To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [155]
It was a disappointment for everyone when the High Street house, when they reached it, proved to have no word of papa. Depositing Jordan, Gelis rode down to the counting-house in the Canongate and fared no better with Govaerts. M. de Fleury had left for the coast and had not yet come back. Applied to, Archie of Berecrofts took off her cloak, gave her warm drinks, and explained apologetically that her crazy husband had been for over two weeks at sea.
‘At sea!’ Gelis exclaimed. ‘I thought –’ She broke off.
Archie grinned. ‘He’s a secretive bastard. Wanted me to go with him. He had this idea of arriving before anyone else at the herring grounds, but his big ship from Danzig wasn’t ready. So he took the new doggers from Leith. Two of them.’
‘They won’t get very far,’ Gelis said.
‘They don’t have to. The grounds aren’t all that many miles off. But a dogger can’t stand up to a Hanse ship. I thought they’d be back before now, glad of whatever fish they had managed to catch.’
‘Has it been stormy?’ she said.
‘Nothing out of the way,’ Archie said. ‘Nothing that Nicol and Robin, for God’s sake, couldn’t handle.’
He smiled, so that she shouldn’t guess how erratic the weather had been, and that his anxiety was far keener than hers. Nor did he say, because he assumed that she knew, that Anselm Adorne and his wife had departed for Bruges in her absence. It was only when, leaving, Gelis asked after Katelijne and her aunt that Berecrofts realised that the girl was no longer at Dean; and Gelis learned that Katelijne had not come back to Edinburgh.
Gelis said, ‘I am sure there is no cause for alarm. She will be with Sersanders her brother.’
As was often the case with the van Borselen, Gelis was not just inadvertently right, but catastrophically so. Having seen off his uncle and aunt, Anselm Sersanders followed his predestined plan and crossed to the west coast of Scotland. After a sojourn of two days at Ayr, he was able to greet and board the great ship of his uncle. On the same day, the fourth of March, Sersanders wrote and dispatched a farewell note to his sister at Dean.
In this he told her, in the kindest way possible, why their uncle and aunt had gone home without her. In his pride and delight he went further, and informed her where he, Anselm, was going, and why. It did not occur to him that his ship might wish to stop overnight for fresh stores, or that a courier from Ayr to Dean Castle might arrive, in hope of reward, the same day.
Kathi read her brother’s letter alone and sore-hearted. Love had prompted her uncle to spare her; he had not known that she did not want to be spared. The sprawling writing continued, uneven in its excitement. Guess what, Kathi! Uncle Adorne had a ship freighted and hiding all winter in Donegal. It was coming to pick up her brother at Ayr. He was to command it in place of his uncle, and Martin of the Vatachino was coming to help him. And they were going to return from the north with a fortune.
So far as she knew, her brother had never commanded a ship in his life. He was similarly ill-equipped to deal with feminine logic, believing that, dazzled by the bravura, she couldn’t work out with ease what a herd of puerile merchants was blundering into. Exasperated, she put her mind to a little hard reasoning.
The ship was fully freighted, deliberately positioned in Ireland, and hiding. Ships had been known to do that before fairs, to scoop a valuable market. They hid from rivals, and also from pirates. But there were no fairs in the north worth this trouble; her uncle would hardly circumnavigate Scotland to end up in Bergen op Zoom.
But the fortune was to come from the north. Was the ship concealed because the trip was illicit? Martin of