To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [260]
‘A gräfin?’ Tobie exclaimed. ‘What does she see in him?’
‘A handsome man,’ had said Margot, laughing.
‘And someone who, without charge, will help her increase and manage her money.’ Gregorio’s view was more prosaic.
‘But they are not considering marriage?’ Tobie enquired.
Margot looked at her husband and smiled. ‘Julius would marry tomorrow. But the Gräfin, after all, could choose whom she pleases, with her fortune and her rank and her looks. Nevertheless, perhaps love will prevail.’
Then it was late at night, and Tobie and Gregorio and Margot were sitting alone, and Tobie gazed into his cup and said, ‘Tell me about him.’ He didn’t have to say whom he meant.
Gregorio looked at his wife. He said, ‘Nicholas writes; but everything we know is second-hand. We were wrong in our fears. He lives with his wife and his child, and has gone out of his way to have her accepted. His work in Scotland has been prodigious, and she has partnered him. The torrential energy is the same: he knows all that the Bank is doing, and since he came back has never stopped organising, except during the few weeks he was in Iceland and for a little while after. They all needed time to recover.’
To diagnose, one listens and watches. Tobie repeated, ‘All? Who?’
Margot didn’t look up. Gregorio said, ‘John was with him, and Moriz. And Robin, the son of a Scots merchant, who went as his page. And Katelijne Sersanders.’
‘Kathi!’ he said. His nose tickled. He sneezed.
‘With her brother. She had some crazy idea of protecting them both. Nicholas should never have let her come: they always end up in escapades of some sort. This time she could have killed herself, and Nicholas came back in a fairly bad state. Moriz says he had been divining.’
‘What happened?’ Tobie said.
Margot answered. ‘Afterwards? Kathi had to come back to Bruges for her aunt, and Nicholas and Gelis went to Antwerp.’ She smiled. ‘Nicholas bought a house in Antwerp four years ago, but didn’t tell anyone. Gregorio was furious.’
‘Why?’ Tobie said. He wished he were less tired, or less drunk. None of this was what he had expected.
‘Why Antwerp? Secrecy, we suppose. He hadn’t decided yet what to do. And now it removes Gelis from the gossip of Bruges. People still talk about Simon. And he thought it would keep Jordan safe.’
‘Jordan?’ The gross man, Simon’s father came to mind.
Margot said, ‘What are we doing, keeping you sleepless on your first night? The rest can wait till tomorrow. Come. Gregorio will take you to your room.’
He remembered who Jordan must be. ‘The child?’ he said. ‘Keep him safe from what?’
Then he read the letter from Moriz in Bruges that she showed him.
After a while, he looked up. Margot had gone, and Gregorio was sitting quietly, nursing his cup. Tobie said, ‘Henry tried to kill the little boy?’ The boy Robin had been there; the new page who had been taken to Iceland. He wondered who Robin’s father might be.
‘He tried to kill Nicholas too, a while ago. I remember Henry from Madeira. The little brute should have been hanged. As you see, Nicholas has decided to chastise him himself. I shan’t mourn him.’
‘It may be the other way round,’ Tobie said. ‘Dear Christ … What did Gelis do?’
Moriz doesn’t say. Henry is her nephew. Presumably she would think the army less humiliating than prison. And when Simon de St Pol does descend on them all, it will be Nicholas he will single out, not his wife.’
There was a long silence. Then Tobie said, ‘You said we were wrong in our fears. You haven’t said that we were wrong to have fears. Nicholas and Gelis are not together from love. Why are they together?’
‘I don’t know who could tell you. Kathi, perhaps,’ said Gregorio. ‘They are waging a war, Moriz thinks. An impersonal war, it seems to me, of skill and attrition, rather than something sprung from contempt, or hatred or loathing. For her, the child is of importance because it is important to Nicholas. For him, the child has a right of its own.’ It might have been Gregorio’s own deduction. More