Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [282]
When Gelis came, he was away at the dyeworks, sitting on a bench among the familiar vats, trying to hold a serious conversation about orchella while being side-tracked by all the jokes and gossip and laughter that you got from men you had known since you were ten. He had given up, in the end, and ordered a barrel of ale and they were all drinking it when the servant came running. He was required at Spangnaerts Street to welcome a guest.
It was Gelis van Borselen, of course, who could diagnose a man in liquor whether she was lying unclothed by a pool among Negroes or dressed from breast to hem in meticulous velvet, with a fine, bulbous hat on her head. Her hair, which he had cause to know was well brushed, was out of sight, wrapped round her head. She said, ‘Fermented liquor again?’
‘They keep slipping it into my cup,’ Nicholas said, ‘in the hope that I’ll ravish them.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that Henninc has been trying hard for a very long time. I want to see Godscalc.’
‘He’s here,’ Nicholas said. ‘You’ll have to help me up the stairs.’
He was a little drunk and thankful for it, for, once in Godscalc’s room, whatever they planned, Timbuktu enclosed them. Godscalc and Gelis knew it almost as he did; and hungered to talk. The common irritations: the sand, the wind, the heat, the insects. The exotica they had described to others so often: the apes, the parrots, the river-horses, the lions, the elephants.
The people they had not described. Once, in Venice, Julius had mentioned a blackamoor he had acquired for his boat and Nicholas, frozen, had asked what tribe he belonged to, and had seen the uncomprehending expression in the other man’s face. All that, he and Godscalc and Gelis shared as, for a shorter time, had Diniz and Bel.
They asked him about Umar, and he told them a little, and a little more of the journey to Taghaza. He fell into dispute with Gelis over the fortifications he had left; and again, over where the canal should be. He criticised the type of wool she had proposed for the weaving-shops. Godscalc said, ‘If you are going to quarrel, could you do it somewhere else? I have a headache.’
She was instantly full of remorse. The remorse was as spurious as the headache. Nicholas said, ‘May I see you home?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Gelis van Borselen. ‘Can you walk?’
He could walk. He walked her to where she was sleeping, which was not the Gruuthuse palace, he discovered, but the van Borselen house, where Wolfaert stayed when in Bruges. It was empty, but for two servants.
At the door he said, ‘What do you want of me?’
‘A night,’ she said.
There was a door at the back. He let himself in, and left by the same way in the morning; and it was like Tendeba, but all enacted in a dream, with one strong, pliant girl. One girl, with the myriad allurements of Tendeba. He tried to tell her, but she laid her palm over his lips, and her body on his, and under it, and between. The morning light showed her spent, and still smiling. He said, ‘Gelis. We shall make a child if we go on like this. What do you want?’
‘What I am taking from you,’ she said. ‘I can protect myself. I shall bleed through and after Easter, which will give us both a respite. Is that too womanly for you?’
‘And after Easter?’ he said.
‘We shall have three weeks before I go back to Scotland.’
He said, ‘You are going back?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Unless I cannot do without you.’
‘Or I cannot do without you?’ Nicholas said. And laughed suddenly, for he knew what she was going to say.
‘What has that to do with it?’ Gelis said.
Nicholas supposed, if Godscalc suspected before, that he must be sure now of what was happening. He himself had never needed much sleep, but the nightly toll left him sometimes light-headed. He stood in his office and leafed through the reports from Julius in Venice;