The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [201]
‘Poor man,’ she said.
‘Anselm? Save your pity. Anselm Adorne will find a way of safeguarding his family. Meantime, I have told you all this for a reason.’
She could guess. ‘You don’t want me to serve the Princess again.’
‘It would not be politic. Again, Adorne has come to the rescue. He is bringing his own sister’s daughter Katelijne, who has been in royal service in Scotland. That should be enough, together with his wife and the two nuns, his daughters.’
‘The Countess might ask for me,’ Gelis said. ‘Perhaps she even met Nicholas in Scotland.’
‘I believe she did. It is fortunate,’ said her cousin, ‘that your husband is to be absent this winter. If he has plans to develop in Scotland, a friendship with Thomas Boyd and his wife is the last way to advance them.’
Wolfaert, a stolid man, was nevertheless always worth listening to.
Paul, his bastard, was even better. He did not remember, of course, his father’s good-sister Eleanor who had come to Veere for the Guelders betrothal. But after she disappeared to the Tyrol, Aunt Eleanor had exchanged news with her van Borselen relatives.
He had a list of books he was supposed to be reading. She had sent a gift when his father remarried. He had been fascinated by this man she had hired who could find people.
‘Who?’ Gelis had said.
‘I don’t know his name. Aunt Eleanor employed him to help them find mines. But he can find people, too. Strangers, even. All he needs is some small thing they owned.’
She had contracted to stay for a week. Wolfaert was surprised but not, she thought, sorry when she elected to return home forthwith. The ride took most of the day. Arriving, she brushed her expostulating steward aside and went at once to her room, where lay the parcel she had received just before leaving. A parcel and letter from Nicholas.
The letter told her what she already knew: that he now proposed to make his Alexandrine expedition next year. He was in the Tyrol at present, but would travel south in the spring; when his plans were clear, he would send her particulars. He hoped she had enjoyed her sojourn in Florence, and that she had returned to find her son well. He enclosed a gift for the first anniversary of his birth, whenever that might occur.
She had read the letter, and found its casual tone disconcerting. She had not unwrapped the parcel. She opened it now.
She had seen Nicholas at work. She knew better than most his solitary preoccupations, given some scraps of wood and wire, and an objective. Now she saw another example.
Made for the child named after his most formidable enemy: a little soft toy whose mechanism had been sunk deeper than baby fingers could delve, whose feathers frilled, whose wings fluttered and whose beak, primed by its spring, opened to emit, sweet and shrill, a nursery song from her own Zeeland childhood.
He must have heard her sing it, long ago. Long ago, when he was getting her sister with child.
She might, but for Paul, have taken it as a piece of flamboyance. Instead, sick with anger, she carried the thing into the kitchen and cast it into the oven and watched it burn, erratically brilliant, its beak emitting thin screams and flakes and fragments of song.
The cook stood aside; the cook-boys watched fascinated. Her steward, unexpectedly entering the room, stopped abruptly and was overtaken by a fair man of exquisite appearance, following more quickly than was customary on his heels. ‘My very dear and virtuous lady!’ said Simon de St Pol of Kilmirren. ‘At last!’
Today the west windows were shuttered and the lamps lit in the spacious room where she and Margot used to sit in the summer. Simon’s hair, as he found a seat, glittered like ducats.
No one who met Simon de St Pol ever forgot him: the blue eyes and fine, almondine features, the straight back, the tapering hands.