The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [29]
He left. Adorne closed the door and looked at his physician. Andreas, from Vesalia, served his household, and the Guild, and the Hospital of St John at Bruges. Adorne was not in awe of him as the Guild members were, although he respected his peculiar skills. Now he said, ‘I think you will have to explain that exchange. You disturbed him.’
Andreas said, ‘It was not my intention. Sometimes, a truth comes to the tongue and must be spoken. He did not question it. But the grandson’s name is not Henry.’
‘What is it?’ said Adorne.
‘I cannot tell. My lord, I came because of the vicomte. What did he ask of you? Your reasons for coming?’
One did not need special powers to divine that. All the same, Adorne thought it prudent to sit the man down and then to describe the encounter. He omitted nothing.
At the end: ‘Ah,’ said Dr Andreas, easing his well-covered shoulders. ‘Yes, I see. And now, Monseigneur will have gone to fetch his son Simon to Court. Will you warn M. de Fleury?’
It took a moment’s thought, even yet, to attribute the Burgundian name to the dimpled, rumbustious apprentice. Adorne said, ‘Of what should I warn him? He knows St Pol and his father are here. The battle is over, and vander – and de Fleury ready to bury the hatchet.’ The conversation was fresh in his mind. Cry the peace of the fair. We’re all merchants: we ought to be friendly.
‘You are right,’ said Dr Andreas. ‘There is no need to warn him: he knows.’
The man who, day and night watched Anselm Adorne, slipped down the slope of the High Street and through the fortified gate that divided the burgh of Edinburgh from that of the Canongate. On his left was the road that plunged downhill and northwards to Leith. Ahead was the highway to Holyrood Abbey. Packed between the two was the merchant colony presided over by the family Berecrofts, among which was the house of the Banco di Niccolò; two floors of it finished, the rest in the hands of the masons.
Julius its lawyer was there, as well as its master and patron. ‘Well?’ Julius said when the spy had gone off. ‘You said Jordan would try Adorne first. Now you know Simon will follow.’
‘I am brilliant,’ de Fleury said, being sick, for the moment, of Julius. They had spent the last three weeks on the road with the Court, hunting, shooting, riding, hawking and discussing, among other things, the King’s wedding and the country’s financial wellbeing. In the evenings they had played games and danced.
M. de Fleury had won, without much trouble, a great deal at cards and had achieved, without much trouble, a mild acclaim for inventing new diversions of a socially acceptable kind. He was, it was established, seldom unwilling to sing, and in private displayed a gift for deadly and accurate mime which had come to the ears of the King and his brother. On the other hand, he had not courted royal attention. His business had been with the royal officials. He and Julius had been intermittent guests in a very large household which also held, at intervals, the Burgundian Envoy and his suite. Anselm Adorne had had several exchanges, always pleasant, with Nicholas de Fleury of Bruges.
The evening of licence at Leith had not been repeated. The squires in whom reposed charge of the King and his siblings had been smartly dealt with, and exercise on the shorelands curtailed. It told Nicholas de Fleury what he already knew, that this was a well-conducted court, of such a size that a handful of good men could run it. Of all the other actors of that night, he had interest only in Anselm Adorne. The girl Beth, he rather thought, had gone back to her father.
Since then he had hardly been celibate, but had not as yet managed to coax to his bed, or indeed anywhere, the particular woman he was interested in. The problem pleased him. He found it entertaining to compound his physical assets: to dress as always in black, with a jewel placed each day on his glove, or his hat, or his breast, all of them set in the heaviest gold like the deeply worked chain which crossed his shoulders.