‘But you will visit?’ she said.
‘I don’t think I can,’ Nicholas said. He had begun to realise it.
She said, ‘I will bring him, my lord.’
‘I should like that,’ he said, ‘and my wife would be grateful. She wishes, as I do, that the boy should grow knowing us both.’ He paused. ‘You used to call him a bachique. That is Blésois, surely.’
‘You would hear it at Chouzy,’ she said.
He said, ‘I heard it in Edinburgh.’ Tiens! Tiens! Comme c’est gars bachique, the old woman had said.
She said nothing. He said, ‘If you know her – if you ever meet her – tell her that I am sorry.’
‘For what, my lord?’ the woman asked. She had neither mentioned a name nor asked for one.
‘She will know,’ Nicholas said.
There was an interval, from which he emerged to find the nurse speaking. ‘It is dark, and there is a disagreeable press in the courtyard. Would you like me to find you an escort?’
He had come with John le Grant. He would not be returning with John le Grant. Nicholas said, ‘Have you someone in mind?’
She returned his slight smile with another. ‘Anyone of the required competence,’ she said. ‘An astrologer might serve best of all.’
The small joke surprised him. He admired her for it, for of course she, too, must despise him.
Later that evening, when they all knew the truth, Tobie left Adorne and the rest, and went to tackle the seigneur de Fleury in Gelis’s parlour. He thought of him by his title since he was in the process, for the last time, of excising this particular man from his life. He was also rather drunk (as was John), because the excision was painful.
The parlour was empty. When he went to look for Gelis, as eventually he did, that brave girl Katelijne Sersanders was with her. He took them both back to the room. It was still in fair disarray, but Jordan de Ribérac’s chair was upright still. The cushion was an uneven patchwork of scarlet, and the back and one arm glistened with blood. Caught in one side was the tie of a small person’s bedrobe. Gelis looked at it, and then without speaking walked out of the room. Tobie stood and looked after her.
Kathi said, ‘Jodi was brought in to see him. Mistress Clémence would notice something was wrong.’
She was pale. She had been pale ever since he had told them about Nicholas. ‘I didn’t know,’ Tobie said.
‘He wouldn’t expect you to. Are you going to leave him? Again?’
‘I should never have come,’ Tobie said. ‘And you should forget him. He has destroyed your whole future. How could he? How could he do that, after Iceland?’
‘He saved my brother. He cares for some things. The Play mattered,’ Kathi said. Gelis had come back.
‘It wasted money, that was all.’
‘No,’ said Kathi. ‘And he returned when Zacco called him. And he didn’t sell Iceland.’
‘What?’ said Gelis. She stood as if shackled by weariness.
Kathi turned. ‘Denmark needs money. A little urging from Nicholas, and King James would have bought over Iceland, without means to feed or maintain it. He didn’t.’ She stopped, looking at Gelis. ‘Where is he?’
Gelis said, ‘Someone came to take him back to the city. He could be dead of his wound. He could make himself die. He could kill himself.’
Kathi said, ‘No, he won’t. He isn’t like anyone else. He doesn’t think he is important enough for any disaster to matter. What you have to hope for is that all this havoc teaches him something.’
She looked at Tobie with angry impatience. ‘You know what he does. He invents, and then allows the invention to swallow him. What he did in Scotland is the most amazing thing he has ever achieved. He’s still torn between pride, and an awful awakening. He has to reach the conclusion that he must never do it again.’
‘How?’ said Tobie.
‘I don’t know,’ Kathi said. ‘Perhaps walking away from him is the best thing.’
The man they were discussing was at sea. He had been there for a long time, it seemed; jolting, swaying, rocking. At other times, he was on the bank of a river, and in pain. When he struggled, a. man held both his wrists and seemed to be scolding him. He had seen the man at Angers. But he wasn’t at Angers.
For a time, stupidly, he thought – woe now to the chickens, woe to the blind lion – that he could not see. Then he realised that it was merely night, and he was lying in grass by the bank of his previous dream and drowsy, as if full of poppy, or drunk. A man bent and touched his wrist, but was simply feeling his pulse. His body was bandaged, and hurt. When several men crossed and started to lift him, he made no protest, for he thought he knew where they were taking him.
It was a surprise, therefore, to find himself in a barge, not a carriage. A magnificent barge, it was true. A ship. A ship fit for an Emperor. All the time he lay looking about, he expected to see Violante, princess of Naxos. Violante, Medea. A carriage, a beautiful woman.
A beautiful woman.
Not you, not you, not you.
‘The Emperor bids you welcome on board,’ said Ludovico da Bologna. And all the ghosts vanished, and reality stood at his shoulder.
Long after he knew where he was, Nicholas lay watching the lamps drop behind, over the glittering swirl of the water. The night was clear and very bright: he could see the network of vines on the hills, the mathematical hills of the Moselle, which produced so many exquisite solutions.
Trèves was behind in the darkness, taking its rest before the extravagant, difficult day when the Duke would ride for the last time from St Maximin to the Archbishop’s Palace, there to receive not a crown, but (he thought) the Emperor’s effusive farewell.
Soon, the city would stir. Soon, the smoke would rise into the air, the bakers and cook-shops would put up their shutters, the flash and nod of plate armour and plumes would begin to show themselves in the streets. The musicians would don their tabards and shake out their trumpets, and the horses would stand to their grooming. The Duke would don his heavy pearled robes. The Duke, who yesterday had smashed the stools in his room in his rage, would today have repressed every sign of offence, so that the populace should see not an insulted vassal, but a great lord in his magnificence, tolerating the puerile eccentricities of a man no longer fit for his office.
And some time about then, before the procession set off, a white-faced man would come rushing into St Maximin, and the news would flash from stone to stone, room to room until finally, and slowly, it came with leaden feet to the throne of the Duke.
Monseigneur, one must advise you not to go to the city this morning. Monseigneur, we must humbly suggest that you disband the procession. Monseigneur, the Archbishop’s Palace cannot receive you. Monseigneur, the Emperor’s quarters are empty. The Emperor’s officials have gone. The Emperor has disappeared, and so has his blond son Maximilian. The Emperor has fled during the night, boarded a ship, and is on his craven way back to his heartland, leaving a mountain of unsettled bills, and his uncrowned ducal guest to make his own common way home.
This was the ship. In its interior the Emperor and his son, so far as Nicholas knew, were peacefully sleeping, far from the incandescent rage of his vassal, who had expended three months, fifteen thousand men and a fortune upon nothing, unless you counted a minor duchy which he already possessed.
The Emperor had abandoned the Duke, but he had not abandoned the Duke’s adviser and banker. Nicholas had expressed a willingness to serve the Imperial court: the Duke in his own interests had sanctioned it. It had not been envisaged, at the time, that the Emperor was about to make Burgundy the buffoon of Europe. But Nicholas could not be blamed. He was here, by permission of Besse.
By permission, of course, of the Patriarch of Antioch. Others had had a part in his silent abstraction: faces floated in his unreliable memory; his wound had received expert attention. He had wondered, vaguely, why he was considered to be worth the expenditure. He supposed that he knew.
Ludovico da Bologna, Patriarch of
Antioch, had left Rhodes to come to the west to raise men and funds for the next Crusade, the next onslaught, the next attack on the Turks. The Pope had renewed his commission. The Duke of Burgundy, receiving Guelders, had offered gold and ten thousand men to lead a Crusade to the East, and had made the Patriarch his ducal counsellor and representative. The Emperor was now receiving his solicitations. The Emperor and Nicholas de Fleury.
Nicholas lay, watching fish. They approached, touched the glass, and swam off, scowling. The Emperor’s barge always held tanks of live fish.
His injury, and how he received it, would have been of no interest to the Patriarch. The Patriarch wouldn’t know, any more than the Emperor, that he had endangered his Bank for the sake of an obsession, or that he had lost the allegiance of all his chief officers. On the other hand, he had gold in the East. And Julius wouldn’t mind what he had done. Nor, he supposed, would the patrician Anna.
It was not all, surely, so terrible. Roger could go back to England, Adorne’s kinsfolk to Bruges. Hamilton would take care of Mary. Bel had connections abroad. Henry was safe.
He would never live with Jodi and Gelis again. He had always been sure, whatever happened, that Gelis would stay. He had been wrong.
‘Well?’ said the Patriarch, leaning above him. ‘Well? Have you got rid of them?’
‘It was rather the other way round,’ Nicholas said.
‘But you’ve thought of what I said? The Golden Horde are the key. You don’t get anywhere by pinning your flag to the Genoese or the Venetians or the Muscovites, or to Naples or to Uzum or to the Knights or to the Tartars alone. You pander to everybody.’
‘What makes you think I’m good at that?’ Nicholas said.
‘I knew you’d agree in the end,’ said the Patriarch.
He wondered how the Patriarch knew, when it had been such a surprise to him. It was as curious as the way he had regained Umar recently, while in the haunted place where Umar had been, there was a child, and a girl. Jodi. Egidia.
They had been well matched as a pair, he and Gelis. Matched in a taste for intrigue, for numbers, for puzzles, for business and, to a degree, in the transmission of pain. It had not been a pretty war, but he had persevered, sure enough of the outcome – impatient, at last, for the outcome. And confident, too, that he would watch this son grow, as the other had not, at his hearth.
He had thrown all that away. Oblivious to all but his creation, he had been unprepared for the final awakening, and the revulsion which his schemes would evoke. And yet he should have been ready. It had all happened before. Intent upon his objective, he could set aside all human feeling, in the same way that he barricaded his mind against psalmody. As a result, men and women had died, and others had left him, as Gelis had. He would hear of her, of course, as they reared Jodi between them. He would hear of his other friends, as they abandoned him for new posts. The Bank itself would remain, staffed by strangers, stiff with formality. It was safer than friendship or music or deep discussion or the emotions – the untidy emotions – inspired by the majesty of the world, and creations of an order far greater than his.
So he told himself, in the well-deserved darkness where he had been left. Where he must cease to think of that small, surprising family he had been vouchsafed: Clémence and Pasque, Jodi and Egidia, Tobie, Moriz, John and the rest. And another person, already lost, already renounced: a friend; a precocious friend who, for a short time, had trusted and respected him, and placed her life in his hands. The only one who might have observed the broken thread in his design. Having been to Ultima Thule, he had not sold it.
He had, of course, sold everything else. It was what he was trained for.
It did not occur to him, because he was still in some ways inexperienced, that there are some things – the contents of a dovecote, for instance – which cannot be sold. For as the soul to the body, the birds will find their way back to their master.
Reader’s Guide
1. For Discussion: To Lie with Lions
What are Nicholas de Fleury and Katelijne Sersanders to each other, really? What does each offer to, or release in, the other? What do you think the future holds for them?
2. What are the various motives for which his well-wishers persuade Nicholas to throw himself into designing the great Miracle Play at the novel’s center? What are Nicholas’s motives? Can you contrast Jody’s response to the play with Gelis’s eventual response? Why, of all the possible Miracles in the medieval play-book, is the Nativity such an appropriate story for the novel, and for Nicholas?
3. The journeys of Nicholas, since he first left his home in Bruges years ago, have up to this point been to the far East, or the far South. The most memorable and exotic journey in To Lie With Lions is to the far North. How does Dorothy Dunnett exploit the territory of Iceland—its geography, its history, its economics, its symbolic resonance—in the novel?
4. “A good man is as a tree, sheltering those of his blood whom he loves.” Nicholas hears this brief allusion to family and future from the great scholar Cardinal Bessarion, and stricken, wishes it were true (ch. 36). Is it not true? Of his sons? Of the older men he believes are also of his blood? How do these shelterings deepen the potential for a tragic outcome under this “tree”?
5. Nicholas’s behavior to the king and country of Scotland causes the moral catastrophe that ends the novel: do you see any similarities or differences between this and the Emperor’s behavior to the Duke of Burgundy at the end of the novel? What grounds does Kathy have for hope at the end of the novel?
Dorothy Dunnett was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. She is the author of the Francis Crawford of Lymond novels; the House of Niccolò novels; seven mysteries; King Hereafter, an epic novel about Macbeth; and the text of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photographs by David Paterson, on which she collaborated with her husband, Sir Alastair Dunnett. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth appointed her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Lady Dunnett died in 2001.
Books by Dorothy Dunnett
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
The Game of Kings
Queens’ Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate
King Hereafter
The Photogenic Soprano (Dolly and the Singing Bird)
Murder in the Round (Dolly and the Cookie Bird)
Match for a Murderer (Dolly and the Doctor Bird)
Murder in Focus (Dolly and the Starry Bird)
Dolly and the Nanny Bird
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise
Send a Fax to the Kasbah (Moroccan Traffic)
THE HOUSE OF NICCOLÒ
Niccolò Rising
The Spring of the Ram
Race of Scorpions
Scales of Gold
The Unicorn Hunt
To Lie with Lions
Caprice and Rondo
Gemini
The Scottish Highlands (with Alastair Dunnett)
The Dorothy Dunnett Companion Volume I (by Elspeth Morrison)
The Dorothy Dunnett Companion Volume II (by Elspeth Morrison)
THE HOUSE OF NICCOLÒ SERIES
BY DOROTHY DUNNETT
NICCOLÒ RISING
Bruges, 1460. Street smart, brilliant at figures, adept at the subtleties of diplomacy and the well-timed untruth, Dunnett’s hero Nicholas rises from wastrel to prodigy in a breathless adventure that wins him the hand of the most powerful woman in Bruges—and the hatred of two powerful enemies.
Fiction/978-0-375-70477-2
THE SPRING OF THE RAM
Backed by none other than Cosimo de’ Medici, Nicholas sails the Black Sea to Trebizond, last outpost of Byzantium, and the last jewel missing from the crown of the Ottoman Empire. But trouble lies ahead. Nicholas’s stepdaughter has eloped with his rival in trade: a Machiavellian Genoese who races ahead of Nicholas, sowing disaster at every port.
Fiction/978-0-375-70478-9
RACE OF SCORPION
S
At the age of 21, Nicholas finds himself in limbo. His beloved wife is dead, his stepchildren have locked him out of the family business, and his private army is the target of multiple conspiracies. And both contenders for the throne of Cyprus—the brilliant Queen Carlotta and her sexually ambivalent brother James—are demanding his support.
Fiction/978-0-375-70479-6
SCALES OF GOLD
As unknown enemies conspire against him in Venice, Nicholas sets sail for Africa, legendary location of the Fountain of Youth and the source of gold in such abundance that men prefer to barter in shells. There he will discover the charms of Gelis van Borselen—a woman whose passion for Nicholas is rivaled only by her desire to punish him for his role in her sister’s death.
Fiction/978-0-375-70480-2
THE UNICORN HUNT
Nicholas seeks to avenge his bride’s claim that she carries the offspring of his archenemy, Simon St. Pol. When she flees before Nicholas can determine whether or not the rumored child is his own—or exists at all—Nicholas gives chase. So begins the deadly game of cat and mouse that will lead him from the infested cisterns of Cairo to the misted canals of Venice at carnival.
Fiction/978-0-375-70481-9
TO LIE WITH LIONS
As three courts vie for his allegiance, Nicholas finds himself embroiled in furious combat with his estranged wife for the future of their young son. He embarks on the greatest business scheme of his life—beginning with a journey to Iceland. But while Nicholas confronts merchant knights and the frozen volcanic wastelands of the North, a greater challenge awaits: the vengeful Gelis, whose secrets threaten to topple all Nicholas has achieved.
Fiction/978-0-375-70482-6
CAPRICE AND RONDO
Winter 1474 finds Nicholas exiled in the frozen port of Danzig, Poland. His Machiavellian exploits in Scotland have cost him friends and family—not to mention countless riches. As Nicholas pursues his future, his estranged wife, Gelis, seeks the truth about his past, only to discover the secret identity of his latest comrade in arms—a ghost from the past poised to deal him the crowning death blow.
To Lie With Lions: The Sixth Book of the House of Niccolo Page 82