To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [38]
And that was certainly true. Whatever the rights of the case, the mother had been forcibly deprived of her child for four months and might arrive with some sort of mandate to seize the child and cancel the marriage. Or she might do worse than that. Mistress Clémence had seen other clever, solitary girls who repressed all emotion until it exploded in blows, or steel, or self-destruction. She herself intended to support neither side nor allow Pasque to do so, but she would certainly shield the child from distress. She had not been responsible for the upbringing of M. de Fleury or his lady, but come what may, she would make a respectable citizen of this petit mafflu, their little Bouton de Fleury. When the summons came, in mid-June, the child and his nurses were ready.
The command dispatched by Nicholas de Fleury to his representatives in the Tyrol arrived a week later, and received a more guarded welcome. John le Grant had no wish to witness the terminal encounter between Nicholas and this dangerous girl he had married. His colleague Father Moriz, whose acquaintance with Nicholas was shorter, reminded John of their obligations to the Bank. Nicholas had been absent since February, and consultation on alum and silver, on gun-casting and mining was imperative. He did not mention what his own personal remit to do with Nicholas was. As usual, their common deep professional interest carried the day. They carried out their instructions, took their leave of the Duke and the Duchess and set off in the heat of late June for the Somme, bearing a material gift for the child and several intangible ones for the Banco di Niccolò.
In the same heat, in the north, Nicholas de Fleury, machiniste, fatiste, Master of Secrets, set the last of his chiselled wheels spinning and crossed into Burgundian Artois where lay his mercenary troops under Astorre and his present titular employer, Charles, Duke of Burgundy.
He felt satisfied. Happiness was something different; generally fleeting and born from the unexpected, like the wheel of angels in Angers. Contentment came from intellectual satisfaction. There was something in between, which he had recently felt, but then he had been ill, or at least not himself.
The audience before him was the last, and perhaps the most important, but he was not at all apprehensive. Everything he had done, ending with this, had been precisely planned. It was appropriate, if unnecessary, that this, the second wing of his triptych, should have brought him to the acme of artifice, the Duke of Burgundy’s palace of Hesdin in Artois. Unnecessary because there was no danger, here, that he would be received as a man imported to mend the ingenuities. The Duke and he had done business already. It was known that the Bank, to oblige Burgundy, had withdrawn from a lucrative proposition in the East. More particularly it would be known that, at this moment, the sieur de Fleury came to him warm from the embraces of Louis of France, who had equally failed to seduce him.
It was true, so far as it went. Nicholas had ridden from Ham directly to Hesdin, crossing the Somme, then crossing the Authie without attempting to halt at the Burgundian camp and appear to consult with his captain. Instead, a few miles short of Hesdin, Astorre himself had slipped unseen into M. de Fleury’s small cavalcade and briefly ridden along with him, under a ceiling of night clouds shot through with crackling fireworks and flushed with the red light of bonfires.
‘They’re happy. York on the throne. The French’ll be sick. How was it at Ham?’ Astorre said. He was riding where his good eye, not his sewn one, could observe his employer. His beard had turned black.
‘Just as we hoped. The army stays for the season in Burgundy. High pay, reasonable weather and no fighting. A lot of comforts in camp?’ Nicholas said.
‘Anything you want.