Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [59]
‘I hope we have,’ Nicholas said, facing her. He spoke very softly. ‘I mean you to think about this. Enough lives have been wrecked. How did Jordan get Simon to leave? Did he pay him?’
Faint as powder on ice, points of colour appeared on her skin. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘As much as was needed. It was not expensive.’
He turned then, and let Godscalc walk with him out of the room. He let them bring his horse, too, and actually joined the cavalcade out of the gates and a short way down the hill before he stopped the chamberlain and made his excuses to leave them. Godscalc, looking suddenly grim, took his horse and stared down at him thoughtfully. He said, ‘You will risk yourself unattended?’
‘There is no risk, padre,’ said Nicholas. The chamberlain smiled, and set his horse in motion again. It was assumed, naturally, that he had in mind some feminine company. Which, of course, he had.
He waited until they were all out of sight, while children played, and men and women with their burdens thrust past him. His head felt hollow. A boy climbed up to his level, a basket of live conger eels on his head. The leathery heap passed by his shoulder, the sun rousing the smell. Nicholas crossed the alley and went into a tavern where it was dark and cooler, and a plump, olive-skinned woman brought a flask of wine for him, and a cup, and he tried out his very average Portuguese on her. She helped him finish the flask, and then he emerged and climbed uphill, back to the house of the Vasquez.
He had misled Godscalc only slightly. It had been politic to have the formal interview first: to be received by them all without protest. After that, he planned a less orthodox entry. He thought he might manage to make one, despite his piquant encounter with Crackbene and his more recent duel, in which different barbs had showered upon him. And the physical shock of – the shock.
He had expected nothing like that. He had expected tears, and sullen silence, and whispered abuse and perhaps threats from them both. He hadn’t known, either, that Diniz the idiot, the idiot, was fighting in Ceuta. He might already be dead.
Circling the walls, he found a place with a window he could reach, and enough footholds to get himself up to the sill and unlatch the shutters, and begin to ease them open a fraction. The room from the outside looked small, and he had counted on finding it empty. At worst, one or other of the women would be there and he could say what he had come to say. They must be satisfied by now that he couldn’t afford to do them an injury.
Unfortunately, he was wrong on every count. The room was not only occupied, it was a bedchamber; and the woman lying in bed was the last person to welcome a man looming between opening shutters. She screamed, and continued to scream.
A distant woman’s voice spoke. ‘The dolt’s come in the wrong window.’
Another woman’s voice answered. ‘Don’t you fret; I’ll get the brute. Holy Mother of God, have you blown out my match?’
He might have closed the shutters, scrambled down the wall he had climbed, and got himself safely away. The option didn’t even enter his mind, any more than it would have when he was eighteen in Bruges. Nicholas lifted both hands and, punching the shutters aside, vaulted over a dressing-chest and crashed with its toiletries into the chamber.
The floor was covered with shards. Above him was the bed of the screaming woman, who was sitting up, a warming-brick grasped in both hands. The doors flew apart. A second woman jumped in: a squat, grey-haired person on the operating side of what looked like a fully-primed handgun. It was trained in his direction. He noticed, with sorrow, that no one had blown out the match. It glowed in the fingers of Gelis van Borselen, standing behind the grey-haired markswoman and preparing to use it. He started to laugh, and got hiccoughs.
He was trying to make a placatory joke in three languages when everything exploded at once.
It couldn’t have been the hackbut, because he was still alive, with