Like everyone but the Africans, both companies have underestimated even the size, let alone the cultural and religious complexity, of Africa: no travellers in this age can reach Ethiopia from the East, and the profits from the voyages of discovery and commerce recently begun by Prince Henry the Navigator are as yet mainly knowledge, and self-knowledge. There is gold in the Gambia, and there is a trade in black human beings which is, as Lopez is concerned to demonstrate, just beginning to take the shape that will constitute one of the supreme flaws of the civilisation of the West. There is also, up the Joliba flood-plain, the metropolis of Timbuktu, commercial and psychological ‘terminus’, and Islamic cultural centre, in which Diniz finds his manhood and Lopez regains his original identity as the jurist and scholar Umar; where Gelis consummates with Nicholas the supreme relationship of her life, hardly able as yet to distinguish whether its essence is love or hatred.
On this journey, Godscalc the Christian priest and Umar the Islamic scholar both function as soul friends to Nicholas, prodding him through extremes of activity and meditation that finally draw the sting, as it appears, from the old wounds of family. Certainly there is no doubt of the affection of Diniz for Nicholas, and surely there can be none about the passion of Katelina’s sister Gelis, his lover. As the ships of the Bank of Niccolò return to Lisbon, to Venice and Bruges, success in commerce, friendship, and passion mitigates even the novel’s first glimpse of Katelina’s and Nicholas’s four-year-old son Henry, moulded by his putative father, Simon, in his own insecure, narcissistic, and violent image.
On the way to his marriage-bed, the climax and reward of years of struggle, Nicholas is stunned by two blows which will undermine all the spiritual balance he has achieved in his African journey. He learns that Umar—his teacher, his other self—is dead in primitive battle, together with most of the gentle scholars of Timbuktu and their children. And on the heels of that news his bride Gelis, fierce, unreadable, looses the punishment she has prepared for him all these months: she tells him how she has deliberately conceived a child with Nicholas’s enemy Simon, to duplicate in reverse—out of what hatred he cannot conceive—the tragedy of Katelina. As the novel closes, we know that he is planning to accept the child as his own, and that he is going to Scotland.
How Nicholas will be affected by the double betrayal—the involuntary death, the act of wilful cruelty—is not yet clear. There is a shield half in place, but Umar, the man of faith who helped him create it, is gone. Nicholas’s own spiritual experience, deeply guarded, has had to do with the intersection of mathematics and beauty, with the mind-cleansing horizons of sea and sky and desert, and with the display in friend and foe alike of the compelling qualities of valour and joy and empathy: the spiritual maturity with which he accepts the blows of Fate here may be real, but he has taken his revenge in devious ways before. More mysteriously still, the maturity is accompanied by a curious susceptibility he cannot yet understand, a gift or a disability which teases his mind with unknown events, unvisited places, thoughts that are not his. As much as his markets, his politics, or his half-hidden domestic desires, these thoughts seem to draw him north.
VOLUME V: The Unicorn Hunt
Thinner, preoccupied, dressed in a suave and expensive black pitched between melodrama and satire, between grief and devilry, our protagonist enters his family’s homeland bearing his mother’s name. Now Nicholas de Fleury, he comes to Scotland with two projects in hand: to recover the child his pregnant wife says is Simon’s and to build in that energetic and unpredictable northern backwater a new edifice of cultural, political, and economic power. Nicholas brings artists and craftsmen to Scotland as well as money and entrepreneurial skill, making himself indispensable to yet another royal James. But are his productions there—the splendid wedding feasts and frolics for James III and Danish Margaret, the escape of the King’s sister with the traitor Thomas Boyd, the skilful exploitation of natural resources—the glory they seem? Or are they the hand-set maggot mound, buzzing with destruction, of Gregorio’s inexplicable first vision of Nicholas’s handsome estate of Beltrees? Is Nicholas the vulnerable and magical beast whose image he wins in knightly combat—or the ruthless hunter of the Unicorn?
The priest Father Godscalc, for one, fears Nicholas’s purposes in Scotland. Loving Nicholas and Gelis, knowing the secret of Katelina van Borselen’s child, guessing the cruel punishment which her sister has planned for Nicholas, the dying Godscalc brings Nicholas back to Bruges and extracts a promise that he will stay out of Scotland for two years, and so remove himself from the morally perilous proximity of Simon, the father-figure whom he seeks to punish, and Henry, the secret son who hates him more with every effort he makes to help him. Nicholas agrees, and turns to other business, mining silver and alum in the Tyrol, settling the eastern arm of his banking business in Alexandria, tracking a large missing shipment of gold from the African adventure from Cairo to Sinai to Cyprus. These enterprises occupy only half his mind, however, for the carefully spent time in Scotland has confirmed what he suspects: that the still-impotent Simon could not in fact be the father of the child whom Gelis has in secret borne and hidden, and who, dead or alive, is the real object of his quest. In a stunning dawn climax on the burning rocks of Mount Sinai, Nicholas and Gelis, equivocal pilgrims, challenge each other with the truth of the birth and of their love and enmity, and the conflict heightens.
The duel between husband and wife finds them evenly matched in business acumen and foresightful intrigue, tragically equal in their capacity to detect the places of the other’s deepest hurt and vulnerability. But Nicholas is the more experienced of the two, and wields in addition, or is wielded by, a deep and dangerous power. One part of that power makes him a ‘diviner’, who vibrates to the presence of water or precious metals under the earth, his body receiving also, by way of personal talismans, the signals through space of a desperately sought living object, his new-born son. The other part of the power whirls him periodically into the currents of time, his mind aflame with the sights and sounds of another life whose focus is in his name, the name he has abandoned—the vander Poele/St Pol surname whose Scottish form, Semple, is startlingly familiar to readers of The Lymond Chronicles, Dorothy Dunnett’s first historical series.
The professionals Nicholas has assembled around him have always tried to control their leader’s mental and psychic powers; now a new group of acute and prescient friends strives to fathom and to guard him, from his enemies and from his own cleverness. Chief among these new friends is the fourteen-year-old niece of Anselm Adorne, the needle-witted and compassionate Katelijne Sersanders, who finds some way to share all his pilgrimages as she pushes adventurously past the barriers of her age and gender. The musician Willie Roger, the metallurgical priest Father Moriz, and the enigmatic physician and mystic Dr Andreas of Vesalia add their fascinated and critical advice as Nicholas pursues his gold and his son through the intricate course, beckoning and thwarting, prepared by Gelis van Borselen. In the end game, as the Venetian Carnival reaches its height, this devoted father, moving the one necessary step ahead of the mother’s game, finds, takes, and disappears with the child-pawn whose face, seen at last, is the image of his own.
Yet there is a Lenten edge to this thundering Martedí Grasso success. Why has Nicholas turned his back on the politics of the Crusade in the East to pursue projects in Burgundy and Scotland? Who directs the activities of the Vatachino mercantile company, whose agents have brought Nicholas close to death more than once? Have we still more ambiguous things to learn about the knightly pilgrim and ruthless competitor Anselm Adorne? What secrets, even in her defeat, is the complexly embittered Gelis still withholding? Above all, what atonements can avert the fatalities we see gathering around the fathers and sons, bound in a knot of briars, of the house of St Pol?
VOLUME VI: To Lie With Lions
Nicholas de Fleury goes from success to success, expertly operating large structures by the nice application of invisible pressure, as the craftsmen do in the
miracle plays in which he has from time to time taken part. Within the theatre of family he has produced the convincing illusion of harmony between himself and Gelis, his estranged wife, for the sake of their beloved, acknowledgeable son Jodi. Within the circus of statecraft, where the lions of Burgundy and France, Venice and Cyprus, England and Scotland, Islam and Christendom stalk and snarl, the Banco di Niccolò wields a valued whip. Its padrone is a cosmopolitan, virtually stateless man, intellectually drawn to the puzzle of history in the making, but not visibly compelled by the roots of race—although, to be sure, some of his enemies think him motivated mainly by the passion of revenge on his own family.
Free now to enlarge and complete projects in the small, unsteady country of Scotland—which the priest Godscalc, half guessing his intent, had compelled him to abandon for two years—Nicholas carries out two coups de théatre which have consequences and resonances unexpected by their designer. He spends ruinously of his time and the kingdom’s money on a nativity play whose single performance, a glory of thought, feeling, and art which makes transcendence of all its illusions and momentarily unites its fractured community, hints at the strength and value of the wounded spirit who has devised it. And he mounts a merchant expedition to the fish-fertile waters of Iceland, whence he lures and bests his old rivals the Adornes and the Vatachino company, as well as a new one, the Danziger pirate Paúel Benecke.
Sharing this adventure are Kathi Sersanders and Robin of Berecrofts, a Scottish youth whose courage, and desire to break free of the bounds of his sturdy mercantile heritage, bring him to the magnetic Nicholas as an admiring squire. Together they explore the new world of the North, learn from the hardy generosities of the Icelanders, and, transformed in the end from actors and designers to spectators, experience in awe and humility Nature’s own nativity play, the re-creation of a continent in the double explosions of Katla and Hekla, the volcanoes of Iceland.
Nicholas’s well-wishers will need this glimpse of his humanity. For in the matters he controls, Nicholas’s plans are coming to dark fruition. Gelis has a climactic announcement to make—she has won the war between them because she has secretly been working for years for the Vatachino. But Jordan de St Pol, whose painfully rebuilt career in France Nicholas has undermined once again, brings a devastating illumination: Nicholas knew of Gelis’s connection with the Vatachino and skilfully played with it; further, all his projects in Scotland, from the nativity play and the Iceland expedition which brought him a barony, to more secret investments of the Bank’s and the country’s money in worthless mines, poisoned grains, and debased coinage, were meant in fact to wreck financially the country whose gentry, the St Pol/Semples, had terrified and rejected Nicholas’s mother, and Nicholas himself, thirty years before.
He has carried out this plan because he could: he could not draw back from it because it was his. In this final spectacle, the work of an angry child, of an obsessed artist, even his friends believe they see the death of Nicholas’s soul, and desert him. Stunned by his own dire success, Nicholas agrees with them: as the novel ends and the abandoned and pitiless banker allows himself to be carried East by the newly ascendant Emperor of Germany, he seems ready for burial. Or, possibly, resurrection.
VOLUME VII: Caprice and Rondo
Nicholas seeks another life in the violent and irresponsible company of his old sea-mate Pauel Benecke, but the quest-shapes of his life are printed too deeply for denial. Already he has set in motion another search for that lost African gold used so cruelly to deceive him in his search for his child. And the worldwide network of correspondence he maintains guarantees that counsellors for the Polish King will come seeking him, that new business projects will tempt him, that the religious and political leaders who have been using him as a bridge between West and East for decades will compel him to responsibility again.
Three times before Nicholas has been propelled East: to Trebizond, to Cyprus, to Sinai. Now three forces converge to send him East again. Anselm Adorne and Ludovico da Bologna’s overt agenda is care of Christian interests in the East, Julius and the clever Countess Anna’s spoken mission is to increase their business, but these groups also have covert reasons for drafting Nicholas in to help. And Nicholas’s cadets and soulmates from the Icelandic adventure, Kathi Sersanders and Robin of Berecrofts, now married and starting their own family, recognise that he needs a difficult and penitential enterprise to precipitate self-recognition and redemption, and urge him to go.
Meanwhile, those at home who had expelled Nicholas as a congenital ‘wrecker’ recover their economic and emotional balance, and, impelled to understand him better, turn to trace the mysteries of his birth and early history. The Scottish St Pols who deny his paternity are sequestered in Portugal. Now the maternal de Fleury ancestry comes into focus: the loving and terrified mother Sophie, who bore a dead son and then many months later a live one rejected as a bastard; the uncle Jaak de Fleury, who took the boy into his household at age seven as a menial dependent and subjected him to brutalizing contempt; the young ‘aunt’, Adelina, who came also to the cruel and sensual Jaak in childhood, to be in her turn abused and abandoned. And the grandfather, Thibault de Fleury, long rumored imbecile, whom Gelis and Tobie discover still exercising, despite paralysis and disease, those supreme gifts for mathematics and music, for witty puzzles and detached analysis, which Nicholas has inherited.
Nicholas meets his grandfather spirit to spirit, in an exchange of letter-puzzles, only once before Thibault dies. The dangerous bond between Nicholas and another de Fleury, however, twists slowly and fatally into sight as the long and frustrating journey of Nicholas and Anna into the East and back parallels the increasing illumination of the searching, speculating families at home. The adored wife of Julius, the formidable Countess Anna with the numeracy to run a business and a desire—cold, calculated, yet ultimately intense—to seduce Nicholas, is actually his grandfather’s child, his fellow sufferer in the abusive grasp of Jaak de Fleury, Adelina herself.
The obsessed woman plans to unravel not just Nicholas’s commercial and political world, but his marriage and the whole structure of his adult life, freezing the two of them in a tableau designed to end in the outlawry of incest before she brings about his death. But Nicholas, master of the interlocking wheels of plot, has in fact recognized the shattered and vengeful Adelina within the stylish Anna, and worked to draw her safely east, away from his imperilled family. Adelina’s final attempt to destroy Nicholas becomes the means of reconciling Gelis and Nicholas to full marital partnership, leaving the rash and unrepentant Adelina to die in circumstances left somewhat mysterious.
The caprice and repetition of domestic plot, Adelina’s plan to ruin Nicholas as Gelis had also attempted to do, is more than matched by the caprice of princes and the sickening replication of political immaturity which wastes both soldiers and civilians in military adventurism. Nicholas had learned the horrors of war in the sieges of Trebizond and Famagusta. Now, unable to stem the caprices of Charles the Bold, he watches the phantom kingdom of Burgundy disappear from the European stage in the death of its Duke and the wreck of its army in the siege of Nancy. At book’s end he is restored to both his private and his business families, and they to him.
But the fading of a potential public life in the East, or in the now leaderless land of his mother, makes him look to the land of the man he believes is his father, and to the questions remaining for him, and Lady Dunnett, to answer in this last volume of the series: as an adult how does one choose a country and foster it, and what is the meaning of ‘patriotism’ in such a context? If Nicholas is as he now believes the survivor of twin sons born to Sophie de Fleury and Simon de St Pol, what will this mean for the lives of his own so different sons, Henry de St Pol and Jordan de Fleury, as all come together in Scotland? And how will the answers to these questions illuminate the meaning of those shafts of insight and foresight hinting at a link between this fifteenth-century story and the sixteenth-century story of Francis Crawford of Lymond?<
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Judith Wilt
Boston, 1999
Sum in-till hunting has thar hale delyte
And uthersum ane nother appetit
That gladlie gois and in-to romanis reidis
Of halynes and of armes the deidis.
Sum lykis wele to heir of menstraly
And sum the talk of honest company,
And uthersum thar langing for to les
Gois to the riall sporting of the ches,
Of the quhilk quha prentis wele in mynd
The circumstance, the figur and the kynd,
And followis it, he sall of werteu be.
The chapter-head verse in this novel is from The Buke of the Chess, a Middle Scots version by a 15th c. Edinburgh notary of the Ludus Scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis. The original work was also the basis for William Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse. This text, edited by Catherine van Buuren, is published by The Scottish Text Society, 27 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At the end of this series, I should like to pay tribute once more to the many libraries which have made this work possible, and especially to the librarians of the National Library of Scotland and the London Library. Similarly, of the generous editorial directors who have given me their time and their counsel, I owe special thanks to Robert Gottlieb and Susan Ralston in New York, and Susan Watt and Richenda Todd in London. And lastly, the friendship and support of Anne McDermid and Vivienne Schuster of Curtis Brown have been invaluable in steering this ship into port.
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