To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
It was possible. Driven by unusual provocation, it was possible. So what illegal profit could tempt a man to sail north at the tail end of winter?
There was one. Thinking of it, Katelijne remembered what the lady Gelis had said about the whereabouts of M. de Fleury. Still thinking, she went to make arrangements to pack, while searching her memory for someone else who had talked of the north, but not recently: someone who had stayed with her uncle in Bruges. Then she remembered who it was.
She went and found the lady Mary and lied. She said her brother had summoned her.
The Countess was in one of her moods. ‘You want to leave?’
‘I must. Today, my lady,’ Kathi said. ‘But Dame Gelis will be back very soon, and Jordan is happy here. I was telling him today how you bought his father’s lovely parrot three years ago. And then you found a new house, with little birds with great red beaks all round it.’
‘Poffins,’ said the King’s sister. To Kathi’s distress, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Our little house on Nólsoy that summer. We were safe. He taught me –’ She broke off. A tear rolled down her cheek and Kathi took her hand in both hers.
‘The Earl your husband taught you to fish. In the Faroe Islands.’
‘Only on Nólsoy. I told you, we were hiding. All through the summer, ships came into Tórshavn from Iceland, for stores and shelter and pilots. We had to stay hidden.’
‘Iceland,’ said Kathi.
‘From the cod-fishing in Iceland. Sometimes they came in with dead men, or wounded. Everyone fights over stockfish: a single ship’s load is worth seven hundred pounds, did you know? They fished all that summer we spent there. Then the Earl and I left to come south. Our baby was born at your uncle’s in Bruges. Jamie, my darling. I shall never see Nólsoy again. I shall never see Tom again,’ the Countess exclaimed, and cried harder.
Later, she tried to recover her calm. ‘M. de Fleury said I must be patient, or I could endanger Tom’s life. I must think of Tom, not myself.’
Kathi gritted her teeth. She said, ‘It was M. de Fleury who helped you escape.’
The Countess gave a watery smile. ‘And his shipmaster, Crackbene. Crackbene had friends in the Faroes who helped us. But yes: without M. de Fleury, Tom and I would never have been together in Nólsoy, with the poffins.’
‘Dear M. de Fleury,’ said Katelijne.
‘Why?’ said Betha Sinclair, coming in with a brisk curtsey. ‘What has he done?’
‘Nothing,’ said the lady Mary, drying her eyes. ‘We were just talking of Nólsoy.’
‘Were you?’ said Betha Sinclair. ‘And persuading Kathi, I hope, not to leave.’
Kathi could not tell them the truth. She could only repeat that her brother had called her to Edinburgh. She found herself moved and distressed by their determination to keep her at Dean. She rode off wretchedly in the end, with Betha standing foursquare and cross in the doorway, and Jodi waving happily from the arms of his nurse. Margaret, pleased to have one keeper the fewer, was already tormenting poor Pasque.
Katelijne travelled quite a respectable distance before she ordered her escort to turn about and spur to a gallop. They were surprised, but they did what she asked. Ayr was not far away.
Chapter 21
HALFWAY TO THE islands of Orkney, with the Svipa pitching and rolling and the sea crashing green into her waist, it occurred to Nicholas, as it still occasionally did, that he was happy. Since this could have nothing to do with the weather, which had been consistently fearsome, it must have evolved from his memories: home-made rafts on the lake at Geneva; his first tuition from John on the voyage to Trebizond; his first command of his own ship at Lagos. And despite all that later had happened, the tranquillity of the Nile and the Joliba; the sail with John, full of hope, to Alexandria; the cloudless small passage from Gaza. The voyages, high in expectation, here to Scotland. The healing sweetness last spring, with his son.
But of course, past contentment was