The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [93]
‘I would throw you out if you came,’ Simon said.
De Fleury turned at the door. ‘Like you threw me out of the salt-pan,’ he said. Simon moved; but the woman had thrust out her arm as a barrier. Her eyes were bright as two silver sequins.
The door opened and shut. The lamp flared. Lucia de St Pol lay on her bier, and the woman Bel stood, her arm still outflung like a curse or a blessing, or perhaps just a silent appeal.
The first stage was over.
The Ghost sailed before dawn, carrying Nicholas de Fleury to Bruges. As a matter of record, a horse bore him from Berecrofts to Blackness, but he did not see the sails raised, being felled once aboard as by death.
The voyage was rough but unmarked by disaster. They were stayed for a week in the harbour at Berwick, awaiting the abatement of winds, and forbidden to step on dry land except to snatch water and victuals. Having himself issued this edict, Crackbene slipped ashore without notice, and reappeared a day later, morosely rolling a barrel of salmon.
Julius was outraged. ‘Where has he been?’
‘In the family colony,’ Nicholas had said. ‘There are Crackbenes all over Berwick. They call themselves Crabbes.’
It was true, so far as it went. There was no call to mention the priory at Coldstream, or Ada.
He was himself by that time, and it was some days since Crackbene had brought him the letter addressed by Adorne. Unlike the others put early on board, inscribed to Adorne’s fellow merchants and wife, to the Chancellor of Burgundy and the Duke, this had no chequered seal, and was hastily sewn. It contained three sentences only, written under evident stress at Kinneil:
For the sake of the town we both serve, I have attributed my wound to a mishap. I expect you to call on me in Bruges. I do not expect you to come back to Scotland.
‘What does it matter to him?’ Julius said. He had learned a little too much from Katelijne.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Nicholas said. ‘He’ll be home himself by the spring. I don’t propose to let it upset our planning.’
It satisfied Julius, who did not always remember that planning occasionally failed. Circumstances arose. Nicholas himself had not spent the autumn, for example, entirely as he had intended. On the other hand, the one linchpin upon which all else depended was fixed. He would be arriving in February in Bruges.
He would be arriving in February in Bruges, to find out whether his marriage was fruitful.
Chapter 13
‘FOR GOD’S SAKE, WRITE,’ his manager had cried in dread and anger from Bruges to Nicholas de Fleury in Scotland. He couldn’t say more, for fear that others might read it.
Alone of the company he, Gregorio of Asti, feared what Nicholas might be perpetrating in Scotland. For he, alone of the company, knew what Gelis had done. He had been there within earshot, when Gelis van Borselen, on her marriage bed, had informed her husband that she was pregnant by Simon.
If Nicholas was returning to Bruges, he was not coming thereto by chance. He was coming because his wife’s child, announced for the spring, was due now.
He had been absent from Flanders for six months. In all that time, his letters to Bruges had dealt with nothing but business. In all that time, Gregorio had sent nothing private to Edinburgh except for one letter, dispatched by the Ghost, in which he had told Nicholas why Margot had left, who was to him what a wife might have been. And, of course, he had reported what all Bruges had learned by October: that Gelis van Borselen was expecting a child, and had retired to a place of retreat for her health.
So the months without Margot had passed, and Gregorio waited in the Hof Charetty-Niccolò, his home and his office in Bruges. The Ghost was coming, he knew; and Nicholas with her. The passage, he guessed, would be slow. The husband of Gelis must not seem to hurry too much, when the legitimate birth was so distant.
Because it was slow, the tidings of Lucia de