To Lie with Lions (6 page)

The next day, she heard the page lifting the pail, and carried the child in his wake to witness the milking. The page, an unexceptional youth, expected the boy to be frightened or thrilled, as if dairies were
unknown in nunneries. Yet, having small brothers, he talked to the boy, and gave him a drink. Coming up, they saw M. de Fleury again in the distance, kneeling over something on the deck. She felt the child halt, but a moment later, M. de Fleury had gone. It annoyed her.

She made no effort therefore, the following day, to stop the child when, seeing the familiar figure again, the boy suddenly tugged his hand free and went forward. Did the man think the child had no wits? This was the person who had brought him from Venice, who had stayed with him until she, Clémence, had reached him. Only perhaps a matter of hours, but a child, a friendly child, would remember all that. And now he was being ignored. She watched him cross the deck in his harness, his cheeks red, his brows straight; and this time M. de Fleury looked up, and paused. Then he said, ‘Look at these,’ and sat back on his heels.

She could not see to what he referred: she thought the objects were raisins. The child sat and M. de Fleury bent forward. The two heads, hessian brown, leaned together. She could hear the child’s high, erratic voice and the other leisurely, masculine one, but could not distinguish the words. Then the man started to rise and the child, getting itself to its feet, faced towards Clémence and said, ‘Que Jodi mange?’

‘Jodi?’ said the man.

She winced. ‘I am training him out of it. He finds his name hard to say. The nuns called him Bouton de Fleury.’

‘I prefer either to Jordan,’ said M. de Fleury. ‘Jodi wants to eat carob seeds. There is a carob seed.’

‘Carobs are nasty,’ said Mistress Clémence, looking him in the eyes.

‘Carob seeds are very nasty,’ he agreed. He had let the child take one. Jodi opened his mouth.

M. de Fleury said, ‘Put it in, have a taste, spit it out. Now here are some raisins …’

The child threw the seed down and stretched out his hand.

‘… but we must ask Mistress Clémence if it is a good time to eat them. Is it allowed?’

‘I think it is,’ she said, using her agreeable voice, and the child backed confidently into her arm, pleased, his cheeks full of fruit. M. de Fleury dusted his fingers, nodded, and began to walk off.

The child half took his weight from her arm and then stopped. The man continued to walk. Just as she thought he had gone he turned and lifted a hand, and she saw the child’s face break into its own private, generous smile, a dimple deep as a pool in each cheek. Then Mistress Clémence took him below and gave him to Pasque, for she
wanted time to consider whether the reason for the long meandering journey had now been explained.

The days and weeks that followed proved her correct. Never in her experience had courtship of lovers been conducted with the finesse of this wordless dialogue between a man and his son. It progressed as it had begun, forming a relationship which included small treats, small adventures, small gifts; but was not built upon them. After a very few days a trust formed; the preternatural tension began to relax.

On the fourth day, M. de Fleury did not come at the usual time. The child strayed, inattentive, from one side of the deck to the other, and hardly replied to the seamen who called to him. When the man did appear, the boy slipped his hand free and went forward. Mistress Clémence halted and watched as M. de Fleury slackened his pace and strolled over.

His appearance had changed. There was a faint warmth in his skin, and fewer hollows, and his shirt was unjewelled and creased. He looked like the student sons she remembered, who used to sleep deeply and late, and then invade her busy nursery, demanding break-fast. He stayed with the child longer than usual, and once laughed aloud.

Mistress Clémence said nothing, but from the next day took her deck-walk much later, to accommodate whatever deferred convalescence was taking place. More: as their patron came to himself, so the disembodied ship, the meandering voyage seemed to find positive focus. The sea turned blue and sparkled with light. Approaching an island, the spaces of canvas and timber would fill with the aroma of flowers. Fish would splash in the waves and nesting birds pause in the rigging, where the nameless pennant flew among stars. Jodi said, ‘Where is maman?’

He had asked Mistress Clémence before, and she had replied plainly as she usually did, although making no promises. And the child seldom fussed since, in the past, his lady mother had always come back, and he was used to friendly faces about him.

But this time, the child asked M. de Fleury, who happened to be in the cabin improving his horse. Latterly it had become apparent that wooden articles bought in the marketplace lacked a certain character which M. de Fleury could supply. A knife, a brush, a paint pot and, it seemed, endless patience had already produced articles which decorated not only the child’s room but the ship, and chirped, rang or clattered to order. As its patron had revived, so the ship itself had begun to stir with new life.

But now, the question was put, and not, this time, to Mistress Clémence. The child began to finger its toy; a stranger would think
that its interest had wandered. Mistress Clémence said nothing. M. de Fleury wiped his brush, laid it carefully down and turned his full gaze on the child. They were both on the floor. He said, ‘Ta maman te manque?’

You miss your mother?
Mistress Clémence gave a dry cough. The child wanted an answer, not an abstract expression of loss. Then she saw the man had suddenly got to his feet and was holding out first one hand, then two. The child scrambled up, and let himself be lifted and swept to the poop windows.

The man swung him round. ‘You see that land over there, far away? Madame ta mère is over there. She cannot come, she is busy. But there are horses for riding over there, and fine boats, and hound-puppies, and cows to be milked. And one day you and I and Mistress Clémence and Pasque will sail to that shore, and find some boats, and some horses, and will ride to where maman will meet us.’

‘Soon?’ said the child. He looked up and round.

‘Soon,’ said M. de Fleury. His voice was easy but his gaze, turned to Mistress Clémence, was dense and unyielding as pewter, as it had been when first they met.

That time, the play with the horse was resumed and the child, she saw, was content. Only, several days later, he said again to the man, ‘And so, where is maman?’

And the man, looking at him, picked him up and seated him again in the crook of his arm and walked again to the windows. ‘Why, you see that land over there, far away? Madame ta mère is over there. She cannot come, she is busy, M. le bouton.’

‘Horses,’ said the child.

‘But there are horses for riding over there …’

‘Boats.’

‘And fine boats …’

‘Puppies.’

‘And hound-puppies, and cows to be milked.’

‘Soon?’

‘Of course, soon.’

The next time, man and boy chanted the recital together, and Mistress Clémence got up and left. To Pasque she said, ‘My head ached.’

Although a peasant, Pasque also came from Coulanges. She said, ‘He hates his lady wife. Do you believe he is truly planning to meet her?’

And Mistress Clémence replied, after a while: ‘He is taking a great deal of trouble to attach the boy to himself. His purpose I do not know. He tells me we are sailing now for Marseilles.’

‘To land?’ said Pasque. When she was pleased, she displayed her very few teeth. When she was extremely pleased, she would dance.

‘Eventually. He is in no hurry. Then we have to prepare the child for a journey through France. Provence; Burgundy. To Dijon in Burgundy.’

‘Dijon?’ said Pasque. ‘The vicomtes de Fleury come from near Dijon. Ser Nicholas wishes to show off his son to his mother?’

‘Hardly,’ said Mistress Clémence. The family château at Dijon was a ruin. M. de Fleury’s disgraced mother was dead; the grandfather locked away in his dotage. M. de Fleury was without brothers and sisters. The child would find no aunts or uncles to greet him at Dijon, no cousins to play with.

‘Then why Dijon?’ said Pasque.

‘I have not been told,’ said Mistress Clémence. She had herself considered the question. The child’s mother might have been sent for, or have demanded a meeting. It might be nothing to do with the child, but merely denote M. de Fleury’s return to the world of affairs. The head of a bank could not vanish for ever. And a child of two years had no place in a bank.

‘M. de Fleury has an army,’ Pasque remarked. ‘They say it is a good way to train up a boy, to put him among men in an army.’

Quite simply, Nicholas de Fleury had bought himself time. For five weeks the vessel of which he was owner floated in the Middle Sea, and gold made it invisible. Even when he finally set foot on shore at Marseilles, quietness followed him still. He was well served, and although René its ruler was absent, the comté of Provence embraced the child and himself with the spring.

The child bloomed. To the uninitiated, Nicholas de Fleury reflected the blooming: a sunlit wall of unknown composition. The journey continued northward through France. For as long as it lasted, Nicholas conducted his life with perfect and costly simplicity, as he had done for three months. Then, reaching Dijon at last, he sat down one day in his room and, taking out his pen and his seals, sent out the commands that would set into motion the plan he had already long formed: the plan interrupted that night in Venice, as he stood with the child in his arms and studied the weeping, desperate face of his wife.

In none of the letters did he say where he was, only that he was travelling in France, and would shortly make his whereabouts public. He was leaving Dijon in any case: the secrecy was for the protection of Jordan, who would stay there in retreat until sent for. They would not be parted for long, and Nicholas made light of his leaving. The child was well served, well protected. Mistress Clémence would
manage the rest. Now, turning his back on the boy, he rode north to where the road joined the Loire, and from there found a boat – a fine-enough boat – to sail him to the castle of René at Angers.

It was the third week in May, and the air over the leafy river was moist, the clouds low, the lions of thunder grumbling faintly abroad in the ether. Unknown to him, a kingdom had fallen, and his plan was already in motion.

Chapter 2

B
Y THE FOURTH
day of June, the house of the Banco di Niccolò in Bruges knew that Nicholas was in France, and by the eighth the news reached Cologne and his child’s mother, Gelis van Borselen.

The company notary Julius, who was also in Cologne, was candidly thankful. Not himself a family man, he had taken little interest in the (somewhat overdue) marriage of Nicholas to this strong-minded young woman. He had shared Nicholas’s evident lack of interest in the resulting progeny. He had found himself quite astonished when Nicholas, performing a total volte-face, actually quartered Venice one night and snatched the child from the arms of its mother.

Julius had found it amusing until he saw the sober faces of all the others who witnessed the kidnapping. Gregorio and his partner Margot; Anselm Adorne and his son and his niece Katelijne; Simon, the chevalier son of Jordan de Ribérac, stared after the vanishing boat as if someone had died.

After Nicholas disappeared, Julius was concerned, as Gregorio was, to restore public confidence. Cursing his wayward padrone during those chaotic first days of planning, Julius was relieved to find less sympathy than he had expected for Gelis, visibly raging through Venice, pouring out threats, gold and a fierce demoniac energy in the effort to track down her son. No one in authority helped. In this quarrel, Venice chose to stay neutral.

Others, too, had held back. Kathi, the niece of Adorne, the Burgundian Envoy, had sided with Nicholas, not the child’s mother. So had Margot, once moved by her fears for the baby to leave even her beloved Gregorio. When, bereft and alone, Gelis van Borselen had stood weeping by the waterside that terrible night, it had been Gregorio who had walked forward in pity and led her back to her home. But he had done nothing since to help her find the child or her husband. And no one knew where Nicholas and the baby had gone.

At first Julius was too busy to care; but he was by nature inquisitive, and finding Gelis hurrying through a public place, would stop and speak to her. At first, learning that he had nothing to tell her, she would treat him with stony reserve. But that changed. Julius enjoyed the pleasant aspects of life and was not a man to cast blame on others. Nor was he shy. When, one day, he asked her why Nicholas had done such a thing, his brashness unexpectedly brought him an answer. Gelis, at first silent, spoke slowly. ‘I kept the child from him. I was afraid.’

Julius knew that much, from Margot. He said, ‘Afraid Nicholas would harm it? Surely not?’

‘I had a reason,’ she said. From a plump child in Bruges, she had grown into a lissome, fair woman of twenty-six with the looks to make a lusty man happy. Although uninterested in her himself, Julius was conscious, at these meetings, that they made a fine pair.

He said, ‘And now?’

She had looked at him. ‘Will he harm Jordan? He might. Even if he does not, how can he heal the shock of that night, stealing him from all that he knows? And he will teach him to hate me.’

Julius said, ‘Margot tells me his nurses have gone.’

‘Even his nurses,’ she said. Her voice was bitter. After a moment she said, ‘But if they are with him, of course it will help.’

Then, as she fell silent, Julius said, ‘What are you going to do?’ He supposed she realised that if Nicholas didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t find him. And meantime she was friendless in Venice, and in Bruges would find no warmer reception, he suspected. He doubted if she had any close relatives living, apart from her cousin Wolfaert at Veere. On the other hand, she had money. Nicholas had endowed her as his wife with a fortune. He must be regretting it now.

She said, ‘What are your plans?’