The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [77]
It was time to stop this. Simon said, ‘That’s enough. You are not of my blood, or my father’s. As for Gelis van Borselen, keep her if you are able. She is too lusty for me. My God, I barely escaped with my manhood. She has a habit …’
He waited.
‘Yes?’ said de Fleury.
‘Shall I tell you?’ said Simon.
‘If you want to. I thought I knew all her habits,’ said the other man.
Already perplexed, Simon found himself outraged. ‘One would think –’
‘I didn’t care? Of course I don’t. But I dislike trespassers. I have returned the courtesy, by the way, so far as flesh will allow. Your taste and mine sometimes differ. Ada, for example. I felt the love of a working mother would be better savoured by Crackbene.’ There reappeared the punctual insult of the dimples. The man was still calm. He stood there, exuding an unnatural calm.
Simon said, ‘I may, then, announce your wife’s coming child to be mine?’
‘Of course,’ said the other. ‘And I shall say, hand on heart, that so long as it is healthy, I should welcome any sister or brother born of my wife.’
Put into words it was loathsome. Only a sick man would think of it. ‘No one would believe you,’ said Simon.
‘But they would repeat the story,’ the other man said. ‘And unless I let you, you couldn’t really deny it. Because I hold the ultimate card. The denunciation of Henry.’
The words fell into silence. Simon heard them, his thoughts in disorder. Henry’s guilt. The danger he had remembered and tried to thrust out of mind: the murderous stabbing of young Mar’s preserver to which so many could attest – Adorne and his niece, Julius, Roger. The stabbing which de Fleury had not reported, Simon now saw, for this very reason. To hold against this moment the weapon, sharper than steel, which Henry – his heir, his jewel, his joy – had placed in the hand of his enemy.
Simon drew all his forces together, and spoke. ‘I gather he was competent? If not quite competent enough?’
The other man’s face showed no emotion. ‘Competent enough to ensure that, if Gelis survives, her child will pass for mine and not yours. If, sadly, neither survives, I have other propositions to put to the family.’
The words shrank and boiled like chips of ice in the heat. Simon tried to retrieve them. ‘If neither survives?’
‘I am going to Bruges,’ the other man said. ‘And coming back. Whatever it, is, I shall convey my family news to you, or your father.’
The chill this time was unmistakable. Simon said, ‘That is why you are going back?’
He stared at Nicholas de Fleury who he now saw and had to accept was not the Claes he had known and despised. Who had come to Scotland on a cool, well-designed mission of vengeance which was not new, but had found many targets over the years, as he now recognised, although its full malevolence had never, until now, been turned against Simon himself.
Except, of course, through the killing of Katelina, his wife. No one had ever proved that Nicholas caused the death of Katelina in Cyprus, but here was evidence at least that he was capable of it. Capable of killing Simon’s second wife, and now his own; now Gelis van Borselen, who had spoiled the pure line of the House he was carefully creating.
Therefore Simon would meet hatred with guile. He would remove Henry from Scotland, so that no accusations could harm him. And then, or before then, he would exterminate Nicholas. Or he could be in thrall to a monster for life.
He broke the silence innocuously. ‘You mean to come back to Scotland from Bruges?’
‘To fill your place,’ the other man said. ‘You are planning to take Henry away? And go yourself? It might be wise; I may not be a comfortable neighbour. You know I hold the land next to Kilmirren?’
In the pan, the bubbling had died. Now, choking the liquid, beds of orange-brown salt were appearing, stained by the blood and the scum which no one had troubled to skim. Where it touched the hot lead of the pan, it lay, hissing.
Simon forgot both Katelina and Gelis. He said, ‘There is no vacant land there.’
‘There is Kilmirren itself, which Jordan owns, and you