To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [57]
Then the grey gaze swept round and opened, and the lips parted, and the dimples, black as devils, flew into the round cheeks. ‘Maman!’ cried Jordan de Fleury, his voice rising in delight. ‘Maman! R’garde!’
‘I see you,’ said Gelis, and set foot on the step, and received the rush of his body in her arms, hardly marking the pain.
Nicholas de Fleury turned away, and then stopped, because Mistress Clémence’s iron hand was clamped round his wrist. He had apologised to her. He had been, in fact, royally generous. She said, ‘If you went forward now, it would be better.’
His eyes reflected the light, bright as mirrors. He said, ‘I have to lead this party to Calais, Mistress Clémence.’
Mistress Clémence dropped her hand. ‘You need not stay with him long. You are …’ She hesitated, then went on: ‘You are a new possession to the child. He will continuously ask. It can cause jealousy.’
M. de Fleury went forward without further comment. She followed. The child saw her first, and looked pleased if not overwhelmed: with Pasque at his side it was axiomatic that the other half of his household would follow. Then he saw his father and cried out again. In front of his mother, the cry was a trifle theatrical: Clémence sighed. Then M. de Fleury spoke to his son, and to his wife, and after a reasonable time, took his leave and turned back. He did not go near Clémence again.
It had been necessary. Anyone would agree who knew something of children. These three were going to Scotland together. They had to establish some sort of surface relationship, or the situation would be worse than before. And he himself had, after all, taken some trouble to lay the foundations.
‘… And so he hates his wife,’ said Pasque indulgently that night, sharing a bed at St Omer with her superior, their shifts decorously side by side on a coffer. ‘To subject her to that! She might have been killed! Well might he have the man whipped for forgetting the mattresses. And she! What wife will she make to him now, compelled out of her country, frightened out of her wits! I tell you, you and I will have our work cut out to bring up that child.’
Mistress Clémence lay as if asleep. In many ways, old Pasque was right. Stubborn, bitter and devious, the family they were now to accompany to Scotland offered small prospect of happiness or normality to themselves or to those who lived with them.
Nevertheless …
Nevertheless, why, subjecting his wife to this trial, had the sieur de Fleury also put at risk the child’s nurse, upon whom depended the boy’s whole security?
Mistress Clémence de Coulanges would not say to Pasque what she thought the real test had been. She would not say to Pasque that she had seen a man whipped almost to flaying because he might have killed Mistress Clémence, as much as his wife. She would not say that the lady Gelis had, in the end, been allowed to hold her son in her arms because, in the face of hurt and possible death, she had put her son first. She had pushed Clémence aside from that trap so that Clémence would live, no matter what happened. And because of that, she was here with her child.
Hatred? Perhaps. She had seldom seen husband and wife behave as relentlessly as these two had, in that unchivalrous cavern of artifice. The mother had not given way, and the so-called mishap had followed at once.
Yet in falling – to her death, she would think – the girl had cried only one name, and that in anguish, not anger. And the man so entreated had moved faster than thought: had been first to sink to her side; first to touch her brow and her hair; first to gather her up, until others came to carry her out. Then had come the annihilating explosion of anger.
The commerce and torments of marriage were not a servant’s concern. Clémence lay as if sleeping, and thought of the child, and of where