Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [270]
But she was forgetting. Men didn’t go to war and stay merchants. He had been taught to kill now, and so had Felix. And one of them had paid the price.
She thought for a long time. The house was quiet. Along the passage, the door to the handsome chamber Jaak de Fleury had adopted as his own was shut and locked, his possessions piled in the empty room. Beyond it was the room Nicholas had taken when he and Gregorio made this house their office before the night of the fire. No light came from it, but the door was open.
It had been open when she passed. She knew why. He was the man who had taken Felix from her. He was her husband. He was neither. There was no role for him in this tragedy, unless she wanted to make him one.
Did she? Her memories tonight were of her family, of Cornelis and Felix, Tilde and Catherine. However long she had known the boy Nicholas, he was outside that small, tight circle. To admit him was a kind of betrayal. He had been to Felix what Julius had been: a mentor, a tutor if you like. He had been to Cornelis an apprentice. To her, he had shown the face of the ideal steward: loyal and hardworking and thoughtful.
Outside in the street, someone passed with a lantern. The little glow swept her room, printing her hands and her robe with frail lozenges. Her hair, falling coiled to her lap, briefly gleamed. She looked down, smoothing it.
I am a fool, she thought. Gregorio is an ideal steward. Julius is loyal and hardworking and thoughtful. But I made Nicholas marry me. And then I became the child, and he became the parent.
She thought, Now I have no other child. And he has no one else, either, to understand the day it has been.
The door was still open when she walked along the passage, shielding the small flame of her candle. He was resting, as she had done, at his window, but had turned his head from it on hearing her step.
All the daytime energy had gone, pressed down below the surface to give room to the thoughts that had to be dealt with.
She knew what they were. She walked to the window and looked down at him, so that he could see her dry eyes, her command of small things.
He didn’t rise: a thing she found touching. But his face eased a little.
She had handled children and husbands. She knew how to give comfort as well as receive it. She saw him recognise what she was about to do just before she blew out the candle, and laid it down, and sat, gathering her robe, at his side by the window.
There was enough light to see where his hand lay. She took it lightly in both her own.
He said, “I didn’t know what you wanted.”
She said, “I need someone who needs me.”
She was wiser than she knew. As it turned out, in this one thing she was the stronger. As doctors do, she forced him out of his composure and then, as she did with Tilde or Catherine, took him in her comforting arms.
But he was not Tilde or Catherine, and she too was astray and bewildered and suffering. His embrace, gentle as hers, held within it something else, which she realised he was silently controlling. That was when she lifted his hands in hers and ran them through the warm, shining weight of her hair. Then she held them to her breast, in the hollow where the robe fastened. “Nicholas?”
His fingers escaped hers but stayed, touching her robe. In his anxiety, he spoke in French. “Think.”
“No,” said Marian de Charetty. “Don’t think.”
Chapter 39
HOW OR WHERE Marian de Charetty passed the first night of her second bereavement did not escape notice. Tilde, her daughter, disturbed by some small sound, rose before dawn to find her mother’s room empty. Nicholas had closed his door. Tilde had paused there only a moment when she heard her mother begin to say something inside. Whatever it was, she broke off almost at once, as if she were out of breath like Catherine, and crying. But the sob had not been one of grief. Tilde stole past the door. Then,