To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [16]
But now, the question was put, and not, this time, to Mistress Clémence. The child began to finger its toy; a stranger would think that its interest had wandered. Mistress Clémence said nothing. M. de Fleury wiped his brush, laid it carefully down and turned his full gaze on the child. They were both on the floor. He said, ‘Ta maman te manque?’
You miss your mother? Mistress Clémence gave a dry cough. The child wanted an answer, not an abstract expression of loss. Then she saw the man had suddenly got to his feet and was holding out first one hand, then two. The child scrambled up, and let himself be lifted and swept to the poop windows.
The man swung him round. ‘You see that land over there, far away? Madame ta mère is over there. She cannot come, she is busy. But there are horses for riding over there, and fine boats, and hound-puppies, and cows to be milked. And one day you and I and Mistress Clémence and Pasque will sail to that shore, and find some boats, and some horses, and will ride to where maman will meet us.’
‘Soon?’ said the child. He looked up and round.
‘Soon,’ said M. de Fleury. His voice was easy but his gaze, turned to Mistress Clémence, was dense and unyielding as pewter, as it had been when first they met.
That time, the play with the horse was resumed and the child, she saw, was content. Only, several days later, he said again to the man, ‘And so, where is maman?’
And the man, looking at him, picked him up and seated him again in the crook of his arm and walked again to the windows. ‘Why, you see that land over there, far away? Madame ta mère is over there. She cannot come, she is busy, M. le bouton.’
‘Horses,’ said the child.
‘But there are horses for riding over there …’
‘Boats.’
‘And fine boats …’
‘Puppies.’
‘And hound-puppies, and cows to be milked.’
‘Soon?’
‘Of course, soon.’
The next time, man and boy chanted the recital together, and Mistress Clémence got up and left. To Pasque she said, ‘My head ached.’
Although a peasant, Pasque also came from Coulanges. She said, ‘He hates his lady wife. Do you believe he is truly planning to meet her?’
And Mistress Clémence replied, after a while: ‘He is taking a great deal of trouble to attach the boy to himself. His purpose I do not know. He tells me we are sailing now for Marseilles.’
‘To land?’ said Pasque. When she was pleased, she displayed her very few teeth. When she was extremely pleased, she would dance.
‘Eventually. He is in no hurry. Then we have to prepare the child for a journey through France. Provence; Burgundy. To Dijon in Burgundy.’
‘Dijon?’ said Pasque. ‘The vicomtes de Fleury come from near Dijon. Ser Nicholas wishes to show off his son to his mother?’
‘Hardly,’ said Mistress Clémence. The family château at Dijon was a ruin. M. de Fleury’s disgraced mother was dead; the grandfather locked away in his dotage. M. de Fleury was without brothers and sisters. The child would find no aunts or uncles to greet him at Dijon, no cousins to play with.
‘Then why Dijon?’ said Pasque.
‘I have not been told,’ said Mistress Clémence. She had herself considered the question. The child’s mother might have been sent for, or have demanded a meeting. It might be nothing to do with the child, but merely denote M. de Fleury’s return to the world of affairs. The head of a bank could not vanish for ever. And a child of two years had no place in a bank.
‘M. de Fleury has an army,’ Pasque remarked. ‘They say it is a good way to train up a boy, to put him among men in an army.’
Quite simply, Nicholas de Fleury had bought himself time. For five weeks the vessel of which he was owner floated in the Middle Sea, and gold made it invisible. Even when he finally set foot on shore at Marseilles, quietness followed him still. He was well served, and although René its ruler was absent, the comt