The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [195]
“And if he claims the company?”
Godscalc had been silent. Then he had said, “A murderer cannot benefit from his crime. But we must resist the temptation to pin the blame on an innocent man.”
“And if he can’t be proved guilty?” Tobie said. “We beg him to take over the company?”
He had thought Godscalc soft. But Godscalc turned to him and said, “If, when we return to Bruges, the Church and the law and the demoiselle de Charetty find his marriage is valid, and the demoiselle has no wish to change her bequest, then one day Messer Pagano Doria will inherit half of the Charetty company. Until then, I shall resist any attempt on his part to take control. Did you think I should say anything else?”
“No,” said Tobie. “But we may find it harder than we think.”
“If you think it hard for us, think of the child,” Godscalc said. “When we catch up with the girl, remember what she must be feeling.”
“And Marian de Charetty?” Tobie had said.
There had been a silence. Then Godscalc had said, “We shall have to write and tell her, of course. But not yet. Poor woman, not yet.”
After that, they rode in silence through green corn and blossoming orchards in the warm, hazy sunshine and then through the climbing, narrowing valley whose walls were feathered with alder and walnut, elder, beech and lime. Then, after ten miles, came the first of the fir trees, clothing the heights on either side. They paused there to rest their horses and refresh themselves briefly, saying little. For the practical side of such a journey, Astorre was the natural leader. But Tobie, remembering, acknowledged to himself soberly how much such an expedition would owe its stimulus, latterly, to the imagination, the secure touch of Nicholas. Even the men, in their silence, seemed to recognise it. “My boy,” Astorre had called him more than once. Before, it had been “that brat;” with whatever tolerance. Yet they knew, he and Godscalc better than anyone, how incendiary the real Nicholas was. It should make the loss easier.
They overtook Catherine de Charetty past Cevizlik, where the basalt cliffs rose in columns above them and the river was joined on the left by the stream they were to follow. They were then within three hours of their destination. She and her escort in its good Genoese armour had already set off into the neighbouring valley. The Imperial road, kept in roughest repair, was half sunk in dirt and looked as untended as the other highways, the bridges, the viaducts bequeathed by the past to the Empire. Beyond, the deepening valley seemed filled and brimming with green, where summer suns and fine mists had nourished the forests so that they mounted and thickened with flower and leaf. Already the horses had brushed past purple banks of rhododendron and azalea bushes yellow as butterflies. Ahead, he had been told, was a gorge a thousand feet deep, fragrant and steaming with flowers. And the monastery, cool and airy, laminated the rock face far above it, rooted in deep caves and grottoes, with a sheer drop to the torrent below.
There were men of God in such crags, but also robbers. The Genoese, as was prudent, had turned in formation at the sound of massed horses. Then their captain lowered his arm, recognising the pennants of Charetty and Florence, and the familiar flamboyant helm of Astorre. Through the ranks, you could see the tired faces of the women attendants, reflecting some faint hope of rest or remission. The face of their mistress, turned also, showed the same smudges of dust and of weariness, but beneath them, the hardness of basalt. Then she saw who they were. She said nothing. But Tobie caught, for an instant, a glitter of something like fright. Then Godscalc was alongside and saying, “Demoiselle. Let us come with you.”
Behind, Astorre and the Genoese captain were talking, low-voiced, as the cavalcade rearranged itself. In this country of brigands, thirty armed men were sure of their welcome. There was no welcome on the girl’s face. She said, “My lord is ill at the monastery. I’m going to the monastery. Perhaps he’s dying.”
“Then we’ll go all