To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [58]
On the twenty-eighth day of July, 1471, on a ship leased for the purpose and handled by his own sailing-master Mick Crackbene, the padrone of the Banco di Niccolò sailed out of Calais on his long-deferred voyage to Scotland. With him he carried his wife and his son, Jordan de Fleury. The two years of absence he had promised his dying chaplain, Father Godscalc, were done.
Just two days before, on a warm Roman evening, the Holy Father (Pietro Barbo, Paul II), dined in his garden bareheaded and sadly expired of a stroke, directly after enjoying a dish of three melons. He was aged fifty-four. The news reached the Hôtel Jerusalem, Bruges three weeks later.
Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy, received it first from the hands of a courier, whom he sent off with gold. Afterwards, he sat alone at his table, his gaze on his fine painted windows. All their plans gone for nothing. All the credit he had acquired from this Pope for himself, and for his Genoese kin, and his Burgundian master. And a loss greater than that, the post his son Jan was to have found in the Curia.
All gone; and a new Pope to be elected, who might be of any nationality, any persuasion. Weeks would go by, perhaps months, while Jan would exacerbate with his ill temper the appalling, abnormal life in this house.
Mary of Scotland, Countess of Arran had been here with her husband, her husband’s father and their household for sixteen months. Last year, their first child had arrived. Within a week, the second was due. Once the child was born and the Princess could travel, they could leave Flanders. Now that Edward of York was on the throne, they could ask for shelter in England. They could only go back to Scotland if Tom Boyd, the Earl her husband were to be pardoned.
Adorne had tried, through the Duke, to persuade King James to take back his sister and her family. The King was fond of his sister, and might be petulant over her misplaced loyalty, but would do her no harm. But the effort had failed: the courier (Alex Bonkle) had come back from Scotland wincing from a violent refusal. And so the royal pair were still here, and would very likely remain here for weeks.
Everything now was in disarray. As legate of the young King, Adorne had concocted with Jan this marvellous manuscript of their travels which was to be gifted to James when it was finished. With the Boyds off his hands, Adorne could have carried it to Scotland this month, reinforcing his special position. But the coming of the second Boyd child had made that impossible. And now there was Margriet.
Anselm Adorne rose. Knight of the lists, financier, diplomat, he was only just past middle years, and kept the considerable beauty of face and form that he had always had. He had married Margriet when she was fourteen and he nineteen; and in the twenty-eight years that followed had been loving and faithful in all that mattered. If, here and there in the world, he had lapsed, the interludes had been brief, and tempered with passions other than physical: with friendship and laughter; with a love of music, of poetry, whose absence he never complained of at home, for he had given Margriet too little cause to learn either, with her great house and her children. And now …
And now, when she should have been safe and coming to harbour, he had given her another child. He had not intended it: they had grown long accustomed to caution. But she was his dear wife, and on his return after great dangers and absence, he had met in her a dizzying welcome such as he did not remember since the early days of their marriage. That she meant to make of it more than that, he now knew. He had not thought; he had not realised what resolve she had made until April advanced into May and she came to him illumined with triumph. There was to be a last child.
He would cherish it. He had made her happy, as he was happy with the news. But she had never had such trouble when pregnant as she had faced in those first early weeks, and was still facing, although the child was four months on its way. Without Katelijne his