To Lie with Lions Read Online Free PDF Page B

society through the success of the Bank. But not, I understand, an athlete of the bedchamber.’
    ‘Perhaps his tastes will now change. Tell me again about the redoubtable M. de Fleury. He is a kinsman of yours?’
    The vicomte did not sigh, but the cost of his restraint could be glimpsed. ‘He is a bastard of my son Simon’s dead wife. My son Simon, who keeps my castle in Scotland.’
    ‘I remember,’ said Louis. ‘Then if he comes here, I expect you to bring him to see me. I speak of M. de Fleury, not your son.’
    ‘I have sent my son to Madeira,’ said the vicomte; and this time he exhaled like a jet from a pudding.
    Of the three people who. all this time knew where Nicholas de Fleurymight be found, two had been trained to distrust him, and one was too young to hold an opinion.
    Several weeks before the baby (now kidnapped) was born, Clémence de Coulanges had come to serve Gelis the mother, and had stayed to tend mother and baby. Convent-reared, convent-trained, Mistress Clémence was a lady as well as a nurse, even though her parents (report said) had neglected to wed before dying. Her elderly amanuensis Pasque was neither a nurse nor a lady, but, grumbling, fetched and carried and washed, and chivvied the wet-nurse when the time came to hire her.
    Pasque was in the last resort respectful of Mistress Clémence, who held herself upright as a hat-stand of wood, and had been born, you would say, middle-aged. Pasque was even more in awe of her employer, the lady Gelis van Borselen, who carried her babe with the spunk of a countrywoman, even though the child was her first, and a desperate burden. It did not seem right to Pasque that the Lady’s husband should stay so long overseas, and never ask for her.
    It seemed downright cruel that the Lady gave birth to her fine son alone, struggling in agony hour after hour, while her husband neither sent nor tried to come till weeks after. And by then even Mistress Clémence knew that something was wrong, although the Lady never offered a confidence. It was Madame Margot, the Lady’s companion, who told them that the lady Gelis was afraid that her husband would take against his new son, and so the boy must be hidden.
    And concealed he had been, sometimes in this house or that, but always with Mistress Clémence and old Pasque to look after him, and his mother too, when it was safe. And it even seemed that the Lady’s fears must be right, because the husband did actually come, and bring a troop of armed men to the convent, and try to torture the servants, Heaven preserve us! But the child had been taken away, and was safe, of course, with his nurses.
    Then the Lady had followed her husband to the Holy Land, so they were told, to soften his heart towards her and the child. From that she had come back full of hope for the future, only to be betrayed by her so-called friend Margot. So the father, Nicholas de Fleury the torturer, had been able to kidnap the baby at last, and have his nurses brought to the ship where the child was, and demand that they serve him.
    Nicholas de Fleury. Pasque would never forget the day she first set eyes on him; neither would Mistress Clémence, for all she planted herself on the floor of the cabin, chin up and hands clasped at her apron, as if about to complain to a tradesman. Being small, Pasque stood behind.
    He was a very big man, M. de Fleury. She had seen smiths of that build, although none buttoned up to the chin in his pourpoint like this one, seated at a tidy chart-desk like a clerk, with pen and paper before him. He didn’t rise. His voice, smartly outlining his proposals, alarmed her by the excellence of its Burgundian French: they had been told he was Flemish. His hair was brown like the child’s, but there seemed, at first, no other resemblance that hit you. His eyes, although of the same grey, were big and fixed and bright as a drunk Marseilles monkey’s. Pasque had edged closer to Clémence.
    He said, ‘I recognise you have long