To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [100]
He could not have left the King’s sister in Bruges. He could not leave in England a family so dangerous to the Scottish throne that his own future in Scotland would have been forfeit. He had only cajoled the girl herself into coming by exaggerating the hope he knew did not exist – that she, favourite of James, would persuade him face to face to let her husband come back to Scotland.
The outcome had been as he feared. James, in the act of opening his arms to a penitent sister, had learned that Mary, shining and scented with milk, had no regrets; no wish to be released from her marriage vows. Her sole mission was on behalf of the traitor her husband, so that they might come back to Scotland in state, their lands returned, Lord Arran’s death sentence quashed. She not only wished it. She seemed to expect it.
The open arms had not remained open. Instead of her brother’s embrace, the walls of David’s Tower had closed around Mary Stewart and her household and children. And the door to the enclosure was locked.
Returned from his difficult audience, Adorne found Sersanders his nephew awaiting him in the big house he usually leased in the High Street. His niece Katelijne, it seemed, was in bed, having overtaxed herself the previous evening. Katelijne Sersanders was delicate. Her brother thought the family wrong to wish her to marry in Scotland, but Sersanders did not know, as his uncle did, what ageing princes could do to a country. Or young ones, for that matter.
Anselm Adorne listened therefore to his nephew, although he was tired, and asking him to sit down, had poured him some wine. The beaker was from home. So was all their linen and silver and glassware. Margriet had insisted. He had gone just now to her room to reassure her, but had found her asleep. He was thankful. She had been weeping all day for the Princess.
Now he said, ‘Why revile Nicholas? It was not his fault that the Pope died, or if it was, I have not yet heard the details. As for the rest, the King will recover his equanimity. In his heart, he knows that we have brought home his sister, whom he had lost, and that her children are better brought up under his eye. What we lose, we shall recover in other ways. And I have great hopes. You have spoken to Martin. You have not yet heard all I have to tell you.’
‘De Fleury has a Bank behind him.’ Sitting four-square, with his father’s energy and his mother’s muscular neatness, his nephew and godson looked very young.
Adorne said, ‘Nicholas is the Bank. That is its greatest strength and its greatest impediment. Nicholas bestowing his undivided attention upon any project is a sight worthy of awe: it leads naturally to success. It does not lead to stability; to consistent leadership; to the broadest vision which will carry a company or a family safely into the future. Nicholas is not concerned with the future – for his country, his town or himself.’
‘But surely!’ Sersanders said. ‘He has plotted and planned all his life! What was he doing in the Tyrol, in Hesdin, in Ham? What has he been attempting to carve for himself here?’
‘You would think so,’ said Adorne. It had come to him recently, the truth about Nicholas, or what he thought was the truth. He said, ‘And you are right, when you speak of his mind. But what the core of Nicholas lives by is not the present, nor what is to come. It is the past.’
To the exasperation of all except, perhaps, the King, the sieur de Fleury continued to be absent all through the first days of the lady Mary’s arrival and imprisonment and, having by now virtually a doctorate in disappearance, remained lost.
John le Grant, at whose side he unexpectedly appeared, bruised and sneezing, did nothing to give away the whereabouts of his padrone; but was cheered by the concentrated violence of both his language and