Gemini (31 page)

He disliked being organised. He was trying, very hard, to keep his breathing even, and the turmoil within him under control. Gelis had come. Whatever it meant in terms of extra anxiety—and it would increase his burdens tenfold—was outweighed, as she had realised too, by the necessity that they should be together. Now he had let go; now he had given into her charge all the part of him that found expression in physical love, he could not manage without her. With her, he could do anything.

So he must leave her in no doubt that he wanted her. The desolation he felt must be set aside, even though it ensured that, for all time, he could never explain what the death of Phemie had truly meant. But one did not repeat one’s mistakes. This time, Gelis came first.

She was in the parlour, and alone. Her face was paler than it had been in winter, and her eyes marked a little with strain and want of sleep. She looked as if she had waited there a long time. She rose, and stood still, and said, ‘Nicholas. I have come at a bad time. I am so sorry.’

Of its own accord, his throat jammed, leaving an ache like a sprain. ‘You know?’

‘About Phemie, yes. Bel told me. But Adorne, arriving like that … What happened?’

‘Bel!’
He was still bewildered. He said, trying to recover, ‘Adorne came, with Andreas, and found her in the chapel. Scheves was kind. Kathi and Saunders were there. He’ll stay at Roslin until the burial. No one knows what will happen after that.’

‘He meant to stay in Scotland for a while,’ Gelis said. ‘Until the baby could travel. What have they called her?’

‘Euphemia,’ he said. ‘She’ll have a plethora of nurses. Cristen. Clémence. Ada. Nanse Preston, even.’ He broke off.

‘What?’ said Gelis. She walked forward and drew him down to the settle, as Bel had done with herself.

He said, ‘I wonder what Robin will make of it? Another rival. He needs so much …’

‘And now Jodi and I are competing as well for your care. Nicholas, you can’t be everyone’s crutch. You don’t need to be. I’m here as well. So is Kathi, and Tobie and Clémence. You walked into all this alone, and you’ve managed for five months. But now we are all with you.’

He said, ‘But I was meant to—’

‘You were meant to prove that you could hold to a straight line on your own. You have sustained it so far. I’m prepared to trust you the rest of the way. So are the others. Nicholas, Nicholas, don’t.’

This was how, stemming his grief, she had held Jodi all through his childhood, wishing that he were Nicholas. Now it was Nicholas.

Presently, when the positions had courteously got themselves reversed, he said, his voice still disconnected, ‘I meant this to be different. I haven’t even told you yet what I feel about seeing you.’

‘Perhaps later,’ Gelis said. ‘You did say that Clémence was with you? She must be running out of small talk by now. Unless she’s found Jodi?’

She had found Jodi. Exploring, Jodi’s father and mother discovered the two of them, deep in a game. Then Jodi looked up and saw Nicholas, and the game flew to the floor.

Much later, Clémence asked, with some briskness, if anyone would mind if she removed Jordan to her own house for the night, as there was something Dr Tobie was waiting to show him. Jodi said No, and then Yes. Gelis kissed Clémence, even before she kissed Jodi goodbye.

Mailie came to say that my lady must be tired, and she had made up the bed.

Nicholas discovered that he also was tired. He said, ‘I have an idea. I go to bed first, and you follow.’

‘It doesn’t sound very seductive,’ Gelis said.

‘They do it in harems,’ Nicholas said helpfully. ‘Anyway, you followed me here.’

She said, ‘What made you think I was coming to you?’ They were upstairs by now. He noticed that Gelis’s coffers had been unpacked, and some of his own belongings moved to the room next to the marital bedchamber. Clémence had been busy.

He said, ‘Well, for one thing, no one has claimed you. Which is just as well, because now you can’t go.’

‘I can’t?’ she said. He was thankful to see that she was shaking as well. He shut the door of the bedchamber.

‘No. It’s a convention. It’s like not leaving before the end of a dinner, unless you can plead you’ve a nose bleed.’ He was suddenly shattered. ‘Of course …’

‘No. I don’t have a nose bleed,’ she said. ‘You’ve gone white.’

‘That’s because—’ He broke off. ‘Do you suppose we could just get there together?’

Where?’

‘On the bed. Anywhere. Oh God,’ said Nicholas, ‘there isn’t time to undress.’

She was laughing, and so was he; and then there was no room even for laughter, because they were as one at last: joined in lust but also in love; knit together in love, but also in constancy.

And be thow nocht, as nocht sone sall thow be;
Forget thi-self and in ensample se
The lyoun, king of bestis, as thou sayis
Sum tyme is fude to megis and to fleis
.

H
APPINESS, THAT MOST
childish of states, is infectious. Furthermore, in its innocence, it will not be hidden, even when tempered with sorrow.

In the weeks that followed, none of his friends required to be told what had happened to Nicholas. Most, like Kathi, were thankful. Others took longer to welcome it.

A growing son, available once more to his father, expects his father’s attention. Nicholas, rather desperately, did what he could, but it was Mistress Clémence who swept Jodi off and embroiled him and his minders in the raucous young community of the Canongate, from whose expeditions of fishing or fowling he returned ragged, filthy and triumphant. Occasionally, he would be sent to exhibit some bedraggled capture to Robin, but never stayed long. Robin, like Jodi’s father, was a deity whose services tended, as now, to be moderated or withdrawn without warning. Usually, someone else was to blame.

At eight, Jodi himself was too young to detect the same reaction in Robin. As he welcomed Jodi, so the bedridden young man greeted Gelis when, friendly and practical, she came to call as she had done in Bruges. She went alone, and so did Nicholas, and neither appeared before him with Jodi. The tact this time, it seemed, was too obvious: Robin showed his annoyance by driving himself and everyone else into a morass of business minutiae, displaying a lightly cutting insistence both in the counting-house and in private with Nicholas.

It was Andro Wodman, the veteran Archer, who diagnosed the root trouble and, one day in the Berecrofts house, put it to Nicholas, who had called. While Adorne remained with Andreas in Roslin, the double house in the Canongate had become home to several new people: the home and offices occupied by Sersanders now housed John le Grant as well as the
Conservator, and opened its doors to the frequent visits of the sailing-master Crackbene, and Dr Tobie. At present, the inhabitants were merely a coterie. They were also, you might say, a company in embryo, awaiting instructions from two very different men.

Both of these, for personal reasons, were at present preoccupied; and the Conservator, like Kathi, was not censorious. Nevertheless, when Nicholas, crossing the road, raised the problem of Robin, Wodman gave his opinion. ‘Of course he’s moody. That’s because you and Tobie are wrong. Robin doesn’t want to talk about business at all. He wants to talk about war. So does John. They just don’t realise it.’

John wasn’t there. John, since his return, had resorted to the same pugnacious isolation he had adopted, according to Gelis, in Bruges. Nicholas stared at Wodman, whose damaged nose, since the oysters, lent a hooting quality to his lightest remark. ‘You think so?’

‘I’ve seen it before. You’re the one they’re afraid of. You’ll have to take the lead.’

By now, Nicholas knew that there were men who were afraid of him, because he intended them to be. Applied to John or Robin, it was mad.

Except that, God knew, fear took different forms, and arose for different reasons. Pride, for instance. He said, ‘Then I suppose I’d better go and talk war to them.’

‘That’s right,’ Wodman said. He had looked grim. ‘Hold an inquest.’

He hadn’t said any more, and presently Nicholas left. Thinking it through, he realised how right Wodman was. He
had
led Robin through such an interrogation at Berwick, but that was not enough. Men subjected to horrors require to talk about horrors, but also to try to find in them some meaning. Men whose imagination, fired by chivalry, still idealised war didn’t want to be offered some well-meaning substitute: now this is all you can manage; forget all your dreams.

That was Robin’s private misery. John’s must be different. John’s wars had been like his own, the happy exercise of a gift for ingenuity, with no particular bias, reprehensibly, towards either side. Until—a little older, a little less footloose—John had found and respected Astorre’s company, and had also discovered a reason to think about causes.

Unlike Robin, John had other passions. He could take to the sea, or make a name with his devices. But he also needed first to digest what had happened at Nancy, to pass this immovable block through his spiritual gut and get rid of it.

Kathi, when Nicholas took the idea to her, was unimpressed by the metaphor, but examined the theory in silence. In the end she said only, ‘I wonder. If you want to do it, they’re in there together just now, Robin and John, talking about the price of slab iron. It wouldn’t be hard to go in
and alter the subject. It might help them. It might put them through hell on the way. It might do that anyway, and not help them.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I asked you. I may have been doing the wrong thing all this time.’

She shook her head. ‘You couldn’t know. None of us could. What Robin needed at first is not necessarily what he needs or wants now. If we have fenced him in, you can show him that there is a gate in the fence.’

‘I’ll go to them,’ Nicholas said, and got up. ‘There are a lot of possibilities, you know. All we have to do is to find out what he wants. Then, I promise you, I’ll see that he gets it.’ He paused, and winced.

‘I know,’ Kathi said. ‘Apart from a body replacement. Nicholas, be careful. Of him, but also yourself. You are not Robin. Don’t try to be.’

‘I know,’ he said, in echo, and stood, looking down. In a year or two, Jodi would be taller than Kathi was at twenty-three. She looked spent, as she had done in Berwick; her face full of slight, sharpened bones and the ends of her mouth curled in irony rather than mischief. Always, Katelijne Sersanders had treated her strength as a boundless commodity; a windblown orchard, spinning winter and summer with blossom, in which the fruit never took time to set. In that, he and she were alike.

But now he had Gelis, who had an ability—noticed before, when they had worked side by side—to render the impossible possible, and to divert him from his enthusiasms, before they exploded from white heat to ashes. Only now her devices were different.

Kathi was smiling. She said, ‘At least, if John and Robin collapse, you will remain firm as a chimney. Nicholas, you look as if you could walk on water.’

‘That,’ he said, ‘is an illusion.’

He had Gelis, but Kathi had nothing. That is, she had a doctor, she had Tobie. And she had Robin. She would have Robin, for he was going there now, to sit with Robin and John, and force them—and himself—to talk about Burgundy. And then about the late Duke. And then about how he had died. And that would be the beginning.

It was a beginning. It was about war; and about leadership; and about responsibility. It was about how peoples were ruled, and might live together. It was not, this time, about the sights and sounds of the battlefield, although that was its provenance. It disposed, for all time, of the unalloyed enjoyment of war for its own sake, although it couldn’t banish completely their instinctive love of a fight. They were men.

Afterwards, he did not seek Kathi out: he had no wish to share this experience. He went home. Later, his balance sensationally restored by quite a different experience, he was able to turn his mind to other things, such as the news that Jordan de St Pol had gone back to Kilmirren, leaving the old lady, Bel, in his house. It was Clémence who told
him, recalling the old fondness between Mistress Bel and young Jodi. Nicholas owed a great deal to Bel of Cuthilgurdy. Her opinion of him, he knew, was not so high. Nevertheless, he would take Jodi to see her. It was safe: even Henry was not there, but lodged with a comrade. He would go, when he had time.

He did not immediately have time. It was remarkable, during this period, how little time Nicholas had, and how unpunctual he had become. He also fell asleep, now and then, at his desk. He had a suspicion that Gelis spent part of the day, every day, recovering her sleep. In fact he knew that she did, for once or twice he had returned to the house of an afternoon and found her fast asleep in her chamber. Which had made him late for something again. He was gripped by carnal delight to a degree of shocking intensity—an immersion in glorious lechery which still retained, at its heart, all the uncomplicated joys of his boyhood, kept for the only woman who matched him exactly in this. For this was her music, this ferocious deployment of instruments; each development unexpected; each thoughtful progression reaching for a different climax.

He gave himself to it, for it would never happen again, or not to this degree. And when it reduced itself, as it must, to the safer levels of marital happiness, he would be enabled, charged with this power, to master anything.

Then Adorne came back from Roslin, and Davie Simpson from the north, where he had been engaged in Cistercian business. He was made welcome, as ever, by the Abbot of Newbattle.

There were two things to be done before the matter of Scotland reopened, with all its new players. Nicholas descended one of the paths to the Cowgate, and fulfilled a serious appointment with Avandale. Then he set off to return to his house, to fulfil his intention of taking his wife and his son to see Bel.

He hadn’t reached home when he was stopped by someone from his own household. ‘Ser Nicol. I was to ask gin ye’d come. Young Maister Henry’s arrived at the house, and won’t budge till he’s seen you.’