Caprice and Rondo (91 page)

Then she said, ‘Also, there are other arrivals, I am told; among them a man, travelling west, who heard of your presence and has asked to be permitted to see you.’

Gelis stood without speaking. She heard Clémence say, ‘It may not be whom you expect. Let me take Jodi away. He can come back when we leave.’

She let him go. It could be anyone. Since she became a banker, and wealthy, unknown relatives and forgotten acquaintances had become eager to meet her. Then she saw, making his way between the chattering
groups, the piles of luggage, the hurrying servants, a man whose cloak was lined and turned back with ermine and whose face was shadowed by glorious sables. She caught the sober intensity of his gaze as he saw her; saw his fine-gloved hand lifted in tentative greeting; glimpsed, even, that someone followed behind him.

The man advanced. As he drew nearer, Gelis observed that he was less than tall, and that his eyes were not unusually open and grey, or his cheeks furrowed with dimples. Indeed, the face beneath the fur hat was classically handsome, its cheek-bones distinctively high, its nose Roman.

The man coming towards her was Julius. And the slender figure pressing towards her, and taking her tenderly in her arms — the girl with the pure face, the dark hair, the subtle, unmistakable scent was the Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck, his wife.

If there was anything Gelis had learned in the years of her torment with Nicholas, it was how to disguise her feelings. She returned Anna’s embrace cheek to cheek, and stretched to give her free hand to the lawyer. ‘Julius! We were so distressed. I am so thankful to see you.’ They had once thought him dead. Towards Julius, her relief and pleasure were genuine. She saw by the flush on his grave face that he recognised it.

He had enfolded her hand when Anna suddenly drew in her breath and pulled away from them both, her hand to her side.

Gelis said, ‘Anna? Is something wrong?’

Julius, his arm round his wife, his face dark, began to say something, but Anna herself interrupted. She straightened, shaking her head. She was white. ‘It is nothing. You will hear of it later. My dear, we have news to break to you first.’ She glanced up at Julius.

Gelis said, ‘Let me send for some wine. And don’t think you have to break news about Nicholas. We know they say he is dead, but he isn’t.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Anna. It sounded helpless. She looked again at her husband.

‘She will have to hear the truth,’ Julius said. The hall had emptied: the cavalcade outside was forming.

Manoli, his face stolid, appeared in front of her with one of the ducal grooms. ‘Demoiselle. The Duchess is preparing to leave.’

‘What truth?’ Gelis said.

Anna said, ‘You must go if the Duchess is waiting. Nicholas died in a fire, leaving Moscow. His body was found. We left before him, but have been travelling slowly, for my sake. The news reached us at Bremen.’

‘Then it is wrong,’ Gelis said. ‘I know, because he has been divining. He was alive at least up to last night.’

‘I wish that were so,’ Anna said. ‘But go. You are with the Duchess, and all the seats are required for her ladies.’

‘I am sure the Duchess would make an exception,’ Julius said. He
spoke to the groom, who looked surprised, hesitated, and then bowed and went off.

Gelis said, ‘I shall try to help, but I must stay with the Duchess. I can see that Anna needs care. Let her rest, and once we are in Ghent, you can tell me everything.’

Anna said, ‘We must talk before then. If only, if only you had been with us … I can’t say more, not when you have just been bereaved. But the Duchess will free you. And did I see Mistress Clémence? Is Jodi here?’

There
was
something wrong, it was clear: her face was drawn, the blue eyes heavy and shadowed. Before Gelis could speak, the groom returned swiftly. There was a seat on the last wagon, if the Gräfin would allow him to take her there. They parted in haste. Only Julius called, ‘So we shall see you in Ghent?’

And Gelis waved, walking away.

There were advantages in being a van Borselen. Such was the disposition of the cortège that there was no question, that morning, of communication between the vehicles of the van and the tail. And at the very first stop, the power of the governors of Holland produced a speedy, small carriage which could convey the lovely invalid Gräfin direct to her destination, while her solicitous husband might ride at her side. He thanked the Duchess for her kindness, but there was no opportunity for Gelis to speak to him. It pained her to exclude him in such a way, and to deny herself all the questions she wanted to ask. But his loyalty had to be to Anna, and Gelis did not want to put it to the test.

That night, preparing for bed, Clémence slipped on her bedgown and, finding Gelis in a quiet part of the chamber, drew up a seat close beside her and set to combing her own soft, dark hair ready for plaiting. She spread a lock over her palm and gazed at it. ‘That is natural. What did you think of the Gräfin’s?’

‘That it was cleverly treated, considering the time she has been travelling. Or did I deceive myself? Did I think I saw dye because I was looking for it?’

‘No. You saw it,’ said Clémence. ‘I wonder if your husband saw it when they travelled together. She must have had to improvise dyes. And, of course, he is an expert in those.’

It had never struck her. He was, of course. In Egypt, he had dyed his own thick brown hair and bright beard. Gelis said, ‘They still insist that Nicholas is dead.’

‘They believe it,’ Tobie’s wife said. Her eyes followed her fingers, working down the long strands. ‘I sat beside the Gräfin on the journey. She was reluctant to talk, but Master Julius insisted that she tell me how she came by her affliction. I was to convey it, if I thought fit, to you.’ She lifted her eyes.

‘She blamed Nicholas?’ Gelis said. She understood Clémence now.

‘It was a wound from a knife. The Gräfin presented it, to begin with, as an accident, but her husband, riding beside us, contradicted her in a childish way, exclaiming that your husband had tried to seduce her, and she had been injured when trying to defend herself.’

‘Really?’ said Gelis.

‘Indeed. In a public place, with strangers listening. The Gräfin tried to say it was nonsense, but some of those around her were deeply impressed. Others toyed with the theory that she had turned the knife on herself out of shame. Forgive me.’

‘Why? Do you believe it?’ said Gelis.

‘There are intemperate men,’ Clémence said. She completed a plait and pinned it up. ‘Your husband may be one. But his remorse over the wounding of Master Julius would more than deter him from seducing his wife. The story was an invention.’ She paused. ‘As you say, they are quite convinced that your husband is dead. They say that his cavalcade, leaving Moscow, was set upon by a party of brigands close to a hamlet. All were killed, and an accident set the timber houses on fire, so that the bodies were hardly identifiable. They knew him by his dress.’

Gelis said, ‘You are saying that, believing Nicholas dead, Anna will now turn her hand against me. And that my instinct that he is alive may be wrong?’

Clémence de Coulanges finished pinning the second plait and rose gently. She said, ‘Your husband is a man unlike others. Mine is less extraordinary, perhaps. But if I can tell you, as I can, that Tobias is at this moment alive, although not necessarily well, or comfortably quartered, or happy, then I am certain that you can do as much for your Nicholas. If you say so, then he lives.’

She was smiling. She held out her arm, as she had done so often to Jodi, and Gelis got up, and crossed it with her own, bringing her close, temple to temple, so that she rested, eyes closed, against the clean hair and the scrubbed, scentless skin.

T
HE
COLD
, at the same time, had begun to descend upon the besieging army of the Duke of Burgundy in Lorraine. Nothing momentous was happening, unless you counted the irritating frequency of enemy forays: well-organised bands from little garrison towns which fell upon the Duke’s foraging parties, killing them to a man; which shadowed outlying patrols and cut their throats while they slept; which infiltrated, on one fearful occasion, the fringes of the Duke’s siege camp before Nancy, and captured a large number of horses. The Duke’s comments on that had not been pleasant.

Nothing positive was happening, because both sides had run out of
soldiers and money. The Duke, possessed of all the Moselle valley from Dieulouard to Thionville, with a lifeline to Metz and his arsenal and treasury stationed at Luxembourg, still had too few men to take Nancy. Duke René, aged twenty-six, and adhering obstinately to his land to the south, had likewise too few men to dislodge him. René (or L’Enfant, as the Duke chose to call him) had provisioned Nancy for two months and gone off to beg help from Alsace and the Swiss. Duke Charles, ignoring all advice to withdraw and re-form over the winter, was awaiting what troops his Duchess and others might send.

Captain Astorre and his hundred lances, with the unexpected bonus of Dr Tobias and the polite young lad Berecrofts, took his share of the drills and the foraging, organised games, conferred with other captains and greatly enjoyed, of an evening, relating to Tobie and Robin all the tales that Thomas and John had stopped listening to. The new, good quarters made out of boarding, replacing the huts lost at Grandson, resounded to Astorre’s opinions of the Duke, and his mercenary band of four hundred Italian lances, led by the famous Niccolò de Montfort, Count of Campobasso (real name Gambatesta), already flung out of Naples for supporting the old man, King René, and now, in the view of Captain Astorre, responsible for losing the Duke’s Nancy in the first place, by advancing so slowly that it had to surrender to young René the grandson. The Count of Campobasso, Astorre said, was surreptitiously back in Angevin pay, mark his words. He was then reminded of the days when he himself had fought in Naples, on the opposite side, and the trouble he had had with that damned mercenary Piccinino.

The boy, Robin, would always ask then for more information, while John would be sitting morosely in a corner, filing down something that had fallen short of perfection, and Thomas snored, and the doctor got up, like as not, and went to tramp round the camp. Astorre hoped he wouldn’t find himself run through by a pack of deserters. Cold and boredom led to that. The English, especially, had never encountered this kind of warfare and didn’t like it at all. And there were some units who didn’t get their provisions in, the way he did, and keep the men in good heart. Once they wearied, then you got the diseases. He ought to be glad Dr Tobie was here, even if it was years since he had been on campaign. But he had had his moments, by God, in the past. Captain Astorre thought he must remember, one night, to talk about Cyprus.

John le Grant, watching Tobie, could have told that he didn’t wish to talk about Cyprus, or Albania, or Volterra. The boy Robin had come mostly because he was nineteen, and courageous, and wanted to be able to say, one day, that he had fought with an army. Tobie had come for other reasons, and finding himself back in the field, was remembering why he had left it.

John had accompanied Tobie when he received his first audience with the Duke, in the great, gilded wooden pavilion lined with tapestry which had been erected in the grounds of the old Commanderie of the Knights of St John, a mile or two from the ramparts of Nancy. It was the same pavilion and the same site occupied by the Duke in October, when he had entered Nancy in triumph but left it so poorly defended that René had taken it back again. The Duke, short and burly, pious and wilful, had not impressed a man who had been military surgeon to Urbino. Tobie had got on better with Matteo, the Duke’s Portuguese doctor. Tobie had a new wife, and in John’s opinion, was an ass to be here. And of course, if Nicholas were alive, he wouldn’t be.

They had talked of Nicholas one night, he and Tobie. It was a subject he normally avoided, but recent conversations with Gelis had made him reconsider a number of things. At the end, Tobie had said, ‘You used to call him a wrecker. You’ve mellowed.’

‘That’s because I’m alive and he’s dead,’ John remarked. ‘Resurrect him, and I’ll toughen again.’

A week later, Tobie rode across the crusted mud to his smithy to find him. ‘Are you still interested in news of Nicholas?’ An icicle dripped down his neck, and he looked up. ‘Christ, I thought this place would be warm.’

‘So did someone else. The fuel supply’s gone, and I’ve just come from rewrapping the guns for the third time. So what about Nicholas?’

‘A letter from Clémence,’ said Tobie, shaking it in his gloved hand. ‘They think he’s alive. And Julius and Anna have come back to Flanders.’

‘What!’ said John. It came out sharply, and he saw Tobie’s reaction.

‘Ah,’ said Tobie. ‘Then we have something to talk about this evening. And I think we should include Robin.’

He didn’t need to be told, then, what it was about. He had warned Gelis himself about trusting money to Anna and Julius. He had thought there was something fishy about the girl Bonne. He had not guessed what Tobie was to tell him that night about Anna, before the meagre fire in their cabin, with Robin pouring their ale. Or what he was to find out, infuriatingly, about that scented snake David de Salmeton.

It was not all new to Robin. Robin, he had already discovered, had observed a lot about Nicholas in Poland: enough to temper the hero-worship, but not to dispel it. You could see in him now, as he moved about, listening, the mixture of involuntary thankfulness and horror that he supposed he felt in himself. It impelled John to speak, out of contrariness, at the end of the recital. ‘We still canna be sure about Nicholas. There was a rumour that he was dead. Gelis is now convinced that he isn’t. There’s no proof either way. Except that some envoy’s priest begging money from Venice has spread a tale that he’s met him coming from Moscow.’

‘Don’t you find that suggestive?’ Tobie said. ‘The priest knew him from Moscow, and Nicholas let himself be seen. If Nicholas thought Gelis was in danger, he would want it to be known as fast as possible that he was on his way. Shamming dead might have been his only way of escaping from Moscow.’