The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [313]
The Baron Cortachy, erect and pale, began to say the correct words at last, in formal Latin, and Lorenzo translated them. The Abbot bowed stiffly and Adorne knelt and kissed his foot, his drawn face hidden. The younger man turned back and waited. The Baron Cortachy rose, bowing, and left.
The Abbot said, ‘Let him go. I wish you to show me what you have brought.’ Brother Lorenzo crossed over and uncovered and brought back the object in the niche.
It was a great chalice made by a master, the match of the one that Charles of France had given them sixty years earlier; its knop similarly inset with enamels. Its worth could not be gauged, not without expert valuation, which it would have.
The Abbot laid it on the stiff liturgical shelf of his lap, gold on gold, and moved his fingers, wondering, round the prayer-engraved rim. ‘We thank you,’ he said. ‘And we are prepared to hear that you have set your heart on redeeming some of the lesser gifts left to St Catherine. I have had both objects brought.’
Again, Brother Lorenzo walked across and came back, bearing with an air of slight distraction the two ostrich eggs which had lain in the Coffin. Presenting the first, full of gold, he saw the other man shake his head, smiling and, smiling himself, laid it gently aside. Then he presented the other.
‘I would take it,’ said Nicholas de Fleury. ‘But not without your consent. And I should pay for it.’
The Abbot smiled. ‘The price is one ducat,’ he said; and continued to smile, in a benign way, as the box, small as a button, was lifted out of the egg and placed in the other man’s palm.
Nicholas de Fleury said, but as a statement rather than as a question, ‘It is forbidden to tell me the donor.’
‘It is forbidden,’ said the Abbot in a friendly voice. ‘Nor can I distinguish what it contains. Your perception may be greater than mine.’
Detached from the blown egg and the mouldering sarcophagus, the little box lay confidingly, you would say, on the man’s broad, hardened palm. He touched the clasp and laid back the shell of the lid, revealing the phial to be empty but for a minute heap of transparent slivers. He smiled, without lifting his eyes.
‘The box is of gold,’ said Brother Lorenzo.
He had nowhere to go. Katelijne Sersanders, fierce in her concern, saw her uncle, unfamiliar in his distress, thread his way through the maze of alleys and arches, along the vaulted corridors, up the haphazard staircases of the community of anchorites, termites of Justinian’s monastery. Long before he arrived, she had pushed everyone out of his room and into the next.
She saw him pause on the threshold, seeing it empty, but he was too tired, she thought, to wonder why, and too grieved to wish it otherwise. Stepping softly behind, she saw he had crossed to the crucifix on the wall and knelt before it. Then he covered his eyes.
She drew the curtain over the door and backed away.
‘What?’ said his son. ‘God in heaven, what are you crying for now?’
‘Hunger,’ she said. ‘And if you’re not going to the Refectory, I am. Dr Tobias?’
He had been watching as well. ‘Yes. The Refectory, immediately,’ said Tobie.
When they came back, Anselm Adorne was lying still on his mattress. It was dark, and they would be required to rise not very long after midnight to hear Mass and to prepare for the climb. They would be away until nightfall next day, and had still to arrange for the food they would have to take with them.
Dr Tobias and M. le Grant had shown no enthusiasm for the expedition. M. de Fleury having once again vanished, no one knew of his intentions, but Dr Tobias thought that he, too, would remain. The meal had been uneasy, but in the presence of the monks and the Abbot, nothing untoward had been said.
Having several untoward things she wished to say, Katelijne Sersanders took a lantern and made her way, with discretion, to that small gallery high under the wall where she had once before found M. de Fleury.
He was not there. She walked from level to level, brushed by low devotional murmurs; touched by moths;