Gemini (91 page)

He sank again, and hit his last rock. He didn’t know, lurching backwards, that the afterwave was about to pick him up and throw him, half conscious, into just such a shallow lade as he had imagined. He lay there, half on silt, half in water. When he stirred, not long after, it was to find the rain had stopped; the water had loosened its grip; and the level was lower. Only the boughs of trees, high on the bank, showed where the last block of water had passed.

He did not think he could move, but he did; fanning into the water until the stream received him again, and he swam. He was close to the confluence when his gorged eyes perceived the cradle of boughs that had been cast up on the slope of one bank, and settled there, half out of the water.

Someone was sleeping there, lifted into it perhaps by a wave. Then he saw that there was not one person, but two.

It took a long time to reach them. He would think he had progressed; and then a surge would buffet his shoulders and snatch at his limbs and the nest would recede, so that he had to try all over again. When he touched the embankment, he could hardly climb to the ledge, and grasped at bushes as he made his way over and knelt. But by then, he knew what he would see.

Both men were fair, but he thought that nothing in life could ever approach the matchless purity of the young face, its fine bones upturned to the sky, the heavy lids closed, the soft lips parted a little, as if desiring to speak.

Simon lay on his breast, as he must have arrived, lifting himself with the last of his strength to gather the boy safe from harm; and then sinking down, his eyes open, to weep.

His eyes were still open, blue in the face which, at the last, had lost all its petulance. And Henry’s gilt hair, loosed and fallen over his shoulder, was interwoven and mixed with the fair hair of Simon de St Pol. Both were dead.

A
NSELM
A
DORNE CLIMBED
down before anyone else, and knelt in silence, his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. Then, having permission, he signed for his men. He and his captain drew Simon from the place of his finest passage of arms: the act of chivalry completed not for his own glory, but for the sake of another. But only Nicholas laid tender hands on the boy, and lifted him, and carried him uphill himself, aided by steadying arms. At the top, there were litters.

Andro lay in one, his eyes closed, but breathing still. Two more, drawn well aside, received those who were not. Men brought cloaks to cover the crushed and torn bodies. You could tell how beautiful they had been. Fair; so fair.

Nicholas’s own clothing, too, was in shreds. As he knelt back from the pallet, he felt Adorne’s hands on his shoulders, moving lightly to explore the bloody hacks and gouges and misshapen contusions that he could see but not, as yet, feel. Then someone, coming with cloths, began swiftly to tend them, and Adorne, who had gone to give orders, reappeared with a man at his side. ‘Nicol, this is my courier. Tell us everything you know.’

Pain returned while he was speaking, and he began to shiver, and they brought him something to drink, and a rough shirt, and a cloak. He went through what he had to say twice, and then everyone vanished, and he was alone. The courier would leave now. The rest of them had gone to uncover the boats and prepare to cross while the Tweed was still running high, and the Till’s flooding upstream held the soldiers’ attention. Once across, Nicholas would be given means to take him to Kelso where, with fitting reverence, the crypt of the Abbey would receive Simon and Henry de St Pol for the interim, and where he could stay, if he wished. It was only an hour’s ride away.

Adorne would not be with him. Adorne was to follow his courier north, taking Andro, for there were twenty thousand enemies at the door, and the King’s brother leading them. Nicholas, said Adorne, had done enough.

Adorne would not greatly mourn Simon, who had been cavalier with his own son, and whose weaknesses he despised. Equally, he had had small time for Henry’s undisciplined wielding of steel, although he had observed, perhaps, Nicholas’s forbearance. Adorne’s compassion was for Nicholas, and was rooted in those first days in Bruges when—to general derision—Nicholas had not only claimed the name of St Pol, but appeared to believe in the claim. Adorne had always been a humane judge. However baseless the contention, he was honouring it. For—he would argue—if Nicholas held it to be true, he was suffering today the loss of a father in Simon, and a half-brother and nephew in Henry.

He did not know more than that.

To an outsider, Nicholas had little cause to mourn Simon, a man who
had shown him nothing but violence; who had stabbed and hounded him as a boy; who had, fatally, sent a man to oppose him in Trebizond; who had first sided with Gelis in her misery and then, persecuting her and Jodi, had come near to causing their deaths. Who had found it easy to blame Nicholas for the death of Lucia, Simon’s sister, and had done his best to kill him just before, in an agonising fight stopped by Adorne. Who had hoped to see Nicholas die in Madeira, and had taught Henry then, and ever after, to hate and despise him. So that Henry, too, over and over, had tried to cause harm to Nicholas, and to Jodi his cousin.

So an outsider would say. But a son would try—had always tried—to understand Simon, a man of divine looks and all the physical attributes of knighthood, whose rearing had been blighted by the lazarhouse that was his home; by his hated, too-early marriage; and, above all, by the brilliant, absent, acerbic father who mocked his intellectual shortcomings and dispatched him rejected to Scotland, away from the golden arena of France.

And a father would feel love and pride and agonising pity for Henry, so alone and afraid, and beyond all but the most tentative touch of the lunatic happiness: the stupid, profligate de Fleury happiness that might have been his if he, Nicholas, had had the imagination to step out of his role and care for Katelina, study her, strive to understand her as he had learned to do, finally, with Gelis.

He had given Katelina happiness, too, in the end. Then she had died.
I leave you my soul and my son
.

He had tried. Because of this implacable feud, his path and Henry’s had lain mostly apart. When they met, Nicholas had protected him as best he could, and tried to guide him a little, and staked his own life, as was only fair, in the process. It had not been sufficient. Henry would have been better with a father wiser than Nicholas, or more ruthless. The truth was that no rescue was possible while Simon lived, and his father. From these two, loved and hated and feared, Henry derived his coherent being: they represented all that he was, all he wanted to be. Subtracted from the St Pols, Henry would have found no highway to happiness. He would have ceased to exist.

He had ceased to exist.

On the pallet, his face was uncovered. Now, the features were stern: set in the timeless disdain of the dead. Before, the softness had said something different. Perhaps, with the last flicker of life, the boy had felt the touch of Simon’s gathering arms, and had seen the face of his father, come for him.

The storm broke for Nicholas then. The black pillar of grief with its debris crashed upon him unawares, overwhelming in its ferocity; worse than the sorrow for his people at Nancy, for Godscalc or even for Umar and Marian; Felix; Zacco … reaching back beyond that, to a bottomless
misery he could not remember; beating him down as he crouched. He wanted to scream. He could not keep silent.

Anselm Adorne, hearing, set his lips but did not come near. Andro Wodman, forced awake, clenched his eyes to shut out the anguish.

O
N THE SAME
day, Sunday, the twenty-first of July, 1482, James, King of Scotland, was riding south at the head of an army on his way to the Tweed, to confront the far greater army of Gloucester. He intended to save his proud town of Berwick. He was also responding, as royalty should, to the perfidy of Sandy his brother, who had joined the English he once claimed to loathe, and was leading them, insolently, cynically, against his own King.

On James’s cheek was the red flush of his family; and behind him trod the files of yoked oxen dragging his guns, commanded by a bright-eyed Tam Cochrane, full of masonic fervour and deaf to the cries of his friends.

Towards the south, it seemed to be raining.

T
HE HEAVY RAIN
dashed into Edinburgh that evening, pelting upon Adorne’s courier as he raced with his dispatch to the Castle. He delivered it to Chancellor Avandale and the King’s uncle Atholl, who was now Governor of the Castle and all it contained: its armoury and its seals; its charter-house and its treasure; its wells of sweet water and its cellars of ceiling-high stores; its defensible walls reverberating to the roar of the livestock within. This was according to plan. Immediately the King took the field, his officers of state were to disperse: some to spread about the Castle and burgh; some to accompany the King.

Indeed, the courier’s first port of call on this journey had not been the Castle. An able man of Adorne’s personal household, he had already been stopped, two hours south of Edinburgh, by the vanguard of the royal army, on its way to meet more troops at Lauder. The King was not yet with them, he was happy to find, so that he delivered his message, in full, to the Earls of Argyll and Huntly, with all the military detail he had memorised. He had Lord Cortachy’s leave. Lord Cortachy had instructed him to convey his message to the King’s statesmen and his commanders, but, under pain of death, not to the King.

He had also been asked, on a lesser matter, to say nothing yet of the death of St Pol and his son. It was of minor importance, except to the family, and Adorne had wished, humanely, to tell Kilmirren tomorrow himself. The courier respected his master, and said nothing of it, even when seized outside Huntly’s pavilion by three Floory Land men—the priest, the doctor, the gunner—desperate for news of Nicol de Fleury. He told enough to set their minds at rest—that the man was safely back from his mission in England, but had elected to stay, reason unknown, on
the Border. Master Wodman had taken a wound, but should be back in Edinburgh with Lord Cortachy in the morning.

The three had been silent at first and then, he suspected, had made straight for their men and the ale in a way that their leaders would not have approved. Or perhaps, after what he had told them, Argyll and Huntly would concede that there was something to celebrate.

They were pleased at the Castle as well, although they interrogated him for a long time, and he was glad when they let him retire, leaving the Chancellor and Archbishop Scheves and Master Whitelaw and the Abbot of Holyrood to assimilate what he had told them. He was particularly glad not to be at Lauder when the King finally got there. It hadn’t looked much of an army to him: more of an arbitrary medley of companies from different parts of the country, all with different masters and different objectives and different grievances. They said, and he knew it for true, that you could hardly hold a burgh court in Scotland without a fight breaking out over something. They would never get near the enemy, that little lot. They’d be too busy fighting each other.

A
FEW DOORS
away, Avandale’s voice had become very level. ‘Darnley isn’t there. The King is almost at Lauder and Darnley hasn’t arrived. What has happened? They had enough warning?’

‘Rain,’ said the Archbishop. ‘They have to come from Lochmaben. It’ll slow everything down. Gloucester too. And the guns.’

Whitelaw grunted. There was nothing to say about the guns that had not already been said. The great ordnance, thank God, was still in the Castle. But despite all they could do, Cochrane had persuaded Cathcart and the rest to take the medium artillery with them. He had designed the carriages, and fashioned the balls, and planned the trajectories, just as he had constructed the defences of Berwick. Whatever anyone said, he was going to put his work to the proof. He was going to save Berwick for the King.

The fight over the guns had been lost. As a result, their artillery was exposed in the field, instead of where it would be needed. Darnley’s absence posited an even greater disaster. The King was marching to war with a quarrelsome, incomplete army, and nothing between him and annihilation but the golden tongue of Argyll, the broad-spoken persuasion of Huntly, the short admonitions of Buchan his uncle, and James’s own understanding, if it ever dawned, of the odds now against him.

They had always known that he would hurl himself south without thinking. Given time, he would sometimes reconsider. It was thanks, one supposed, to the slowness of the guns that he had progressed initially no further than Soutra. By now, crawling to Lauder, he would be aware of the power of the English army and the sparsity of his own. And Argyll,
fortified by the news from Cortachy’s courier, could give him an honourable reason for retiring. Sandy was not the traitor he seemed. In return for little more than free reinstatement Sandy would abandon the English and come back to his brother. He had said so to de Fleury in York. He had written it down.

It might be enough. Taking counsel; setting his mind to what he was being told, James might well, at his best, take the responsible action of stopping the march and electing to return to his position of strength, there to negotiate. It was what they had hoped, even before de Fleury had supplied concrete evidence that it was possible. But since a nation’s security cannot depend entirely on chance, the King’s ministers had made a further provision, these many weeks past. If the King marched, and if the English attacked on the east, the Warden of the West March would bring his men to join the King’s host. And if, having joined him, the Lord Darnley found the King’s position untenable, and the King deaf to the advice of his officials, he would return him to Edinburgh by force.

John Stewart of Darnley had agreed. He had undertaken to perform, if necessary, what was an act of high treason because he, too, was a Stewart; second cousin to both King James and Avandale; kinsman to the three royal uncles; claimant to Lennox and grandson of the first seigneur of Aubigny. Darnley would bring with him men from the greatest families of Lennox and Ayrshire and Renfrewshire. Afterwards, he and they would be sure of indemnity.