To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [311]
Gelis had waited, Kathi beside her. Bel wasn’t there, although he knew she was in town. He was glad she wasn’t there. He had enough to contend with, without Bel.
Kathi said, ‘So how did you like your present?’ She was dry-eyed and smiling, but her kerchief was soaked.
He said, ‘I saw you. You were singing.’
‘But you didn’t hear me,’ she said flatly.
Gelis said something, and he automatically turned to her, smiling. Kathi was right: he had heard almost nothing. The effort of hearing almost nothing had given him an acute headache, but he had solved several unusual mathematical problems, devised a poem and run through many more while avoiding the pale stare of Tobie, who had never heard the performance before and was sitting as if axed on the head.
Gelis said, ‘I don’t remember if I congratulated you last time.’
Nicholas said, ‘I’m sure you did congratulate me. Anyway, this wasn’t my doing: it’s Willie’s night.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ Kathi said. ‘Did you see Bel?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘She came late. She must have gone away as soon as it finished.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But this isn’t the last night of our lives. I’m not taking the habit. We’ll all continue to meet, I hope, outside Scotland.’
‘I expect we shall,’ Kathi said. She hesitated and then said, ‘The King is waiting. I don’t want to keep you. I only wanted to speak of the music’
They watched her go, and turned to rejoin the royal party back in the hall. He had been looking at Gelis all night because she was wearing court dress, with jewels he had never seen round her throat and latticing the wings of her white, floating headgear. The King had been watching her as well. Nicholas said, ‘This shouldn’t take long. The Queen will want to retire. Then we take our leave. Then we go out through the gardens and walk by the back path to the Canongate house. Then we talk.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Every trader has to set dates, or starve. I am to rejoice in the palace of my master.’
‘Let us say,’ Nicholas said, ‘that we have enough on the board for a deal. Rejoicing would stretch it too far. So, to the Canongate?’
‘My poor Nicholas,’ Gelis said. ‘By the back path? Through the gardens? Do you imagine for one moment that you are going to escape all those people outside?’
He had persuaded himself that he would. Such was his determination that the illusion stayed with him all through his last audience and past the moment when the Abbot, amiably conspiratorial, had them shown to a postern and he and Gelis slipped through. For one more moment, the Abbey garden seemed deserted and quiet. Then the glare of twenty lanterns struck him in the face, and his ears were ringing to the whoops, the catcalls, the bawling of ten times that number of people, and the saucy rattle of kettledrums.
They had caught him. They had caught them both. The crowd of his companions marched them up to Willie Roger’s and there was no escape. None at all.
He got drunk very quickly, because he meant to. Gelis, who had never been there before, seemed to his vague surprise to conform easily to the new habitat, in the same way that she had come to terms with tough seamen off the African coast: in the mode of a cool, amused donna di governo. It was strange, because Gelis was here and not Kathi. Roger had never asked Kathi to enter this warm vinous world of music and gossip and badinage. It was not right for an unmarried girl. And, Nicholas guessed, he saw that it would have been unfair for a girl who must marry. The distaff should not have to compete against this bright, boisterous masculine world, or with the music. Luckily, they sang only ditties, obscene ones, so that he too could float, a wanton bladder, above the dead anchor-weight of his purpose. He did not remember going home.
He woke alone in his own room in the Ca’ Niccolò and was amused, briefly, at the confidence implied by her absence. She required no advantages. He made, with the help of Alonse, a ponderous toilet, and eventually