To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [110]
Roger said, ‘Then it won’t touch you. Nicol? Your Passion, and my Chapel. This is what my Chapel will be like, when I have the money for it. Today, they are singing for nothing. This performance is for you. You and him.’
He indicated the near side of the church. Nicholas stretched back his head, expecting to be shown Father Moriz; but the man quietly sitting in one of the stalls was Anselm Adorne. A man who studied his enemies.
Ludere, non ledere. He was no longer an apprentice. He nodded to Adorne, but didn’t join him. There were stone benches lining the aisles, and he seated himself on one of those, and watched Roger walk to the circle of singers and take his place in the centre. The Master nodded. Moriz bent to the bellows. The organist lifted his hands. Nicholas reclined, embracing one knee, and studied the floor.
The tiles were glazed. They glimmered green and yellow and brown, double-netted like fish where the window-leads caught them. When the first rumbling sound shook from the organ you would have expected them to heave up in shock, to writhe and to glint, but they didn’t. The coloured designs on the windows hugged the shafts of the piers like embroidery on an Angevin doublet, in and out of the pleats, teasing up to the floriate collar of the capitals, which promptly exploded in clamour. The stone pealed. The capitals became the surrogate mouths of the organ. He removed his eyes from the capitals and gazed at the tiles all through the noise of the organ, and the echoing silence, and the lifting of the first human voices.
Gaude, flore virginali honoreque speciali, the two trebles sang. He knew the text, but had never heard the music before. It was to be a motet, not a Mass. The Seven Joys of the Mother of God. It shouldn’t take long. His neck ached with looking down. He looked up.
He approved of the roof. It was simpler than at Roslin, where Sinclair had barred the aisles with carved timbers. Sinclair, whose daughter was sitting by Anselm Adorne’s wife Margriet, struggling to carry her child. No one blamed Adorne. An aristocrat with a dozen children might still demand more; and none would blame him. Gaude sponsa cara Dei, sang the altos, weaving, blending as all the five parts came into play.
There was a virtue in simplicity. Here, the beauty lay in the strictness of the lines and the delicacy of the colour, complementing each other, so that the proportion of the whole was deeply pleasing: an imposing ninety feet from the bright cup of the apse to the rood tower behind him. The back of his own house could be viewed from the tower; he had climbed up there once to verify how much an outsider might see. Now he had less need to trouble; it was generally known that the King’s guest-gifts were made in Wilhelm’s private furnace, and accounted for the strong chests and the charcoal sheds and the smoke. It had amused him to accommodate Gelis, all unknowing, in the nuns’ house which had also, in its time, been a mint. But time enough, of course, for all that.
Gaude splendens vas virtutem … In pictures the Nativity was the Third Joy, and the Adoration of the Magi the Fourth. Nicholas had met John le Grant through a Magi procession in Florence, organised for Cosimo de’ Medici. He had met Cosimo’s small grandson, who had also had a whistle, and who had died. John le Grant was wary of children but had proved his worth on that mining expedition in the Tyrol, and would do so again very soon. Nicholas gave some thought to his plans.
Ut ad votum consequaris quicquid virgo postularis, the basses were singing, while the tenors slipped back and forth. The harmonies, the dissonances were breathtaking; he ignored them. To obtain what he wanted in fullest measure was his intention as well. Riches were not all, although they were enjoyable in church as elsewhere: the cloth of gold and massed cups on the altar; the curtains of pleasance; the silk brocades and the fringes that trembled over the statues of the Blessed Virgin and of St Margaret – but riches were not always enough.
So the foundress had discovered perhaps: