To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [76]
Much later on, when he had drunk enough and laughed enough, Roger sat down beside the voice’s owner and said, ‘Nicol? You’ll get the King to see he can’t go ahead with this Passion thing? It takes ten months to set up something that big, and it can’t be done on the cheap.’
‘I brought a lot of stuff with me,’ Nicholas shouted. He was rousing his new drum into a frenzy, the way he used to do with the old, and everyone else was yelling at him to stop.
He stopped. Roger moderated his answering shout in a hurry. ‘Even so. It would be crazy.’
‘Don’t you want to do all the music?’ Nicholas said. ‘The Dufay of the North? I don’t know about crazy. Getting the King to tamper with Coldingham Priory is crazy.’
‘We need the revenues for the Chapel Royal,’ Roger said, alerted suddenly. ‘Bugger your Passion. I want James’s money for a proper choir and a set of proper musicians.’
‘Contradiction in terms,’ Nicholas said. ‘Say I get both, what’s it worth? Say I get your Chapel Royal and my impossible Passion?’
Roger stared at him. ‘My bloody tropes,’ he said. ‘I’d give you my bloody tropes for the chance of both. Or another drum. But you won’t. It’d be ruinous.’
‘It’s a wager,’ Nicholas said.
Later, when the Burgundian had gone off at dawn with the others, entwined and indistinctly chanting downhill, Roger realised, thinking it over, that Nicholas hadn’t said what he’d pay if he lost.
After two months of it, Gelis had become used to Nicholas returning home late, sometimes drunk, sometimes sober, sometimes in between. It was not to say he was wholly absent. He used the Canongate mansion a great deal, as a base for his work and his meetings. She became accustomed to finding one or other of the resident officers installed at her table: the correct figure of Govaerts the manager, or John le Grant arguing percussively about his multifarious projects, or Father Moriz making known his requirements or the duties of Nicholas, which were usually the same thing. Occasionally a battered man in a black apron appeared and talked German in a hoarse voice with Father Moriz. He was a goldsmith from the Tyrol called Wilhelm.
The men who lived elsewhere, like Crackbene, seldom came to her part of the Casa to eat. There were many of them, she knew; and other projects which were taking shape on the business side of the edifice, where the bureau and counting-house were, and the clerks’ sleeping rooms, and the office of the padrone her husband. It had a separate entrance.
She did not feel unwelcome. The house was well built and meticulously furnished to a high level of comfort; Govaerts, a steward by training, had established an excellent routine and collected a good, willing staff. Her own chambers, and those of the child and his nurses, were fresh and pleasant, and she learned early to value the amiable goodwill of the Berecrofts family, on whose tenement holding their house had been built. Archie in particular had struck up a friendship with Jordan since the first day of the whistle, and often crossed the wall from his house to her own to bring something or suggest something that might divert the child. In return, she let his own son Robin spend as much time as he wished in the nursery. The boy was fourteen and lonely, she judged. Jordan liked him and, more to the point, so did Mistress Clémence.
She saw Nicholas from time to time. His chamber, adjoining her own, contained a bed and a desk and a number of presses for books and nothing else of great interest, although all of it was of good quality. Entering the house the day after their arrival in Leith, he had come to knock on her door and ask after her comfort. He had already called to see Jordan; she had heard their voices together. Now, coming in, he must have read her expression.