To Lie with Lions (69 page)

Tommaso Portinari was absent. There was no sign of Anselm Sersanders, and those members who were related to the Duke of Burgundy were also missing; but that was understandable. He had heard the rumours of trouble himself, meticulously forwarded by Astorre and by Diniz. He wondered what Adorne was making of it all, now one supposed he had time to turn his mind to the future. The truce between France and Burgundy was meant to last another month yet. If it broke, Scotland would immediately be involved. And Anselm Adorne was now deeply identified with Scotland.

Jan Adorne said, as if he had spoken, ‘What a pity you will never
be able to sell fish in Antwerp again. The King has forbidden it. All Scots merchants must sell to Bruges, and my father is Conservator of Scots Privileges in all the domains of the Duke. Do you know what that means?’

‘Yes, I know. It is a great honour. Jan, I came because of your mother. I know you will miss her so much. What are your brothers and sisters going to do?’ He kept his voice quiet. Under the chorusing, no one could hear them.

‘It means,’ Jan continued, ‘that for his lifetime, my father has power to govern and direct and administer law to the Scottish subjects in the dominions of Burgundy. He is allowed to tax staple wares for his salary, and can arrest anyone who won’t pay him. And all because of the way my father represented the nation of Scotland not only at the papal court and in Christian countries, but among the barbarous nations of the Saracens and the Turks. You represented nobody but yourself.’

‘Did it seem so? Then the misfortune was mine, in having no son who could write about it. Your father must be proud of you.’ He turned to Adorne. ‘And I dare say Jan has brought you the latest information from Rome. What of the papal Crusade?’ It was all he could think of to say. The song then being sung was not very papal, or welcome to a man still in mourning.

‘Your reports, I am sure, are as good as mine,’ said Adorne. ‘The combined fleets have presumably left for the East, your own ships among them. They will do what they can. The main assault, as you know, is next year. And the fund-raising legates have gone – Cardinal Bessarion towards France, and Cardinal Barbo to the Emperor Frederick, unfortunately for Jan.’

‘I heard,’ Nicholas said. ‘But Bishop Graham has found him a post?’

Jan Adorne opened his mouth. ‘Unfortunately,’ said his father, ‘the Bishop, although a good man, is receiving less support than he would like from King James. Or perhaps it is fortunate, for Jan is able to render him help so long as he stays in Rome. Once the Bishop goes home, Jan will have to seek other employment.’

‘Perhaps I can help,’ Nicholas said. ‘Or Lazzarino my agent, or Julius. Added, of course, to your own excellent circle of friends.’

‘The way you helped my mother and father?’ said Jan in a low voice. ‘My mother might be alive today, without the burden of the Earl and Countess of Arran all those months. My father
thanked you
for what you did for my cousins. What did you do? Betray my father’s ship to the Hanse, try to wreck it; have one cousin captured and take the other aboard and debauch her!’

‘Jan!’ said Adorne, also quietly. He had turned his back on his neighbours.

‘This is not the place,’ Nicholas said. ‘But I must speak for your cousin Katelijne. She came aboard to prevent us from fighting. She came immediately under the care of my chaplain, and stayed so. Her brother was never in danger of being captured. As for the device to rid myself of a pirate ship and a rival, I must claim that to be quite legitimate. Martin would have done the same in my place.’

‘A pirate ship!’ said Jan. His voice, properly scathing, disregarded a protest from his father. ‘The Hanse believe they are the only authority, but there are others more private. My father was sanctioned by the Bishop and Governor of Iceland.’

‘And I by the King of Scotland,’ said Nicholas dryly. ‘I fancy that my next cargo might even be permitted in Antwerp, under the circumstances.’

Jan looked at his father. After the first moment of surprise, Adorne’s lips produced a wry smile. He said, ‘My compliments. I believed my staff-work was good, but I see yours is better. You did well.’

‘But you got the sulphur. Martin is a very shrewd man,’ Nicholas said. ‘Although careless. He really should have checked what had become of Anselm and Katelijne. Where is Anselm?’

‘I hoped you would ask,’ Adorne said. He turned in his seat, opening the conversation again to the table. He called across. ‘Jehan: Nicholas is impatient to talk to my nephew.’

The solid cheeks of Jehan Metteneye quivered. ‘Patience! Patience! He will be here!’

There was a ripple of laughter. Nicholas put on a complaining face. ‘There is a secret. I am excluded.’ All the eminent faces were smiling but one. Louis de Gruuthuse, conveying an unspoken message. Nicholas acknowledged it equally silently.

Jan said, ‘He’s willing to speak to you, now you have forgiven your lady wife. You were talking of Julius, your lawyer.’

‘Yes?’ said Nicholas. Some of the diners had risen and were crowding round the inner door at the end of the room. He added, ‘He is coming to Bruges. You might see him.’

‘I hope,’ said Jan, ‘that he is bringing his new lady with him. A gräfin. Perhaps you have met her?’

‘He is bringing a lady,’ said Nicholas. ‘But no, I have not met her. You have?’ The doors at the end of the room were slowly opening.

‘Oh yes,’ Jan Adorne said. ‘A vision of beauty. A little lacking in height, but the horizontal aspects more than make up for it. In fact, I have seldom seen a comparable girth outside a cheese-house. I should
think he had to roll her over the Alps like a barrel, even to the danger of scratching her paint.’

‘Jan, that is ungallant,’ said Adorne sharply. ‘Nicholas, I am sorry. No gentleman speaks thus of a –’

He stopped because his voice was drowned out by cheers. The doors stood open. The crowd before them fell back. Nicholas stood, and so did Jan and his father. Then Nicholas started to laugh.

Entering the room, limping slightly, was Anselm Sersanders. His face was smiling; his dress, after the travel-worn quilting of Iceland, was stylish and rich. And by his side, two porters were trundling an object.

It looked at first like a crate on four wheels. Then, as it stopped at the end of the table, Anselm leaned over and drew back the covering cloth. Nicholas saw that it was not a crate but a cage. A stout cage with thick iron bars, within which sat something enormous and furry and white. Sersanders put his hand through the bars and scratched the object under the chin, and the object sniffed him.

It was a white Greenland bear. Nicholas said, ‘
Há!
The cub? Anselm, this is the
cub?
You went back for it?’

‘Of course,’ said Anselm Sersanders. ‘Meet the
het beert je
Besse gift from the White Bear Society of Bruges to the great and powerful Charles, Duke of Burgundy, Count of Flanders and everything else. Uncle, come and shake hands.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Anselm Adorne, with amusement. But he walked over, Nicholas with him, and stood in front of the cage. Nicholas said again, ‘That’s a
cub?’

‘Well, they’re born in winter,’ said Sersanders with mild irritation. Can’t cross the ice till their second year. Bears are big.’

‘Katelijne caught
that?’
Nicholas said.

‘I helped her. I brought it back on my own. Well, with the Icelanders. So. Better than stockfish, do you think?’

‘It depends what you feed it on,’ Nicholas said. ‘Anselm, I do think that is enterprising. Where do you keep it?’

He waited until the noise and laughter increased and the talk became general, and then made his way to where Gruuthuse stood a little apart. As Anselm Adorne was a loyal officer to the Duke, so the Gruuthuse family were one of the bastions of Burgundy. In their palace in Bruges had lived the exiled English King and his brother, before their triumphant return the previous year. In the same house, Gelis van Borselen had lain with her future husband for the first time since she seduced him in Africa. Nicholas said, ‘Something has happened?’

Gruuthuse said, ‘You have spent a long time in Scotland.’

‘The winter. My army is still on the Somme, and I am here with my gunner as promised.’

The other man’s face had always been lined, now it was more so. He said, ‘I told Duke Charles, but you should go to Arras to speak to him yourself. The King of France’s brother has died, poisoned, they say, by his order. The Duke of Brittany is preparing to march. It seems very likely that our Duke will then take the field.’

‘Breaking the truce?’ Nicholas said.

‘An oath made to a murderer is no oath. Your lady is with you?’

‘Gelis is well,’ Nicholas said. ‘She is in Antwerp. I shall return there tomorrow, and then report to the Duke. Are the English likely to send troops?’

‘They have sent them already. A thousand archers to Brittany under Earl Rivers. We may tempt them to invade France with us yet,’ Gruuthuse said. ‘There is enough land in France to please everybody.’

Soon after that, the party broke up. Nicholas, setting off to walk down the short slope with Diniz, was stopped by Anselm Sersanders, expansive in drink. ‘You haven’t seen Kathi.’

Adorne and his son had gone home. He didn’t want to see Jan again. The moon was up, and it was a long way to the Jerusalemkirk. Nicholas said, ‘Anselm, I love you and her and the bear, but not tonight. And I’m going to Antwerp tomorrow.’

‘Then come tomorrow, before you set out.’ Sersanders paused. ‘I heard how you found me and Sigfús. I heard how you set out to find Robin. I don’t agree with the Church.’

‘They have to be careful,’ said Nicholas. ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to beat up Jan Adorne, although I’ll wring Nerio’s neck if I ever meet him. Tell Kathi I’ll come early tomorrow, and you both ought to be proud of your bear.’

It was easy to say. When the moment came to leave for the Hôtel Jerusalem the following morning, he stood in the stables doing nothing, until stirred by the mock-annoyance of Diniz.

Guds frida veri med ydr:
the peace of God be upon you. He had not been alone with the girl since those words were spoken, in the thundering dark, with the doom-fire of the gods in the clouds. Until last night, he had pushed aside all he knew of that tongue, as he had buried the language of Umar.

This girl was not Umar. The situation was not at all of that kind, except in so far as it was a relationship, disembodied as that of the mistletoe, which found its nourishment in strange, diverse places: in the excitement of danger; in the marriage of music and words; in
understanding allied with compassion. Until now, he had not fully realised how privileged he had been, knowing Katelijne Sersanders.

Since Iceland, her illness had kept them apart. At Leith, she had been swept off by Father Moriz and Archie of Berecrofts, and after that the nuns had not allowed her visitors, not even when, grudgingly, they had allowed her to sail off to Bruges.

There were nuns, too, at the Hôtel Jerusalem, but when Katelijne spoke to them mildly, they left him alone with her in Adorne’s parlour. He had been there many times in the past: sometimes with Marian; sometimes as a boy about to be condemned to a night, in the Steen, or a thrashing. Adorne had been lenient, on the whole, for a magistrate.

His niece was brown-haired, not fair, and smaller than you would expect of the family. Her slightness made her almost invisible, as did her dark high-revered gown, and the black veil that covered her cap. He thought of Sersanders’s portly white shirt in the geysir. She said, ‘Do we shake hands? I am sad, but not dying.
Ey
, Nicholas.’

‘I liked Banco,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry about Mistress Margriet. I’m sorrier than you know. I heard you got back in time, and I’m glad.’

‘So was I. She liked you,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you had nothing to do with her death. She knew the risk. She wanted that child. They sang Willie’s Nativity music at her funeral.’ She stopped and said, ‘You don’t need to talk about that. Won’t you sit?’

He found a seat, since she did. He said, ‘I mustn’t stay long.’

‘You are going to Antwerp with Diniz. Sersanders told me. What do you think of the bear?’

‘He went back for it. He is an idiot. So are you.’

‘He wanted Uncle to have it, in case the sulphur didn’t arrive. He knows you saved his life. He is truly grateful.’

‘It’s all right,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ve already told him. I won’t lambast Jan, or not while he’s in Bruges.’

‘Oh dear,’ Kathi said. ‘Do you know the Bishop of St Andrews?’

‘Not well enough to re-educate him,’ Nicholas said. ‘What is the main trouble? Money?’

‘A bit. He holds too many benefices and can’t pay for them. And there’s Coldingham, too. I know,’ said Kathi, looking cross, ‘that Willie Roger
aches
for his Chapel Royal choir, but it would be a great boon to Jan and the Bishop if the King would change his mind and not suppress the Priory and give Willie quite so many tenors and altos. It’s been a very fine religious establishment. Dr Andreas says their school was so good that foreign colleges took their orphans for nothing.’

‘How does Dr Andreas know?’ Nicholas said.

Kathi grinned. ‘He looks after Ada’s children when they need it. The Crackbene–Crabbe tribe are old friends, didn’t you know? Also, he fancies Ada, I think. Much chance of that, of course, while Mick is about.’

‘You are opening my eyes,’ Nicholas said, ‘to Dr Andreas.’

‘Really? Have you never noticed?’ Kathi said. ‘Necromancers, astrologers and ordinary prophets: women fall at their feet. Diviners as well. You want to watch. Well, it’s too late now, I suppose.’

‘Much too late. Does he draw up horoscopes?’

‘It would be odd if he didn’t. He’s a by-blow of the astrologer John of Vesalia, the town doctor of Brussels. John of Vesalia was rector of Louvain when Bishop Kennedy was there, blazon three weasels. You know all that. He made those awful predictions in January when the fiery star flew across. Dr Andreas says you ought to be careful.’

‘Of women?’ Nicholas said.

‘Of divining. He says the future can open when you don’t want it to. He thinks you should lead an ordinary family life, and keep away from the occult.’