The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [360]
It brought Gregorio comfort but it was not, Tobie thought, necessarily true. The child might be missing, and Margot might be trying to find it. Or Nicholas, spent, was mistaken, and neither the child nor Gregorio’s lover was in Venice at all.
He took Gregorio away, and left Nicholas to rest if he could. When he went back ten minutes later, he had gone.
One by one, the masqueraders took to the streets after dinner: in couples, in companies. Katelijne Sersanders, called for by friends, received her uncle’s permission to leave. Her uncle also departed, bidden to celebrate with the Knights of the Order. Jan, attired in cocks’ feathers, had already met with his friends in some tavern. Katelijne saw a play in an adjacent Campo and then, pleading indisposition, excused herself and made her way home. There, she changed quietly and went out again, feeling loose-limbed and free, as in Egypt. Unhappily, by then the lie had come true. She did feel sick.
Simon de St Pol, in ravishing costume, attended several parties and began, with a small group of acquaintances, to rove through the lanes and squares of the city. His father, for the nonce, stayed at home.
Julius, dressed as a Senator, introduced himself into a number of illustrious homes and began to enjoy himself greatly. Cefo went off to the rooms of a young woman acquaintance. Tobie took Gregorio by the arm and propelled him outdoors in high anger. As well as Nicholas, Gelis had gone. Tobie had no doubt the two were together, and he proposed to discover them both before – as the Franciscan had hinted – they killed each other.
Gelis said, ‘You can still occasionally surprise me. I thought you would have demanded your nursemaids.’
There were fatigue-hollows under her eyes and she wore no mask and no elaborate headgear; only a netted cap into which her hair had been rolled and pleated with ribbon. Contradicting the simplicity, her cloak was a conspicuous one of white satin. You would say she was seeking a child, and wished to be easily visible. Or perhaps you would say that.
She had been ready, of course, to come with him. If he found anything, she did not want Tobie or Gregorio present. And neither did Nicholas. He wore the whistle hung from his neck, where it rested in the swathe of his cowl, and over the black needlework of his tunic. The black hood bound his head, and the black brimmed hat was pressed, slanting over it. Between hood, hat and mask nothing human appeared. He saw and breathed through cut eyes and cut nostrils. He was not dressed for children.
In his divining hand he carried his batocio, the small scrolled stick of the underworld being he represented, and three-quarters of his conscious mind clung to it. The stick was uneasy, stirring this way and that, but only a little. Never the heart-thumping blow he had experienced in the ducal Palace. He knew Gelis was glancing at him, for he was usually talkative enough, God knew. She didn’t press for an answer. She walked a fraction behind, and let him lead her.
He had identified, now, the true impediment to his art, to his sorcery. Preoccupied since his arrival, he had failed to visualise that on this, the last day of the revels, the city would fill like a cornucopia with people. Tomorrow was Mercoledì delle Ceneri. Tonight at midnight began the time for abstinence, penitence, when last year’s palm fronds became cinders.
Today the palm branches were green, and these could be flowers or people who slowly flowed, cheek to cheek, through the paved lanes and the narrow canals between the tall marble palaces; or spanned each bridge like the fringe of a fan. People garlanded roof-tops and balconies and clustered in every piazza: round the bull-baiting in San Geremia; below the stages in the Campo della Salute where the actors stalked through their dramas; around the Campo Santo Stefano where the human pyramid formed and reformed and men wrestled naked, and artists sang and played carnival ballads to fiddle and lute; in the