To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [163]
Then, for the first time, he gave all his mind to what she had done. He said, ‘I thought you would have gone back to Bruges with your uncle and aunt.’
‘They didn’t tell me they were going,’ she said. ‘They left while I was at Dean Castle. They want me to stay in Scotland, and do well, and marry. It is right that I should do what they want. They have been a father and mother to me.’
‘But you would rather have gone.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘But Dr Andreas is there to take care of her. He will be better than anyone.’
‘So that is really why you are rushing to Iceland. I’m sorry,’ he said.
She looked up and smiled. ‘I had other reasons. No, they are right. I should marry soon.’
‘I hear there are suitors,’ he said. ‘Someone, for example, not too far from Berecrofts?’
Her smile remained, full of friendship and mischief. ‘Perhaps. My uncle has several favourites, all kind men, and good. He says the choice may be mine.’
He thought of Gelis’s sister, forced into a loathsome Scottish betrothal and repudiating it with such violence in Bruges. The suitor was dead, and so were the parents who picked him. ‘Do you like them?’ he said. ‘Your uncle’s candidates?’
‘I’m in no hurry,’ she said. ‘But yes, I could share a house and a family with one of them. I should like to have sons like your Jordan. He enjoyed the ponies at Dean, and the country.’
‘Of course. You said Gelis came.’
‘Not for long: Bel of Cuthilgurdy took her off to see Beltrees. I hear it is a beautiful place. You would make a good lord of the manor.’
‘You have been reading my mind,’ Nicholas said. ‘A coat of arms, do you think, with a fish in it?’
‘And a tree, and a ring? It’s been done. I’m going to bait hooks. What about you?’ said Katelijne.
‘The very same thing,’ Nicholas said. She thought he meant it; until she saw him with John le Grant, supervising the emplacement of cannon. The Unicorn had no artillery. She would have to decide whether to say so.
She remembered le Grant in Egypt. She liked his unsentimentality, and his fervour for the things that he created, such as the machines for the Nativity Play. Since she came on board, she had encouraged him to talk about it and he had done so, in bursts of impassioned exposition, his fingers stabbing, his chalk slashing out diagrams. The sliding of the scenery thus. The smoke, the vapours, the lights orchestrated thus. The ghosts of the Prophets – how did she imagine that had been done? The unbearable light for the Deity? The paintings that moved?
She asked intelligent questions, and he went on to relate to her, chuckling, the fearsome tally of near-disasters that they had overcome, all of them, that terrible, that miraculous day. He spoke like a man starved, recalling a banquet. She realised that, since the immediate intoxicated aftermath of the Play, he had never been allowed to digest what had happened, or even refer to it. M. de Fleury had made it impossible.
It worried her. She learned quickly that Father Moriz was baffled as well. She had heard a good deal about the chaplain from Germany. It was he and Will Roger, they said, who had involved M. de Fleury in the Play: for the sake of his voice or his character, or perhaps both. It didn’t seem to have worked. The Play, in all its purgative glory, was past; and M. de Fleury had sailed off to Hell unredeemed, and was about to start a small war over fish.
Tackled in private, Father Moriz admitted that he shared her regrets. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I see we are two people who do not easily give up on the gentleman. You are here, then, hoping to turn him back from this unsavoury venture?’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But I had nothing better to do, and he does need a sharp word now and then. I couldn’t leave it to Robin.’
‘To Robin. Of course. Although I doubt if I have ever seen M. de Fleury receive a sharp word from Robin.’
‘I goad him. Robin looks after him. Until someone else comes who can do it.’
The priest studied her thoughtfully. He had a large, unkempt head and a short neck. He said, ‘You are risking a great deal to do so. So is Robin. I am not sure if his