Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [234]
Simon he now knew had not even stopped to see his sister on his way north. The child had stayed, he discovered, and then had been sent for.
‘How should I know where Henry has gone?’ Lucia said. ‘They sent a nurse for him, and an elaborate escort. You would think he was the vicomte already.’ Bereavement – even mistaken bereavement – had made her a little stouter, although the golden hair was still perfectly coifed and her morning gown and linen immaculate. There were lines round her mouth.
She added, ‘I suppose you met the child? Then you know. An ogre. I told Bel, really, not to trouble.’
‘Bel?’ said Gregorio. She was the real reason why he had called. He hadn’t seen her.
‘Bel insisted on joining the party travelling with Henry. First to Ribérac, and then somewhere else.’
‘To Ribérac? To his grandfather Jordan?’
‘I told her Simon would be furious,’ Lucia said. ‘He’s training Henry to be the first champion jouster in napkins. You know all this madness was for Henry? Simon sold the estate and invested in the Fortado to make money for Henry? The idea of losing it in some sort of court case, I tell you, is driving him mad.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Gregorio said.
‘No! Don’t be,’ said Lucia with elegant spite. ‘A dynasty founded by that child? I think they should present Henry to the van Borselen family. They wanted him. They sent the girl Gelis.’
‘You think he’d make a good merchant?’ said Gregorio. His smile felt artificial, even to him.
‘I don’t think he’d make a good anything,’ Lucia said. ‘He’s too like his father.’
At the end, she said, ‘And so, when does the San Niccolò sail for the gold?’
‘In October,’ Gregorio said. ‘With a new master, and a good clerk, and a pilot who can make use of our charts. She’ll arrive in Cantor in December, and bring Gelis and Godscalc and Nicholas back. I can’t go with her: I must go to Bruges.’
‘I don’t want Diniz to go,’ Lucia said. ‘He is not to go back to Guinea.’
‘I know he thought of it. If you like,’ Gregorio said, ‘I could take him to Bruges. I need help. Jaime will do very well in Madeira without us.’
He wondered if she would object. Bruges was connected with Nicholas. A year ago, she had been convinced that Nicholas was trying to kill all her family. Presumably, he thought, she had observed that Diniz and Gelis had survived, and that the person most worth despising was Simon. He waited.
‘Perhaps I could come to Bruges too,’ Lucia said.
Gregorio clung to the smile. It was what his orders required. He had hoped, truth to tell, to sidestep this particular order. ‘Why …’ he said. ‘Why, of course.’
In the second week of September, when Zuhra was five months pregnant but hardly showed it, Umar invited himself to the house he had taken for Gelis van Borselen and, leaving his shoes in the garden, followed her servant into the largest chamber, where she sat surrounded by carpets. It had been coarse cloth, chigguiya, last time. He came and knelt smiling before her. He said, ‘You know we don’t make anything in this city. We buy from one man, and sell to another.’
‘You make books,’ she said, looking up. In the heat, she dressed mostly as Zuhra did, in a single garment of cotton, with one of coloured silk to wear over it in public. In private, in the steam baths and pools and lounging-rooms of other women she often went bare, he knew from Zuhra, and probably did so here, too. She had made for herself a way of living in an environment as different as Europe had been for him. He knew how much fortitude it needed – and even more how much energy, how much understanding, and how much intelligence. He could not understand why, with all that, she had not left Nicholas alone.
They never spoke of him. They spoke a lot of Timbuktu, and all that concerned it. She saw it not just as an exchange mart, a centre of peace, of learning, of wisdom, of retreat, of happiness, although she recognised all these things. She wanted to give it more: a wealth of its own. Even though the carpets around her were poorly woven and inadequately dyed, she contemplated them, frowning, to see how they could be