To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [237]
Jan said, ‘He’s willing to speak to you, now you have forgiven your lady wife. You were talking of Julius, your lawyer.’
‘Yes?’ said Nicholas. Some of the diners had risen and were crowding round the inner door at the end of the room. He added, ‘He is coming to Bruges. You might see him.’
‘I hope,’ said Jan, ‘that he is bringing his new lady with him. A gräfin. Perhaps you have met her?’
‘He is bringing a lady,’ said Nicholas. ‘But no, I have not met her. You have?’ The doors at the end of the room were slowly opening.
‘Oh yes,’ Jan Adorne said. ‘A vision of beauty. A little lacking in height, but the horizontal aspects more than make up for it. In fact, I have seldom seen a comparable girth outside a cheese-house. I should think he had to roll her over the Alps like a barrel, even to the danger of scratching her paint.’
‘Jan, that is ungallant,’ said Adorne sharply. ‘Nicholas, I am sorry. No gentleman speaks thus of a –’
He stopped because his voice was drowned out by cheers. The doors stood open. The crowd before them fell back. Nicholas stood, and so did Jan and his father. Then Nicholas started to laugh.
Entering the room, limping slightly, was Anselm Sersanders. His face was smiling; his dress, after the travel-worn quilting of Iceland, was stylish and rich. And by his side, two porters were trundling an object.
It looked at first like a crate on four wheels. Then, as it stopped at the end of the table, Anselm leaned over and drew back the covering cloth. Nicholas saw that it was not a crate but a cage. A stout cage with thick iron bars, within which sat something enormous and furry and white. Sersanders put his hand through the bars and scratched the object under the chin, and the object sniffed him.
It was a white Greenland bear. Nicholas said, ‘Há! The cub? Anselm, this is the cub? You went back for it?’
‘Of course,’ said Anselm Sersanders. ‘Meet the het beert je Besse gift from the White Bear Society of Bruges to the great and powerful Charles, Duke of Burgundy, Count of Flanders and everything else. Uncle, come and shake hands.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Anselm Adorne, with amusement. But he walked over, Nicholas with him, and stood in front of the cage. Nicholas said again, ‘That’s a cub?’
‘Well, they’re born in winter,’ said Sersanders with mild irritation. Can’t cross the ice till their second year. Bears are big.’
‘Katelijne caught that?’ Nicholas said.
‘I helped her. I brought it back on my own. Well, with the Icelanders. So. Better than stockfish, do you think?’
‘It depends what you feed it on,’ Nicholas said. ‘Anselm, I do think that is enterprising. Where do you keep it?’
He waited until the noise and laughter increased and the talk became general, and then made his way to where Gruuthuse stood a little apart. As Anselm Adorne was a loyal officer to the Duke, so the Gruuthuse family were one of the bastions of Burgundy. In their palace in Bruges had lived the exiled English King and his brother, before their triumphant return the previous year. In the same house, Gelis van Borselen had lain with her future husband for the first time since she seduced him in Africa. Nicholas said, ‘Something has happened?’
Gruuthuse said, ‘You have spent a long time in Scotland.’
‘The winter. My army is still on the Somme, and I am here with my gunner as promised.’
The other man’s face had always been lined, now it was more so. He said, ‘I told Duke Charles, but you should go to Arras to speak to him yourself. The King of France’s brother has died, poisoned, they say, by his order. The Duke of Brittany is preparing to march. It seems very likely that our Duke will then take the field.’
‘Breaking the truce?’ Nicholas said.
‘An oath made to a murderer is no oath. Your lady is with you?’
‘Gelis is well,’ Nicholas said. ‘She is in Antwerp. I shall return there tomorrow, and then report to the Duke. Are the English likely to send troops?’
‘They have sent them already. A thousand archers to Brittany under Earl Rivers. We may tempt them to invade France with us yet,’ Gruuthuse said. ‘There is enough land