Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [22]
Godscalc was watching him. Godscalc said, ‘I don’t think you need be afraid of my lord Simon. He has finished with you, and bears no grudge, so far as I know, against Tilde and Catherine. It is his wife I should worry about.’
‘Well, she is unlikely to harm me from Anjou,’ Nicholas said. ‘Nor is she likely to follow me, if I don’t know myself where I am going.’
‘After three months?’ said Godscalc. ‘That is time enough to plan a lifetime. Something must have lifted your heart.’
‘That’s true,’ Nicholas said. ‘What would you say if I went to join up with Astorre?’
They all stared at him. Julius said, ‘Whose crazy idea was that? Thomas? Astorre himself?’
‘The idiocy is wholly mine,’ Nicholas said. ‘Tilde doesn’t want Thomas, so I suspect he will decide to rejoin Astorre. Why don’t I take my money and join them?’
Godscalc thought. He rarely hurried to speak. He said, ‘Hand-to-hand fighting? It is different from laying man-traps, and plotting. Or perhaps you mean to finance the company; to act as Astorre’s wealthy patron?’
‘Hand-to-hand fighting is more fun,’ Nicholas said. He held the priest’s eyes for a while and then said, ‘I haven’t decided. But while I’m here, there are some things I’d like to take with me.’
Loppe moved forward, his skin glossy black above the white of his shirt; his movements with a natural, erotic grace which, from experience, was so far unintentional. He said, ‘I have some of them here. The small lady sleeps close to your room. She would wake if you went there.’
He opened a box already placed on a table. In it were the few clothes Nicholas had left when he departed for Trebizond, and some things he had always had, from the time he came, aged ten, to work for the Charetty. Among them was his first knife, and some of the playthings he had made with it. Made for the pleasure of Tilde, and of Catherine, and of Felix. Nicholas turned them over, and then lifted his head, and said, ‘Thank you.’
Loppe smiled. Godscalc said, ‘We’ll see them sent to the tavern. Now what else?’
Julius said, ‘He can’t have anything else. The girl’s in bed in the demoiselle’s chamber.’
Nicholas stood. The room came into his mind, arranged as when he and Marian slept in it last. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Godscalc was watching him. Godscalc said, ‘Time is passing. The mattress might have caught someone’s eye. It’s important you shouldn’t be seen, and not only for your own sake. Without us, the company would fall into ruin. Without Julius especially. They depend on him.’
‘I only thought,’ Nicholas said, ‘that I would like to see her office. I have nothing, you see.’
Julius was silent. Godscalc looked at Loppe. Godscalc said, ‘Then I think you should go there.’
He did so, alone, after taking his leave of all three. It was better if they hid the box and extinguished the lamp and dispersed, leaving him to make his way out alone. The future of the Charetty company depended on them, not on him. There had not been much more to say. They had wished to apologise, and to explain, and to establish a channel of communication and of goodwill, all of which they had done. He knew that Loppe was waiting to be asked to come with him; but he would not invite him.
Of all the rooms in the house the office was, for him, the one Marian lived in: so close in style to the one he had known from his earliest days, when he had come to her desk to be sentenced for some escapade, or to be catechised, or, rarely, to be promised some treat. Only Marian had ever sat behind the desk in the office although, latterly, he had spread his papers on the opposite side and crouched to consider them, feet on the stool bar, knees under the chin, pen-hand dangling, while she argued and contradicted. All their relationship, all their real relationship, had been created and shaped