The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
Nicholas looked at him in silence. He gave the impression that he wasn’t sufficiently interested even to guess.
‘Who came with you? Who is with you?’ said John.
‘Adorne’s niece,’ Tobie said. ‘The girl. Katelijne Sersanders.’
Chapter 32
LATER, THE GIRL said to Tobie, ‘Was he pleased to see you?’
They were in Alexandria, in the House of Niccolò’s rooms on the first floor of the larger Venetian fondaco. Handsomely built by the Mamelukes, it took the form of a rectangular building enclosing two immense courtyards, placed in a garden surrounded by extremely strong walls. It was one of a dozen such khans in the city, each providing its nationals – Genoese and Venetians, Catalonians and Tartars, Persians and Florentines and Cypriots – with lodging, office, warehouse and trading-counter at once.
Nicholas was not there, being still incarcerated with the customs officials, securing his passes, displaying his cargo, submitting to the interminable weighing and argument that would determine his tax liability. Even with John and the Venetian Consul to help, it would drag on for hours.
Katelijne Sersanders sat at a table, where she had been grinding something in a small mortar. She had plaited her hair and tied it out of the way on the top of her head. She was wearing a thin cotton robe with a girdle, and there was a smear on one cheek. She looked up.
Tobie said, ‘No. He wasn’t pleased to see me.’ He sat down. The table was littered with saucers, boxes and jars, a piece of unfinished palm mat and several books. He said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Improving on yesterday’s mix. It’s a secret: I told you. I should have gone on board to meet M. de Fleury, not you. It was too much like the time he came out of the Sahara. When you were waiting for him at Oran.’
He said, ‘They wouldn’t have let a lady on board. But you’re right. Too soon after Oran; too soon after Godscalc. Godscalc was part of Africa too.’
He had stopped wondering at himself for talking to this girl about Nicholas. He had been with her now for four months: ever since he had left Bruges in February in the knightly cortège of her uncle, bound for the Holy Land.
His reasons for joining Adorne had been complex. The girl was ill, and he liked her. He would be able to visit that old devil Giammatteo in Pavia. And he had become haunted by the feeling that Nicholas in the hands of Father Moriz and John le Grant was still not good enough: that they would both let him get his own way. For nine years, Nicholas had needed someone to stop him, but only one man had, for a while. And the one man was dead.
Tobie had seen Katelijne Sersanders before, as a child. Meeting her again in the Hôtel Jerusalem he had been disturbed, as a doctor, to see how slight and pale she had become; how the quicksilver energy had drained away, leaving her prone to sudden fatigue and seized with perpetual headaches. She had smiled from brilliant eyes all the same, and had spoken with all the readiness he remembered.
‘Dr Andreas is very forbearing, and doesn’t seem to find it an insult that my family should rely so much on St Catherine and not on his potions. But he says the climate in Alexandria is good, and the sea air should help, and the martyrdom of St Catherine on top of all that should spell perfect health. Only he can’t come with me.’
She had been speaking in February when persons of eminence were beginning to gather for the birth of the Countess of Arran’s first baby in March. Of course Katelijne was tired: she and Adorne’s wife between them had borne all the travail of the Scottish Princess’s arrival with her handsome, smouldering husband. And later the husband’s father, Lord Boyd, had favoured them with his presence as well. Poor Margriet, lady of Cortachy. Poor Katelijne.
It was fortunate, then, that the physician Andreas of Vesalia had arrived with the rest of the party from Scotland, come to stay for the birth and the christening.