The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [112]
‘You don’t want me with her?’ she said.
Nicholas said, ‘I was thinking of you.’
Once, long ago, Margot had been forced into marriage and fled. Once, long ago, Margot and Gregorio had been unable to marry, but now her husband was dead, and they could. Except that they didn’t.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to keep secrets from Goro. I’ll wait until the official birth, and come back. She has to come back then, surely. This is no life.’
He said, ‘He misses you. This is one thing that should not have happened. Come with me and marry him.’
‘Now?’ she said. ‘You think I should marry him now, after all that has been happening? No. It has been so all our lives, and it is not going to change now.’
He said nothing more. He followed her to his wife’s room, and waited outside, and was almost beyond feeling when Margot came out and said, ‘She is sleeping.’
Her eyes were on him. He said, ‘Let her sleep.’ He, too, had been felled.
Margot said, ‘The child. What will you do?’
He said, ‘I am leaving men here. She’ll expect that. She’ll probably find out how to elude them. I don’t think it matters. She’ll announce the birth when the timing is right.’ He stopped. ‘I should have liked to see the boy. Will she let me? Some time?’
Instead of replying, Margot slowly re-opened the door, as if the answer might lie somewhere inside. The bleak afternoon light showed the chair he had sat on and the guttered candles and the brazier choked with grey ash. It showed the uprights of the bed, and the pallid rectangle upon which a girl lay like a stone, like a corpse on a beach; furled in her summer-light, bare-shouldered gown, her roughened hair spilled down her back. Her hand was sunk clenched in the pillow.
Nicholas took off his lined mantle and lowered the furs, soft as snow, till they covered her. Margot started and stopped a small gesture. Outside she spoke. ‘Take your cloak back. We have blankets.’
He smiled. ‘I have a raincloak as well. That will do. No. Leave it. I mean it. She will hate it so.’
She looked at him. Her expression had changed. So far as he knew, his had not. Goro was a clever man, but transparent: they made a good pair. She said, ‘He has the best nurse that money can buy.’ Then she ran to her room.
Riding back the way he had come, Nicholas was sensible of the difference. It was daylight. His attention, no longer compelled inwards, could play on the country about him: the bustle of birds, the sound of an axe, a fox crossing his path without haste. It was not spring as yet, but overhead the leaf-buds were thickening and the first petals were pale underfoot. He passed hamlets with pigs grunting about, and inquisitive children. There were carts on the road, and other riders, although no one he knew. Finding himself suddenly hungry, he stopped at an inn and took part in a solemn exchange on the subject of foot-rot.
Disencumbered, exposed, the spaces of his mind were touched now and then by vagrant sound; by spangles of music which occasionally coalesced into something he had heard Will Roger devise, or the girl called Katelijne Sersanders. Sometimes the verses were bawdy. He chanted under his breath, knowing he wanted something else, and then knowing what it was. He also knew where to find it: in St Donatien’s, where – orderly, pious and calm – the trained voices uttered praise in the perpetual choir of divine service: hymn and psalm, collect and canticle, grail and anthem, cursed by Colard in ecstasy as he painted them into his missals. For evensong, Magnificat was what they would sing. He would be there very soon, and in time.
He was singing inside his mind when he became aware that he was neither alone nor in casual company, but that the road was lonely, the trees dark, and a group of armed men was blocking his way.
He swung his horse, looking for a way out, his sword in his hand, but it was too late, and there were too many. The attack when it came was peculiarly savage; or perhaps that was because he was so unprepared.
There was nothing much he could do, except inflict what damage