The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [323]
They were admitted. Her uncle looked disturbed and unhappy; the Cretan was calm. She gathered – from Brother Lorenzo rather than from her uncle – that the scheme to send her to Crete was defunct. Since the disaster at Negroponte, the monks of St Catherine could neither send a vessel for her nor receive her. On the other hand, there was a convent of Clares in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus. Cyprus, birthplace of St Catherine.
Katelijne thought of Cyprus and St Catherine. Her mind travelled beyond St Catherine to Venus, who seemed preferable to what she knew of the Minotaur. Cyprus was on her uncle’s itinerary for November. He could call for her when he had been to the Holy Land. It transpired that an important caravan was just about to leave for the Holy Land, and it was desirable that the Baron Cortachy should travel with it. And Jan, and Lambert, and the other two. And Brother Lorenzo.
Kathi said, ‘So who would take me to Cyprus?’
‘Why, Dr Tobias,’ said her uncle quickly. ‘Otherwise I should never have suggested it. Dr Tobias is also going to Cyprus. Until we come, he will look after you.’
Kathi gazed at him and he flushed. It was Brother Lorenzo who said in his collected, soft Tuscan, ‘It seems that M. de Fleury has found occasion to travel to Cyprus and has commandeered a ship. Your uncle is concerned, but I have told him that he has a niece of good sense, who will take no harm. The Signor de Fleury has been asked not to trouble you, and Dr Tobias will remain with you until you are settled. What do you say?’
She agreed, in a subdued voice, and remained looking subdued until they left her.
When Nicholas de Fleury called to see her, as he did shortly after everyone else had departed, she treated him to the same forlorn gaze. She said, ‘They’ve made you take me, I’m sorry. Because you can’t leave me here.’
M. de Fleury said, ‘No trouble at all, if you want it. You’d have to marry, and the going price is six hundred camels. But your Arabic’s reasonable, and your uncle, I dare say, could afford them. On the other hand …’ The encounter ended with the kind of escalating nonsense she had got used to in the Garden of Balm.
Then he had thought his wife dead, and the levity at Matariya had all been inconsequential; a way to escape from what was too much to bear. Now, it seemed almost real. As if, despite the fatigue, the strange dimension he sometimes escaped to, he had been touched with hope, with something not far from elation. Or perhaps, as before, he was simply using the gift he had, which children also have, to push trouble away.
She saw Dr Tobias was anxious, and remembered the flat way in which M. le Grant had made his farewells. But then she had also seen how some men and women liked to claim him. She did not know why he was going to Cyprus except that it was for something, she saw, more important than gold. She only hoped, for his sake, that he found it.
The ship, when Nicholas and his party finally boarded her, was nothing out of the way: a rather battered small trader with some primitive cabins in the poop. The voyage was, however, usually short: only two or three days, and the girl was much better. Indeed, it was more comfortable than Nicholas had expected, there were so few other passengers.
His mind was not really clear. He was happy in a strange, detached way to do with the sea and the sunlight and the white sails curving above, and an island ahead which was still three-quarters unreal; an enchanted isle conjured up by the pendulum glinting, glinting over the maps through the night. This time, he wanted to be so very sure.
Below the happiness, of course, was the black well he had never thought to dip into again. Tobie had drunk from it already: he saw it all in his face, and then saw the girl watching them both, trying to fathom unaccountable moods.
In Ghent, in Bruges, a family of position would discuss