To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [244]
The leader of the household bodyguard, a busybody, had sent to fetch little Berecrofts who came running, all sweaty from fighting, and looking as if the Turks had come to the door. He knew the Lady perfectly well – he had been there when the family visited – but you would have thought he was Mistress Clémence herself, the fuss he made about the child leaving home. It wasn’t until the dame de Borselen asked him sarcastically if he thought the boy would be safer with him than he would be with his own blood relations, that the youngster mended his manners.
Even then, he wanted to come and bring all his bodyguard, until the lady Charlotte, with the same chilly patience, pointed out that the household retinue of the van Borselen was perhaps adequate for most occasions. She did agree, however, that Lord Beltrees’s page might go with her, finding his anxiety – if misplaced – highly commendable. By the time they left, she had recovered all her gracious good humour.
‘Now,’ said the Lady. ‘Now at last we may do what best pleases us, and show this little Jordan the pleasures of Veere.’
Racked with anxiety, Robin of Berecrofts remained obstinately attached to the side of the child as they embarked on their journey of pleasure.
Awaiting his master in Antwerp, he had been given no office to perform, other than that of being useful, and pursuing his training. He knew that the son of a banker should always be guarded from kidnappers. He further knew that Nicholas de Fleury had enemies, and would have preserved Jordan from Simon de St Pol, for example, with his life. Unlike Mistress Clémence, he had been given no specific instructions about excluding Jordan from Bruges or from Veere, simply because he would have asked questions, and Mistress Clémence did not. Also, no one had dreamed that the child’s mother and nurse could be absent at once.
Leaving Antwerp, Robin had considered, frantically, whom he should warn. It was the third day of June, and Nicholas de Fleury had been away for nine days and was momentarily expected to return. Meanwhile, the lady Gelis and Clémence were both in Bruges: Clémence at the Jerusalemkirk, and the Lady at the Casa Charetty-Niccolò with the lawyer Julius from Venice and a rich German lady investor. Even if Robin sent a courier now, neither could come within three or four days. Also, the van Borselen were Jordan’s own relatives: it ought not to seem as if Robin, on monseigneur’s behalf, did not trust them.
Robin scrawled a note to be given to his master, and left another for Jooris, the agent. The next rider to Bruges was to tell the lady of Beltrees that her son was in the house of her cousin at Veere.
*
Gelis and Katelina van Borselen had been members of a very great family; Gelis still was. Their territory was Zeeland, and their home was on Walcheren, the stranded island north-east of Bruges whose southern shore was the mouth of the Scheldt, leading to Antwerp, and whose opposite shore lined the Veergat, the waters of which served the trading port of Bergen op Zoom. Placed between Bruges and the Baltic, Zeeland’s wealth lay in trade and in shipping. Her lords intermarried with the Counts of Flanders and the Dukes of Burgundy and the royal house of Scotland, and were showered with formidable honours.
The late Henry van Borselen, lord of Veere, had carried Mary of Guelders to Edinburgh to become the Queen of James II; and twenty years later had borne Edward of England to his throne. Henry’s son Wolfaert, now over forty, had brought up young Sandy, the Scots Duke of Albany, and had possessed, briefly, the Scottish earldom of Buchan; his first wife had been sister to James II. Charlotte, second wife to the same Wolfaert, was of royal French as well as ducal Burgundian blood. Louis de Gruuthuse, married to a van Borselen, had become lieutenant-general for the Duke