The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [201]
Before the girl, one could do nothing more, however one longed to. Godscalc bowed to her, and left the room, followed by Tobie. Instead of turning into the passage by which they had come, Godscalc slowed. He said, “I need air before we join the others. Let me follow you.”
Tobie said, “I’ll come with you. Over there. It leads to the balconies.”
The door he opened led to a summer gallery built on the face of the rock, its floor tiled, its pillars open to darkness. Tobie walked to the rail and stood looking over. Below, the forest sighed and rustled unseen, and the rush of the river was no more than a long exhalation. Behind him, Godscalc knelt, his back turned. After a while Tobie spoke. “Father? There are some things I can ease.”
Godscalc rose slowly. “No,” he said. “It is fatigue, which sometimes makes simple things seem suddenly difficult. You feel it too, I am sure.”
Tobie said, “You told the girl about Doria and Simon.” He couldn’t see the priest’s face.
The priest said, “And yet I forbade Nicholas to disillusion her. That is what you mean?”
Tobie said, “And you let Nicholas go, knowing that Doria might follow. It was to be Doria himself who showed her what he was. But it didn’t succeed. If he killed Nicholas, the girl has no idea of it. And there’s no proof.”
“He killed him,” said Godscalc. When Tobie didn’t speak, he said, “I know what I said. I gave him the benefit of every doubt there could be. I listened. I watched. There is no proof, but before God I know that man either killed him or had him killed. That is why I told about Simon. But that failed as well. It needs more than that to break what binds the child to Doria. And breaking that, what else would one break? That is the question.” He stopped and said, “I am sorry. Tonight I don’t sound like a priest.”
“Tonight,” said Tobie, “you sound like a man who needs food and wine and rest and sleep almost as much as I do.”
Chapter 29
ON THE ELEVENTH DAY of May, a week after his wound in St Omer, the Charetty lawyer Gregorio left the Knights of the Golden Fleece to their vows and, turning his back, rode out from Bruges in the direction of Dijon and Italy. Ostensibly, his errand had to do with the expansion of the Charetty business. In private, it was the same as that of Marian de Charetty, who had set out ten weeks before to discover the fate of her daughter, and of Nicholas. It was with some perplexity that Gregorio received, at the last moment, a companion he did not want.
On the same day, far to the east, the Charetty doctor and Godscalc their priest, sparsely escorted, rode over the Pyxitis bridge and through the eastern suburb of Trebizond to their trading fondaco, leaving behind them in the Sumela monastery the same daughter and the golden Doria her husband, also wounded the previous week; but in a different cause.
To Tobie, the approach to Trebizond looked just the same. The same dilatory buffalo jammed the way from the bridge. The same geese hissed and cackled. The same women slapped their laundry beside the same fountain; the same dogs and children ran after them; the same men called a greeting from the work booths; they had the same trouble picking their way through the market. You realised then how many faces and dwellings had become familiar in just five weeks and how Nicholas had seemed to know not just a few people, but everyone. A plague of small unreeling toys seemed, of its own, about to constitute his greatest memorial. There was no sign, here, of anxiety or disruption.
The Florentine courtyard, when they turned into it, was equally tranquil. Only, because the day was dry as well as mild, the business tables with their brass inkpots and cash books and sealing-wax had been set out under the arcades. A lad from somebody’s counting-house was just rising, a minor transaction completed. On the house side of the table, instead of Julius sat Patou the senior clerk, with John