The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [56]
Adorne said, ‘Yes. You are a strong man. Nevertheless, I know what happened. Does Simon?’
‘I have no idea,’ de Fleury said.
‘You haven’t told him? You really don’t wish the truth … the extent … the details to be known?’
‘Not particularly,’ de Fleury said. ‘I shall employ myself out of town. The prize of the Court’s attention is yours. Yours and Simon’s. You have the boy Henry to thank for it.’
Adorne got up slowly. ‘The butcher has abjured his axe? I salute you,’ he said.
‘Do you?’ de Fleury remarked. ‘I might as well have entered the tournament. If I’d had any armour.’
Three days later, he departed for Berecrofts, the comfortable Forthside estate of his landlord. No one saw him go, and no one knew therefore the manner of his conveyance, although the nursing brother in charge could have suggested that it was not on the back of a horse.
Julius, who had been required to arrange the matter with Andreas, had taken the occasion, yet again, to invite Nicholas to arraign Henry de St Pol for attempted murder – and had been met, yet again, with blank refusal. Dr Andreas, consulted, had been soothing. ‘There is an actual wound, you are right, but he is recovering. You do not admire his Christian spirit? He absolves a child, forgives a former enemy?’
‘It’s unnatural,’ Julius said. ‘He must be losing his wits.’
‘Or has plans he is not telling us? You would prefer that,’ Andreas said, ‘to finding him reduced or complaisant?’
‘He usually has plans he doesn’t tell you,’ said Julius. He had brightened. He said, ‘I’m sure you’ll tell Berecrofts the same, and I don’t blame you. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard – if M. de Fleury isn’t a little more fit than we think. He’s preparing some mischief for Simon.’
‘In one respect you are right,’ said Dr Andreas. ‘He is a man who lays plans for himself, and for all those around him. I had been told of him, although not quite enough.’
‘Oh, he’s a cool one,’ said Julius.
‘You admire him,’ said the doctor. ‘You would do well to be afraid of him, too.’
Julius kept his face straight. He wished he had Tobie or someone to share the joke with. He would not have confessed even to Tobie the thread of uneasiness that he, too, sometimes experienced in the company of Nicholas de Fleury. And Dr Andreas kept his counsel, for he had struck a bargain with M. de Fleury. In return for his care, he had undertaken not to reveal the small margin there had been between life and death at the hand of this child. The dreadful irony of the attack he did not know.
Nicholas de Fleury, who did, set it aside, for he had to recover.
This had happened before, with another man’s hand over the steel. He had survived that. He always survived. Now, as the clock beat its way through December, he forged his own return to health, admitting Andreas when he could not avoid it; deviating hardly at all from the dense, the convoluted programme he had come to Scotland expressly to follow.
In only one respect did it change: Julius and Crackbene and Bonkle to a lesser degree carried the messages and pursued the negotiations that he could not keep for himself. And, as he had predicted, his place at Court fell to others as his absence lengthened, and was further prolonged after Yule by a deep frost followed by a sudden, early blanket of snow.
Before that, the laird’s house in the Regality of Broughton by the south bank of the Forth saw more activity than old Berecrofts or Archie his son could well remember. And when the old man retired to his Canongate house for the winter, the younger stayed on with Robin his son, to study this self-contained man, younger than himself, who – from bed, from chair and then from the desk in his chamber – ran a business that seemed to span the margins of the known world.
Often, when Julius arrived, frozen after the long ride from Edinburgh with a satchel full of ledgers and papers and maps, Archie would