The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [37]
‘It will look like me,’ Simon said. ‘Her child. Our child. And then be damned to all your precautions.’
‘It may even sound like you,’ said his father. ‘In which case, you are right, I do not know why I am troubling to preserve you or your livelihood. Meanwhile, have I made myself clear? You have your heir. You have your legitimate, your undisputed son, Henry. This child is not yours. And you will do nothing, at any time in the future, to claim that it is.’
‘Or?’ said Simon.
‘Or you will find yourself in isolation, without money, in a place far less pleasant than this. I mean it,’ said his father. ‘You do not doubt that I could do it?’
‘Then you will have to do the same to Lucia,’ said Simon viciously.
‘So I have told her,’ his father said.
He waited, but Simon, it seemed, had thought of nothing more to say. Jordan de Ribérac rose and left. Outside, he saw a glint of silver and heard his grandson’s shrill voice. He remembered the tournament.
He knew how Simon’s mind worked. He could not keep Simon at Kilmirren for ever. He had given him leave to attend. But that was when all his enquiries had indicated that vander Poele was not aware that Gelis van Borselen had deceived him.
Now it was not enough to think so: the vicomte de Ribérac had to be sure. He began to consider how to do so.
The tournament of the Unicorn which, although properly run, was not a candidate for the heraldic record-books, took place in the first week in December and on the first day of the Christmas festivities, when anyone bearing the name of Nicholas could expect a certain amount of vulgar attention.
Since Haddington, Nicholas de Fleury had himself been the source of most of the more strenuous activities in Edinburgh. The stands, staging and devices for such entertainments, as well as the tents and pavilions, were in the hands of the carpenters, masons, tent-makers, painters, carriers and purveyors who usually moved the Court from place to place with its plate, its clothes, its furniture and occasionally the glass for its windows.
None of this was on the scale of the Dukes of Burgundy, who required seventy-two carts to remove their possessions from one of their five splendid palaces to another, but there was a routine; and de Fleury knew by now all the Court officials and merchants involved, and most of the labourers. Half of them, it seemed to him, were working on his own house as well.
His role was to enhance the spectacle: to produce ideas within the capacity of the operators and the limits of the short time available and, tactfully, to supervise them. At the same time, necessarily, he continued to invent, direct and process the enterprises which were his reason for coming to Scotland. For a short period the tempo of his life, always impressive, accelerated to an extreme. To Julius, there were days when he seemed to be physically present everywhere from the monastery of the Abbot of Holyrood at the foot of the Canongate to the King’s lodgings in the Castle at the top, and most of the houses between. The rest of his time he might be found beside the West Port in the grassy space at the foot of the Castle Rock where the lists were to be set up.
It was where Anselm Adorne found him, the day before the Eve of St Nicholas, standing below the flagpoles and talking forcefully, a sausage in one outflung hand and a stick in the other. His voice sounded menacing, but the faces around him were grinning. Adorne called, ‘Don’t you ever take a rest? I could share that sausage with you, if you had another.’ De Fleury turned, smiling, and beckoned him over and pointed.
Adorne dismounted, and left his sweating horse for his groom to walk while he found his way to the tent where the brazier was, and sat on a box beside a half-unpacked basket of food. He poked into it.
It was true that he was hungry, having just spent an hour with Sersanders running at a makeshift tilt in the burgh common. In his day, Anselm Adorne had been a man of international reputation in the jousting field: he had taken the helm of one of the best of Duke