The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [296]
Tilde de Charetty turned. “I hear no very great news of your efficiency, Meester de St Pol,” she said. “Perhaps we might give you a run for your money as well. You made a loss this year, I see. Perhaps you will make a bigger one next time.”
“Threats!” said Simon. “My dear small demoiselle, I am trembling. But yours is not the field I am cultivating. Since my agent has gone, I propose in future to act on my own. Genoa, Venice: I have not yet decided. But Nicholas will find out which in due course.”
Astorre, at a nod from Gregorio, was moving briskly to the door, his eyes on the sisters. Gregorio himself turned halfway there. Nicholas said absently, “No. Wherever you are, I shall be somewhere else.” He pulled a sudden, wry face, from the store of faces that once he used to employ. He said, “The superiority of the word over the sword. You learn quickly, don’t you, from your inferiors?”
“Nicholas,” Gregorio said. “The Collegio. If, of course, you are staying.”
He waited for Nicholas to pass him and go down the stairs. It was not yet time for his interview at the Collegio, but he saw him escorted there none the less, cleansed and changed into fresh clothes and insulated from everybody but himself and Loppe. Dressing, or allowing himself to be dressed, Nicholas had had time to ask all the questions he needed to ask. In fact, he said almost nothing. It was Gregorio who told him, patiently and without drama, what he knew he ought to know. A lawyer, like a notary, was by his profession a witness to tragedy, and was familiar with the suspension of feeling that comes after shock. Having to face the Collegio was the best relief he could offer Nicholas now. Later, it would be different. He had always thought he knew how it was between Nicholas and his wife. Now he saw there was something else.
Astorre provided the guard that delivered him to the Collegio, and then dispersed. Gregorio went with him so far and then made his way back, through the alleys and over the bridges that were now as familiar to him as the alleys and bridges of Bruges, after the weeks he had spent, with a sullen Tilde, waiting to break the news with care, with compassion to Nicholas. Marian de Charetty is dead.
All the company knew it now, and would be waiting for him when he returned to the Martelli Palazzo. They would have questioned Astorre, and Astorre would have told what he had seen and heard in Simon’s lodgings. They would not have had to face the two girls, for he had given Tilde to the care of Tasse and, after hanging back, Catherine had come slowly forward and allowed herself to be taken, too, to the chamber her sister was using. By courtesy of the Medici. He had not bought the lodgings and offices for which he had the authority because, from the moment he had found Marian de Charetty in death, he had been waiting for Nicholas. To learn if he had survived. And then to commit him. Forcing him to attend the Collegio had been the first step towards that. Giving him the letter his wife had written in her last days had been the opposite: the act that might wreck all his hopes; but he wouldn’t have denied Nicholas what she had written.
He didn’t know what it was. What he had told Nicholas had been true. She was already dead when they found her, he and Tilde; searching the region by chance in an effort to find Thibault de Fleury, Marian’s brother-in-law, the grandfather of Nicholas. If he had not seen her, and buried her, he might not have believed in her death, or suspected her murdered. But her looks belied that, even without the words of the priest who attended her. Later, although he failed to trace the old man, he found that Doria had never been near him, nor made any attempt to legalise a marriage to Catherine de Charetty. And at Florence, the papers had proved equally false.
He told it all again at the palazzo, when Martelli had left them considerately alone, and while Nicholas was absent still with the Venetians. To Julius, to Godscalc, to Tobie he said,