To Lie with Lions by Dorothy Dunnett Page A

now, while the Princess can travel, but they won’t know where to go until the English succession is settled. The Earl of Arran can’t go back to Scotland, and the Princess his Countess won’t leave him.’
    ‘A fine-looking man,’ suggested Tilde, with all the complacency of one married to another such.
    ‘It wouldn’t matter if he looked like a boot. She worships him. It makes Jan puke,’ Kathi said. Jan was Adorne’s son, her cousin, who had returned from his pilgrimage with the offer of a good job in Rome, and was not at all pleased to be stuck in Bruges with a household of foreigners.
    ‘And you?’ Tilde had said. ‘Do you want to stay with the Countess, or go back to help with her sister in Scotland?’
    Kathi’s eyes, as sometimes happened, had lost focus. She concentrated again. ‘I liked Scotland,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t mind going back. There’s your mixture.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Flea paste,’ the girl said. ‘I wondered if I remembered how to make it.’
    ‘Dr Tobias,’ said Tilde. ‘Of course, he was with you as well. Do you know he has gone? Back to his hated uncle the physician in Pavia. No one knows why.’
    ‘He keeps doing that,’ Kathi said. ‘He’s waiting for his uncle to die, so that he can get hold of his books and his printing press. I don’t think it’s an omen. Master John and Father Moriz left as well, but just to see to the mines in the Tyrol.’
    ‘I wish we knew where Nicholas was,’ Tilde said fretfully. But she was certain by then that neither Kathi nor the Adorne family knew.
    The next time Kathi came, Tilde did know where Nicholas was, because he had sent to tell them. He had also sent to have his wife directed from Cologne to Bruges to await orders. ‘She wants to stay here, but I’m not having her,’ Tilde had said flatly. As a solid, narrow-faced matron of twenty-three she was acquiring something of her mother’s authority. At first, Tilde and her sister had bitterly resented Nicholas when he had married their mother. Now they resented his present wife, who had cheated him in ways no woman should.
    Tilde de Charetty seldom talked about Nicholas, and never to Catherine, who had learned to deal with life at second hand through a shifting circle of suitors. Tilde supposed that every girl child in Bruges at some time had dreamed of receiving the merry, loving, undemanding attentions of Claes, the Charetty apprentice. A sweetheart for the season, not a lord to preside at your table, however gentle his manners.
    But then, building upon the Charetty business, a lord was what he had become. To Tilde, he had always behaved as a member of the household as much as a stepfather. It was his planning which had brought her Diniz Vasquez her husband. Tilde thanked God for that daily, even if Nicholas often occupied the rest of her thoughts; Nicholas whose ability had always been there under the generous, inconsequential demeanour. Hidden there.
    But for Gelis to marry and cheat him had been unforgivable. Tilde inadvertently wakened the baby, slamming down the basket which Katelijne had brought, and had to march up and down with the child over her shoulder declaiming, while Kathi unpacked the pannier. There were two oranges in it, which Kathi set out and peeled. She said, ‘I keep wondering why the lady Gelis did what she did.’
    Tilde put down the baby, which was annoyed but no longer alarmed. ‘I thought you’d know. Didn’t you help get the boy away from her in Venice? She hates Nicholas.’
    ‘Everyone helped. It was time, for the boy’s sake. But if she hated M. de Fleury, why keep the child?’
    Tilde held a section of orange and thought briefly. ‘She wanted a baby, she didn’t want Nicholas. Or she hoped the baby was Simon’s.’ She ate the orange.
    ‘She knew it couldn’t be. Margot told me.’
    ‘So what do you think?’ Tilde asked. She knew from report that Adorne’s niece had been popular on the pilgrimage in the way a mascot was popular: