Gemini

  He heard Henry’s strained, angry voice almost at once; not that it was loud, but because he would know it anywhere. When another young voice replied, he knew he was listening also to Muriella. They were in the room above, leading off the turnpike staircase he was climbing. He stood where he was.

  Muriella was angry as well. She was saying, ‘You’re not my husband! I’ll speak to whom I want! He’s a polite boy. I hate you!’

  ‘He’s a baby! Jo-dee!’ Henry mewed the name like a kitten. ‘He wets the bed. He’ll make you his mammy. If you want a baby, I’ll give you one. You want a man. You don’t want a piddling baby with a goat for a father! Do you know that Nicholas de Fleury isn’t de Fleury at all? He’s a by-blow. No one knows who his father was. His mother was a tart and his wife is a worse one—did you know that she slept with my father? Do you know that half the cripple Berecrofts’s children were sired by Nicholas de Fleury, not Berecrofts? Do you want to play with a boy whose father is dirt?’

  Heigh-ho. Those who eavesdrop never hear good of themselves. With some difficulty, Nicholas de Fleury, by-blow, produced and dwelled on this piece of philosophy. The effort almost made him miss a slight noise. He turned, fast, on the step.

  Below, his face set and sick, stood his other son, Jordan. Nicholas said, softly and sharply, ‘Go. Go outside, down to the river. I’ll come.’ For a moment, he thought the boy would refuse. Then he spun round and went.

  Inside the room, Muriella was speaking. ‘… care? Your father’s a worse goat than that, everyone knows. Jordan isn’t the same as his father. He’s not a bastard. He’s kind. You’re not a bastard, but you make fun of me.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘You sneer at everybody! You tell fibs! Jordan doesn’t wet the bed!’

  ‘How do you know?’ Henry’s voice hardened. ‘Muriella! How do you know?’ Nicholas moved.

  The girl’s voice said petulantly, ‘I just know. I haven’t been in his bed.’

  ‘Then he couldn’t give you a baby,’ Henry said. His voice softened. He said, the cajolery mixed with a kind of off-hand complacency: ‘Look. You like to look, don’t you? Go on. You like it when we do it?’

  A moment passed. The girl said something, obscurely. Her voice was shy.

  ‘And there you are, now. And me. Isn’t that nice? I’m going to give you a baby,’ said Henry, in a soothing voice broken by hurry.

  Which was when Nicholas, sick to the heart, encompassed the stairs and, not quite in time, crashed back the door.

  They were on the floor, rosily geometrical, and fully and rhythmically conjoined. Henry, blind and deaf, could not at once stop; Nicholas pulled him off and sent him sprawling. ‘Dress!’ The blue eyes, glaring at him, were like those of a madman, what with near-coition and fury and anguish.

  The girl was bare from the waist, her legs thin and white, the place between them apricot-coloured. She was sobbing. She said, trying to bring her skirts lower, ‘Don’t look!’

  ‘Why? Is there more to see?’ Nicholas said. When the boy, part-laced, came at him like a fiend he slapped him hard on the face and then flung him back in a corner. The girl tried to run for the door.

  ‘Later,’ said Nicholas, grasping her arm. He pushed her into a chair, and set his back to the door. He said to her, ‘Shall I call your father?’

  She stared at him, speechless. Henry said, ‘Do. We’ll deny all you say.’ He was still breathing in gasps.

  ‘All right,’ Nicholas said. ‘We’ll call Muriella’s father, and if she says this didn’t happen, we’ll ask a physician to attest her virginity. Yes?’

  ‘No!’ said Muriella.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Henry said. ‘She’s been with plenty of others. I’ve never touched her. I’ll tell them.’

  She didn’t quite understand. ‘I haven’t!’ she said. For a moment, she just sounded indignant.

  Henry said, ‘You’ve been with Jordan de Fleury, his son. You told me. He wets the bed.’

  She stared at him. Nicholas said, ‘You’d swear to it? That she and Jordan are intimate?’

  ‘All the time. Everywhere,’ Henry said. In the midst of the horror, Nicholas ached for him. Always, always, no matter whom it hurt, Henry lied to cover his sins. Perhaps it was in his nature, or instilled by the Church. More likely it had its roots in a very old fear: the dread of his grandfather’s mockery; and later, of Simon’s. Other people solved the problem by admitting to everything.

  Nicholas said, ‘Then I’m afraid you’d still be proved wrong. Jordan is too young to be anyone’s lover just yet. It’s just as well, isn’t it? You do realise, both of you, that if Muriella became pregnant, you would have to marry? Exactly as your father did, Henry? Unless, of course, you really plan to spend your lives together. But it seems a little early to force Muriella to choose. Especially the kind of coward who will deny everything and put the blame on the girl. Do you want to marry him, Muriella?’

  ‘No! I hate him!’ she said.

  ‘It didn’t look like it,’ said Nicholas dryly. ‘Or is it just the attention of the opposite sex that you enjoy? I think it is. I think it is someone’s duty to have a serious talk with your father and perhaps your confessor, and suggest they find a husband for you immediately.’

  ‘I wouldn’t marry him!’ said Muriella.

  ‘Then I shall tell them exactly why it is necessary,’ Nicholas said. ‘I shall tell them in any case, if Henry comes near you again. Henry, you will leave here tonight. I don’t care what excuse you invent. Muriella, you are coming north with Bonne and myself, and you will stay in whatever convent your father may choose. The excuse will be the war, but by the time the war ends, you will be married. Do you hear?’

  ‘Who are you? Who are you to say so?’ said Muriella. She was weeping again.

  ‘A goat,’ shouted Henry. ‘An old rutting bastard who can’t bear to see young people getting more than he does.’

  ‘I thought the premise was that I was getting too much,’ Nicholas said. ‘Never mind. Put me down as someone who happens to know what this kind of thing leads to, and who is going to stop it, whatever you do. And Muriella: you will not meet Henry again. You will not expect to meet Jordan either.’

  She was scarlet, her face swollen, her voice choked, but she still managed to speak. ‘There isn’t any point, is there?’ she said. ‘If he’s just a stupid boy who can’t do anything yet.’

  BY THE TIME Nicholas appeared downstairs, and made small talk, and bought himself time to walk down to the river, the sun had almost gone, and he felt as drained as the landscape in the withdrawing light. The wind had dropped, so that the sound of the water was clear and level and soothing. As he walked down through the grass, a grazing horse lifted its head and watched him, and a rookery at the top of some trees lobbed out some brickbats of sound, and fell silent again. A jaundiced line of swans trundled from one bank to the other, as if pulled on a wire. Jordan was sitting, low on the bank, watching the water. When Nicholas dropped at his side, he didn’t speak.

  Neither did Nicholas. He hadn’t even thought what he was going to say, or not say. He didn’t have the gall to compare this exhaustion, this access of mental paralysis, with what was Robin’s daily portion.

  In the end, it was Jordan who spoke. He said, ‘It’s all right. I know it’s not true.’ After a moment he turned fully round and repeated it, touching Nicholas’s hand where it lay on his updrawn knee. ‘Father?’

  It was not a form of address Jordan used very much now. Generally he called him nothing at all, unless formal custom required it. To everyone else, his father was Nicol. Jordan said, ‘Father, you can’t do everything for everyone. It’s all right.’

  Nicholas looked at him. It came to him that all the time he had been agonising over what Jordan had heard, Jordan himself had been fretting over what he, Nicholas, must be feeling. To Jordan, whether or not Henry had spoken the truth hardly mattered. His father had been vilified, and he wanted to comfort him.

  Nicholas took the hand and lay b
ack on the grass, carrying it with him in both of his own. Jordan dropped back beside him. His hair, which was long and brown, lay flattened under his wide, sunburned cheek. His eyes were on Nicholas.

  Nicholas said, ‘It’s all right for me, too. People say silly things. You don’t need to heed them. I was troubled about you and Muriella.’

  Jordan’s brow wrinkled, in a fine little print under his hair. He said, ‘I was silly there. She belongs to Henry, doesn’t she? She was just using me to make him feel jealous.’

  Nicholas smoothed and bent the flat fingers. He said, ‘I think she likes you both, but there was something of that in it, yes. In any case, she’s too young to be serious. She’ll go off to finish her training, and then her father will choose her a husband. By that time, you should have met twenty more. The world is full of nice girls. That’s one of the good things about it.’

  ‘I like Margaret of Berecrofts,’ Jordan said.

  ‘I know. So do I,’ Nicholas said. ‘And remember, I’m a fountain of wisdom on girls. Anything you want to know, or to tell me, just come.’

  ‘You think you know everything?’ Jordan said. ‘You’ll find it’s the other way round. One day, you’ll just come to me.’ He sat up and, retrieving his hand, leaned on it, smiling.

  Nicholas said, ‘I think I have done, today.’

  He was thinking about it when Jordan, bending suddenly, gave him a fierce, intent kiss on the cheek, releasing it slowly. Then he disengaged and jumped up, as if returned to himself, his face full of unexpected, raw happiness. He said. ‘Then come on, old man. Race you back to the house.’

  They ran like demons. Nicholas won.

  Chapter 35

  In tyme of weir unto none erdly wicht

  Patent suld be thar portis on the nycht.

  THE TOWN OF Berwick-upon-Tweed was invested that autumn; its walls battered by guns and its harbour closed to supply ships. The siege lasted two months, and then was called off because of the cost and the weather. The citadel was of course untouched, and the townspeople had mostly remained, knowing that the attack couldn’t last long. The besieged had been slightly better fed than the besiegers. There had been two very bad harvests: it made you wonder sometimes what was happening to the weather these days. Julius took part in the skirmishing, and enjoyed himself so much that he stayed till November.

  In Edinburgh, the King hanged Alec Brown, outlawed Peter his brother, and offered Leithie Preston a vast sum, which he refused, as a reward for bringing back the wine-ship from Orkney. Nicholas, freed after a murderous journey with two hostile girls and a nun, found Leith in an uproar, and John le Grant in a timber yard, smashing things. He took him back to the Leith house with Gelis. Father Moriz was there, waiting to hear the news about Bonne. Nicholas informed him, in two words. He had already told Gelis all she needed to know.

  He listened to what everyone had to tell him, inside both his own house and several others, and including friends who accosted him outside taverns. Then he set off, with John and Moriz and Gelis, back to Edinburgh. Before he went, he had a brief exchange with his own chief skipper, Mick Crackbene. At the end of it, Nicholas had walked away and turned back.

  ‘You said your Ada couldn’t read?’

  ‘She can now. I taught her,’ Crackbene said.

  Gelis had overheard. ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘Ask me later,’ Nicholas said. He wished he meant it. He wished she didn’t know that he didn’t mean it. At least she knew—he made sure that she knew—that after Eccles and Malloch, he found it a shattering relief to be back.

  In Edinburgh, he saw Robin, left a message for Tobie, and was collected by Adorne for a swift session of the King’s inner council, without the knowledge of the King. It was held, for that reason, in the house of the Abbot of Cambuskenneth in Aikman’s Close, which led off the High Street just a little downhill from his own house.

  They were all there when Nicholas entered with Adorne—eight men of good age, distributed about a low-ceilinged, wainscoted room in their autumn doublets and robes, and guaranteed a fast, incisive meeting with Abbot Henry in the chair, which he was, despite the presence of the highest officers of the kingdom. Years as part of the procuratorial team representing Scotland at Rome, years close to the royal Court at Stirling as Abbot of the wealthy monastery over the river had made Henry Arnot a highly visible statesman, known to churchmen and politicians alike. Small, quick, sharp-featured, round as a pomander, Arnot made chancellors tremble by the speed of his oral delivery, which Colin Argyll once calculated to exceed that of a hodful of hailshot dropped from the spire of Durham Cathedral. In languages other than Latin, it was even quicker. He knew Adorne and his oldest son well. His cousin was married to a Brown of Couston. He commissioned music from Whistle Willie. He was a confidant of the Queen.

  M. de Fleury was invited to mention anything relevant to the kingdom’s condition, following his findings in the Borders and Leith. He did so.

  The company was asked to consider short- and long-term projections and policies for the war with England, taking into account the King’s views on Berwick, and the fact, just made public, that Louis of France had suffered a second seizure.

  He didn’t need to elaborate. Alec Brown had been killed because the King had discovered he was still working for and in England. So were half the other merchants in Berwick. But to the King, Berwick had become a symbol, a token, an obsession.

  The English war had declined because of the winter, but also because England was being challenged on too many fronts. Now one threat was receding.

  Drew Avandale spoke to Adorne. ‘Seaulme. I can see France trying to buy peace with England. Can you see them attempting the same with the Duchess of Burgundy? Would Maximilian agree to a truce?’

  ‘If it were unknown to England,’ Adorne said. ‘So my correspondents think.’

  ‘So do the traders,’ said Nicholas. ‘It would free England to invade us next spring. But whatever the King may wish, men are going to hesitate to die over Berwick.’

  ‘What would they die for?’ said Henry Arnot.

  He was answered by the other Abbot, Archie Crawford. ‘Until now, the King, or what the King represents. If that is to continue, the King must hear advice. If that does not continue, in my opinion the country would still unite for one reason only: to drive out an overlord.’

  ‘And will the King hear advice?’ said Argyll. ‘Or are we here to look for a successor?’

  ‘Hardly, when I am sitting here,’ said Drew Avandale. ‘Colin, we don’t have time to waste. We have a grown king, with young sons to follow him. There may be some who would like to replace him, but if we act as we should, there will never be a faction with popular backing to oust him. We have to find ways to guide him, that is all. Will? Seaulme? Archie?’

  It was Adorne who replied; Adorne who, as a charming and experienced foreigner, had been allowed as close to this young King as anyone. Adorne said, ‘It is time to ask the Queen.’

  ‘So I happen to think,’ Avandale said. ‘So, I think, do we all. Abbot Henry? You know her grace better than anyone. Stirling is the home of her children, and where she spends much of her time. She has been trained well; her brother rules Denmark; she is no stranger to statecraft. Would it place too much burden upon her to bring her actively into our plans?’

  ‘She is half there already,’ said Henry Arnot. ‘She has her own court, her own advisers, her own views. She is loyal to her royal husband, but knows of his difficulties. She would respond. But whoever visits the Queen is bound to lose the King’s trust. You must choose carefully.’

  There was an hour more. At the end, Avandale and the others went off, and the Abbot, neatly entrapping the Burgundians, invited them to his room for a dish of cheese and imported olives and pasta, which he thought a Genoese might enjoy, while continuing to talk about bullion.

  Much of the recent discussion had been about money: tax-raising, coining and, finally, storage. Mints and treasure chests required stout stone hou
ses. In Edinburgh, coins had been pressed in the stone house Adorne had once leased from the Swifts. The tiled house in his care at Blackness had been used as a royal storehouse and mint. The Precentor of the Order of St John hoarded treasure at Torphichen, as his counterpart in England stored the war funds of the English King. The Abbot of Holyrood had confided half the church plate of the monastery to another Swift, chaplain Walter, who had a stone house in Edinburgh. In his reprobate days, Nicholas himself had used part of his premises in the Canongate to mint illicit coins. In places like Berwick and Edinburgh, the merchants’ valuables, the coining-irons, the garrison’s wages were kept in time of war, in the castle, not the town. But gold was hidden everywhere; and so were jewels; and expensive garments; and documents worth more than the gold. And faced with an invasion, you had to know where.

  Expatiating, the Abbot of Cambuskenneth had noticed his liturgical hour-glass. With an exclamation, he bounded from the table and lit a candle, still declaiming at speed. Nicholas assumed, since it was broad daylight, that this was a prelude to prayer. The Abbot said, ‘You had finished? Ah, good. Follow me.’ Since Adorne willingly got up and did so, Nicholas left the table as well.

  Instead of leading them to the chapel, the Abbot took them down to a cellar. Below that was another. It was full to the echoing roof with large boxes. ‘How careless of me. He will be waiting. Now where …?’ said the Abbot, to himself.

  Adorne, smiling, took the candle from him and touched the flame to others planted about the large, uneven chamber. Nicholas said, ‘You’ve been here before.’

  ‘I haven’t had time to tell you,’ said Adorne. ‘We were only shown it the other day.’

  We. A muffled banging echoed from the end of the cavern. Adorne said, ‘Abbot?’

  ‘I hear it,’ said Henry Arnot. ‘Ah. There they are. Good.’ He delved into his skirts like Lang Bessie and lifted out a prodigious steel key. It didn’t bleat. Holding it, the Abbot trotted past what he had been looking at, which was a stack of brass handguns.