The Unicorn Hunt (28 page)

She heaved to her feet and her eyes, resting with compassion on the bed, lifted up with the same compassion to Simon himself. She said, ‘Nicholas de Fleury is going to depart, and ye maun let him depart. His ship will sail, and ye maun let it sail. But before he goes he will tell us, I hope, that he is never going to come back to Scotland.’ She turned. ‘You will stay away. Do you hear?’

‘I hear,’ the other man said. ‘But it is not a promise that I can keep. I am sorry.’

He rose with an effort. For a moment, approaching the bed, he leaned towards it. When Simon made a quick, hostile gesture, he stopped. ‘Did you think I was going to kiss her? I thought her son Diniz should be told how she looked, that was all.’ He stood motionless where he had stopped, his eyes open.

‘Nicholas.’ It was the woman, reminding him.

‘I am going,’ said de Fleury, and shivered.

Simon was no less tired, no less angry, and with a brother’s responsibility for what had happened. He said, ‘I say when he goes. And he doesn’t go quite so easily.’

The woman looked at him. She said, ‘It’s his house.’ As she spoke, as on cue, the door opened. Simon looked towards it in haste.

Hacked out of Scandinavian whalebone, the renegade sea captain Crackbene stood there. He said, ‘Padrone, it is time.’

De Fleury moved then, pulling himself erect like a bow at the stretch and looking at the woman, and then at Simon himself. He said, ‘I am sorry. I have to go to Bruges, where so many, many riotous delights may be had. Sadly, I also mean to come back. Unfinished business: profits in prospect. I do own a Bank.’

He had begun to walk towards Crackbene, who was watching him. De Fleury glanced at him and then back. He said, ‘It may not be as bad as you think. It may be worse. At least, Mistress Bel, you have tried. Simon … I am sorry. I cannot wait for the funeral.’

‘I would throw you out if you came,’ Simon said.

De Fleury turned at the door. ‘Like you threw me out of the salt-pan,’ he said. Simon moved; but the woman had thrust out her arm as a barrier. Her eyes were bright as two silver sequins.

The door opened and shut. The lamp flared. Lucia de St Pol lay on her bier, and the woman Bel stood, her arm still outflung like a curse or a blessing, or perhaps just a silent appeal.

The first stage was over.

The
Ghost
sailed before dawn, carrying Nicholas de Fleury to Bruges. As a matter of record, a horse bore him from Berecrofts to Blackness, but he did not see the sails raised, being felled once aboard as by death.

The voyage was rough but unmarked by disaster. They were stayed for a week in the harbour at Berwick, awaiting the abatement of winds, and forbidden to step on dry land except to snatch water and victuals. Having himself issued this edict, Crackbene slipped ashore without notice, and reappeared a day later, morosely rolling a barrel of salmon.

Julius was outraged. ‘Where has he been?’

‘In the family colony,’ Nicholas had said. ‘There are Crackbenes all over Berwick. They call themselves Crabbes.’

It was true, so far as it went. There was no call to mention the priory at Coldstream, or Ada.

He was himself by that time, and it was some days since
Crackbene had brought him the letter addressed by Adorne. Unlike the others put early on board, inscribed to Adorne’s fellow merchants and wife, to the Chancellor of Burgundy and the Duke, this had no chequered seal, and was hastily sewn. It contained three sentences only, written under evident stress at Kinneil:

For the sake of the town we both serve, I have attributed my wound to a mishap. I expect you to call on me in Bruges. I do not expect you to come back to Scotland
.

‘What does it matter to him?’ Julius said. He had learned a little too much from Katelijne.

‘I’ve no idea,’ Nicholas said. ‘He’ll be home himself by the spring. I don’t propose to let it upset our planning.’

It satisfied Julius, who did not always remember that planning occasionally failed. Circumstances arose. Nicholas himself had not spent the autumn, for example, entirely as he had intended. On the other hand, the one linchpin upon which all else depended was fixed. He would be arriving in February in Bruges.

He would be arriving in February in Bruges, to find out whether his marriage was fruitful.

Chapter 13

‘F
OR GOD’S SAKE, WRITE
,’
his manager had cried in dread and anger from Bruges to Nicholas de Fleury in Scotland. He couldn’t say more, for fear that others might read it.

Alone of the company he, Gregorio of Asti, feared what Nicholas might be perpetrating in Scotland. For he, alone of the company, knew what Gelis had done. He had been there within earshot, when Gelis van Borselen, on her marriage bed, had informed her husband that she was pregnant by Simon.

If Nicholas was returning to Bruges, he was not coming thereto by chance. He was coming because his wife’s child, announced for the spring, was due now.

He had been absent from Flanders for six months. In all that time, his letters to Bruges had dealt with nothing but business. In all that time, Gregorio had sent nothing private to Edinburgh except for one letter, dispatched by the
Ghost
, in which he had told Nicholas why Margot had left, who was to him what a wife might have been. And, of course, he had reported what all Bruges had learned by October: that Gelis van Borselen was expecting a child, and had retired to a place of retreat for her health.

So the months without Margot had passed, and Gregorio waited in the Hof Charetty-Niccolò, his home and his office in Bruges. The
Ghost
was coming, he knew; and Nicholas with her. The passage, he guessed, would be slow. The husband of Gelis must not seem to hurry too much, when the legitimate birth was so distant.

Because it was slow, the tidings of Lucia de St Pol’s death came before it. The courier came from Kilmirren and brought letters for Diniz her son, and for her Vasquez brother by marriage, and for the van Borselen family because, twenty-five years before, Lucia had been maid of honour to Wolfaert’s Scots first wife in Veere. The account said that Lucia had drowned in a river, by accident.

The letter had been written, Gregorio judged, by a clerk of Simon’s and signed by him. Which meant that Simon at least was alive. It did not mention Nicholas de Fleury.

The news brought sadness, and a passing regret. To Diniz it meant more – after the loss of his father, Lucia was the only link with his happier childhood. But she had been a weak-natured, excitable woman, terrified of her father and hardly redeemed by her Portuguese marriage. After that, so far as Gregorio knew, she had done nothing that was not purely selfish. And Diniz, of course, had another protector and deity now.

After that, Gregorio counted the months and the days, and was unsurprised when news arrived that the roundship the
Ghost
had been sighted, and that Nicholas de Fleury would shortly be with them. It was the third week in February, and seven months and more had passed since his wedding.

There followed the hubbub that occurs in even the best-run establishment of bankers, dyers and merchants when the owner is about to descend on it. Gregorio handled it all, helped by Diniz Vasquez in mourning, whose pregnant wife Tilde was the stepdaughter of Nicholas de Fleury. He even enjoyed the assistance of Tilde’s unmarried young sister Catherine, currently attended by three different gallants.

One of them, who was related to Gelis, stopped calling. Nicholas, who had not been seen with his wife since their marriage, was not popular with her van Borselen kinsmen, who suspected that he had engineered her disappearance from society. No one dreamed that not even Nicholas knew where his wife of one half-night might be.

Public curiosity about the lady de Fleury’s whereabouts had attained a lower and more forgiving level. It had been known for other brides to hide their qualms during pregnancy. They generally reappeared a year after the wedding accompanied by a babe with a full set of teeth. The babe, however, was expected to look like the husband.

Now that the prospective father was due to return, public curiosity (by the same token) revived. Merchants who invested in the House of Niccolò had good cause, of course, to call on Meester Gregorio, and relish a cup of his Portuguese wine, and establish that they would appreciate, presently, an interview with Meester Nicholas himself.

Rivals were worse. Tommaso Portinari, affluent, dashing, the Duke of Burgundy’s chamberlain and manager of the Medici office in Bruges, announced his intention of riding to Sluys, the port of Bruges, and welcoming his old friend Claes in person. Diniz
endorsed the idea, out of sheer inexperience and affection. ‘Why don’t we all go!’

Tommaso Portinari had been drunk throughout his last meeting with Nicholas de Fleury and might not therefore remember it. Unfortunately, Nicholas would.

Diniz Vasquez was a young, able man who should not have to meet the first onslaught of whatever the
Ghost
was to bring. Gregorio persuaded him to stay to welcome his patron at home. He persuaded everyone to stay except Tommaso. When he left for Sluys, Tommaso and his servants rode with him.

It was usual for the master of an important ship arriving in Sluys to invite on board those magnates who were waiting to welcome her. When the
Ghost
dropped her tattered sails in the harbour, mobbed by boats and with cannon speaking courteously from the castle, Crackbene himself came ashore in the lighter to bring Gregorio and the ducal chamberlain back to the vessel. Julius came with him.

Crackbene addressed Portinari. Julius seized Gregorio’s arm. ‘Well?’

‘Well what? You have all my news. What about Nicholas?’

‘Oh, he’s gone off his head,’ said Julius happily. ‘You heard about Simon and Lucia? And young Henry did his utmost to murder him. We weren’t allowed to write and tell you. Listen –’

‘Lucia died,’ said Gregorio sharply. ‘We heard.’

‘That’s right. She drowned, after Nicholas and Simon tried to kill each other. And then Nicholas took a sword to Adorne.’

‘
Adorne!
Why?’

‘He was trying to stop them. Listen. We’re to take Tommaso aboard, and Nicholas will butter him up, and then I’ve to keep him in talk so that Nicholas can have a word on the quiet with you. But I thought you’d better hear something beforehand. Scotland!’ said Julius. ‘You know what he used to be like in Bruges. But by God, Scotland has brought out the man in him.’

He turned away. Gregorio heard him address Portinari by his first name. Of course, they had known one another a long time. Crackbene said, ‘We had a wager that Ser Tommaso would find his way here.’ There was nothing in the large-blocked Scandinavian face except the marks of rough sailing and a certain hardness of scrutiny that in itself was not a bad augur.

Gregorio said something. He was not going to ask Crackbene for advice. Then he got into the skiff.

The
Ghost
was not a ship Gregorio had ever sailed in. He remained obdurately angry that Julius had been the preferred
choice for Scotland, and not himself. He understood it, of course. Knowing nothing, Julius could not impede whatever Nicholas had set out to do. Whatever he had done.

The ducal chamberlain climbed aboard first, and Nicholas greeted him. Gregorio heard his voice, which was the same. At first sight he looked the same also, and the sombre magnificence of his dress manifested a style he had already adopted last autumn. Nicholas said, ‘There is no need to frown. You are looking at two salt-pans and a coal mine. Tommaso tells me his staff has burst into flower and he’s marrying.’

‘When my lady mother –’ began the Medici Bank’s agent in Flanders.

‘When his lady mother has found him a wife. It is much the best way, to leave it to mothers. Why don’t you come in? The poop cabin has been scraped fairly clean, and we bought some wine from a keel in Newcastle, and Julius swears the pies have stopped moving.’ His tone embodied no threat, no trace of recollection. Tommaso, innocently drunk last July, blurting out the news of the death of the African Umar, might have been forgiven, forgotten. Then again, he might not.

The Duke of Burgundy’s chamberlain was given his due. But in a remarkably short time Tommaso Portinari was sunk in his seat, relating some long tale of triumph to Julius while Nicholas, on some excuse, was on deck. Gregorio joined him. He said, ‘He’ll have a very bad headache tomorrow.’

‘God forgive me,’ said Nicholas.

They were surrounded by seamen. The hatches off, unloading had already begun, and the lighters were assembling below on the water. Crackbene’s voice came to them from the prow, but he did not look round or come over. The air was raw. Nicholas said, ‘There is an empty cabin,’ and leading the way there, closed the door and set his back to it. He said, ‘Well?’

His eyes, cold and deep, completed the question. Gregorio said, ‘I don’t know what you have heard.’

‘I’ve heard nothing since you wrote in October. How should I?’ said the other man.

The gulls were screaming outside the casement: their shadows stirred in the cabin like vermin.
The bitch. The bitch
. Gregorio drew a steady breath. ‘You know then that the lady –’

‘My wife.’

‘– that your wife retired from the Duchess’s court to a convent. Or so she said. She didn’t say where the convent was, either then or at any time afterwards. Not even her family knows where she is.
She did, however, send them a message to say she was well. That reached Veere in December.’

‘Oh?’ said Nicholas.

Gregorio looked up. He said, ‘I didn’t know when I wrote to you about Margot. It means, if you care, that she must have carried for seven months successfully. Otherwise she would have come back.’

The grey regard, which had been intense, changed in quality. The other man said, his voice lenient, ‘Whom are you thinking of? Not my wife, surely. My wife and I invent much longer games. So you have heard nothing at all since December? No announcement?’