Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
Later, when she had read the letter, they talked about Seaulme Adorne, and about the rising in Bruges. Listening to what she was told, Phemie was disturbed, but not unduly apprehensive. Men like her uncle, Kathi said, might be subjected to a token imprisonment but, by now, it might well be all over. Of course, Phemie could not travel at present, but had begun to speak of joining Anselm after the birth. It was only two months away. He might even travel to fetch her. Then she asked about Robin.
There, Kathi held back nothing, but balanced the bad news with the good. He could never walk, but could be strapped in a chair. One side would always be dead, but the other was not, and the living intelligence that made him was unimpaired. Kathi was in Scotland to stay, but her life henceforth would depend on Robin’s determination to rediscover his place in the world. Phemie, she thought, understood.
Then it was time to open the door, and announce Phemie’s news to the world. For whereas yesterday she was an earl’s daughter, illicitly pregnant, today she was the promised wife of Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy, and could now quietly reshape her life.
Nicholas stayed for a while, as did Kathi. It was partly because Phemie wished it, and partly to savour the moment when Nowie was told. Consummate performer that he was, Sir Oliver moved from relief to chaste satisfaction, expressing delight at his dear cousin’s choice, mixed with the faintest censure for the gentleman’s hastiness. He gave her his blessing. It was even possible, since he had certainly guessed it all beforehand, that the satisfaction was genuine. Reminded of recent events, Kathi murmured to Nicholas at her side, ‘You made her very happy just now.’
‘I wanted to,’ Nicholas said. ‘I knew how she felt.’
‘How?’
‘When I first heard I had a son.’
He spoke very softly. It was so unlike him that she thought at first she had misheard. She said, on a light breath, ‘Where were you?’
‘In a convent. I left. I was thinking about him when they attacked me, or I should have escaped. Abrupt awakening.’ He gave a laugh, still very soft.
‘Who attacked you?’
‘Men of Jordan’s. Jordan de St Pol. It doesn’t matter. But I know how she feels.’
He said nothing more. Kathi thought crossly, No one knows. No one knows what has happened to him. He hardly knows himself. Only this moment of happiness suddenly came back to him now, because of Phemie.
Then she had to step forward, for Betha rushed in, followed by young Will Crichton’s mother, another cousin. And that was only the beginning. As word spread, the castle would fill up with relatives. No one, dear God, could say the Dunbars were not well connected. Among her second cousins, Phemie counted some of the King’s staunchest friends in the north-east. The Earl of Moray was once a Dunbar; a Dunbar was Keeper of Darnaway Castle. Phemie’s sister Cristina had married into a family that held the rents of all the royal fishing on Speyside, for which at Lammas each year they had to present to the King three and one half lasts of salmon, full, round and sweet.
So Nicholas had told her. The same rights, of course, obtained in salmon rivers elsewhere. Tom Yare held tack of the River Tweed fishings for life. The Knights of St John held salmon rights in Peterculter, Aberdeenshire. Monasteries, great and small, all had their privileges: the extraction of salmon, which then required to be salted, barrelled, and shipped to their markets. Andrew Lisouris, that peripatetic carpenter of noble birth, shipped down the King’s salmon with timber from Darnaway forest for barrels, for building. Timber often accompanied salmon, and coal, to fire up the salt-pans.
The keys to the future of Scotland, Nicholas called them: what would weld guild-brethren together, what would fill the royal Treasury; what would draw the eyes of the siblings from England; what should occupy,