To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [143]
He could see her breathing, long and slow, with a shudder. She spoke abruptly. ‘So you were the love of her life, and she died for you. Is this, then, how you take the news, with your damned reasoned arguments? She died for you! Isn’t she worth a pang, a single sign that you cared? Why show nothing for her, when you can make thousands weep over a play-show with tinsel and dummies?’
‘Because you are here,’ Nicholas said.
‘Without which you would be rocked by contrition?’
‘Without which I might have the memory that she meant me to have. Of an idyll. Of an idyll now spoiled, as you spoiled the Play of the Nativity.’
‘Was it: an idyll?’ she said.
‘Under a waterfall. You remember. I talked in my fever, and you memorised every word. Katelina was frightened of butterflies. And one of my other friends – one of my wives, at the time – had upset her. It was the least I could do, to console her. Really,’ said Nicholas, ‘the butterfly episode was truly quite charming. She was wearing –’
‘No,’ Gelis said.
‘That is, she was fully clothed when I saw her first. Then –’
‘No,’ Gelis repeated.
‘But you wanted to know,’ Nicholas said. ‘When I came in, you begged me to tell you. Exactly how did she excel? Be explicit, you said. Why not show me?’
‘You never stop,’ she said. ‘You never know when to stop. Sometimes you fill me with horror.’
‘Good,’ he said.
Outside the room a child shouted, and the voice of Mistress Clémence could be heard, and the cackle of Pasque. Someone knocked on the door.
Nicholas rose. After a moment, Gelis stood also. She said, ‘You are taking Jordan to Bel. With Clémence? Or not?’
‘With, I think,’ Nicholas said. ‘I shan’t keep him too long. I am glad we talked.’
‘Are you?’ she said. ‘We must do it again. And meantime, which house are you planning to live in?’
He showed his surprise. ‘Where else but here? Unless you don’t want me?’
‘Never that,’ Gelis said.
The house of Jordan de Ribérac was quite close: between the top of the High Street and the Castle itself. To reach it, Nicholas had to traverse the busiest width of the road, including the graveyard and King’s park of the church of St Giles, and the houses of well-doing burgesses, all of whom knew Nicol de Fleury, and most of whom were inclined to fall into step with him as he passed. Mistress Clémence held the boy by the hand, and saw that he responded politely to all the introductions, without which he would have paid a great deal more attention to the dogs and the pigs and the gulls.
Nicholas conversed smiling with everyone, one hand to his hat, his heavy cloak swirled by the wind. Once before he had come to meet Bel of Cuthilgurdy at this house, his thoughts chaotic as now. Then, he had known he was going to meet his wife’s lover, and to see for the first time his unacknowledged son Henry, the handsome, spoiled child of Simon’s wife Katelina. Now, a greater irony, he was deliberately presenting to Bel his undoubted son by Gelis, Katelina’s young sister.
There was no danger that Henry would be here; the two children, half-brothers and cousins at once, would never meet, if he could help it. And even if they did, they would appear less alike than most cousins were: Henry tall and blue-eyed and fair at eleven; Jordan brown-haired and chubby at three, with two remarkable dimples to Henry’s one.
Two sons. Now he knew there might have been three. But what he had just learned he had to obliterate from his mind, together with all emotion. He remembered talking of bastards to Gelis. You may have made a better start than you know, she had remarked. She had nearly