To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [48]
She saw the flash of armour from outside the entrance, and discerned double doors standing open, and men-at-arms in the tunnel behind them. She could not see who else waited among them. Then her sergeant brought her troop to a halt and, jumping down, helped her dismount. She found with anger that she was shaking, and was curt with him, to show she was not afraid. She saw she was to go onwards alone. She shook back her hood and walked forward.
Within the vault, no one moved. Her eyes strained, she thought she could distinguish civilian headgear mixed with the helms: the hat of the governor, perhaps; the veil of some lady proposed as her servant or chaperone. She was a van Borselen, related to princes. She would be treated with ceremony. She was sure, then, that Nicholas was not here, or if he were, that he waited for her indoors. Inside Hesdin, palace of mischief.
She was still thinking so when she realised that among the anonymous watchers was a man of greater height than the rest, richly and quietly dressed. His identity was lost in the gloom, but she knew him as if he had called. It was Nicholas.
He let her traverse almost the whole way to the gatehouse before he stirred, and strolled out with his shadow to meet her, alone in the roseate light. She stopped and waited.
Once, from a window in Florence, she had looked down on someone she thought was fashioned like this: brown-haired and solid and calm. She had forgotten, till now, how different Nicholas was. It was like forgetting birth, or the sea. The seething, chopped tides of the sea, with combers of violet and crimson emerging. The walls of the palace were red, and behind him the spires of the gatehouse were burning like torches. He lifted his head, deigning to give her at last his attention, and met her gaze with his own.
Time stopped. For almost five months she had meditated on what she would say to him, and how she would say it. She had planned it in anguish and bitterness. She had not forced herself further: to visualise how he would look, or what she would feel when she saw him. Perhaps he had not either, or perhaps the long silence from which, bemused, she began to emerge was deliberate. She realised that her escort was waiting behind her, and that the group by the gatehouse was murmuring.
Now the sky flamed; the air they breathed was dyed red; the palace windows glittered and burned. She choked, her throat clearing at last, and saw Nicholas smiling at last: the brilliant, deep-dimpled smile that filled her with horror. Before she could speak, he unloosed a hand and, smiling still, indicated the way through the yards to the palace.
‘Walk over with me,’ he said.
Clémence de Coulanges heard the words from the entrance, and caught the suffocating change on the young woman’s face. It arose perhaps from debility. Once of exceptional looks, the girl had grown hollow, as many wives did in a crisis of marriage. The husbands were most often unmoved, unless to guilty bad temper.
To Mistress Clémence, M. de Fleury had shown nothing that morning of either impatience or temper. They had been at Hesdin for an hour. All the time his wife’s cortège approached, dim against the dawn light, and even when the Lady dismounted, M. de Fleury had stood motionless; had indeed let her walk for some distance before he moved forward to greet her. Then, cruelly perhaps, he had said nothing. Mistress Clémence saw that the Lady herself was struck dumb, either from fear or from nervousness. The silence, as it stretched, became ominous, like the deadening of sound when a cannonade stops. Then M. de Fleury had uttered four simple words.
Mistress Clémence didn’t know what inner meaning they bore, but