Caprice and Rondo by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online

said Robin. ‘But he knows he can never go back. No one would stand for it. And his wife and son would be dragged into it too. All the same …’
    ‘Yes?’ said the priest. He put down his spoon. ‘All the same what? I must go.’
    ‘Take the tart,’ Kathi said. Her hands with her new rings felt cold.
    ‘All the same,’ Robin repeated, ‘I wish I knew where he was. Can’t you make a guess?’
    ‘If you have a napkin. Now that is kind,’ said the priest. ‘Can’t I guess what? Where Nicholas is? I don’t need to. Wherever it is, I’ll find out before we get beyond Poland. Every friar in the land is looking out for him. And if you want to know where he’s going, I’ll tell you that, too. To Tabriz. Because that’s where I shall be sending him.’
    At last, Robin looked at his wife and Kathi drew a short breath and spoke with no patience at all. ‘And you imagine he’ll go? Has Nicholas de Fleury ever done what you told him before?’
    ‘No,’ the Patriarch said. ‘But his friends have never flung him out before, have they? What else should he do?’
    She sat, watching him lick and holster his knife, and then proceed, with some deftness, to parcel up the thick, sticky tart. He got out his satchel. Robin said, ‘If Kathi’s uncle allowed it, would you mind if I came on this mission?’
    The priest got to his feet, satchel in hand. ‘To Persia? Really? Through Poland, round the Black Sea, across the land of the Crimean Tartars, south through Georgia and into Tabriz? My dear boy, what a glutton for travel!’
    Robin was not put off by mockery. ‘Not so far. At least I hope not so far. To wherever M. de Fleury has stopped.’
    ‘And what good will it do if you find him? You’ll hand him pretty notes from the child, and he’ll pine, or come back and be killed.’
    ‘It is not for him,’ Robin said. ‘It is for me.’
    The Patriarch’s eyes, under their spirited brows, relaxed their stare. He said, ‘Well, that’s frank enough. I tell you what, then.’ Father Ludovico bent and lifted his satchel. ‘Adorne may not agree. But I’d take you to hunt for de Fleury. You might shame the brute into repentance. He needs to take a look at what’s happening in Caffa. He needs to be frightened into doing God’s work in Tabriz. You come and tell him, my boy.’ And baring a set of frightening teeth, he departed.
    A LONE WITH R OBIN that night, Kathi returned again to the argument they had been having all evening, and which she knew she would win in the end. ‘If you go, so do I. Nicholas won’t forget what he has done, but you might.’ She spoke wryly. Despite what the Patriarch rightly called the catastrophe , she could not expect Robin to throw aside years of hero-worship; to dismiss this unpredictable, this extraordinary man who would choose, if he felt like it, to risk his own life for theirs, and yet would destroy, they now knew, just as wantonly.
    ‘You think he should be induced to go east?’ Robin said. ‘For the sake of the Patriarch and the Church? Into a porridge of Ruthenians and Tartars and Mongols, Turcoman bandits and Turks who have four wives apiece and eat horses?’
    ‘He might enjoy some of it,’ Kathi said. ‘Look. He has a life to fill. It may as well have a purpose.’
    ‘And Nicholas is supposed meekly to go wherever the Patriarch wants him?’
    ‘I think,’ said Kathi, ‘that would be unrealistic. I think the Patriarch’s pushing, not pulling, and he wants you as his floppy-eared beater. You’re supposed to flush Nicholas out, and drive him painlessly east, at the trot.’ She gave an involuntary shiver.
    Robin moved, and was still. They had an arrangement; or rather he had, with himself. Kathi put her hand into his. She said, ‘We’ll go together. I’ll speak to my uncle tomorrow … My bed looks very cold. Who will warm it?’
    I T WAS NOT EASY , that interview the next day. Departure was close, and Anselm Adorne was preoccupied with the needs of his journey,