The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [362]
Down below in the alley, a page in a moretta mask and striped hose occupied the grand doorway he had just left and began, absently, to play with a jew’s trump.
Chapter 49
GREGORIO SAID, ‘THERE’S going to be fog. We’ll never find them. We ought to go back to the Casa.’ They had been back twice already, in case Margot had sent a message or come.
It was an hour to sunset and mist, like white smoke, had already drifted in from the sea and was filling the Piazzetta, so that the stalls of the butchers and the salami-sellers started to vanish, and the Doge’s Palace dimmed, arch by arch. The haze searched through the Piazza until only the bell-tower soared clear, a finger of rose against the fading Basilica. The final wan rays of the sun lit the Lion of St Mark, and the angels’ wings, and rested on the dull gold below, and then were extinguished.
Tobie said, ‘I think the crowds are causing the trouble. No one can move. And Nicholas can’t fine tune unless he has peace. I hope to God that girl keeps her head.’
The latter part of the pronouncement represented his doubts about Gelis. The first was, as ever, to keep Gregorio calm.
What Tobie could not understand, himself, was how the first, violent intimation had managed to penetrate to Nicholas through crowds just as great. It had seemed to come, he remembered, most clearly from Gelis; and had registered, perhaps, the height of her despair.
He had found it hard, himself, to keep his equanimity in this harsh, brilliant atmosphere of festival, sliding now, as the light waned, towards something darker, less innocent. Now the prostitutes were coming out in greater numbers, men as women, women as men; nursemaids with broad shoulders and thick calves pushing carts loaded with full-grown, lumbering babies, drooling, chanting, clawing at skirts with both hands as they passed. Every dark archway and porch seemed to be filling with rustling figures.
The real children had gone; or he thought so until, his breath caught in his throat, he saw an imploring masked figure before him, a limp child in her arms, its golden hair lifelessly drifting.
Tobie blundered towards her: she turned. He saw that the mask was two-faced; the figure that of a man; and the child in its grasp an effigy fixed to the stuff of his costume. Sickened, Tobie had hurried past.
He got Gregorio to agree to go back to the Casa, and to meet him later at the Rialto. Their boat would be there. He counted on Nicholas to remember that, if all else failed.
Nicholas woke up in darkness, suddenly. He had been asleep in a chair whose high back was comfortably padded, and which faced a small window whose panes glimmered white. He rose abruptly.
A voice said, ‘The mist came down, but it is still very crowded.’
Gelis. He could make out the outline of a bed, and then her shape, lying watching him. He wondered how visible he had been against the light, and if she had or had not guessed what wakened him. He said, ‘Do you have any particular resources for casual visitors?’
There was a stand of candles by the bed. She struck tinder and started to light them. Her fingers were steady. Without moving, he saw that his dagger had gone. She said, ‘Through that door. There is no other way out: you will have to come back here.’
She had been watching him, then. He departed in any case, and found her standing when he came back, combing and pinning her hair. The line of her body had not changed. She said, ‘It shook you awake. A real sign this time. So where did it come from?’
He walked into the room and stood looking at her. Behind his back was the other door which led outwards. He said, ‘Somewhere in Venice. This time, that is all I can tell you.’
She finished what she was doing and sat down. She had regained all her composure. She said, ‘You mean that is all you will tell me. I offended you. I remember.’
‘In what way?’ he said. He stood, no less at ease, his back to the door. ‘My various mishaps in Cairo were not your doing. You even sent me your ring. As for Mount Sinai – I have to thank you, I gather,