To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [138]
He said, ‘I really shouldn’t say that to Kathi. She would find it, as I do, unforgivable. The rest, even for you, is special pleading. It could all have happened perfectly well without me. Is that all?’
‘You don’t care?’
He said, ‘Of course I care. A child is dead.’
‘But you don’t accept any blame. You never do. My sister Katelina, for example.’
Then he sat down. He said, ‘Go on, then.’ However he felt, this was something that had to be faced, that he would not try to escape. Katelina her sister was dead, but Gelis had never forgotten that he had been her lover when young, and was the father of Henry her son.
It was not the only sin she held against him. He was about, now, to hear more. Unless he did, he would never fully be able to assess the depth of her anger, and the strength of her resolution. And with an enemy, one should always do that.
Gelis said, ‘A child is dead, and you care. I am glad. You cared for Katelina as well, or so you tell me. You cared for her on her death-bed in Cyprus, when she was innocently caught in the siege of Famagusta. So young. So lovely. A tragedy.’
‘We all know that,’ he said.
She said, ‘Only Katelina wasn’t accidentally trapped in Famagusta, Nicholas; she deliberately went there. She went there to die. She went there in the hope – in the certainty – of being killed, because she was pregnant.’
Her eyes were shining. She knew what she was saying. If Katelina had been pregnant, it was not by her husband. Simon had not been with her for months. But Nicholas had. He waited, and then said, ‘So, go on.’
Gelis said, ‘Have you no comment to make? Katelina had to arrange her own death because she was carrying a second child planted by you, and she couldn’t hope to cheat Simon again. So she arranged to die, and take your unborn child with her. The Dry Tree. The Immaculate Conception. I thought you should know. You would want to mourn that little child, too.’
He had no comment to make, because his thoughts had become tangled again, child for child, death for death; even to a sense of children unborn, still folded aside in their hampers, awaiting their part on the stage. Katelina, Adorne. The death of a child, decreed by its parent, so that another should live. Both Katelina and Adorne in a way had been guilty of that, but their sons had not breathed, smiled, cried, trusted. Say good night to the dark. He had killed his own son.
The words had no sense. In a distorted way, they made perfect sense. He wondered if it would have been a son Katelina was carrying. He wondered many things, but dared not let himself think of them, because Gelis was waiting, and this was a stage in a very long war. He found his unseeing gaze had fixed on Gelis’s fair, bright-eyed face. It was full of mockery, beneath which lay a curious attentiveness.
He said, ‘I don’t know whether or not I believe you. I should need a little more proof. I can only take this for what it is, a sign that I am succeding a little too well.’
He stood up and smiled. ‘Was it so good, then, the Play? Was it so very good that you couldn’t bear it? Then, of all praise I have had today, yours has to rank as the highest tribute of all. Thank you, Gelis.’
The clutter had left his mind, along with everything she had told him; set apart for the future behind the mental wall he knew so well how to raise. He watched her straighten, frowning, and deepened his smile. She could see that, superficially at least, she had failed. That in every other way she had succeeded, she could only surmise.
In the distance, footsteps made themselves heard. Gelis drew breath, then thought better of it and turned to the door. There, she looked at him again. ‘You have nothing to add?’
‘Mistakes happen,’ he said. It was true. Planning could only take you so far. She could