Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [288]
She looked at him. She said, ‘I am going to Scotland. I have a duty. I want to fulfil it. I am afraid, too, of exactly the things you have mentioned. We may be natural mates, but not partners. What we have gone through together may run through our fingers. You have found a way of thinking, and I might destroy it. We need to separate for a while.’
He drew a long breath, and held it. Then he said, ‘Not outright rejection? Look. I am sitting prepared for it.’ His head swam.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, my idiot Nicholas, no. But a space of six weeks to consider. I am going to Scotland. You will hear my answer from Lucia.’
‘Lucia?’ he said. He thought of Lucia: the perfect hair, the screams in the bedroom in Lagos.
‘She is travelling to Bruges for the Wedding. If I stay to lead my own life, she will tell you.’
‘And if not?’ he said.
‘Then,’ she said, ‘I shall be on the same ship.’
She left presently: the shortest night but one they had ever spent together. The next day he went to Sluys to see the Scottish ship sail, and Godscalc, riding awkwardly on an old mule, accompanied him. Gelis was already there, surrounded by her van Borselen family. She kissed him chastely goodbye, and commanded her page, as she went, to deliver to him a leave-taking parcel. A gift, she said, in token of the many small kindnesses she had received from him.
Long after the ship had moved out, he saw her face as she said it, the deep-set eyes wide, the lips pinched and curled at the corners.
When he was home, he opened the parcel. It was a working model, in wood and metal, of a table fountain. It solved the Baroviers’ three problems of linkage. He could hear, now, the critical van Borselen voice, and his own belated, tolerant answers. Godscalc said, ‘What is that?’
‘A reproach,’ Nicholas said. ‘But a clever one.’
Those who knew Nicholas, and suspected what had happened, treated him each according to their natures in the six weeks that followed. Tobias Beventini his physician arrived, accompanied by Captain Astorre, the head of his mercenary army. Tobie, having summed up the communal health problem of the double company, threw himself into the hilarious revival of friendships, interspersed with long sessions with Father Godscalc, spent partly on manipulating his hands, and partly on arguing about medical literature. From Godscalc, he learned all he needed to know about Nicholas and, as a result, left Nicholas to himself.
Astorre, to whom Nicholas was a mascot, slapped him on the back, asked a couple of questions (purely anatomical) about the Empire of the Blacks, and demanded to be taken to the seigneur of Gruuthuse, seeing that he had the right sort of men for the seigneur’s cannon.
Julius arrived three weeks later, disinclined to be apologetic about having left the Bank to itself in order to attend the Duke of Burgundy’s wedding. He said if Tobie came, he didn’t see why he should miss all the fun. He wanted to know if it were true that Tilde de Charetty was going to marry the Portuguese boy, and the Charetty and the Bank were to merge? He wanted to know why Nicholas hadn’t come back to Venice.
Gregorio, acting as a one-man Bruges reception committee, assured Julius that he would see Nicholas soon, and that they had all found it hard to plan, because of the upheaval caused by the Wedding. ‘I can see that,’ Julius said. ‘Every street being repaved and scaffolding everywhere else. All the same. Is Nicholas doing any work? The Ghost. The Fortado. The missing gold. Nothing done about anything. I don’t know how you’ve found it in Bruges, but in Venice he just walked through the day as if it didn’t much matter. Of course, the Bank does run itself, in a way.’
‘What more do you want?’ Gregorio said. But, of course, it was true in Bruges as well. Gregorio had tried to set up enquiries and meetings, but so far nothing had come of them, because Nicholas largely ignored them. Nicholas worked, but not as he once had.
During this period Nicholas worked mainly, truth to tell, on