Caprice and Rondo (99 page)

He had never spoken like that in her hearing before. She did not know what to do. She drew breath and went on, as evenly as she could.

‘Poland, then? Or the Black Sea? Or Persia? Or Africa? I hear that Benecke is waiting for you to join him. I even hear talk of Jordan de Ribérac sending ships to the gold coasts from Portugal.’

She didn’t know why she even mentioned him: Nicholas wasn’t going to talk about Jordan de Ribérac. As it was, the strain in her manner drew his attention. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy sailing with Benecke,’ Nicholas said. ‘He drinks, and gambles, and is seduced into subversive activities, and takes pretty women to bed without considering what it would do to them, or their lives. I don’t know where I shall go. You would have to help me choose that, as well.’ He broke off, the tortured levity evaporating from his voice, and made a small gesture which she recognised, disconcerted, as one of helplessness. ‘It’s too uncertain. You don’t know me. How can you decide?’

She moved thoughtfully then, sliding her hands from the polished wood, turning from the post to the stairs where he sat.

He stood.

Gelis said, ‘I’m not sure.’ She could not say why she was not sure. Or she could, but she was afraid. Her voice sounded steady. She held his gaze, her own eyes open and clear, so that he might know he could trust the channel between them, and that it was not unfriendly. His face, which had been drained of expression, slowly changed, and he looked at her differently, with understanding and patience, as if she had been Jodi. Her eyes filled.

He said, ‘Of course. There are two rooms. Sleep tonight, Gelis. We can talk in the morning.’ A dimple trembled, in an unattended way; oddly forlorn.

She hesitated, one hand fingering the cloak at her breast. He stepped down to where she stood and taking her fingers, set them formally to his lips. Then he released her and walked into the hall, where he looked up, with both smiling dimples, deep as coins.

‘Good night, Monna Donnina.’

‘Good night, Nicholas,’ Gelis said.

They had not touched, except for that moment. He had kissed her on the boat, swiftly, as they confronted danger together.
Sweetheart
, he had said to her there. But not here, where a lifelong decision required to be taken without arousing those fires; for fires burn out, unless they are fairly tended, and fuel by itself is not enough.

She left him.

H
E
WAS
VERY
TIRED
, and his bruises ached beneath the torn clothes he had not yet had a chance to change for the others, above. He listened to her weary footsteps climbing the stairs, followed by a small pause. Then
a door shut. From the sound, he knew that it was not that of the room he had taken.

He turned aside, and ranged through the hall and into the little parlour of the Sersanders house now owned by Adorne. There was nothing in it that spoke to him of Kathi, to whom he owed the key, and the loving gift of this night. A gift which, however empty its outcome, would perform one office at least: it would close, one way or another, the wound he had borne for the last eight years of his life.

The room was small, but he dared not sit, for fear of falling asleep. He thought, and sighed and smiled at the thought, that Adorne would have to purchase a larger house for Kathi’s expanding family. He felt no misgivings about Robin; only thankfulness that the quicksilver mind had found a wise young protector and shield.

He thought of Anna, and of what lay ahead, and wondered, suddenly, whether he could go on. He was not alone. Whatever they thought of him personally, Diniz, Moriz, Tobie and the rest seemed united in their resolve to help deal with Anna. But he alone was of the same blood as Anna; and must bear the onus of what was to happen to her, and to Julius, arriving tomorrow.

But of course, there was no alternative. Only the poor in spirit were permitted that kind of choice, as a sop.

He left the lamp in the hall and, stumbling a little, climbed the stairs to the top, where a half-consumed candle was set. There had been two. She had carried the other into her room.

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

J
ULIUS
OF
B
OLOGNA
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 the 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.