To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [234]
She had already endured his five-week absence in Iceland, but that was a single project, now finished. For half a year before that, their daily lives had been shared. She knew where he was, and she heard what he was doing. In some things, they had even acted together: in the ceremonial visits to Court; in the social life of the merchant community; in the making of the Play, which had seemed, at first, to offer such a manifest opportunity, and then had been revealed as the greatest threat, perhaps, she had yet faced.
While he was there, she could create her planning around him; when they were apart, his unpredictability baffled her. You would think, from the tales he freely told, that he had been perfectly candid about his voyage to Iceland. Only she noticed the lacunae: the parts which none of them ever discussed or explained. The girl Kathi, sometimes helpful, could not be reached. Archie had extracted what little he could from young Robin, but the boy had been reluctant and awkward. If there had been a dark side to that visit, a romantic young page was unlikely to know.
It fretted her, this impenetrable barrier. She was reminded of the swift, merry stream they all talked of, usefully busy, until suddenly the wholesome rock splits and the scalding marrow spurts forth. She was made anxious by any untoward influences – those of Africa, of Sinai, of the Play – that threatened to move Nicholas to another dimension; that had the power to replace logic with something more powerful. She did not want an emotional crisis of that sort again. Or not until she was ready.
Visitors came to the house. It was built of red brick, one of a row in a narrow street to the west of the Cathedral and not far from the river upon which Antwerp lay. It was smaller than the great house in Spangnaerts Street, but sufficient for herself and the child and the nurses and household attendants. There had been an agent, Jooris, occupying the upper floor, who had discreetly moved out to the riverside, where the counting-house and the packhouses were.
She knew why she had been settled here, because Nicholas had told her quite frankly: to avoid repeating the experience she had already had, living as an object of curiosity in the Bruges house run by Diniz and Tilde. She had brought that upon herself by her connection with Simon, and Nicholas showed little sympathy.
The other reason she understood even better. Simon’s heir Henry was now a page with her van Borselen cousins, living either in Bruges, or at their castle sixty miles north of Antwerp at Veere. And if the handsome Simon, at forty-seven, had cause to dislike her, she knew without doubt that this boy of eleven held her and her child in abhorrence. Mistress Clémence had been warned never to take Jordan to Bruges or to Veere, nor to allow him to be taken.
There was no harm, of course, in Wolfaert van Borselen and his wife calling on Gelis at Antwerp, provided Henry did not come with them. Indeed, they came sooner than she had expected to congratulate her on her new status. Nicholas, who was there at the time, received them solemnly, and the charming docility of Jordan transfixed them. Mistress Clémence, presented, described him as a sweet-natured child, and later found herself drawn into gracious conversation with the lady Charlotte de Bourbon, married for four years to Wolfaert, and now expecting her third. Pasque was presented.
Gelis, smiling continuously, found that she had caught her own husband’s eye, and freed it immediately, to quash any suggestion of conjugal conspiracy. She averted her gaze after that, aware now that his amused gaze seldom left her. For a moment it felt like last summer: herself a shadow, an echo, and Nicholas her invisible watcher. When their visitors left, and when, later, he himself departed to Bruges, Gelis even experienced some relief.