He turned to his own room, where the open door showed him a lamp dutifully tended, and his cold bed already prepared. He realised only then that the other door was ajar.
He stood, frightened. Within, a low, golden light flickered over the carpet, and a chest with some silver stuff on it, although he could not immediately connect it with Gelis. He could see the platform of the bed, and the end-posts, with the cloth gathered back. He took three halting steps to the doorway, and stopped.
At first, he could see only darkness. Then he distinguished the white of the pillow, and the blur of her fair hair, loose upon it. Her breasts were curved and bare where the old, soft sheet crossed them, and below, the linen rested on the firm, breathing shapes of her body. Her eyes were deep in shadow, and open.
He walked over, and stepped up, and knelt; and she lifted her arms, touching his face tenderly with her palms, before she pressed him down to the crook of her shoulder. He smelled her scent, a girl’s scent from long ago, breathing from a skin sleek and smooth as a girl’s. His body remembered it first. She said softly, ‘I am sure. Forgive me, as I forgive you for much less.’
He lay without speaking, and her fingertips passed and repassed through his hair. Then he raised his head, drawing away to rest on one elbow to view her, but also to let her see him as he was: defence-less; his guard melted away in the torrent of relief. But the relief was adult, not childish; and when he spoke, the words were both adult and formal.
‘I have carried your hurts along with my own, and I think you have done the same with mine. We are both to blame, and we have both suffered for it.’ Then he bowed his head and said, ‘Is it ended?’
She had lifted herself a little to meet him. She laid her arms round his shoulders, and her head against his. ‘Yes, it is ended. If you want it to end. If you want me.’
He said, ‘I think … there is not much doubt of that.’ He could hear his own breathing, and hers.
But she was not ready yet. Her hands slid down, and she held him by the upper arms, facing her, while her eyes examined his face. ‘Why did you say I don’t know you? God knows, once it was true, but surely not now. And surely, you know me now, too.’
He said, ‘We are not the same as we were.’
‘We shouldn’t deserve each other if we were,’ Gelis said. ‘It’s not given to many people to choose again after eight years.’ She paused and said, ‘I want no one else. I never will.’
He hesitated. ‘But you weren’t sure?’ he said at last.
She flushed. The colour spread from her cheeks to her throat and below, where the sheet had fallen away. She said, ‘I was sure of my feelings. But what if I am not the right person for you? Perhaps there is someone better.’
He rose to his feet, looking down at her. Her hands dropped from his arms and she sank back on the pillows, a smile fixed on her lips. She had exceptional courage. He had always known that.
Nicholas bent, and taking the sheet by the edge, turned it slowly back to the foot of the bed. Gelis said nothing and neither did he, as the light followed his hand, and his eyes travelled, too, over the veined breasts and delicate rib-arch and curved belly and thighs. He pulled the sheet free of the slender shin bones and narrow feet and let it drop.
She lay trembling and, looking down at her, he knew that he had come to the end of a long road. He said, ‘There is no one better. I have what I want. Sweetheart, do I have leave?’
And then the smile was a real one, and her relief and her tears were the same as his own as she joined him on the step and said, ‘Stop shaking. Yes, of course. Let me help you.’
His clothes, fortunately, were in tatters, and easily shed, and the sheet was already turned back. She stepped up, and then leaned out and brought him beside her.
It was eight years ago, and he was walking the streets, drunk with happiness, exploding with lust, on his way to bed the fierce lover who was now truly his bride. Don’t let go all at once, she had cried to him then.
He must have said the words aloud, for Gelis repeated them now, in his arms, and then revoked them in the same breath.
‘Let go now. Let go, Nicholas. You are home.’
He could not sing, with his labouring breath, but he remembered the song of that night, and whispered the words before thought and reason both fled.
Crions, chantons …
Bien vienne.
Chapter 42
JULIUS OF BOLOGNA arrived, thrashing a lathered horse, late the following day, attended by Diniz Vasquez and a hard-riding escort I from the Hof Charetty-Niccolò, Bruges.
Julius had ridden to Bruges to find Nicholas gone. Worse, they had taken him aside, in the familiar house where he had worked for Marian de Charetty, and told him a tale about Anna, his wife. He had received the so-called revelation with an ashen horror which escalated into paroxysms of angry disbelief, and had now borne that incredulous fury all the way back to Ghent. Reaching the Gruuthuse mansion, he demanded his wife be set free, and obscenely derided the claim that she did not want to see him. Removed, with apologetic restraint, by Diniz’s men, Julius had next demanded to be taken to Nicholas de Fleury.
It had been inevitable. Wodman had agreed — had indeed, told Diniz where to go. The hammering on the front door of the Sersanders house should not have been unexpected, unless to a dreaming man in the arms of his lover, claimed by sleep after a night which had begun at the dark edge of day, and had moved from term to term in different conditions of happiness, the greatest happiness being that there were so many as yet untried.
Nicholas had risen, at one point, to descend and speak to Adorne’s housekeeper. He had returned, a little flushed, with beer and bread and some fruit. He had sent a message to the Hof Ten Walle, to satisfy Clémence that Jodi’s mother would soon be returning, and his father, as well. She would know, of course, from Wodman and Marguerite van Borselen what had happened. She would not know what had happened today.
Then the banging came to the door.
Someone woke him with a snowfall of kisses. He ignored the banging, in the modest surge of reviving ideas.
‘No,’ said Gelis. ‘No. No. It will be Julius.’
They were clothed, just, by the time the door to the bedchamber crashed open. It hardly mattered, even though Gelis sat, and he stood by the window. Nicholas could imagine how it all looked; the strewn chamber; their ruffled hair and enlarged eyes and flushed skin. Love, that irrational passion that diminishes a man’s responsibility for his actions, as the laws of Venice maintained. And quite rightly, too.
Anna. Nicholas looked at Julius, shouting, and remembered what it had been like, eight years ago, when Gelis, young and maddened, had cheated him. This was different. But whatever happened, Julius’s life was being sundered today.
Julius was crying: that was the first shocking thing: far worse than seeing the half-unsheathed sword he was trying to draw, hindered by Diniz and one of his soldiers. It was evident that he no longer wished to challenge Nicholas to a duel, but simply to kill him. It was not even a furious regenesis, Nicholas thought, of the husbandly outrage in Moscow. Julius now looked possessed: a man who would not believe, could not believe what he had been told of his wife, and who could only expunge what had happened by violence. It hardly mattered, now, whom he killed. At the moment, he wished to annihilate Nicholas.
On the face of it, there was reason enough. Had Diniz and Gelis not known what they did, they might have been convinced by Julius’s incoherent accusations as he stood, pinned by the arms before Nicholas, cursing him with a vocabulary never before applied to him by the good-natured, exasperated tutor, bear-leader, practical joker of their joint youth. Nicholas bore it; bore being addressed as offal, traitor and pervert; bore being castigated as a lecher who tried to excuse himself by blaming his victims.
Nicholas said nothing. It was Gelis who sprang to his side, and interrupted the flow. ‘Julius. It is true. I was there. She tried to kill us.’
‘So you say,’ Julius said. ‘So, of course, all th
e van Borselens will say, and Louis de Gruuthuse.’
‘You should thank him,’ Gelis said. ‘Because of him, Anna was allowed to stay in his house, instead of in public custody. Julius, she committed these crimes. You didn’t know. You are not to blame. But don’t blame Nicholas either. He was her principal victim.’
‘Anna. You called her Anna,’ Julius said. ‘So that at least isn’t true. The lie that she isn’t the Gräfin.’
He had stopped struggling, and Diniz had slackened his grasp. Nicholas wondered why Diniz had come, and not Father Moriz. Beside him, Gelis drew closer, and he felt the touch of her hand. Nicholas enfolded it with his own, astonished, thankful, stupidly conscious that he had brought Julius close to death, and now had what Julius had not. But this had to be done. Nicholas said, ‘She married the Graf. But her real name is Adelina de Fleury.’
‘No,’ Julius said. He was shivering. He continued to shiver and exclaim while Nicholas spoke, as gently as he knew how, piling fact upon fact, calling upon Gelis and Diniz for corroboration. At length, Nicholas managed to speak uninterrupted. He said, ‘Defend her if you will. She is your wife; she is lovely. But she is wicked. She wanted me dead. She persuaded the Genoese to stage the death of Ochoa, when she believed she had the secret of the gold, and she wanted to silence him. When you were both expelled from Moscow, she made the plan that went wrong, and killed de’ Acciajuoli instead of me. Last night, she deliberately trapped Gelis, and would have disposed of us both, but for Wodman. She sent you out of the way, to leave her free to do it. But eventually, of course, she meant to kill you as well.’
Julius tore himself free, but not to attack. Instead, he dropped into a seat as if he could no longer stand. ‘It isn’t true,’ he said. ‘Or if she did try to hurt you, it was because you seduced her.’ But his voice no longer rang with conviction.
‘And Gelis?’ Nicholas said. ‘Why do you suppose Anna should so dislike her, in that case?’ He paused, choosing his words. ‘Anna’s ambition led her to marry you, but she always wanted more than she had. If we did not exist, Gelis and Jodi and I, she would be heiress to everything that we had amongst us. If Jodi survived, she could control his fortune she thought, by wedding him to Bonne. She was greedy. But most of all, she wanted to revenge herself against me, and those I might be fond of. You were the victim.’
The slanting eyes frowned. ‘But if Anna is who you say she is, they couldn’t marry. Bonne and Jodi would be related.’
‘So I agreed to the marriage,’ Nicholas said. ‘I knew it couldn’t take place. I knew who she was.’
Beside him, he felt Gelis move. Diniz, his dark face drawn, took a breath. Nicholas looked only at Julius, whom he knew so very well. Julius said, ‘You knew?’
‘Could you have forgotten those eyes, once you had seen them? I was sure, but it was not hard to collect other proofs. All the small lies. Why would a woman so dark require to protect her skin from the sun? Why was so little known of her past? Then others searched, and found the facts we have told you.’
‘You knew, and didn’t tell me?’ Julius said. It sounded, on the surface, disbelieving and hard. Beneath was something that in another man would have verged on the piteous.
‘Would you have thanked me? Would you have believed me?’
‘No,’ Julius said.
‘No. And I needed you to believe in the gold, because that was the only reason she protracted my life. The mythical gold, brought by Ochoa.’
‘Mythical?’ Diniz intervened. He looked dazed.
Nicholas said, ‘Oh, it existed. But it never left Cyprus, until David de Salmeton dug it up. Ochoa’s messages told me that. But Anna couldn’t read codes, and it was easy to persuade her that the gold was coming, and once I used my password, she could have it. Then Caffa fell, and the excuse had gone, and I had to look for other ways to escape her. It may not feel like it, but you are lucky, Julius.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it,’ he said. ‘She wouldn’t see me.’ It was a cry.
‘Because she is guilty. They will keep her guarded in private just now. But when the courts are free, and they have sorted what advantages to draw from it, she will suffer, Julius,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you condone what she did, you will suffer as well.’
Leather creaked; the brazier whispered. Julius said, ‘What are you going to do?’ There was no fight in him now.
‘About Anna? I won’t bear witness against her, if that’s what you’re asking,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’m afraid that there is enough evidence, in any case, without me.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ Julius repeated. He looked ghastly.
‘Go away,’ Nicholas said. ‘Once I have found David de Salmeton and dealt with him. He will be in the Tyrol, they say, until the spring. He can’t do any harm there.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Diniz said. The formality grated, even though Nicholas had imposed it himself. Diniz said, ‘De Salmeton isn’t in the Tyrol. The Duke summoned the Earl of Buchan to Nancy. Hearty James expects to spend the winter in camp, and to try to negotiate with the Tyrol from there. He has de Salmeton with him.’
Nicholas stood still. The fate of Anna left his mind, as, slowly, the hand of Gelis also slipped from his clasp. David de Salmeton was in Nancy with Robin; with Tobie; with John. No wonder the elegant Master Simpson had left Ghent with such alacrity. He could return to find Nicholas, once he had disposed of those he ranked as Nicholas’s friends. Robin, and Tobie, and John.
Nicholas was aware that Julius was watching him. He had no time to nurse Julius now. He said, ‘Why the change of plan? Why should the Duke entertain a Scottish envoy in Nancy?’
‘Because Buchan is royal,’ Diniz said. ‘And there is another guest, too. The King of Portugal is due at the end of the month. The Duke’s cousin. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been summoned to Nancy to interpret.’
Diniz was half Portuguese. The uncle of Diniz had been secretary to the Duke’s Portuguese mother. The hated grandfather of Diniz, Jordan de Ribérac, was currently living under Portuguese dominion, unaware that David de Salmeton, whom he had dismissed, was embarked on a campaign of destruction.
Nicholas said, ‘If the King of Portugal is going to Nancy, might he take your grandfather with him?’
‘It is possible,’ Diniz said. He shut his lips. Diniz would not care if Jordan de Ribérac died. Perhaps no one would. But, oh God, de Ribérac was not the only possible victim, in that war camp at Nancy, facing David de Salmeton. They were none of them fools, these former companions and friends of Nicholas de Fleury; but de Salmeton was vain, and vindictive, and clever. And in war, accidents occurred very easily.
Nicholas saw that Gelis was studying him. Her eyes, immense with fatigue, were empty of appeal, but not of love. Her hand had left his, freeing him. She understood; he did not need to explain; but, nevertheless, his eyes sought her forgiveness.
One night. They had had only one night. He could not even hope to see Jodi. After three years, he could not return to Jodi and leave him on the same day.
Nicholas turned to Diniz. ‘When are you leaving?’
‘Today,’ the other man said. He was not a child any more. He was thirty, and watching Nicholas with curiosity now, aware of the complexities of what was happening.
‘Will you take me with you?’ Nicholas said. Julius stiffened. Nicholas looked at him.
Julius said, ‘What about Anna?’
‘What about her?’ Nicholas said. ‘She will be brought to justice. She will be better off if I am not there.’
‘If she is who you say, she’s your family,’ Julius said. ‘She married me because of you. Everything happened because of you. And now you are leaving me with this mess?’ The petulant, self-centred Julius of old, beginning to return through the anger and anguish.
Nicholas said, ‘I expect to come back. No one has said you need stay.’
‘Where would I go? To Moscow? To Caffa? To face Anna’s noble kinsmen in Cologne?’
‘You could come to Nancy,’ Nic
holas said. ‘Astorre would welcome it. It would give you someone to fight, apart from Anna, and me, and yourself.’
‘I went to Bruges to challenge you,’ Julius said. He rose slowly. Some of his colour had returned.
‘So perhaps we should be seen to have a match,’ Nicholas said. ‘Decently supervised. On the way to Nancy, if you like. The fault was Anna’s, not mine, but I wouldn’t have you lose face for it in public. Will you come?’
Julius agreed.
Diniz took Julius off to his lodging. There was not much time, if they were to leave the same day. Then, and only then did Nicholas shut the door and turn back to where Gelis stood.
There was no recrimination in her face: only sadness. ‘You are good with Julius,’ she said.
‘I know him. Can you forgive me?’ he said.
‘I know you, too. I told you,’ she said. ‘A sensible woman would say, These are grown men, down there with the Duke. They can defend themselves against David de Salmeton. He will come back. You can deal with him in the spring.’
He said, ‘You haven’t married a sensible man. I should have had to join Astorre anyway, sooner or later. Robin and Tobie are with him because of me. And now de Salmeton is there because of me, and because of—’ He broke off, too late.
‘Because of Jordan de Ribérac?’ Gelis said.
He lost his breath. Then he said, ‘What do you know?’
Her smile was one-sided, and wry. ‘What Tilde told me. That when I was working against you, I was working for Diniz’s grandfather. I didn’t know. I never knew who the head of the Vatachino was. That doesn’t excuse it.’
‘I have done worse,’ he said. He had come close, and was looking down at her, painfully. ‘I wanted to tell you myself, at the right time.’
‘This is the right time,’ Gelis said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know, I know.’ His eyes were blurred, for the sake of all the words that had reduced themselves to the five she had spoken. He said blankly, ‘I have to go.’