Free To Lie with Lions by Dorothy Dunnett Page A

opposite. His gaze remained level. ‘A pendulum is only a weight on a cord. You ask it questions and it replies yes, or no. This is a little different. Your answer is more complete. It is spelled.’
    Nicholas sat, his unseeing eyes on the bowl. In his purse was a thread, and bound to one end was a carob seed: the pendulum whose presence he had denied. His son was in Dijon. The pendulum told him that every day, as any expert could guess: his finger was inflamed with the rub of the thread. The man said, ‘Please accept. I should balance one thing with another.’
    Nicholas looked at him then. The eyes, darker grey than his own, remained level, and the lips within the brown beard, although authoritarian in set, were not without sensibility. Against his better judgement, Nicholas drew the fragile thing from his purse and handed it over.
    It dangled over the bowl. The warmth of the sinking sun roused the oil in the fabric that covered the window, and hazed the copper with light. The little play-token hung, motionless, its cord in the Jew’s strong, clean hand. Then it stirred.
    It was very quiet. If the revels continued in the next building, they didn’t penetrate here. The only sound was the chime of the seed as it shivered, and swung, and, spacing each swing and each movement, touched the rim of the vessel five times.
    The doctor holding the cord had not been told what its owner wasasking. Nicholas, bedevilled by the mists of the future, hardly knew himself what most he needed to know, so ominous and diffuse he felt the shades around him to be. He simply opened the doors of his mind, so that there was nothing between him and the man who held his son’s treasure. And the carob set to its work, and spelled out a name.
    The seed stilled. The Jew looked at him. He must have worn a puzzled expression because M. Pierre drew back and said, ‘You are disappointed. Would you like me to do it again?’ His gaze remained calm, although this time Nicholas was conscious of some sounds of activity distantly in the passage and the trampling of horses outside, enough to break the concentration. But when, as he nodded, the pendulum began its travail again, the result was the same.
    A name. Not a place-name, the name of a person. The name ROBIN .
    It was a relief. Nicholas stood. He collected the pendulum from the long palm of the other and, holding it for a moment, made it his own again before putting it away. Architects, glass-makers, doctors, the family Robin were known throughout Anjou and Provence. He thought of the lion Martin and smiled. It was a crooked smile, because the trampling was coming nearer. Not the feet of angels, but of six men at least, outside the window and door. He had been kept there very artfully. But then he had known what might happen. We cannot even protect our friends .
    The door opened.
    ‘I am sorry,’ said the man opposite.
    ‘You had no choice, I am sure. It would have happened in any case,’ Nicholas said. The men who came in were armed. Their leader was a man he had seen before, at long intervals in strange places, in Bruges, in Louvain, in Scotland. He remembered his name, Andro Wodman. Until not so long ago, a member of the King of France’s Scottish Guard; now accompanied by soldiers, every one of whom wore the royal badge of France on his tunic.
    Wodman walked in and glanced at the table. ‘We had finished,’ said the physician. ‘Do your duty. I shall tell the Duke of Anjou what has happened.’
    Wodman turned. ‘M. de Fleury, my master begs you to forgive the hasty invitation, but I have to ask you to come with me at once.’
    ‘It is, indeed, remarkably short notice,’ Nicholas said. ‘My boxes, for example, are up at the castle.’
    ‘They are here,’ Wodman said. ‘My lord apologises, as I have said, for the inconvenience. There is, however, no possibility that he could be refused.’
    ‘Then I shall not try,’ Nicholas said. He turned. ‘So I must say goodbye, M. Pierre