Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [185]
It was the kind of thing he did say. He might even mean it. The hands withdrew. Nicholas lay, his eyes closed. He heard the King leave, and Katelina’s steps apparently following. Tobie said, ‘I’m still here.’
Something had to be done. Nicholas twitched his lips, without opening his eyes. He said, ‘I hope Abul Ismail can take the piss out of ermine.’ With the last of his consciousness, he registered Tobie’s grunt of approval.
*
Outside, waiting as bidden, Katelina van Borselen raised weary eyes to the man gowned as a King who, it seemed, was young and comely and hardly older than Nicholas, for love of whom he had come here. The antechamber they stood in was private, and he did not ask her to sit. Instead he walked frowning to the window, and turned.
‘We have a few moments only. We were curious to see you. We are told there is some relationship, some estrangement, between your family and the lord Niccolò?’
The lord Niccolò. But he was, officially, a Knight of the Order. To him, Zacco had spoken as to a familiar. Now he used the royal plural, which should have seemed childish, but did not. She said, ‘That is so. But my nephew and I are here, my lord, through no fault of our own. We are anxious to leave.’
‘For Kyrenia?’ he said.
‘I have abandoned that plan. For home. For Portugal,’ she replied.
‘Indeed,’ he said. There was a jewelled chain round his neck, and his big-boned fingers played with the pendant. He said, ‘Our lady mother says she has seen you.’
‘Your lady mother, my lord?’ she said.
‘In the Palace, with the lord Markios, her brother. You were ill in your chamber,’ said Zacco.
She had only been visited once at the Palace. What had happened then she had thrust to the back of her mind hoping, perhaps, that it had been a delusion. The auburn-haired girl who had turned into a cynical, acid-tongued harridan. The melting face, speaking of locusts. What then should I do to you? Skin you as the Mamelukes do, and makes hawsers out of the peelings?’
It had been a real person. Her brain told her as much. But – this man’s mother?
‘She frightened you,’ Zacco said. ‘We are afraid that, in her zeal, she sometimes goes too far to protect us. But she is not harsh to those who are reasonable. She says we should be lenient, and should prepare to release you even without recompense for your lodging. We have agreed. We have said that if by autumn the gold has not come we shall send you away. Meantime, you will be lodged in the south, where you will have no temptation to incite your nephew, or communicate with Kyrenia or Famagusta. There are several families of good blood near Episkopi. You will take your woman, and stay with one of these. You will suffer no hardship.’
Her limbs were trembling, but she tried to keep her voice steady. ‘And my nephew, my lord?’
‘That is settled. He remains here, and works in the dyeshop. Messer Bartolomeo, we are sure, will be a good master. That is all.’
She said quickly, ‘I should prefer to stay with the Clares. Or at some –’
His eyes, full on her face, were brilliant hazel and colder than metal. ‘We have spoken,’ he said; and walked out.
For love of Nicholas, he had come. Katelina thought of what she had heard, and the caress she had seen. She had always assumed that one kind of love precluded the other. She had held herself firmly apart from the plebeian tangle of this apprentice’s conquests – from the serving-wenches of Bruges to his elderly wife; and from there of course, to Primaflora. There had been a rumour from Venice. There had been another, which she discounted, from Trebizond. But now, slowly, she began to consider whether or not there were reasons for this strange inconstancy which had nothing to do with simple lust or base blood or ambition.
She went back to the Clares, and could neither pray nor go to a friend, for she had no friend to turn to, here or anywhere.
Chapter 27
WHAT HE SAID and did when