The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [232]
‘Does she hate Nicholas, then?’ Tobie had said.
‘Oh, no!’ Katelijne said. There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘You are saying, why hasn’t he seen his own son?’
‘I don’t think it’s for lack of trying,’ Tobie said. ‘If he stopped short of force, I think it was only in case he goaded her into doing something extreme. I don’t know why she should deny him, but young mothers are sometimes irrational for a while. She may not have wanted a child. A bad birth-experience may have led her to blame him. There may be something wrong and she is ashamed of it, or even trying to spare Nicholas from the knowledge.’
‘Or she may be jealous,’ had said Katelijne.
He frowned. ‘Of Nicholas? In case he steals the love of the child?’
‘Perhaps. Or,’ she said, ‘of the child. In case it steals the love of Nicholas.’
They looked at one another. She said, ‘They are very alike, M de Fleury and his wife. Trade, calculations, puzzles, mechanical devices, the manipulation of money.’ She paused. ‘She refers to him lovingly, always.’
‘Lovingly,’ Tobie repeated. She didn’t speak. Tobie said, more lightly, ‘Isn’t everyone interested in money?’ He watched her face.
‘Are you?’ she said.
He had been disconcerted by her before. This time he just said, ‘You should meet my uncle. I rest my case until then.’
Curiously, neither he nor the girl ever talked about reaching Alexandria ahead of Gelis van Borselen. Only, at Rome, Katelijne – Kathi, she had asked him to call her – took this turn for the worse. By the time they had sailed she was practically recovered.
Nicholas arrived very late at the fondaco, long after the groans and braying of asses and camels and the clamour of many voices, shouting in Italian and Latin and Arabic, indicated that the cargo had been released, dues paid, taxes implemented, and was being installed in the warehouses. He ran up the stairs and came into the rooms, cap in hand, his hair like astrakhan from the heat.
He shone. Occasionally in the past Tobie had noticed this property in Nicholas: that, however tiresome the moment, a chance happening, like a spark, would set some fire running, and he would radiate a burning and transient happiness.
Nothing in the abrupt, cold reception on board the Ciaretti had prepared Tobie for that. He thought the successful landing was perhaps the cause; or sudden hopes for the future; or the assimilation of the truth that Gelis was not here. He even thought it might have something to do with the girl, until he saw the quality of the gaze Nicholas directed towards her. It was not admiring or fond, but neither was it the look a man allots to a pet marmoset he is training. It was the sort of greeting he had seen Nicholas give to an exceptionally bright clerk of his own company; and the girl’s smile, responding, was as frank.
Nicholas said, ‘And have you a Scots title as well?’ It wasn’t especially cutting.
‘Are they infectious?’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’re right. I feel a unicorn growing in, now you mention it.’ She had put her feet into shoes and replaited her hair and changed, as everyone did, into something clean for the Consul’s table at supper. They never went on the street after sundown: the Mamelukes locked the front gates.
Nicholas said, ‘I thought you were ill. What was wrong?’
‘Too much energy,’ said Tobie, surprised into sounding protective. ‘She used it up. She doesn’t want to use it up again.’ Nicholas was wandering round the low-ceilinged room, looking out to the gardens on one side; looking down on the other through the ruddy sun-dazzle at the courtyard with its vaulted storehouses and shops, its handsome tiers of lodgings completing the square.
From the next room you could see the back gardens, but not the wall at the bottom which divided them from the road and the sea. Nicholas looked, and then came back to study the courtyard. Tobie could see Kathi itching to get up and join him.
Nicholas said, ‘There’s an ostrich tied to a tree.’
Tobie said, ‘No!’
‘Well, yes. It’s been there all year,’ said John le Grant, coming in.