The procession down from the Castle was a triumphant one therefore, despite a shower of rain; and the comfort of the royal stand, when they reached it, drew exclamations from the eminent visitors. They gazed at the face of the Abbey before them, hung with arras and garlands. They studied the silks of the awnings, the veiled and silent box of the stage in the centre below them. They were offered mulled wine and talked, while the benches were filled, and lamps and braziers glimmered, warming the air. From the well of the Abbey arena there arose the buzz of a beehive: the expectant murmur of two thousand curious souls. Then a fanfare of trumpets rang out, and the curtains raced back from the four walls of the stage, light as smoke. Behind them was Paradise, furled in sweet-scented clouds, beyond which glinted the slow-moving wheel of God’s angels and the celestial throne, bright as the sun, with, kneeling beside it, a mighty-winged Gabriel. Then, from a core of dizzying radiance, the voice of God rolled, sending his herald to earth.
It had begun.
Many who were not present would later describe all that happened thereafter, for the report of it, borne on the wind, carried far. A man digging peats was petrified where he stood by the sudden silence as the curtains were drawn, and then by the gasp, and then the snatches of a single voice speaking, so terrifying and rolling and deep that he crossed himself. The voice stopped. Then the breeze slammed forth the peal of an organ, followed by a susurration like a wheatfield under rain, that swelled and swelled until it burgeoned into the voice of a full choir in song. The man leaned on his turf-spade and listened.
Dr Andreas cried, ‘But you must be glad! Shout for joy! One glorious effort, and all your labours will be at an end! See, give the woman your hand. Praise God and shout!’
A play could take all day or a few hours. Your Nativities, with six or seven scenes, were sometimes over by noon, but not this one. It was the music. Not just the ‘Ave Maria’ and the ‘Angelus ad Virginem’ for the Annunciation, and a bit of something for the Salutation of Elizabeth, but a lot of singing no one had ever heard of before. And then when it came to the Shepherds …! Everyone afterwards said it must have been during the Play of the Shepherds that the dance music came in, and between it the gusts of laughter, which you wouldn’t expect.
Later, it came out that the shepherds were speaking in Scots, and making jokes that you wouldn’t believe. Not that all the rest was in Latin, they said. A right mix-up of tongues, as if the story of Mary and Joseph belonged to everyone, as you could say that it did. The fun of the shepherds, they said, was what broke your heart when it came to the Manger, and the holy music was mixed with the lullaby. Lully lullay, hail my bairn, hail my King, hail my darling. You could hear that as well, from the hills.
Noon came and went. It rained a little, and ceased, and rained again. The peat-cutter worked slowly, cutting in rhythm. Across the marshes and plains, others listened. At the Abbey of Holyroodhouse, the scenes unfolded one by one. The Star burned. Glittering Herod sent out his messengers and ripped the leaves from the books of his lawyers, the fires of hell licking his throne. Kaspar, Melchior, Balthasar spread their jewelled robes and knelt, and myrrh and frankincense scented the wind. Over Paradise, palace and stable the cloud banks lingered and passed, tinged with sound; flushed with close-woven plainsong; opulent with polyphony; pierced by trumpets and clarions, dulcions and clarsachs, schawms and viols: Ne timeas, Maria, Gabriel sang.
Instead of seedlings and moisture the wind distributed words, and sighs following words – Ave Gloriosa! Swirling about the small hills: Craiglockhart and Blackford and Braids, music fell like ash on their slopes; and the voices of children – pleni sunt caeli gloria tua – were borne by the stout vanes of seabirds winging from Cramond to Bass. Watching them, men saw that the underclouds carried thumbprints of light, and sudden colours, and once a spray of crackling sparks, as if someone had grated down a half-pound of thunder and lightning, and tossed it for joy.
Dr Andreas said, ‘Of course you are tired, but your baby is not! He is angry; he is straining to meet you; you must give him your strength. Brace yourself. Push!’
Towards the end, there was nothing but music: noble; expansive. The light blazed, and the Star, and the poetry ceased, giving way to the voices, at first transparent and low. The music thickened, beginning its climb. The secret trumpets suddenly burst into sound from the roof-tops, and the four organs began their low thunder.
Dr Andreas said quietly, ‘Take your time. Rest. The boy will wait. The Bride of God suffered as you are suffering, and also had joy.’
Anselm Adorne said, ‘I do not want this child. Save her.’
On the stage, in the stands, nothing moved except a veil touched by the wind, or the threads of a child’s hair, or the sudden spark of a jewel. The sound reached its apogee, vibrating through earth, flesh and bone, physical and spiritual at once; plangent, tender, triumphant. Emmanuel!
The paean stopped. The silence clamoured and raged, beating about in distraction like a soul torn from its casing and lost. Then it deadened and the people stirred, and moved, and made their opinion known.
In the house of Anselm Adorne, a woman was screaming.
Jordan screamed. At first, Nicholas did not hear him, such was the uproar about him. His fingertips ached. He saw that the Queen was weeping, her face concealed in her kerchief; that all the men and women he could see had tears on their cheeks. On the stage, everyone was looking at him, and he tried to break from his stiffness and smile, but it was difficult. He felt Willie Roger’s hand at his neck. The composer’s face, contorted, produced no words at all. Nicholas smiled at him too. Then he heard Jodi crying, and looked for him.
Gelis was there, attempting to comfort her struggling son. She was white. The child pulled himself free and stood apart, his eyes clenched, his mouth open, shrieking. She said, ‘He won’t say what is wrong.’
‘Jodi?’ Nicholas said.
The child opened his eyes, his chest heaving. Nicholas knelt and, stretching out his cramped hands, closed them fast about the boy’s doubled fists.
‘Scream,’ he said. ‘Scream for me, too.’
Gelis exclaimed. Clémence of Coulanges touched her, and spoke with a smile. ‘It is nothing. When you are a child, you think that something wonderful will go on for ever. And that was something wonderful, was it not?’
No one had left. Like Jordan, they remained in their hundreds, close to the stage, as if by adhering to it, the experience would somehow continue. Jodi’s screaming had died, replaced by ordinary sobbing. Nicholas looked round, and Mistress Clémence drew out a kerchief and knelt. Presently, with a glance for permission, she lifted the boy into her arms, and did not chide when he laid his cheek to her neck and cuddled close. Nicholas watched, and then turned the same smile to Gelis, who did not smile back. Then the royal party arrived.
He was used to it. Even at this extraordinary moment, he found the right tone, the right expression, the right words to deal with the chaotic mixture of raw sensibilities and royal formality. It was the same, after that, with everyone else who surged round him, securing him as in a clamp to the place where it had happened, although it was over. He became aware in due course that, although he had not escaped, at least he was mobile: that a phalanx of companions composed of his actors, engineers and musicians was moving him steadily away from the scene, and uphill. Just short of his Canongate house they formed a barrier and drew him through it, and forbade others to follow until he was indoors, in the Casa Niccolò, in his own house.
Will Roger was there, and Tom Cochrane, and John and Moriz and half the polyglot crew who had helped him to do what he had done. And Gelis. And Katelijne Sersanders.
Will Roger said, ‘Come, my bastard Flemish apprentice. Come, you amazing man. Come and get drunk.’
If he couldn’t scream like a child – and he couldn’t – it was what he wanted most at this moment on earth. Except that he had seen the face of Adorne’s little niece. Nicholas said to her, ‘What?’
She shook her head. He
r eyes spoke, and the tears on her cheeks. He said to her, ‘Come to my room,’ and threw a word over his shoulder to Roger. Belatedly, on his way through the house, he saw that Gelis had followed. She was right; he had no wish to stop her. In the privacy of his own chamber, Gelis drew the girl down to a seat while he closed the door and dropped kneeling before her. ‘Kathi?’
She said, ‘I’ve just been told. My aunt was brought to bed of a son during the Play.’ She stopped, looking at Nicholas.
He wondered if she thought the significance had escaped him. He said, ‘Tell me.’
She said, ‘They saved my aunt. The boy was born strangled. He died.’
Nicholas rose to his feet. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There was a knife.’
Gelis dropped her arm. Kathi looked up, her lashes stark as boar-bristles. ‘They cut the cord with a knife. The cord strangled him.’
His head swam. He said ridiculously, ‘How do you choose?’
Kathi frowned. She said, ‘My uncle chose to let the child die, to the risk of his soul. Men make decisions.’
‘Pawns cannot make choices,’ said Nicholas. ‘Doctors can. The cyrurgyens ought also to be debonayr, amyable and to have pytye of their pacyents. Was Dr Andreas there?’ He did not know what made him think of William Caxton. For no reason he pictured Anselm Adorne’s condemned son as an angel of beauty; a golden child like the one in the play. He began to feel even more strange.
‘Dr Andreas was there,’ Katelijne said. She added quickly, ‘It wasn’t your fault. Nothing was. I must go. I wanted to tell you.’ She was looking at Gelis.
Gelis said, ‘I am so very sorry. Can we do anything?’
‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I must go.’
She was halfway to the door before he realised he had said nothing more. He said, ‘Kathi. Shall I come with you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Rest. It was glorious. It was the crown of your life.’
The door closed. He sat, rather suddenly, conscious through the cloudiness in his mind that he had been wholly inadequate. His skin was clammy. Shreds of old emotions, old tragedies wrapped themselves round his thoughts, mixed with the sadness of Adorne’s loss and other deaths, other burdens he could not understand, which seemed to lie on his shoulders. He felt ill, and adrift, and afraid.
Gelis said, ‘Are you going to be sick? Even Jodi wasn’t as overexcited as that.’
He had forgotten Gelis was there. He had even forgotten the Play. Of course, that explained how he felt. He said, with a certain effort, ‘Not unless you pay me for the performance. Did you enjoy it?’
‘Enjoy what?’ she said. Now that he looked at her, she was sitting upright in her splendid court gown and veils, her hands clasped in her lap. They were glistening white. She looked as if she meant to be there a long time.
He said, ‘I had better go back to the others.’
‘I have something to tell you,’ she said. ‘Something you wanted to know.’
He got up. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘Later, please, Gelis.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We have been interrupted so often, that I think it must be now or not at all. It won’t take long. Sit down. Mourn the Adorne child a little before you plunge into all your well-earned festivities. After all, its death was your fault.’
He remained standing. He said, ‘You needn’t go on. Kathi knows all that you do.’
‘And thought you required reassuring. Why? Because she knows, as you and I do, that for the sake of your precious Boyds, Margriet was compelled to travel to Scotland. But for the Boyds and the threat of your Bank, Adorne might never have undertaken his Levantine journey. But for the long separation, Adorne might not have been careless: Margriet might not have had to suffer this child.’
He said, ‘I really shouldn’t say that to Kathi. She would find it, as I do, unforgivable. The rest, even for you, is special pleading. It could all have happened perfectly well without me. Is that all?’
‘You don’t care?’
He said, ‘Of course I care. A child is dead.’
‘But you don’t accept any blame. You never do. My sister Katelina, for example.’
Then he sat down. He said, ‘Go on, then.’ However he felt, this was something that had to be faced, that he would not try to escape. Katelina her sister was dead, but Gelis had never forgotten that he had been her lover when young, and was the father of Henry her son.
It was not the only sin she held against him. He was about, now, to hear more. Unless he did, he would never fully be able to assess the depth of her anger, and the strength of her resolution. And with an enemy, one should always do that.
Gelis said, ‘A child is dead, and you care. I am glad. You cared for Katelina as well, or so you tell me. You cared for her on her death-bed in Cyprus, when she was innocently caught in the siege of Famagusta. So young. So lovely. A tragedy.’
‘We all know that,’ he said.
She said, ‘Only Katelina wasn’t accidentally trapped in Famagusta, Nicholas; she deliberately went there. She went there to die. She went there in the hope – in the certainty – of being killed, because she was pregnant.’
Her eyes were shining. She knew what she was saying. If Katelina had been pregnant, it was not by her husband. Simon had not been with her for months. But Nicholas had. He waited, and then said, ‘So, go on.’
Gelis said, ‘Have you no comment to make? Katelina had to arrange her own death because she was carrying a second child planted by you, and she couldn’t hope to cheat Simon again. So she arranged to die, and take your unborn child with her. The Dry Tree. The Immaculate Conception. I thought you should know. You would want to mourn that little child, too.’
He had no comment to make, because his thoughts had become tangled again, child for child, death for death; even to a sense of children unborn, still folded aside in their hampers, awaiting their part on the stage. Katelina, Adorne. The death of a child, decreed by its parent, so that another should live. Both Katelina and Adorne in a way had been guilty of that, but their sons had not breathed, smiled, cried, trusted. Say good night to the dark. He had killed his own son.
The words had no sense. In a distorted way, they made perfect sense. He wondered if it would have been a son Katelina was carrying. He wondered many things, but dared not let himself think of them, because Gelis was waiting, and this was a stage in a very long war. He found his unseeing gaze had fixed on Gelis’s fair, bright-eyed face. It was full of mockery, beneath which lay a curious attentiveness.
He said, ‘I don’t know whether or not I believe you. I should need a little more proof. I can only take this for what it is, a sign that I am succeding a little too well.’
He stood up and smiled. ‘Was it so good, then, the Play? Was it so very good that you couldn’t bear it? Then, of all praise I have had today, yours has to rank as the highest tribute of all. Thank you, Gelis.’
The clutter had left his mind, along with everything she had told him; set apart for the future behind the mental wall he knew so well how to raise. He watched her straighten, frowning, and deepened his smile. She could see that, superficially at least, she had failed. That in every other way she had succeeded, she could only surmise.
In the distance, footsteps made themselves heard. Gelis drew breath, then thought better of it and turned to the door. There, she looked at him again. ‘You have nothing to add?’
‘Mistakes happen,’ he said. It was true. Planning could only take you so far. She could take that however she pleased.
She didn’t please. Her face changed, filling with something more violent than scorn. Then she walked out, the door swinging behind her.
The rolling step of Roger approached, by now unmistakable. There were others behind him. The time for celebration had come.
Chapter 19
FROM THAT TIME on (people said), the sun and the moon shone out of the backside of Nicol de Fleury, and he could do what he liked. The King loved him. The people loved him. Only the Lord Treasurer cursed him on the quiet.
After all that, it was not surprising, either, that the patron of a bank, having for so long neglected his business, had to move his bed and office back from the High Street to the Canongate. It pleased the King, amid the Yule feasts that followed, to have instant call once again on the Burgundian’s services, more especially since Adorne, of course, was understandably absent.
As to that, it pleased the King even more to see how kindly his little Queen treated the poor sick lady of Cortachy, showering her with delicacies as she recovered from her confinement. Since the afternoon of the Nativity it seemed to James that there had been some change in Margaret his spouse. She had asked Willie Roger, his musician, to repeat for her several of the verses that had caught her fancy that day, and to rewrite some of them to suit her voice and her lute. It was, however, usually Nicol de Fleury whom she invited to sing for her. The lady Mary was sometimes allowed to come too.
The visitors left, and the yards in the High Street and in the Abbey of Holyroodhouse returned to their previous state, to the disappointment of Jodi and the delight of the Abbot, who immediately set about his rebuilding, all of it distinguished by his personal monogram. The collegiate church of the Trinity, which had filled its coffers by renting itself out as a music-room, made known its loyal desire to commission a triptych depicting the monarch, his Queen, and Edward Bonkle, the Provost of Trinity. The initial response, such as it was, indicated that a donation in cash might be preferable.
To Lie With Lions: The Sixth Book of the House of Niccolo Page 31