Caprice and Rondo (76 page)

They would ail miss Clémence, although the house she and Tobie would live in was not far away. Jodi would visit them. Father Moriz would continue his education. Chivalric training, interrupted by Raffo’s death, would resume. For some reason, Jodi had taken against Manoli, Raffo’s partner, with whom he had got on perfectly well before Scotland. Kathi’s husband had offered to help, to Jodi’s joy. But Robin, sooner or later, would be taking his family back to Scotland. The only question was, when?

Whenever news from Scotland came, touching on David de Salmeton, Gelis depended on Tobie to glean it. By the middle of August, they knew that the adviser to the Apostolic Collector had not returned to Rome, but had rented a warehouse at Leith and bought himself a house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, from which he was soliciting orders. His terms were low, and had already attracted royal attention. One of his specific aims, it would appear, was to undercut the business of Archie of Berecrofts, and that of Anselm Sersanders in Edinburgh and Perth.

Such at least was the opinion of the Scottish merchants in Bruges. From the letters her brother sent Kathi, this appeared to be true. It was also apparent that so far, de Salmeton had caused no other disturbances, and had made no attempt to harass Bel of Cuthilgurdy. In any case, Sersanders wrote, Bel was being well looked after by Andro, his partner.

This appeared a doubtful blessing. Gelis waited, with hard-tried patience, for Kathi to bring her next letter. When two weeks passed and she did not, Gelis collected Jodi and walked round to see what had happened. Robin answered the door and asked her in, displaying a mixture of embarrassment and high spirits, which were soon explained. She went to see Kathi, but didn’t stay long. On the way home Jodi, who had learned a lot in a year, looked up at his mother severely. ‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Because I’ve just had some news. News about Aunty Kathi.’

‘She’s going to have another baby next year. I know. Why are you smiling?’ said Jodi. Then, before she could answer, he said, ‘Wee Aunty Bel doesn’t have babies. She can load a hackbut and shoot it.’

‘So can I,’ said Gelis unwisely.

Jodi said, ‘But you could have babies if you wanted to.’

It was a busy street. People smiled. Gelis said, ‘Well, I don’t want to. I have you. I don’t need any more.’

‘You can’t have any more. Papa has gone away and you can’t make them without him. I hope he doesn’t come back,’ Jodi said. He wasn’t crying, but his face was quite red. ‘I don’t want to see him.’

‘Well, I’m sure he wants to see you,’ Gelis said. ‘Don’t you think he misses your poems? He hasn’t even seen your new horse. Let’s go to the stables and see him. You might ride with Ser Tommaso’s children tomorrow.’

That evening, after Jodi was sleeping, Gelis asked Tobie to sit with her in her chamber. The cushioned seats, the light hangings, the tables, all of which had been her choice, looked mellow in the long summer twilight. Outside the open windows, swallows shrilled, and by leaning out, one could look down on Spangnaerts Street, quiet now, the dust of its cobbles printed with the marks of the day’s bootprints and hoof-marks and wheels, either climbing upwards on the way to the Square, or bumping down to the working canal. The canal itself was out of sight: the bridge, the stacked kegs and moored barges concealed by the turns of the narrow street, dark as a canyon between its double row of tall houses. At night, you might hear the ducks quacking. At the top of the street, modest in shadow, the White Bear of Brugge presided from its high niche, listening perhaps to the faint laughter and music which floated from the Society’s windows around it.

Gelis gave Tobie wine, and he pulled off his cap, so that the weak pink light glowed on his scalp and his short, kittenish mouth and curled nostrils. He did not look like the army surgeon of the Duke of Urbino, accustomed to wielding his saw and mallet and knife in the great bloody tents that followed the cannon. He said, prosaically, ‘So what is wrong? Jodi? If it is about Jodi, you would be better with Clémence.’

But he listened, and at the end said, ‘No. You were right. This is not about Jodi, it is about Nicholas.’

‘It is about them both,’ Gelis said. ‘As he grows, Jodi will deserve some explanation. I don’t wish him to turn against Nicholas. But Nicholas doesn’t write, except about business.’ It was true.
Part of the core of me
. It was untrue.

‘Because he has decided on a clean break from all except business. I happen to think he is right. Are you asking whether you should take Jodi and go to him?’

‘Without being invited?’ Gelis said.

Tobie looked at her. ‘Are you thinking of yourself, or of him? If you have convinced yourself that he wants you or needs you, then go. I suppose you can afford an armed troop to protect you. But don’t take Jodi
with you. After all that has happened, that child needs to step into a home, not a trial marriage.’

She said, ‘I couldn’t leave Jodi.’

‘Anna wanted you to go,’ Tobie said. ‘Anna was desperate for you to go, after we had been to Montello.’

‘It was Anna who sent us to Montello,’ Gelis said.

‘She wanted to help Nicholas, and us. We might have proved his legitimacy. She didn’t know the outcome would oppress him.’

‘She gave him Jodi’s poem,’ Gelis said. ‘She’s good for him, but she isn’t as perceptive as Kathi. If he can’t come back, and if it’s not certain whether I could, or would, or should join him, it would be kinder to let him forget. She should allow him time to make his own choice, and send to tell me himself. She is simply causing hurt, otherwise.’

There was a silence. Her heart beat. Tobie said, ‘I want to say something. Since Julius left, you must have exchanged messages with his company. Friczo Straube in Thorn. The agents in Augsburg and Cologne. When you were with him, they did well. What is the state of his business now?’

She was silent.

Tobie said, ‘You don’t want to say it, because Julius proved himself a good manager both here and in Venice. But we know Anna brought him no money. Perhaps she burdened him with considerable debts. And the company obviously hasn’t recovered, although he has been too proud or too vain to tell us. Anna must have had great hopes of the African gold when Kathi told her about it. And Julius thought it important enough to abandon his office to juniors and join her in Caffa. It was a rash thing to do, unless he was fairly sure that Nicholas would use the gold to help him.’

Gelis drew a deep breath. She kept her voice steady, because it was so important and she was so glad it was in the open.

‘Everyone thought it was coming to Caffa last autumn,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t. Nicholas knew, as late as last November, that it was still buried in Cyprus. By January it had gone, but it couldn’t have reached the Crimea through the winter. If Ochoa dug it up, everyone would have to wait until the spring.’

‘Ochoa didn’t dig it up,’ Tobie said. ‘A Hanse ship is just in, with some Genoese merchants. They all rushed to their quarter as if reporting the plague, but I heard some waterfront gossip. Everyone knows Ochoa de Marchena. They said the Genoese captured him during the winter, and he was killed trying to escape. There was no mention of gold. And that was in February.’

‘Poor, silly Ochoa,’ Gelis said. ‘So David de Salmeton has it, unless Ochoa left it to others to bring for him.’

‘But then, Nicholas would have told you,’ Tobie said. ‘There’s something
else I want to say. Do you remember the nun you wrote me about? The one we heard of from Thibault de Fleury? His late-born little daughter was fond of her.’

She remembered. The nun was called Ysabeau, and was sister to Josine, the vicomte’s first wife. She had sent to the address Brother Huon had given her, and then to two other convents. The last one had been a Cistercian foundation in Scotland. She said, ‘We decided not to investigate further.’

‘Then you don’t want to hear what I found?’ Tobie said. ‘I was going to keep quiet. But now I’m not sure if I should.’

‘You mean I might not have to annul my marriage, because it was never legal in the first place?’ said Gelis with irony. She clasped her hands hard together.

‘No,’ said Tobie. ‘No. It has nothing to do with Nicholas’s birth. I hoped this Ysabeau might know something about that, but she only remembered the scandal. Eccles is a very small priory, and the Sister suffers from deafness, but she did tell me something. She remembered Thibault’s daughter Adelina. Blue eyes and red hair: wilful, pretty, intelligent. Walked out on her family with just enough to pay her way into a convent, but was transferred from one to another because of the trouble she gave. Finally parted company with religious life at nineteen, when she disappeared for a month and turned up with a baby, a daughter.’

‘A daughter?’ Gelis said.

It had become dark while they were speaking. The swallows flashed past the window, silhouetted in the moonlight; their shadows flickered inside the room, slashing across the white bed, the unlit brazier, the grim, ghostly features of Tobie. She rose to lift a candle and light it. A daughter. A daughter. Her fingers shook.

‘Fourteen years ago,’ Tobie said. ‘So it wasn’t Bonne. And Anna is black-haired, and German. She introduced herself to Julius in Cologne, and Julius adored her on sight. You were there. Then she committed the Graf’s business to Julius, and that brought her in touch with the Bank. Nicholas liked her as well. We all did. Kathi thinks she is the sister that Nicholas needs. And that is what matters, even if she is not the person she says she is: even if Moriz can find no trace even to prove she is German. Shall we go on talking?’

She turned and sat down. ‘There is more?’ According to Kathi, Nicholas had been devastated, afterwards, by what he had caused to happen to Julius. She had been sure, she was still sure, that whomsoever he took to his bed, it would not be Anna.

Tobie got up, walked to the window, and sneezed. He took out his kerchief and sneezed several times more, blew his nose and then, without asking permission, took the spill and lit all the remaining candles. Then he shuttered the windows, refilled their glasses, and sat and looked at her.

He said, ‘It’s something about Adelina, Thibault’s daughter. Clémence knows this, but no one else; not even Nicholas. I learned it years ago in Geneva, from Tasse, the little woman who lived near Montello.’

He stopped. Gelis said, ‘Drink. Don’t tell me, if you don’t want to.’

‘No. I must.’ But he drank. Then he resumed. ‘Little Tasse. She was a serving-maid in the house of Jaak de Fleury, the brother of Thibault. She worked there all her life. She remembered Nicholas; you could see that she loved him. She was fond of Julius. She knew Adelina. Even after Adelina had gone, she heard the rumours and she spoke to people who had met her as she moved from one place to another.’ He paused. ‘Tasse didn’t speak of a baby. What she heard was quite different, and she believed it. She said that because of her childhood, Adelina could never have children.’

‘Her
childhood
?’ Gelis said.

‘I think,’ Tobie said, ‘that that is all you need to know. But if that rumour is true, then the theory that Adelina had an illegitimate baby is wrong. Whereas Anna did have a child: the Graf’s daughter Bonne.’

It was hot now. Her eyes stung in the candlelight. Tobie had emptied his glass and was refilling it. Once, she had heard, his drinking had nearly wrecked him, but his discovery of Nicholas had changed that. He had discharged himself from that patient, but was still, out of duty, prescribing for the last of his ailments. It was not likely to drive him to drink: Clémence would see to that. He was making free with it now, because he wanted Gelis to tell him something.

Gelis said, ‘I don’t know what it all means. I don’t want to know, unless it is going to harm Nicholas. Is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tobie said. ‘I don’t even know whether to try to tell him. That’s why I wondered whether you seriously intended to join him.’

‘No,’ she said. She had already begun to reach that conclusion. This time, it was firm.

‘Then will you write? Or shall I?’

‘It might fall into the wrong hands,’ Gelis said. ‘I suppose I could put it in code.’ Her thoughts turned. She said, ‘Would Nicholas have known the nun you met? Ysabeau, Josine’s sister?’

‘Josine died before he was born,’ Tobie said. ‘The nun told me that. He never knew his grandmother, or had anything to do with her sister, although Adelina did. He never knew, apparently, that his mother Sophie was a twin. She had a sister.’

‘But that is — Nicholas has an aunt?’ Gelis exclaimed. ‘Where? Can we find her?’ And reading his face, she answered herself, ‘No.’

‘No,’ Tobie said. ‘The twin was born dead. No witness for the antecedents of Nicholas. If you want to write to Nicholas, I’ve told you all I know’

Again, the invitation. Again, she refused it. She had begun by worrying
over Jodi: about his fatherless future; about the dangers from de Salmeton and Wodman. Now she had another perspective.

She could not explain, but she could affirm, at least. ‘I love him, you see,’ she said to Tobie. ‘You ought to know that.’

‘Do you think I don’t?’ the doctor said.

The words remained, long after he had gone; after she had lost the chance of asking him what they meant.

And soon, it hardly mattered.

I
T
WAS
R
OBIN
OF
B
ERECROFTS
who came to the Bank the next day and, avoiding the bureau, had himself shown to her quarters. She saw his face, and sent Jodi away. ‘Kathi?’ she said.

His face relaxed, and then tightened. ‘No! Bless you, but no. Gelis —you know of yesterday’s ship, that brought some Genoese merchants from Poland? Tobie told you?’

‘They brought news,’ she said. She pushed aside the notes on her desk. They were already encoded.

‘Bad news,’ he said. ‘Bad for Genoa; worse for us; worst for you.’

‘Then it’s Nicholas,’ Gelis said. Quite slowly, everything came to a halt.

‘It isn’t certain,’ he said. ‘Gelis, it may be all right. But Caffa has fallen. The Turkish army landed at the beginning of June and overran Caffa and Soldaia and Gothia: took the whole Crimean Peninsula, and captured or killed every foreigner whom they could reach. No one knows who escaped, but some did. Nicholas would have Julius with him. Anna is clever. If Ludovico da Bologna is also still there, they would have a better chance of survival than most. We don’t know yet, that’s all.’ He was kneeling beside her, his warm hands around hers.