The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [194]
No one answered him; but the doctor, who had been wringing out cloths, lifted his bald head as if he, too, would have spoken in accusation. But, unlike the bearded man, he looked at the big priest who had welcomed him. And presently that man, turning, said, “And, sir, you heard the story from Messer Pagano himself? If we were to make our way to the monastery, might we see the wounded man and learn more?”
“Indeed,” said the man from Sumela. “It will be a week before Messer Doria may easily ride, and the sight of his friends will surely comfort him. His lady wife has already set out there.”
He saw them look at one another, but the man with the beard said, “What’s the point?”
It was the doctor who replied. He said, “The point is, Astorre, to find out who killed them.” Then he turned his back on the bearded man, who had drawn a long breath, his cheeks turning red, and, laying the cloths down, said, “I shall send someone to go on with this, and make you a bed. If some of us go to the monastery, there will be others to set you on your way with food and a horse when you wish.”
“I can see,” said the messenger, “that these are men you held in esteem. I am sorry to carry such news.”
“I am sorry, too,” said the doctor.
The priest and the doctor, with a good escort, left indeed almost immediately, although not before an equerry from the Palace had knocked at the door and asked to hear all the messenger could tell. He was, it seemed, from the women’s apartments, and not from the Emperor. Leaving, he had spoken to the Latin priest, and to the ship-master, a man called le Grant. “My lady would help if she can. It is a loss of which we cannot yet measure the depth.”
“No one could,” the doctor said. “He was not old enough.”
They set out to confront Doria, and it felt like going to war.
An onlooker would have said that the journey was senseless. A company deprived of its leading officials has a requirement to close the wound rapidly: make its new dispositions and appointments and, most of all, repair the shaken trust of its clients. No onlooker had heard Nicholas say, as Tobie and Godscalc remembered, You have to keep me alive. You have to pretend that I’m still running the company. Because the moment I’m dead or deposed, you belong to Doria.
So Tobie and Godscalc rode out, lightly escorted, on the coast road to the Pyxitis estuary and, turning inland, took the road Nicholas had taken two weeks before. With them thundered Astorre with thirty men armed to the teeth. Even had he known more than he did, he would have been ashamed to think of his own future, or the company’s. Whoever had attacked his boy and his notary was going to bear a short life. He had whatever second-hand account of the brigands the messenger had passed to them, and a description of the battleground even vaguer. But Astorre proposed to find it. And examine it. And root out the killers. Behind them, to do his excellent best to manage the affairs of the company, they left a silent John le Grant and their clerks and their servants.
From the very start Tobie had said, “It was Doria.”
And Godscalc, debating rather than contradicting, had said, “He took very few men, compared with the fifteen Nicholas had. And you heard what the man from the monastery said. Doria was covered with wounds, and so were his servants. Wounds from axes and curved knives, not sword slashes.”
“It was Doria,” Tobie had repeated.
And Godscalc had said quietly, “It probably was. But it has yet to be proved.