To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [113]
When the verse ended, they were all gathered close and Roger, who had never moved his gaze from his face, lifted his choir-master’s hand. ‘Do you remember the rest?’
He did remember. This time he summoned his voice, properly placed on the reservoirs of its air; and the others did likewise. The interweaving now was not faint but firm and rushing and brilliant: glass and paint and silver and stone. It swirled through the spaces and quickened. The fierce Amen, when it came, struck the roof and dissolved in a curtain of echoes. The organ pealed and pealed and pealed, and the singers stood, flushed.
Unobserved in the shadows, Father Moriz stole to the door and addressed the man who, arrested, had stopped there to listen.
‘Master Roger will get his Play now. Perfect as that was perfect, whatever it costs.’ He mopped his face, which was moist. ‘I am disturbed. I may have been wrong.’
‘No,’ said Anselm Adorne. ‘No. Your instincts were right. There is the proof.’ His lashes were wet; he made no effort to dry them.
The priest said, ‘There is also the root of my concern. To divert a brook is one thing; to divert a river is quite another. You will still compete against Nicholas?’
‘I must,’ Adorne said. ‘And with my whole heart. My house depends on me.’
‘Good,’ said the priest. ‘And for his sake, I might hope that you’d win, were I not paid by the Bank, and bound to try to outguess you, as he will. I should leave the church now, and so should you. It will permit them to float to some inn and get drunk. The Most High, I feel sure, will absolve them.’
Chapter 15
GREGORIO OF ASTI left Rome in October in order to await the birth of Margot’s first child in Venice. He was aware that Julius, daily expecting to welcome his Gräfin, was disappointed by his departure; but his wife, his darling, vivid and firm as a nut in the hedgerow, naturally came first.
Her pregnancy had been untroubled from the start. They were not foolish enough to view this as an omen. Margot’s bloodline bred aberrations. Because of it, she and her first husband had had no children, and after he died, she and Gregorio had lived without marriage or children because of it. The turning point had been Gelis’s son. Aghast for Nicholas, revolted by Gelis’s tale of betrayal, Gregorio had given no thought to the coming child of that betrayal. It had been Margot, no less upset, who had steeled herself to go to Gelis and offer to share her self-imposed exile and stay to look after the child when it was born. Later, sickened by what Nicholas had been made to endure, Margot had changed her allegiance, and helped to bring together father and son.
It had been, for her, a series of long and difficult trials. She had learned that a bond with a child will overcome anything. She had learned from the steadfastness of Nicholas, who had shown no doubts about accepting his son, however malformed. She had realised with horror that Nicholas, knowing her history, had assumed that the care of his invisible child had required her special acquaintance with deformity. And that Gelis had allowed him to think it, even when the child had been born without fault.
Margot had found it hard to forgive Gelis van Borselen, but now she was ready for children, Gregorio’s children. And if they were less than perfect, they would be born into a love which would compensate. Gregorio felt as she did. He had already sent for old Tasse.
In Rome, alight with Pope fever, the thick insect-ridden heat of the summer moved hardly observed into autumn as the stately delegations followed their harbingers into the city and every bank struggled over its ledgers to keep afloat in the torrents of ducats, the snowfalls of bills of exchange that arrived with their masters.
Handsomely quartered in the Canale del Ponte close to Hadrian’s Bridge, the financial sector of Rome was inhabited by astute men of many nations who knew each other well. Success in a new