‘Perhaps,’ said Simon, ‘you would care to sit down?’
The second week passed, and the third, and Nicholas did not come, while the storms stopped all news from the south. October began.
Reared in a convent, Mistress Clémence had no objection to the Cistercian life of the cloister. The Prioress was a lady of some authority, although the Rule was in many ways lax, as tended to occur in poor countries, where the nearest well-founded buildings had to serve not only as convents but as mints and meeting-halls and national guest-houses, and as nurseries and retirement homes for the great. A well-run abbey or priory was little less than a city, with the swell and surge of the liturgical calendar married to the seasonal management of a great agricultural domain, its products, and its inhabitants.
There were sometimes more men than women in Haddington Priory, and the chambers resounded to secular music and laughter as often as they echoed with Lauds. It was, however, a good place for the young, at least below the onset of puberty. After that, it was an equally good place for concealing the results.
The child liked it almost too well; it required some application to maintain the standards of rearing to which Clémence subscribed. In many ways it was comparable to the conditions at Dean Castle the previous year. The Countess’s children were indulged, but Mistress Betha had sense, and Mistress Phemie was as gentle as ever, although a little withdrawn, and seemed to have relinquished her music. The young Sersanders girl, Katelijne, was often to be heard trying to tempt her to accompany her in some piece or other, but she only succeeded when Master Roger came to teach singing, when the whole Priory seemed to glitter into the air, like a birthing of fireflies. Even Jodi, thumb in mouth, had found his way to some of these sessions and Master Roger had allowed him to stay, sometimes setting him on his knee while he played and letting him tug at the strings.
But mostly, Jodi was directly cared for by herself, for the lady Gelis had to see to the needs of the Countess, helping with her correspondence and interviewing her tradesmen, and attending her, well escorted, when she went out. And as at Dean, the girl Kathi seldom visited Jordan, although Mistress Clémence saw her watching the child now and then. But then, Katelijne herself had other occupations. With the death of her aunt, the necessity of arranging a marriage seemed at last to have been officially enjoined on the Prioress.
Katelijne was eighteen years of age, lively, and possessed of good prospects, and it should not take long. The young men all seemed reasonably pleasant, the older ones even more so. It had been a mystery to Mistress Clémence that a niece of Anselm Adorne should have been so neglected. It led to misjudgements or worse, like the unfortunate voyage to Iceland. The girl was patently innocent, but it was time that such freedom was stopped.
The autumn weather was kind. The children played around the broom-park, the homesteads, the grange; ran to follow the fowler; pretended to assist with the cutting of peats; helped to count the Abbot of Melrose’s wedders; visited the swine; were shown how to beat the kirns in the dairy and peered wide-eyed into the eel-tank. They were chased out of the brew-house and wished, but were not allowed, to carry ash and dung to the midden.
They were guarded night and day: nothing happened. It seemed either that the foolish man Simon had been outwitted, or that he was waiting for his real target, his audience. It made Mistress Clémence privately uneasy to notice the growing preoccupation of the lady Gelis, and of the girl Katelijne in particular, as October wore through, and still there was no word from the child’s father.
He had been going to the Loire. By now, Mistress Clémence knew him a little, although she did not trust him: she trusted few men. She knew at least enough to be sure that his care for the child Jodi was not superficial. He would go to Coulanges.
There he would find nothing that he was not already aware of, except perhaps the comeliness of the Cisse. There were fat cattle, too, by the Loire; the grain would be sheaved; the vines would be weeping with sweetness. Perhaps, like his son, he had been seduced by the joy of the season, and not by the occult.
She had heard it whispered that he possessed powers of divining, and had used them in the Tyrol and Scotland, but she had seen no such dark side in all the weeks he had spent on shipboard in that strange idyll with Jodi, and the mysteries of Hesdin had been mechanical. Master Nostradamus had left the Loire, she had heard, and Dr Andreas was here. Yet the lady Gelis, departing so suddenly, had seemed confident that her lord would somehow know and follow immediately. And then he had not come.
The news broke through, finally, at the end of October, but not to Haddington. It came to Simon in Edinburgh because his man, riding hard from Dunbar, pre-empted the arrival of a battered vessel struggling against wind and tide to reach Leith. And although he longed to proclaim what he knew, Simon had sense enough to keep quiet. The Priory was still uninformed the next day, when Willie Roger, tired of incense and discordant noises, led his class of young adults and children out into the sun for their music, and stayed to join in their games.
Jodi was there, and the Countess’s infants, although the Countess herself was at Court with her sister. There were also some of the choristers from the church of the Trinity, including a handsome man referred to by Roger as the Angel of the Annunciation, who also brought his two children. They had been given carriage from Edinburgh in the wagon-train of a merchant. The merchant had gone, but one of his wagons stood at the top of the field, full of the seed corn to be unloaded tomorrow.
The sun was bright, but the salt breeze was fresh. The little ones, wrapped in shawls, had been marshalled by Master Roger into a circle and were jumping about, shrieking words to his whistle while the older children wove a pattern around them. Every now and then they fell down. It was when the whistle broke off that Mistress Clémence first heard the squeak of the wheels, and looked up.
The wain at the top of the short slope was moving. The incline was bumpy, and at first the cart seemed to be coming quite slowly, its solid wood wheels knocking against outcrops of stone. There were more of these lower down, but the descent also got steeper, so that the heavy sacks in the wagon started to jump and to topple, and then to hurl themselves out, and bound and roll down the decline towards the children. A wheel came off and shot into the air, while the cart itself careered springing onwards towards them. The children started to scream.
Clémence seized Jodi under one arm and Mary’s son under the other and ran. Roger laid hands on another two and did the same, pushing shrieking children before him. Clémence looked over her shoulder. A sack, bursting beside her, nearly knocked her off her feet and Jodi squealed in renewed anguish; the other child was rhythmically hooting, and her apron was soaked with his urine. She saw the wheel hit the ground and strike a young girl, bouncing over her. The cart crashed down where the circle had been and began to slow, its bags scattered about it. Another wheel juddered free and rolled off, and the carcass came to a halt.
There were three children lying still on the grass, and the screaming was thin and continuous, like the sound of gulls over a shoal. She let the two children down on the grass, and began to run back.
Roger was running before her. A tall man passed her, shouting. ‘John! Muriella!’
She said, ‘They are safe. They stayed in the garden.’
She was kneeling by the first silent heap when a man threw himself down and, thrusting her aside, began to talk to the child. She did not know all the fathers: she could sympathise, but in an emergency there was no time for niceties. She said, ‘Please get back. This girl is hurt. She needs a doctor.’
‘I am a doctor,’ he said.
He didn’t look like one. His coat was crusted with salt and his cap, knocked askew, showed a wing of insubstantial pale hair and a section of cranium. She drew breath to object, and saw what his hands were doing. He was a doctor. She got up and left.
The second child was crying, thank God, and seemed to have only bruises. She took her head on her shoulder and let her weep, her eyes following the mu
sician as he flung himself down by the third victim. It was not a child but a boy in his teens, one of the prebends from the church of the Trinity. He was lying perfectly quiet. Clémence spoke to the girl and, leaving her, went to join Roger. She could see, over the hill, help was coming. Among the running figures, she recognised Phemie.
Roger said, ‘I think he is dead.’
‘No,’ said a voice. The unknown doctor, kneeling beside them. He said to Clémence, ‘Go to that child. Tell them no one is to move her till I come back. The other one is all right. Do you know of a Jordan de Fleury?’
All the time, he was examining the boy on the grass. She said, ‘Lord Beltrees’s son? I am his nurse.’
The man looked up. His face was pink. He said, ‘Then what are you doing here? It is your responsibility, I presume, to protect him? Where is he? Where is his mother? Where is Katelijne Sersanders?
‘He is there,’ she said, ‘and unscathed. The two ladies are in attendance at Court. It is your responsibility, I presume, to attend the injured boy under your hand, if your oath counts for anything. I will go and see to the girl.’
She saw, as she went to do what she could, that Dr Andreas was running over the grass, his box under his arm. She was relieved. One heard of all kinds of doctors.
Chapter 39
SEVENTEEN MILES AWAY, at the top of the High Street of Edinburgh, Simon de St Pol of Kilmirren took his ease with his peers at the Castle, clothed, as he had always aspired to be, in the costliest of velvet and furs and envious of nothing he saw, neither the tapestries on the wall, nor the fireplace, nor the silver and gold on the tables of the royal chamber.
Tonight, the King had arranged a small evening distraction of cards, dice and music for the pleasure of her grace his sweet lady Margaret, and in honour of the future prince or princess whom (at last) she was carrying under her girdle. It was a select company, consisting of very little more than the five royal siblings and their favourites. With the King’s sister Margaret was the girl Katelijne Sersanders, about to be married off fast, Simon noticed, now that Nicholas had done with her.
With the Countess of Arran, that moonstruck cow Mary, was her lady of honour Gelis van Borselen.
It was the third time her former lover had contrived to join a company of which Gelis was part; of intent it had always been here, at the Castle, and under the most august of auspices. On the first occasion, he had seen her eyes widen; they had remained wide as he greeted her with exquisite courtesy, and continued to do so for the rest of the slight encounter. She had curtseyed shallowly in response to his bow, and had said little thereafter.
Afterwards the King had chaffed him about it, and Simon had laughed. ‘She is ashamed! It became an embarrassment: I had to thrust her out of my room. In any case, her eyes are elsewhere nowadays. That doublet! My lord King has never looked more comely, in spite of the length of the trimming.’
‘The fur?’ had said the King, looking down. ‘It is fashionable.’
‘For a man of thirty. For a desk-bound merchant, weak in the loins. Praxiteles, had he but clothed his great warriors, would have shown them wearing hose from Milan, of the kind with a spray of gold on the uppermost thigh … When the Duke wears them, they say, it is as if he were coated with honey. Command the lady Mary to the Feast Day next week.’
That time, the lady Gelis had seemed more assured, or at least better prepared for Simon’s tactics. She greeted him as before, with detached coolness, while as before, he showed himself sweetly solicitous. This time, when the feasting was over, the King invited his sister to the dais, and bade the lady Gelis take the cushion below him, speaking to her several times as the evening wore on, and asking to examine her rings. His doublet that night was untrimmed.
Tonight, he greeted both his sisters almost at once, and brought them beside him to play at the tables. Simon, too gleeful to be apprehensive, overheard him address several remarks, in a low voice, to the Countess’s attendant. Gelis replied smiling, but glanced once or twice at the Queen who sat at a distant table and was being plied with attentions and wine by one of the King’s chamber valets. Simon exchanged a glance with Georgie Bell – Little Bell – who cocked an eyebrow in reply and then turned his back on the girl Katelijne, who was gazing at him.
Simon smiled at her too. She was no stranger, surely, to courts. A King, at twenty at the peak of his vigour, was going to satisfy himself somewhere. And if his Queen, a prude from her marriage at twelve, was now looking to her condition as an excuse to refuse him, he was going to befriend any man who could relieve his predicament. Especially if he were offered a fair adventurous foreigner, already known as a bawd who had gone from another man’s arms to her husband.
He had had no trouble convincing the King. The long separations, the friction between the sieur de Fleury and his wayward lady were common knowledge, as was Simon’s own affair with the woman. He had described that. He had described every detail of their conjunction; both as it was, and as he would like it to have been. The King, when his eye rested on the fine lady Gelis tonight, would see through her grand damask robe to her skin, and would not suffer the itch that possessed him much longer.
Simon proposed to make him wait for an hour or two yet. After that, he could have what he wanted. No woman could refuse herself to a king and expect any future position worth having. The King was seven years younger than Gelis and eager, and personable. She would surrender. A single night’s work, properly handled, could be turned to mortify her as she had mortified him and proclaim de Fleury a pimp or a cuckold. And for love of the King, and his Bank, the new Lord Beltrees might even tolerate – condone – perhaps even encourage the union. Were he here.
Simon had already seen the King’s valets, and the vats of warm water were prepared. After her chatter and gaming, the Queen would be tired and retire. Then they would all retire.
It did not occur to him that his victim’s mind, honed in a four-year contest of which he knew nothing, would set to work, after the first shock of perception, to assess his scheme in the light of her purpose. She saw that he wished to purvey the idea that the liaison had not been of his making, but an embarrassing affair of unquenchable lust and reluctant gallantry. He owed the van Borselen nothing now, and could risk it.
Next, he wished to prove that Nicholas, far from objecting, would share his wife with the King for whatever he might personally get out of it. The generously bewived Nicholas had done it before, after all, with Zacco of Cyprus. Zacco had accepted the courtesan Primaflora, whose arts survived death and could be studied still – sweeter than sweet, more bitter than bitter – in the arms of her husband and student.
It did not occur to Simon, the last and sorriest miscalculation of all, that Gelis might decide that what Simon had devised would perfectly suit Gelis van Borselen too. Let Nicholas wriggle out of this, if he could.
She knew of the baths. She remembered Nicholas, returning drunkly damp to her bed on the night of the Florentine football. Should all fail, change thy country; for some cities can cure barren women. He had protected Jodi, at least. Tonight Jodi was safely with Mistress Clémence and Willie Roger at Haddington; she had only herself to look out for. When the Queen retired, and the girl Katelijne, frowning, had followed her twelve-year-old mistress to bed, Gelis had watched, outwardly grave, while the King cajoled his older sister into coming with him to the baths, there to relax with her ladies and his gentlemen. There would be a glass of wine, a little music, some food. They would, of course, be suitably robed. It would be decorous.
They chattered, walking down the steep stairs, and she felt the King’s young hand at her side. It reminded her of a masculine finger, circling a wine-glass. Simon had thought once that she would come back to him, and his son, nauseatingly, had copied his style. Henry had received his punishment now, and what Simon was planning was part of the family reprisals. Jordan’s retaliation would be altogether sharper and more lethal and, she presumed, would fall principally upon Nicholas.
Her thoughts
had turned that way so often that it was not surprising when, emerging from the robing rooms dressed in fine lawn like the others, she turned cold in spite of the scented steam that filled the low room. Someone had spoken her name. A courier, outside the door, was talking to Simon who, in turn, had turned back to the King. Then they all looked at her. She stood on the damp tiles and said, ‘What? What, my lord? What has happened?’
The King came and took her two hands. He said, ‘You must be brave.’
The Princess Mary ran up, her face worried, and placed an arm round her waist. ‘What has happened?’
‘A message from France,’ Simon said.
‘From the battlefield? Ah no!’ said the Princess. ‘But they have the best medical help. Tom always said so.’
They led her to a bench and sat her down. She waited. The Countess was sitting beside her and the King stood, his hand on her shoulder. He was well made. His open robe showed his white linen drawers and the haze of curling red hair at his chest. He was sweating. They all were.
Simon said, ‘It was not on the battlefield. Apparently Lord Beltrees was waylaid on his way from the Loire. He had called at Saumur, and was perhaps thought to be carrying gold. At any rate, he was sprung upon when travelling unescorted, and his body lay by the river till morning. It has only lately been recognised. A vessel is bringing it home. I am so sorry.’
‘There is no doubt?’ said the King.
‘None, sire,’ Simon said. Mary was hugging her, and someone else was patting her arm. The others stood around in the steam, looking sympathetic. She fingered her hair, curling damply over her shoulders, and tried to think.
A trick. Surely a trick? But he had not come, even knowing that Jodi was in danger. He had not known. He was not coming, furious, to protect Jodi and regain face after her clever departure. He was not coming again. The game was over.
She looked at Simon and said, ‘Killed by footpads, alone? I don’t believe it.’