To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [141]
The only sad note is the news I have of dear Tasse. She was to come, as you know, to help Margot. She was well when she came, sprightly as ever; but her footing was not what it had been. She drowned, Nicholas: stumbled into the canal when out buying linen to sew for the child. By the time she was found, she was dead.
She would so have loved Jaçon. We gave her a fine burial, as you would have wanted. It is a loss for us all.
It is a loss for us all. Tasse, the little servant, herself beaten, who helped – as others had done – to make his boyhood bearable after his mother had died. Who, once Nicholas was out of his apprenticeship and married, had come from Geneva to serve Marian de Charetty, his wife. And who, after Marian’s death, had lived in genteel retirement, to be brought out again to what should have been her last happy years with Gregorio, blessed with a child.
Presently, as he had intended. Nicholas folded the letter and, taking the satchel, went to break the news to Govaerts and the rest. Presently also, as was his custom, he left the Casa Niccolò and walked up the hill – hailed by casual company; frequently halted – to spend the night in his pretty house in the High Street with his wife and his child.
Immediately after the King’s Nativity Play, he had had to make several decisions. Business invariably stopped during Yule, but he had lost a great deal of time, and had expected to return to his plans unimpeded. Instead, there had come the changed circumstances of Adorne, and the effect on himself and his schemes of the faultlessly timed intervention by Gelis. The specifications to which he had been working had altered, and hence the machinery had to be tested again; reassembled; its components altered if necessary. The other machiniste had altered his programme. He himself had to devise his response.
He had given himself three days’ delay before he dealt with it. To begin with, he had the excuse of the celebration that followed the performance, and then the further excuse of its consequences, which were drastic enough. During that period, he concluded without too much trouble that he must return to what passed for normal life in the same house as Gelis. There were several reasons, one of which was the continued wellbeing of Jordan. The rest had to do with Gelis, and himself, and her sister.
In the three days of his grace, he had opened the barriers of his mind – as he must – and lived again through all that had happened in Rhodes and in Cyprus eight years ago, and compared it with what Gelis had said. He heard again what Katelina had told him, and the words of her Arab physician. To a mind delighting in tactics and devices, grief is not a familiar factor … In the simplest of games, one person at least knows the pain of doubt, or defeat … Success seldom teaches what is worth knowing. The wisdom of a great man. But nothing had been said of a child.
He knew that Gelis believed what she had said. It was not necessarily true. He must, then, pursue it with her; settle it once and for all. If she were wrong, something might even come of it.
So he had prepared to go to the house in the High Street, and also to make the difficult visit to Bel. He wished, with black and desperate humour, that the egregious Willie Roger were going instead, or the superior Adorne, or the disapproving Father Moriz, or any one of the meddling homespun philosophers who had so recently, so piously attempted to break his life in half. But for Gelis, it might even have worked. He might be carrying back to his marriage all his newly discovered ideals; his dedication to dedication; his resolve not to squander his genius. He ought to sell seats for both meetings and get Roger to play in the interludes. He should never have touched the Nativity.
He was calm enough nevertheless when, on the third day after the performance, he entered Gelis’s house and walked into her room, causing her to drop what she was holding. He said, ‘Why so surprised? I told you I was coming to take Jordan