To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [129]
His niece Katelijne he preferred not to involve. She was busy enough in all conscience, running to the Prioress’s house and her duties over the street, or to de Fleury’s house to interfere with the Play, or here to sit with Margriet, with or without the two Sinclair cousins, Betha and Phemie. He himself did not impose his presence on that part of the house which was women’s business. All Margriet’s women friends came to see her; the Queen sent small gifts; and the lady Mary, Countess of Arran, sometimes seemed to live in Adorne’s house as much as her own.
There was a more settled look now to the Countess – something of resignation, perhaps; and she had made her peace to some degree with her brother. After the first weeks as guest of de Fleury, she had been allowed to move to the monastery of the Greyfriars, not far away. The children visited one another, and she seemed to prize the company of both Nicholas and his wife. She had also recovered her affection for Margriet. If she had blamed the Adorne family once, she did so no longer.
To her husband, Margriet seemed better. Adorne spent time with her, when the others had gone, and sat hand in hand, and read to her, which she always liked. She had never been interested in music, so he set his own lute aside, and devoted himself to what would please her best. He had brought Dr Andreas to live in the house, just to be sure. She did not speak of Nicholas any more, which was as well.
The house of Nicholas, across the street, was – by his own decree – the centre of the whole enterprise of the Nativity. To it, in the early days, came the groups of powerful merchants, the craft-masters, magistrates, lawyers: the men of title and office whose support, guidance, licences, local knowledge, and participation he was going to need. Later, it was the technicians who came to confer, when the rooms the lady Mary had now vacated became a drawing-office, and the stone-lined chamber whose purpose had never become clear suddenly turned into a storehouse of volatile powders and precious metals beaten into strange shapes.
Gelis had been consulted. It made sense, she supposed, that the Ca’ Niccolò in the Canongate should be left undisturbed, to continue trading in privacy. She herself was an excellent organiser. In a project like this, which was something like planning a war, she could become its quartermaster, handling the accommodation and feeding of the multi-national brood which wandered arguing uphill and down between her house and Holyrood, and even assisting the Abbey to provision the performance itself, when engineers and performers, guards and musicians and the spectators themselves required to have access to food.
What she could not yet guess was why Nicholas was doing it in this way. His own capacity for planning was unquestioned, but so was his instinct for good business. It was clearly useful to dazzle the King and to make a killing from all the Bank was procuring. The rest, however, didn’t make sense: the wholesale dedication to this one little project of the Bank’s senior technicians, and – more wasteful by far – the personal undivided attention of Nicholas the padrone himself.
He had never fully explained it, even at the beginning when, seated uninvited in her room with Jodi self-attached to his knee, he had asked whether she would like to help plan it. All she gathered then was that he had offered to furnish a play, and was now expected to produce one for Christmas. He had sounded, if anything, resigned.
She had resisted involvement at first: it was not any plan of hers to assist him. She changed her mind, in the end, for several reasons. For one thing, the prospect of an early departure of the Boyd family had seemed wonderfully appealing. It also appealed, she observed, to Mistress Clémence.
Later, she heard rumours