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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.