To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [146]
As Nicholas de Fleury remained so brilliantly visible that festive Yule and the weeks that immediately followed it, so by contrast the house of Anselm Adorne remained quiet, though not lacking in visitors. The Baron tried not to deviate from his plan, but continued painstakingly to interweave the complicated threads of his embassy and his personal business, always looking to the future, and taking account of the new land he possessed and his increased duties in Scotland and Bruges. He continued to confer in private with Martin. He perused, too, but did not discuss with his womenfolk, the letters which came to him from Genoa and Danzig, Rome and Cologne, and his own agents and partners in Bruges. And, of course, from his daughter in England.
He now knew, from Jan, that the plan had succeeded: that de Fleury’s new ship would not be here by the spring, whereas his own vessel was on its way with its cargo, in immaculate order, in exemplary time. He knew that Diniz, de Fleury’s Bruges manager, was uneasy over the outlay in Scotland, and over the padrone’s winter isolation from Venice and Rome and the Low Countries, as the French-Burgundian truce showed signs of wearing thin. He also knew, but could not explain how he knew, that the effort to divert, to reshape, to tame Nicholas de Fleury had failed.
Adorne had never spoken of this to Kathi, and at present she was wholly devoted to the care of Margriet, like the other kind women and Andreas. The German priest had, he thought, recognised a little of what was being attempted, but had called to leave his condolences, not to chatter. The same applied to the three generations of the Berecrofts family. They said the young one, the boy Robin, was going to Nicholas to train as a squire. Kathi maintained it would do him no harm. Kathi was too young to remember Felix de Charetty, who had also had dreams.
There remained the musician, Will Roger, who had begun it all with his motet. Long ago, even without Phemie Dunbar to instruct him, the Baron Cortachy had recognised that the Englishman’s truculent moods, his battery of invective and blandishments were no more than weapons: the siege machinery of his ferocious commitment to his art.
Adorne had not attended the Play. He had not been there when de Fleury, fulfilling his promise, gave Roger the creation he had asked for; but he had spoken to those who were present, and had learned from their silence as much as from their speech. Will Roger, exchanging words after the funeral, had simply said, ‘God preserved you from watching it. It would have been wrong.’
‘Everyone tells of your music,’ Adorne had said.
‘Oh yes,’ Roger had said. ‘I made music. But this man who wastes time as a merchant – this man put together shape and texture and light and matched the music to movement. Or mismatched it, out of sheer screaming arrogance. He got van der Goes – he got the best artists in Europe to copy the paintings by Lippi and van Eyck and Petrus Christus. He did the Strozzi-Fabriano Magi in its gold frame, and replaced the painted figures with live ones – can you imagine that? The dove was real – it fluttered down the nine golden rays to Mary’s cloak and nestled there. You couldn’t see the mechanism or hear it: the angels floated, the demons from Hell swirled and flew. The shepherd’s bob of cherries was real, and so were Gabriel’s garlands and the stem of white lilies. And he prodded the spoken word into it all, never forgetting that the most fearsome sound a man hears –’ He stopped.
‘What?’ said Adorne.
‘– is no sound at all.’
Adorne did not speak. At length he said, ‘And it was done as he wanted?’
‘As in war,’ Roger said. ‘For the space of one day, they would have followed him into Gehenna. He could have razed Rome or retaken Jerusalem.’
‘Now he knows what he can do,’ Adorne said. He waited. ‘What is it? You cannot think you