Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [238]
‘You think he should stay here?’ said Gelis.
‘He has no choice, for the moment,’ said Umar. ‘If he recovers, as you know, he is his own man. He will decide.’
‘But too late for this ship,’ Gelis said.
‘Take this ship. If he – if he wishes to follow,’ Umar said, ‘I shall carry him myself to the coast. I shall find some means – a Portuguese vessel – to send him home. There will be only one season lost. And if you do not know your mind now, you will know it by then.’
It should not have disturbed her. She was afraid sometimes that Bel understood her. So perhaps did this man. Then she remembered, and interpreted, the hesitation. She said, ‘You don’t think he will recover.’
‘They say he might,’ Umar said. ‘They say he can. Do you know who is his heir?’
The gold. She searched his face, but it showed only fatigue and distress. She said, ‘His partners, so I suppose; apart from the claims of the Bank. He has no family. No –’ She halted.
He said, ‘No recognised family. In death, it might be different. In death he might receive what he always wanted.’
He said no more. For a moment, she felt too sickened to speak. Then she said, ‘Simon hates him.’
‘It is a great deal of gold,’ Umar said. ‘For an inheritance such as that, would Simon not proclaim Nicholas as his son, having Henry to succeed him, and being free of Nicholas for ever? If it has struck me, it must have occurred to Nicholas too.’
‘I think,’ Gelis said, ‘that Nicholas values life more than you think. I think he likes fighting more than you think. I think you are speaking of a weak man, and that he is not.’
‘I am glad you think so,’ Umar said. ‘So you will stay? Or you will go?’
She said, ‘I will come to see him tomorrow, and decide.’
But she had already decided. She sat beside Nicholas the following day, and left whenever the doctors came to examine the bones they had rebroken and set; renew the ointments; change the nature of the liquids with which they hoped to nourish his body; ask him soft, patient questions to which he gave no reply.
Alone, she did not talk to him. She sat paralysed when, once, the abyss of his gaze opened, and he looked straight into her eyes.
She expected perplexity. She saw the reverse: full awareness. Then his eyes closed abruptly again.
Later, she called at Umar’s house, and told him that she meant to leave with Father Godscalc, and the gold. She did not tell him why.
The city of Bruges in November was damp, cold and wet, like the rest of Flanders. Diniz Vasquez, arriving there straight from the interior of Africa, promptly fell prey to the worst cold in Europe, which he treated by wearing two shirts, a pourpoint, a doublet, a large hat and a thick velvet cloak lined with marten. He had never been happier in his life.
He didn’t mind that his mother had insisted on coming. She was in the Vasquez house, and he saw little of her. He didn’t mind that Gregorio, having taken him there, stayed two weeks and left to go back to Lisbon. Gregorio was expecting the return of the San Niccolò with a breathtaking cargo of gold, and Gelis, and Godscalc, and Nicholas. He, Diniz, had wanted to go back to Guinea on the Niccolò, but now he was glad that he hadn’t. He had been a child when he had last been in Bruges. Bruges had changed. Bruges was full of girls.
Bruges was a rich, civilised city with well-maintained roads and canals, and proper administration and defences. It was inhabited by gentlemen, by prosperous traders, by busy, industrious craftsmen, and was one of the three great money markets of the world. Its streets and waterways were lined by handsome stone houses, comfortably furnished, where he could sit eating eggs and collops and shred-pie and talk about millet and sweet roots and Baobab juice with a great cup of good wine in his hand. And about serpents with a hundred