To Lie with Lions by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online Page A

to put him among men in an army.’
    Quite simply, Nicholas de Fleury had bought himself time. For five weeks the vessel of which he was owner floated in the Middle Sea, and gold made it invisible. Even when he finally set foot on shore at Marseilles, quietness followed him still. He was well served, and although René its ruler was absent, the comté of Provence embraced the child and himself with the spring.
    The child bloomed. To the uninitiated, Nicholas de Fleury reflected the blooming: a sunlit wall of unknown composition. The journey continued northward through France. For as long as it lasted, Nicholas conducted his life with perfect and costly simplicity, as he had done for three months. Then, reaching Dijon at last, he sat down one day in his room and, taking out his pen and his seals, sent out the commands that would set into motion the plan he had already long formed: the plan interrupted that night in Venice, as he stood with the child in his arms and studied the weeping, desperate face of his wife.
    In none of the letters did he say where he was, only that he was travelling in France, and would shortly make his whereabouts public. He was leaving Dijon in any case: the secrecy was for the protection of Jordan, who would stay there in retreat until sent for. They would not be parted for long, and Nicholas made light of his leaving. The child was well served, well protected. Mistress Clémence wouldmanage the rest. Now, turning his back on the boy, he rode north to where the road joined the Loire, and from there found a boat – a fine-enough boat – to sail him to the castle of René at Angers.
    It was the third week in May, and the air over the leafy river was moist, the clouds low, the lions of thunder grumbling faintly abroad in the ether. Unknown to him, a kingdom had fallen, and his plan was already in motion.

Chapter 2
    B Y THE FOURTH day of June, the house of the Banco di Niccolò in Bruges knew that Nicholas was in France, and by the eighth the news reached Cologne and his child’s mother, Gelis van Borselen.
    The company notary Julius, who was also in Cologne, was candidly thankful. Not himself a family man, he had taken little interest in the (somewhat overdue) marriage of Nicholas to this strong-minded young woman. He had shared Nicholas’s evident lack of interest in the resulting progeny. He had found himself quite astonished when Nicholas, performing a total volte-face, actually quartered Venice one night and snatched the child from the arms of its mother.
    Julius had found it amusing until he saw the sober faces of all the others who witnessed the kidnapping. Gregorio and his partner Margot; Anselm Adorne and his son and his niece Katelijne; Simon, the chevalier son of Jordan de Ribérac, stared after the vanishing boat as if someone had died.
    After Nicholas disappeared, Julius was concerned, as Gregorio was, to restore public confidence. Cursing his wayward padrone during those chaotic first days of planning, Julius was relieved to find less sympathy than he had expected for Gelis, visibly raging through Venice, pouring out threats, gold and a fierce demoniac energy in the effort to track down her son. No one in authority helped. In this quarrel, Venice chose to stay neutral.
    Others, too, had held back. Kathi, the niece of Adorne, the Burgundian Envoy, had sided with Nicholas, not the child’s mother. So had Margot, once moved by her fears for the baby to leave even her beloved Gregorio. When, bereft and alone, Gelis van Borselen had stood weeping by the waterside that terrible night, it had been Gregorio who had walked forward in pity and led her back to her home. But he had done nothing since to help her find the child or her husband. And no one knew where Nicholas and the baby had gone.
    At first Julius was too busy to care; but he was by nature inquisitive, and finding Gelis hurrying through a public place, would stop and speak to her. At first, learning that he had nothing to tell her,