The first-born of a young king and queen, Mary was the weakest of the five surviving orphans, having neither the ambitious intensity of the King, nor the wilful vigour of Sandy, nor the stupid belligerence of John of Mar, which showed itself more forgivably in the vivid, spoiled wildness of Margaret. Mary, with her wired headdress, her stiffened gown, her pallid skin, had been born frightened. Thomas Boyd, Earl of Arran, had offered her refuge after the death of her strong Flemish mother, and after the spectres of all those deadly contracts which would have married her to men who spoke another language, in parts of the world she had never known. It had happened to all her aunts. It would happen to her.
And instead, Fate had married her to Tom, whom she knew; who was Scots and well born and virile. She knew that, because her maids of honour told her everything. She would have an experienced lover. A glorious lover. Girls – women – married women – were dying of envy.
And so it had turned out. And now they had taken him from her.
She did not quite say all this to M. de Fleury, but when he kissed her hand she held it tightly, and made him sit close by her chair, to show kindness to him as he had shown it to her all those years ago, receiving her secretly in his house, though with respect, and agreeing to help her escape with her Tom. Before the dear children were born, whom it seemed he had befriended. Her dear fatherless children whom M. de Fleury was now going to help. Because now he was here, surely he would reunite her with her Tom?
She had sent her maids from the room. Nicholas, his hand trapped by hers, let her talk. The years of marriage, of intimacy, of childbirth had dispelled the shyness of their early encounters. Gradually, as she spoke, he realised that – as Gelis had said – she knew from her siblings all that had happened at the Castle, and his share in it. And she knew of course why it had been done. She did not even feel contempt for the Queen: she was uninterested. But it gave Nicholas, in her eyes, a physical kinship. He understood desire, her desire for her husband.
He listened, and occasionally spoke. Chiefly, she wanted to be heard. When she finished she wept, and he drew away his hand and found her a kerchief. Then she said, ‘Now you must help me.’
It wasn’t difficult. His shoulder had been cried on often enough by girls who couldn’t read the signs; who didn’t know when to let some lover go. The only difference was that in this case, the lover himself had not made the first move as yet. He said, ‘My lady. The King your brother is not threatening your life.’
‘But he has sentenced my husband to death,’ said the Countess.
Nicholas said, ‘My lady, he has sentenced your husband to death, but he has not tried to force him to return to face his sentence. He has not used his friendship with Burgundy or his new friendship with England to compel the Earl to come back, because his concern all along has been for you. So long as the King’s beloved sister is in Scotland, he will not hound her husband.’
‘But he won’t let Tom return,’ the Countess said. ‘He won’t forgive him.’
‘He won’t forgive him just now,’ Nicholas said. ‘The King is fond of you, my lady. He is hurt that you came back for love of Tom Boyd, not for him. That is why he is angry. His anger may take some time to fade. But once it does, is there not a chance he may reconsider? Young James will grow, and the baby. The King will learn to love them. One day, God willing, he will have his own children and will no longer see the Earl as a threat to his throne.’
Her face showed simple astonishment. ‘A threat to the throne! Tom wishes only to return to his lands, and live as he has always done!’
‘I am sure that he does,’ Nicholas said. ‘But your brother is King, and has his country to think of. Just now, with the Earl sheltered in England, the ruler of Scotland must be prudent. England is friendly now, but what if she fell out with your brother, and decided to launch some token attack with your husband as leader? I cannot know,’ Nicholas said, ‘if your grace has some ambition to be Queen: I do not think so. But I have to tell you that it would be more likely that your husband would die, and that you, if you had joined him, could not be spared execution. You and your children.’
‘Tom would never –’ she began.
‘I am sure not. But if you returned now to your husband, your brother would have to think of that chance. He would be angry once more: you could no longer rely on his love. England would be required to ask you to leave. Burgundy would not accept you again. France would return you immediately to Scotland. So would Denmark. Where are your children going to be reared? Where will you die? In what country will your tomb lie?’
She stared at him. She said, ‘I wish I were dead.’
Nicholas touched her hand. He said, ‘You are at home, in your own land, with your sister and brothers about you. Your children will speak their own tongue. Wait. Have patience. Let the King’s anger die. Wait until his new alliances are made, his way clear. Then you may plead again for your husband’s return. Is it so much to ask?’
He waited. After a long time, she spoke. ‘And if he doesn’t forgive?’
He said, ‘By that time you will know what you want, and what your husband wants. But to join him may be to kill him. You may have to think of his future more than your own. You may have to free him.’
He waited again. She said, ‘How could we part?’ Then she said, ‘If I were free, they would send me away. They would send me away like Isabella, and Margaret and Eleanor.’
He said, ‘There are not so many lords fit for you here, it is true. Some are old, or much-married, although kind enough.’
‘I would marry anyone,’ she said. ‘If I couldn’t have Tom, I would marry anyone, so long as I could stay at home.’
There was no one to hear it. It didn’t matter: it had been said. He felt some pity, and let her see it. He said, ‘Will you understand and forgive, then, if I do not help you? While you are here, your husband has hope. And the King may relent.’
‘You are very kind,’ Mary said. ‘I am afraid I am not very clever. Tom is clever.’
‘He knows he can rely on you,’ Nicholas said. ‘You are his bulwark.’
He had said nothing of Anselm Adorne.
He left almost at once, sweeping up his cloak down below, and brushing aside Katelijne Sersanders unseeing, so that she stood looking after him. He was already striding downhill when his way was barred.
His eyes blind, his mind wheeling, he was in no mood for that. He had his sword half from its sheath when he was set upon. He fought and then abruptly relaxed. The man before him was Roger, and the rest were the men of his choir: nine of them.
‘Christ!’ said the musician. ‘Have they fired you from Martha and cracked you? You nearly broke my damned tooth.’
‘No one would have noticed,’ Nicholas said. ‘You play as if they’re all broken. Gumflute music. Gumpipe music. Gumkrumm …’
There was another scuffle, slightly less vicious this time, during which he took a lot of blows and recovered his self-possession. At the end, panting, they all turned him about and marched him downhill, away from his own house and the nuns’ and Adorne’s. Willie Roger said, ‘You’re coming to the Trinity with us.’
‘Why?’ said Nicholas.
‘A mature falsetto,’ said Roger approvingly. ‘I have this bathing-tub –’
He broke off in order to let the renewed struggle run its course which it duly did, ending near the top of Halkerston’s Wynd with four men shackling Nicholas by the arms and another hitched in immobilising fashion on his back. Halkerston’s Wynd led to the church of the Trinity. Will Roger said, – or we could roll you down. Yes or no?’
‘No,’ said Nicholas, and staggered to a resigned standstill. When Roger disapproved of something or somebody, he was apt to do this. He hadn’t liked the sport at the Castle: Nicholas knew that well enough. He added, ‘But I haven’t much time.’
‘I have plenty,’ said Roger.
It sounded grim. Since, however, the many spectators were grinning, so Nicholas smiled in return equally broad
ly. He said, out of the side of the smile, ‘Clacquedent, they’ll call you. I’ll have your embouchure for orderly garters. Tuscan drawn-work. Punto tirato. Molar merletti. And I’ll wear your tongue in my hat. In the Name of the One, why the Trinity?’
They had let him go, and they were all walking normally. Roger said, ‘Because it has an organ.’
It was too late by then to make another protest. The mellow sun shone on the loch; the moorfowl croaked; the Castle brooded against the bright sky. He walked on, and tried not to show how angry he was.
It was a sumptuous church, the one founded eleven years ago here at the lochside by the King’s mother Mary of Guelders for her own weal, and the weal of her people. It was even complete enough to be used; at least to the extent of an apse and three bays of its choir, owing to the zeal of its Provost, Edward Bonkle his neighbour. Bonkle was not there when they reached it; but the doors were flung wide by the Sacristan and the Master himself, twinkling; welcoming. They walked under the hood of the porch and entered the spaces within.
Silent; cool as a forest the pillars receded, seemingly empty, leading the eye to the east, where a single lamp hung above a group of gowned men round a lectern. As he distinguished them, they were briskly joined by two boys, and then by the priests who had admitted him. Roger’s friends followed after. Murmuring, smiling, they composed themselves surrounding the stand: a loose half-circle of underlit faces, reflective and brilliant as carollers in the snow.
Someone stretched to the lectern and furled back a skin of what lay there. It hung, speckled and supple, holding the light for a moment like honey. The speckles on it were music. And seated to the side of the sacristy door, almost concealed by the pipes of the organ was his metallurgical priest, Father Moriz.
Nicholas turned.
‘Oh no,’ said Roger.
They looked at one another. Nicholas said, ‘This has nothing to do with you.’ No one listening would have understood what he meant. He knew what he meant, and he thought Roger did.
Roger said, ‘Then it won’t touch you. Nicol? Your Passion, and my Chapel. This is what my Chapel will be like, when I have the money for it. Today, they are singing for nothing. This performance is for you. You and him.’
He indicated the near side of the church. Nicholas stretched back his head, expecting to be shown Father Moriz; but the man quietly sitting in one of the stalls was Anselm Adorne. A man who studied his enemies.
Ludere, non ledere. He was no longer an apprentice. He nodded to Adorne, but didn’t join him. There were stone benches lining the aisles, and he seated himself on one of those, and watched Roger walk to the circle of singers and take his place in the centre. The Master nodded. Moriz bent to the bellows. The organist lifted his hands. Nicholas reclined, embracing one knee, and studied the floor.
The tiles were glazed. They glimmered green and yellow and brown, double-netted like fish where the window-leads caught them. When the first rumbling sound shook from the organ you would have expected them to heave up in shock, to writhe and to glint, but they didn’t. The coloured designs on the windows hugged the shafts of the piers like embroidery on an Angevin doublet, in and out of the pleats, teasing up to the floriate collar of the capitals, which promptly exploded in clamour. The stone pealed. The capitals became the surrogate mouths of the organ. He removed his eyes from the capitals and gazed at the tiles all through the noise of the organ, and the echoing silence, and the lifting of the first human voices.
Gaude, flore virginali honoreque speciali, the two trebles sang. He knew the text, but had never heard the music before. It was to be a motet, not a Mass. The Seven Joys of the Mother of God. It shouldn’t take long. His neck ached with looking down. He looked up.
He approved of the roof. It was simpler than at Roslin, where Sinclair had barred the aisles with carved timbers. Sinclair, whose daughter was sitting by Anselm Adorne’s wife Margriet, struggling to carry her child. No one blamed Adorne. An aristocrat with a dozen children might still demand more; and none would blame him. Gaude sponsa cara Dei, sang the altos, weaving, blending as all the five parts came into play.
There was a virtue in simplicity. Here, the beauty lay in the strictness of the lines and the delicacy of the colour, complementing each other, so that the proportion of the whole was deeply pleasing: an imposing ninety feet from the bright cup of the apse to the rood tower behind him. The back of his own house could be viewed from the tower; he had climbed up there once to verify how much an outsider might see. Now he had less need to trouble; it was generally known that the King’s guest-gifts were made in Wilhelm’s private furnace, and accounted for the strong chests and the charcoal sheds and the smoke. It had amused him to accommodate Gelis, all unknowing, in the nuns’ house which had also, in its time, been a mint. But time enough, of course, for all that.
Gaude splendens vas virtutem … In pictures the Nativity was the Third Joy, and the Adoration of the Magi the Fourth. Nicholas had met John le Grant through a Magi procession in Florence, organised for Cosimo de’ Medici. He had met Cosimo’s small grandson, who had also had a whistle, and who had died. John le Grant was wary of children but had proved his worth on that mining expedition in the Tyrol, and would do so again very soon. Nicholas gave some thought to his plans.
Ut ad votum consequaris quicquid virgo postularis, the basses were singing, while the tenors slipped back and forth. The harmonies, the dissonances were breathtaking; he ignored them. To obtain what he wanted in fullest measure was his intention as well. Riches were not all, although they were enjoyable in church as elsewhere: the cloth of gold and massed cups on the altar; the curtains of pleasance; the silk brocades and the fringes that trembled over the statues of the Blessed Virgin and of St Margaret – but riches were not always enough.
So the foundress had discovered perhaps: Mary of Guelders, in her magnificent tomb in the centre of the sacristy. She had outlived her young husband by only two years, leaving to this brood of unruly children a heritage of high expectations and uncertain skills. Of course, they had been brought up by Betha Sinclair, by Whitelaw, by all the loyal, good nursemaids like Mariota; brought up in comfort. They would hardly miss their mother the Queen. Sometimes, when he found them too simple, Nicholas wished that their parents had survived, and that he had been enabled to try his wits against a grown King and his consort.
At other times he recognised the dangers of over-confidence. Whitelaw and Argyll were subtle and experienced men; so were Sinclair and Hamilton. He had pitched himself against a team as strong as any he would find in Burgundy or in Venice. Only Louis of France could give him a more dangerous match. Louis and the fat man, Jordan de Ribérac, who had sent Wodman to spy, but had not come himself, perhaps to discourage Simon from coming. Jordan despised his son, but preserved him from his own follies. Jordan didn’t want hot-tempered Simon in Scotland. Of course, one day Simon would come, if only to vent his spite against Gelis. Gaude mater miserorum. One could look forward to that.
The singing was running, dividing, weaving and leaping like the interleaved arches that lined the aisle in which he sat. The building was so high that the voices floated, unimpeded by finial or crocket, or echoing them in their own florid patterns and knots. Bishop Kennedy must have shared some of the planning: the masons from St Salvator’s were everywhere. The architect was a cousin of Jamie Liddell’s, and had even Cochrane’s approval.
It was as well Kennedy was out of the way, now the Bishop his nephew was making so many ludicrous blunders. The unfortunate man would be in Rome by now, with poor Jan Adorne. There was no shortage of dispatches from Rome: Julius appeared to be mortared into the bricks until Christmas, although Gregorio was returning to Venice, having dispatched all he could discover about the rich and worthy Anna von Hanseyck. The idea of Julius in love was something which, regrettably, sent all his friends into paroxysms. Tobie would have been amused, had he been here. Godscalc would have worried. Well, Godscalc didn’t need to worry about anything or anyone any more.
&
nbsp; The noise was making it harder to think. Leaning back, staring at the immense sweep of the vaulting overhead, studded with bosses, Nicholas was increasingly bothered by the strands of sound soaring over his head. He tried to envisage the text and the pictures. Christ disputing among doctors. A doubtful pleasure, to those who remembered the same Dr Tobias, or knew Dr Andreas or Master Scheves. But of course, that evaded the issue. The equivalent doctors were not of that sort, they were the thinkers of Paris and Orléans and Bologna and Louvain. Of al-Azhar and the Sankore Mosque. Humbly, he had disputed with them. Joy was what he had found. And had lost.
Gaude virgo mater pura, certa manens et secura. The last verse. Translated: secure, this mother had lost nothing by dying. He stared at her image. Behind it, jewelled baguettes, the apse windows had dulled; the light now came from the vast windows and the clerestory behind and above him. The silvered organ pipes glittered and the voice of the organ intervened. You could hear the organ in St Donatien from Colard Mansion’s room. In Venice, it was the clangour of bells which made the head ache, especially in Carnival-time. Non cessabunt, sang the voices. Non cessabunt, nec descrescent sed dur abunt et florescent per aeterno saecula … Will not cease nor diminish, but will last and flourish through all eternity.
One word more.
The echoes of the final chord settled about him. He did not immediately move: he was calculating something. When Anselm Adorne got up and walked over, Nicholas stood. He saw that Moriz and the organist had walked in the opposite direction, and were enclosed within the group of singers, as if mourning in silence. He turned his gaze back to Adorne, standing before him.
Adorne said, ‘You must have been as moved as I was. I have never heard anything finer. The only version I know is from England. We had it sung at the Dry Tree. I know you are musical. When you come back to Bruges, you must let me enrol you there.’ He paused. The knot of singers was still closely entwined. He said, ‘Margriet came to see you.’
To Lie With Lions: The Sixth Book of the House of Niccolo Page 25