The Unicorn Hunt: The Fifth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘The other boy’s father. Claes,’ said Henry. ‘The man with the wife you got under you. The wife that’s birthing my brother. Now he can’t be a knight, can he, my brother? Now that baby won’t have a father like I have?’

  ‘Oh, my hinny!’ said Bel, and found tears of heartbreak and laughter creeping down her cheeks.

  Simon said, ‘What is he saying?’

  She could have lied. She could have pretended not to know. But Henry was not going to leave it. Bel said, ‘He means he stabbed Nicholas de Fleury. He seems to have had several reasons.’

  ‘Stabbed …’ Simon stared at the boy. You could see the anger leaving him.

  ‘I killed him,’ said Henry.

  ‘No,’ said Bel. Simon looked at her. She said, ‘He was hurt, I’m afraid, but not mortally. And he kept quiet about it. You owe Nicholas something this time.’

  ‘Good God! Henry stabbed Nicholas?’ Simon said. Surprise and pleasure dawned on his face. Henry’s face, too, slowly lit up.

  ‘You’re pleased?’ Bel said.

  ‘Well,’ said Simon. He looked at Henry. ‘But not dead?’

  Bel said, ‘Your son would be in the Tolbooth if Nicholas de Fleury were dead.’

  Henry said, ‘The other boy wouldn’t do that.’

  Bel said, ‘For Christ’s sake … There is no other boy, Henry. Your father wants you, not a baby by anyone else. It’s not even born yet.’ She rounded on Simon. ‘How could you do this to him?’

  ‘What?’ said Simon. He hadn’t even been listening. He said, ‘Should I get Henry away? Who else knows what he did?’

  ‘No one who will tell. Don’t worry,’ said Bel with heavy irony. ‘You and Henry are safe.’

  ‘But de Fleury will want a price for his silence?’

  ‘Such as money?’ said Bel. ‘Or maybe a good suit of armour? I think de Fleury, being normal, was willing to spare a silly young child. He took the blow, and he didn’t cry murder. If you owe him a return, it’s one of perpetual gratitude.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simon absently. He regarded the boy, and then stretched out to ruffle his hair. ‘So what have you to say for yourself? My God! Stabbing apprentices!’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ said Henry. Relief filled the painful chasm in Bel’s ample chest.

  ‘Well, you tried,’ Simon said. ‘I’ve reared a monster. And now I suppose I’ve got to hide you at Kilmirren. I expect you’ll try to stab the master-at-arms next, or your aunt Lucia. Did someone give you your supper?’

  ‘He’s had all he wants,’ Bel said. ‘We all need sleep.’

  ‘I don’t want her here,’ Henry said, his shining eyes raised. ‘Tell her to go away. This house is for men.’

  ‘How ungallant,’ said Simon. ‘But I suppose there’s something in it. I’ll find a nice horse to take Mistress Bel home in the morning.’

  ‘Why not tonight? There’s a good moon,’ said Bel.

  ‘Now you’re joking,’ said Simon; and smiled at his son.

  The Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in Edinburgh were not entirely eager to open their doors that same evening to some wealthy foreigner stabbed by thieves in the High Riggs; but Nicholas de Fleury arrived escorted by none other than Dr Andreas, and on the powerful recommendation of the Burgundian Envoy himself.

  For the sake of Anselm Adorne, Sir William Knollys gave room to the Fleming who, in his time, had been a considerable nuisance to the Order in the Levant. To those of his companions who objected, Sir William pointed out that the hospice had a free bed. It was understood that the cut was slight, and that Dr Andreas himself would patch it up and stay overnight. Having given the appropriate orders, Sir William left for the banquet taking with him the worst of the dissidents. He had never liked John of Kinloch.

  As ever, the Greyfriars’ hospitality was excellent, and the food and entertainment first class. The choir performed twice, and there were jesters and jugglers and mountebanks, followed by a short play. Accepting his prize, Simon de St Pol was subdued, it was noted, and left early, as well he might. The King and his brethren took cognisance. When the occasion had finally ended, the King’s sister Mary, Countess of Arran, rode her palfrey downhill to the house of the Order, and there demanded to see the lady Gelis van Borselen’s husband. With her was her friend and mentor of old, Dame Betha Sinclair from Haddington. And following her were the Burgundian Envoy and his niece. Adorne was wearing his unicorn’s horn.

  To do him justice, the nursing brother in charge was not happy to find a quartet of visitors about to ascend to his patient, but was not likely to prevail against a Sinclair, more royal than royalty. They proceeded to the sickroom together.

  Katelijne, entering last, saw only the Princess’s quivering back as she recited, without preamble or greeting, ‘M. de Fleury, I am Mary of Scotland. The King wishes to thank you, and so do I, for saving the young lord, our brother.’

  Adorne coughed. Katelijne, edging round into view, examined Nicholas de Fleury in his latest manifestation.

  Not surprisingly, he was in bed. Lying back in bleached flax he looked as collected as he had in black damask, and was displaying a dimple. His underlids were the colour of slate. He said, ‘You make too much of it, my lady. The child St Pol lacked a stern enough tutor: I supplied one.’

  She sat down by the bed. ‘The boy defended his father. His grace my brother did not behave as he should. But for you, there might have been a tragedy. And now, by way of reward, I hear you have been set upon and robbed. Tell me how you were attacked, and by whom. We shall catch them. They will suffer.’ Her hands were clasped tightly together.

  Katelijne saw de Fleury’s eyes rest on them and then heard him embark, with easy calm, on the fiction she had already heard. A sudden onslaught, a cut, and some blood loss. He would be on his feet and home by tomorrow.

  She was entranced by his skill, and longed to know his reasons for lying. To protect the son of Simon de St Pol? Nothing she had seen of him had suggested that order of sensibility – even if, as her uncle supposed, the long-standing feud was now over. And she doubted if that was the case. There was something in the face and the voice that suggested that a charge of murder against the son of Simon de St Pol was the least of what this extraordinary man really wanted. Then she saw his eyes on her, and closed her mind quickly.

  Mary, half-Flemish princess of Scotland, clearly had no understanding of either the man or the real situation. Young, untried, of middling intelligence, she knew her duty, you would guess, and once had leaned upon and loved this man’s wife, and so had been chosen as envoy to thank him for his intervention.

  You could see, looking at her, how she must have dreaded the childhood exile imposed on her aunts, tied for life to ducal, royal husbands in far-away lands. You could see how she must have been overjoyed when the powerful family Boyd, close to the throne, ambitious to influence the King, swept aside all her international suitors and forced through her marriage to the adept, vigorous Tom who – when he came back from Denmark, from the wonderful scheme which would give the King land, money, a bride – would build her a palace in Scotland and make her fully wife, mother, and chatelaine among her own kindred and friends.

  An innocent, to whom it seemed Gelis van Borselen had been mildly attached. An innocent who did not understand, it was apparent, why her husband’s father Lord Boyd appeared rather less often at Court, or who did not hear the rumours which even Burgundians heard. Which especially Burgundians heard, since the man responsible for some of them was said to be Nicholas de Fleury.

  Perhaps public opinion was wrong. Certainly, here, Nicholas de Fleury hadn’t mentioned the Boyds. On the contrary, he was explaining, although not very energetically, how well his dear wife was bearing her pregnancy, and how it pained him to be far from her side. But – new to fatherhood – he understood that some young mothers craved privacy, and he had agreed, at her wish, not to leave his affairs until the glad time was near. In March or April, they thought. By March or April, of course, he
would be in Bruges.

  He spoke with unstinted frankness; and if he caught his breath once, the rest of the time he sounded like a man in full health.

  Katelijne listened. This performance was less believable, by a long way. The Princess appeared to accept it; Dame Betha, proficient with daughters, was more likely to have reservations. Katelijne wondered what Whistle Willie would think, or Mistress Phemie, who was accomplished with words. They weren’t naïve, and neither was M. de Fleury, whom you didn’t trust even when singing. As Willie had said outright to him once, it took a knave to make cunts of his tonsils. She wasn’t supposed to have overheard that.

  She did not interrupt: it was not her place. The sickly conversation came to an end. The Princess, with tears in her eyes, stretched out her hand and laid it on that of de Fleury. He smiled gratefully, and she removed it and rose. She had no natural grace, and her reddish-brown hair and long face were unimproved by the geometry of pearled wire and veiling that surrounded them. Even with the canvas inside, you could count her ribs through her braided silk bodice. She said, ‘What will you name the child when it arrives?’

  Adorne turned a natural movement into an indolent one. Katelijne watched through her lashes until she saw de Fleury had started to smile. He said, ‘Of course, the name will be Mary. If your grace would allow.’

  The long-shafted face flushed a little. Mary Stewart said, ‘Tell your wife we are pleased. And if a boy?’

  This time, the answer was ready. ‘If a boy, then it will bear a van Borselen name. Or like your cousin, aspire to Charles, for the Duke. We have not yet reached conclusions.’

  ‘It is another reason why you should not delay your return,’ said Mary Stewart, Countess of Arran. ‘The choosing of names for their children is what a husband and wife must speak of together.’

  Her eyes were damp. Dame Betha said, ‘We are tiring M. de Fleury. Come, Katelijne.’ And with a strong, freckled hand she shepherded the Princess from the room. With reluctance, Katelijne walked after them.

  Anselm Adorne stayed behind.

  ‘Yes?’ said Nicholas de Fleury.

  Adorne said, ‘Are you in pain?’

  ‘No,’ said de Fleury.

  ‘I see. There is something I have to say. I shall say it quickly. But for good luck, today I might have killed your reconciled friend, Simon de St Pol of Kilmirren. One of the spears given me at the barre was a war-lance. The coronal was missing.’

  The face on the pillow was unaltered; incurious even. ‘So you didn’t use it?’

  ‘I had it changed for another. But I might not have noticed.’

  De Fleury said, ‘I might not have stopped the skewering of John of Mar.’

  Adorne said, ‘We are talking of Simon, not his son.’

  ‘You are,’ said de Fleury.

  Adorne looked at him, and then let his eyes travel down over the linen, stretched unblemished and motionless as a coffin-cover. This was not the desperate Claes of eighteen, smiling, raw from some deserved beating. And yet, in some way, it was.

  Adorne said, ‘Yes. You are a strong man. Nevertheless, I know what happened. Does Simon?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ de Fleury said.

  ‘You haven’t told him? You really don’t wish the truth … the extent … the details to be known?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ de Fleury said. ‘I shall employ myself out of town. The prize of the Court’s attention is yours. Yours and Simon’s. You have the boy Henry to thank for it.’

  Adorne got up slowly. ‘The butcher has abjured his axe? I salute you,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’ de Fleury remarked. ‘I might as well have entered the tournament. If I’d had any armour.’

  Three days later, he departed for Berecrofts, the comfortable Forthside estate of his landlord. No one saw him go, and no one knew therefore the manner of his conveyance, although the nursing brother in charge could have suggested that it was not on the back of a horse.

  Julius, who had been required to arrange the matter with Andreas, had taken the occasion, yet again, to invite Nicholas to arraign Henry de St Pol for attempted murder – and had been met, yet again, with blank refusal. Dr Andreas, consulted, had been soothing. ‘There is an actual wound, you are right, but he is recovering. You do not admire his Christian spirit? He absolves a child, forgives a former enemy?’

  ‘It’s unnatural,’ Julius said. ‘He must be losing his wits.’

  ‘Or has plans he is not telling us? You would prefer that,’ Andreas said, ‘to finding him reduced or complaisant?’

  ‘He usually has plans he doesn’t tell you,’ said Julius. He had brightened. He said, ‘I’m sure you’ll tell Berecrofts the same, and I don’t blame you. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard – if M. de Fleury isn’t a little more fit than we think. He’s preparing some mischief for Simon.’

  ‘In one respect you are right,’ said Dr Andreas. ‘He is a man who lays plans for himself, and for all those around him. I had been told of him, although not quite enough.’

  ‘Oh, he’s a cool one,’ said Julius.

  ‘You admire him,’ said the doctor. ‘You would do well to be afraid of him, too.’

  Julius kept his face straight. He wished he had Tobie or someone to share the joke with. He would not have confessed even to Tobie the thread of uneasiness that he, too, sometimes experienced in the company of Nicholas de Fleury. And Dr Andreas kept his counsel, for he had struck a bargain with M. de Fleury. In return for his care, he had undertaken not to reveal the small margin there had been between life and death at the hand of this child. The dreadful irony of the attack he did not know.

  Nicholas de Fleury, who did, set it aside, for he had to recover.

  This had happened before, with another man’s hand over the steel. He had survived that. He always survived. Now, as the clock beat its way through December, he forged his own return to health, admitting Andreas when he could not avoid it; deviating hardly at all from the dense, the convoluted programme he had come to Scotland expressly to follow.

  In only one respect did it change: Julius and Crackbene and Bonkle to a lesser degree carried the messages and pursued the negotiations that he could not keep for himself. And, as he had predicted, his place at Court fell to others as his absence lengthened, and was further prolonged after Yule by a deep frost followed by a sudden, early blanket of snow.

  Before that, the laird’s house in the Regality of Broughton by the south bank of the Forth saw more activity than old Berecrofts or Archie his son could well remember. And when the old man retired to his Canongate house for the winter, the younger stayed on with Robin his son, to study this self-contained man, younger than himself, who – from bed, from chair and then from the desk in his chamber – ran a business that seemed to span the margins of the known world.

  Often, when Julius arrived, frozen after the long ride from Edinburgh with a satchel full of ledgers and papers and maps, Archie would persuade him aside after the meetings to talk. There were other couriers too, some of them far-travelled, from Flanders, from Florence and once even from Spain. The Bank of Niccolò, led by a small group of experts, was now engaged, he understood, in reform and expansion after its patron’s long absence in Africa.

  How it proposed to expand in Scotland, Berecrofts the Younger was not as yet perfectly certain. He knew of a land transaction, now lapsed. He suspected promises of heavy loans. He was aware, because de Fleury had built his Canongate house on Berecrofts’s property, that there was a secure room lined with timber and locked, and a double cook-house built of stone in an odd place. He had seen iron boxes which took four men to lift.

  He knew that there was a ship due to dock after Twelfth Night which was rumoured to be carrying articles of the kind men described who had been to Rome and Florence, Venice and Bruges, Paris and Rhodes. He had glimpsed arriving by night local men whom he knew, but who did not seem to wish to be recognised.

  The only traffic which had decreased, understandably, since Nicholas de Fleury
retired to Berecrofts was that of the dames pour amours, the amorous ladies. Joneta Hamilton of Kinneil, who had come twice, had left the second time weeping, and had not returned, which was as well, considering her over-prominence on the day of the jousts.

  The other feminine visitations, hardly more successful, involved not a woman but young Katelijne Sersanders, come from Haddington with a pack of nuns to visit – so the excuse ran – the nearby Cistercian priory at Emmanuel. The real reason for the first visit, Archie deduced, was winter boredom overlaid with curiosity, and the Princess Margaret her mistress came with her.

  That time, less than a week after the stabbing, Andreas had refused to admit them, and Archie had to deal with the Princess’s displeasure as best he could, and see them all off – or so he thought. He returned to the house to discover the girl Katelijne actually inside de Fleury’s chamber, having been smuggled there by a conspiratorial Robin. He cuffed his son and would have cuffed the Burgundian Envoy’s niece, had he had the courage. As it was, she looked up at him with those shrewd hazel eyes and said, nodding to the pillow-packed bed, ‘Isn’t he bored as well?’

  ‘And if he were, what do you propose to do about it?’ said the patient’s dispassionate voice. Since arriving, he had shown no inclination to talk. Now he appeared to examine his visitor. ‘Ah. The guardian, chief flower and matchless ornament of Haddington. And how is the lady Margaret?’

  ‘Annoyed,’ Katelijne said, going in. ‘They said you were sleeping.’

  ‘That was Dr Andreas,’ said Archie of Berecrofts. He wished Andreas would come back. He hesitated.

  The wounded man said, ‘Didn’t you hear her? She requires entertainment. Leave her. If I become rough, she’ll scream. What is the Prioress saying?’

  Archie left them, pushing Robin before him. Had he remained, he would have seen nothing of moment, except the gleam in the eye of the girl Katelijne, preparing to taunt and be taunted.

  ‘She’s moved Ada and the baby to the priory at Coldstream,’ Katelijne said. She found a cup, filled it, laid it on the tray by the bed, pulled out and plumped up his pillows, checked the brazier and sat down on a stool with a book he had been reading.