The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [87]
If you knew enough about dyes, could you cancel out red? Contradict it with some opposite colour? What made colour? Did light vibrate and form tones, just like music? Could you contradict harmony? Nicholas de Fleury might know.
She was following Nicholas de Fleury. She had to keep thinking about that, and about spurring her horse to keep the best pace it could through the snow, while she strained to see the few landmarks she knew. She had been twice to the priory at Emmanuel. She had ridden this way at least once with her small royal lady. She had a memory as tenacious as horse-glue. So they told her.
She was on the right route for Berecrofts – if Berecrofts was where Simon and M. de Fleury were both going. That was less than five miles from the salt-pans. If her guess was quite wrong, then Linlithgow was only three miles away, but in quite a different direction. She held her torch out, flaring and sizzling, and the snow, soft as wool, clogged her tears. She had travelled two miles when it lessened. The sky cleared. Presently she saw the snowfield ahead, lit by starlight and stamped like bookbinders’ work with a long narrow design inked in black.
The design formed by four hooves of a horse. And to one side of it, and still fogged over with snow, an earlier, more confused track. One horseman, following another. And beside the clearer trail, as she raced across to it and then reined, a freckle of pink on the white. The blood of male gender in which Nicholas de Fleury was drenched. She choked unexpectedly.
She had formed no plan except to be a deterrent, a witness. She followed the two trails, riding faster as the clouds drew aside and the moon rose, blanching the document bearing her own growing palimpsest. When, half an hour after midnight, she saw the flat white plain of the Avon before her and a dark horseman upon it, she swallowed again, and then gazed beyond, over the river, to where Berecrofts lay. She saw its windows, minute in the distance, and pale smoke rising. It was intact. Of a second horseman, there was no sign at all.
She lifted her whip, and sent her horse galloping to the edge of the snow-covered river. Had she looked up, she would have glimpsed, far on her left, a haze of light over the ridge which told of the King’s party approaching. Had she looked across, a little upriver, she would have noticed a cluster of torches moving on the far side of the Avon, as a man’s body was carried compassionately out of the cold. Instead, she rode down to the horseman, who was motionless now. Who, perhaps, had been motionless ever since she first glimpsed him. In that light, no one could say.
The snow at his feet was sprinkled with lac and with dragon’s blood. She didn’t recognise the cloak he was wearing, but knew him before he slowly turned back his hood with the care of a man decorticating a wound. The profile beneath, half pallid, half crazed with blood, was that of Nicholas de Fleury, her uncle’s attacker.
He did not look round, although he must have heard her horse in the quiet. Although he probably knew, from its step, that it didn’t carry a man. Her chest shuddered, anger fighting with fear. She said, ‘What is it?’ and dismounted. He didn’t answer, his gaze concentrated far ahead. Then she saw what he was looking at.
First, at a horse, hardly visible at first, since only its flank showed above an upheaval of white which represented a fissure, blocked with ice, in the river. Then, to one side, half concealed by the horse, the cloaked shoulder and averted cheek of its rider, made small and toy-like by distance. All the rest was under water. Because the cloak was so dark, the yellow hair showed, a chill point of light in the gloom.
Katelijne said,