as well. I suppose it is a tribute to something. Simple, childlike, hot-headed justice, which everyone expected of Claes. But he does things rather differently now. And in any case, he’s in Scotland, doing them to David de Salmeton and others, I hope.
THE LETTER FROM Nicholas did come to Veere, and was sent by her cousin Wolfaert to Gelis by courier. By the time she received it, Anselm Adorne had been in prison for some time, and facing, with his fellow accused, a process of questioning which did not rule out the possibility of torture. The date for a tribunal had not been fixed. To all the protests and demands of the ducal officers, the magistrates simply replied that there was a case to answer at law, and that the law would decide.
Well, they would see about that. Wolfaert van Borselen would see about that. Sitting in her room in the Hof Charetty-Niccolò, breathing shakily, with the packet in her hands, Gelis thought of all the times that Claes, the happy-go-lucky apprentice, had been beaten and thrust into the Steen by edict of Anselm Adorne. They had been on opposite sides, Nicholas and Adorne, many times, but Nicholas had never borne grudges for punishment he knew he deserved. In those days, he tolerated even undeserved punishment with good humour. But