The Spring of the Ram

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He found him coming up from the main hatch, his face grey and black in the cold dawn. He put himself in his way.

  Physical punishment, Julius said, never overwhelmed Nicholas. With one singular exception, all Tobie had seen agreed with that. Even-tempered, strong as a bullock, he took what life chose to give, and was either resigned or contented. Now, he was weary but not truly exhausted, and any distress was contained, as the fires had been. He said, “I thought you would come.”

  The big stern cabin was littered with sleeping men. Tobie collected his gear and accompanied Nicholas to the prow, where the little chamber for ropes and sails was untouched and, for the time being, empty of sleepers. Tobie entered. A nest of sailcloth invited, and a moment later Nicholas, lingering to ask some question outside, came in and dropped down beside him. Someone had left a small makeshift brazier: the floor had dried, and the air was gratefully warm. Nicholas sat hugging his knees, and apparently waiting.

  Tobie bestirred himself and sat fully up. He said, “Catherine de Charetty.”

  “Yes?” said Nicholas.

  “Yes what?” said Tobie. “You haven’t mentioned her. The crew needn’t know, but the rest very positively must. What are you playing at?”

  Nicholas said, “You didn’t tell Julius, or Godscalc. No. Or they would have spoken.”

  “Maybe you’ve gone off your head,” Tobie said. “Maybe you’ve mistaken the girl. Or maybe you’re indisputably right, and she’s Doria’s wife, and you are risking your ship and your men for a twelve-year-old. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But the rest of us, wouldn’t you say, have at least the right to know, and to choose?”

  “You think—I hadn’t thought of that,” Nicholas said. He sounded surprised. After a moment he said, “You saw that man’s skull. But you think I invented Doria’s part in the fire?”

  “Didn’t you?” Tobie said. Normally, he enjoyed a chance to test Nicholas. Normally, he found it amusing.

  Nicholas said, “No. If we catch him, I’ll prove it.”

  Tobie said, “Look. I know you think you saw Catherine. I know what it means. Whatever the risk, Julius and Godscalc and Astorre and I would take it, to find the child and discover what’s happened. Half Astorre’s men know her too. So if you’re sure, why didn’t you tell them back there?”

  There was a long silence. Then Nicholas said, “Back there, I thought the Doria was still in harbour. There was a chance of seeing the girl, of keeping everything quiet, of handling the whole thing in private.”

  “And later?” said Tobie. “You’d rather the crew didn’t know. I see that.”

  “There hasn’t been much of a ‘later’,” Nicholas said. “But the other reason is much as you say. He’s a great man for sport, Pagano Doria. I saw her in page’s dress, in the dark, for a moment. He must have meant me to see her. What if he meant to deceive me? A little girl with the same eyes…hair…I’d virtually ruin the real girl by proxy, chasing him all over the East with accusations. He would like that very much.”

  “Then you’re not sure?” said Tobie. “All of this is…just in case?”

  “He caused the fire,” Nicholas said. “And when you saw me, I was sure. And whether you all come or not, I shan’t leave him alone until I make sure, if I have to walk or swim or crawl to catch up with the Doria.”

  Tobie watched him. “Tell me about her,” he said. “The little girl. They sent her to Brussels?”

  “They think she’s still there,” Nicholas said. “She kept writing to say she was staying. Over Christmas, even. Marian…The demoiselle was concerned. She said in the last…Gregorio was going to Brussels to see her. If he did, they’ll know by now.” His eyes were on his hands. The backs were raw, with no fluff left anywhere on them. Tobie knew what the palms were like: his own were the same.

  Tobie said, “What sort of child was she? Pretty, I thought. A bit silly. But I hardly saw her.”

  Nicholas looked up. “I was pretty silly at twelve. Weren’t you?” He made to clasp his hands, and then left them open, dropping his gaze again. He said, “The girls were born years after Felix. He was nine when I first went to work for them, and was being cruel to Tilde, out of jealousy. Catherine was the little one, three. She was slow, coming down stairs. I used to carry her.”

  Tobie reclined, propped by the sails, and considered Claes, the former apprentice. Then aged ten, he supposed, and newly come from the less-than-merciful hands of his uncle Jaak in Geneva, but still smiling, still helpful, still happy. With a three-year-old perched on his shoulders.

  Nicholas stirred. “After that, I suppose she grew the way you would expect. She didn’t want to be treated like Tilde. Felix always ignored Tilde, or baited her. And Cornelis…Their father had a kind heart, but was strict, and a little unthinking. Catherine learned to cajole, and avoid trouble, and make people love her. She wanted the reassurance of love.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said Tobie; and was led into a thought of his own. Toys for the pillow. But Claes, grown up, had turned to the farmuk, to puzzles. And a record, once, of simple, physical wenching. He said, “But what you mean is that she would be ready to fall, if a determined man courted her?”

  “I had married her mother,” said Nicholas baldly. “Also…” The painful tone sank, unexpectedly, into one of parental defensiveness. “Also we’d refused her a lapdog. It was impossible. Marian told her.”

  It was, in view of everything, perhaps the most ludicrous thing he could have said. And the most convincing, thought Tobie later. At the time, it moved him to a conclusion. “Well, for what it’s worth,” Tobie said, “I think there’s no doubt we have to follow that ship. I’ll tell our own people why. You’ll get the best out of the crew—they want revenge for the fire. And you’ll have no complaints from the rest of us.” He paused. “You were surely going to tell Astorre and Julius?”

  “I suppose so,” said Nicholas. After a moment he said, “I saw her in Florence. Outside Doria’s house.” His hands glistened, one gripped in the other.

  “Then she must have seen you,” said Tobie sharply. “She can’t be unhappy, or she would have come to you. I know it’s terrible, but he may be a man who makes women happy. And he married her. We know that.”

  “In a way,” Nicholas said, “it’s the worst thing we know.” At the time, Tobie thought he saw the logic of that. Again, later, he wondered.

  They fell very soon into silence, during which Tobie’s eyes closed. He opened them when Nicholas got up silently and went out: either he had already rested, or felt little need of it. Tobie lay in the warmth, and the problem dissolved before he knew it into oblivion. It was full daylight when he woke, and scrambled out, and found the cook and John le Grant together, and received, eating and complaining from habit, his Herculean orders for the day.

  A methodical man with certain rules of his own, Tobias Beventini shirked none of his duties. At the same time he made it his priority to seek out Godscalc and Astorre and Julius and relate to each, on his own, what he had already told John le Grant, who had never heard of Catherine de Charetty, but ought to know, too, what he was probably going to be killed for.

  He did wonder, lastly, whether or not to tell Loppe. He finally did, but found that Loppe already knew.

  Under the same cold and fruitless skies of February, the news of the loss of Catherine de Charetty reached her mother in Bruges.

  Returning from his errand in Brussels, the lawyer Gregorio of Asti had never in his cool and crowded career climbed the stairs to his mistress’s room more reluctantly, nor asked for admittance. He thought, as her voice invited him in, that she sounded almost prepared to hear what he had to tell her. He opened the door.

  Although not prone to marriage, Messer Gregorio had long been the companion of a handsome and intelligent woman, and could appreciate good looks and courage, even in a woman ten years older than himself who owned and managed a business. He had only been with her a year. He himself was a Lombard and, fresh from Padua law school, had obtained his firs
t post as a junior clerk to the Senate in Venice: an excellent training for a man with ambition. Approaching the end of his twenties, he had thought it time to move on, and had been attracted by what he had heard of the Charetty company. He knew of it already—his father, now a broker near Ghent, had known the man whose widowed daughter currently owned it. A business run by a woman of forty seemed to offer a chance worth looking into. One day, perhaps soon, she might wish to retire, or sell.

  When he had found, installed at the widow’s right hand, a teenage apprentice she was planning to marry, his impulse had been to walk out immediately. He had not left. Mesmerised, he had discovered his first interpretation of the situation to be at fault. Nicholas was unlike anyone he had met. The widow, far from being an object of contempt, won his compassion. Inviting ridicule, she had persevered with this unsuitable marriage. Sooner than most people, Gregorio had begun to understand why.

  Given his choice, he would have gone with Nicholas to the Levant; but that would not have been wise. The business needed what he could give it of skill and of industry. He remained to nurture it, not now with an eye to his own advancement, but for the demoiselle’s sake, and from interest, and from the hope of a stimulating future as Nicholas grew and developed as he thought he might. Of the dark side of Nicholas which Tobie had once discussed with him, he had seen nothing more. Nicholas had made his mistakes, and they had been deadly ones. With Tobie at his side, and Julius, he could surely wreak no more harm.

  But now, his mind was on the woman whom Nicholas had married and left behind. Since the departure for Italy, Gregorio had watched Marian de Charetty try to create, after marriage, widowhood, marriage, a fourth identity in her adult life: one of the wife and manager who has opened the door and allowed a young husband to taste unfettered the sweets of the world.

  The five months without Nicholas had been less difficult than many she must have experienced. She no longer had young children to care for as well as her business. The business itself, well managed by himself and others chosen by Nicholas, was thriving along the lines they had planned. The death of Felix her son was receding; the absence of Catherine her youngest daughter was in many ways a relief. She had time for leisure, and friends, and to find herself.

  The mortal loss, it was apparent, had been that of Claes himself. Of Nicholas, the child she had found and fostered and given a place at her side, and eventually a marriage partnership to. Until, one day, the partnership was no longer one of business alone.

  Then, in admiration and in pity, he had watched her bloom: discard her heavy widow’s headgear for dressings that flattered her dense, red-brown hair; and find jewels and gowns that did justice to her high colour and blue eyes and pretty, plump flesh.

  She kept them after Nicholas had gone. Indeed, as the weeks went by, Gregorio thought that the robes, the chemises, the overgowns, the long sleeves, became lighter and younger still, as if waiting for Nicholas she used the time to become a more fitting bride for him. Or as if, left to a life so nearly that of the rigid widowhood she had left, she needed to affirm to herself and her circle how much things had changed.

  They had both known, she and Nicholas, that the parting would be a long one. His reluctance to go had been genuine, or so Gregorio believed. The reasons behind the decision had been as complex as the reasons for the demoiselle’s in urging it upon him. Nominally, it had been to remove him from danger: from the Scottish lord and his father whose enmity he had incurred—had even, sometimes it seemed, set out to achieve. In fact, Gregorio thought, it was instead the act of a generous woman who had opened the cage door rather than deny the skies to a loved companion, but who longed, hour by hour, for the time when the companion would return.

  Wiser in some ways than Marian de Charetty, Gregorio her lawyer did nothing to disturb what peace of mind she could find. In obeying her wish to have news of her Catherine in Brussels, he anticipated nothing more than an interview with a sweet but spoiled child, and the trouble of reconciling her to returning soon to her home. What he had found had first shocked and then sickened him. The demoiselle had to be told. But what he had to tell her would be a fraction of what he knew. Lawyers gossiped to lawyers. Lawyers did business with harbour officials. Over the weeks, he had learned a great deal that he had kept from her. But not, until now, about Catherine.

  So, entering his mistress’s office, he saw her seated, as ever, behind the great desk with its scales and its inkpot, its ledgers and showcard, decorated with small tufted wools, bright with the dyes of the East. And, now, a small silver box with her name engraved on the side which contained a coil of carved wool and a row of small hammers like teasels.

  She wore pearls and double-cut velvet, folded into a high jewelled girdle that flattered her breasts. Her face was patched with past weeping. He said, “Demoiselle. What have you heard?”

  Her eyes were half-closed by her lids. She said, “You look tired, Goro. You know where the wine is. Pour some for me too. I think we both need it.”

  And when he had done that, and seated himself, and repeated his question, she said, “The same as you, I expect. Tell me first.”

  She listened while he told the sorry story. All the letters, the reassuring, grubby letters which had come so haphazardly from her little daughter since early autumn had been fiction, written all in a day by the same little daughter and consigned to a middleman to send off at intervals. Catherine had stayed in Brussels only a matter of weeks, and had then left from Antwerp by ship, deceiving her host and hostess into thinking she was on her way home. She had left with a Genoese, a man who called himself Pagano Doria. And the ship had been sailing for Florence.

  He laid on her desk the letters of distraught complaint and apology which had been pressed on him by the silly merchant and his wife who were supposed to be housing her child, and training and teaching her. And who had not been able to prevent her meeting a plausible and personable man who had found it simple to lure her away.

  The letters said, in self-defence, something about Catherine’s fickle character which might have been more gracefully left unsaid. The letter ended with an offer, stiffly written, to help underwrite the payment of any financial demands that the rogue might now make. Although, as the demoiselle de Charetty well knew, their own resources were not without limits; otherwise they would never have incurred the anxiety of taking a child of unformed character into their home.

  He watched her read to the end. He said, “I told them there had been no ransom demands.”

  “No,” she said. She laid the last paper down. “No. He has married her.”

  There was a breath of a pause. “Who?” he said.

  Her eyes opened on him, and remained there. “Pagano Doria,” she said. “He has written from Florence. The marriage was contracted and witnessed in the city. He asks for nothing. He merely wishes me to know it has taken place.”

  His mouth was dry. He said, “Without you, it can’t.”

  She remained looking at him. “He says he has taken advice, and it is legal. He sent the papers beforehand to her godfather, Thibault de Fleury, in Dijon. My late sister’s husband. One of the many…Nicholas ruined. Thibault, or someone holding his hand, would be happy to sign them.”

  Wine forgotten, he stared at her. He said, “It isn’t legal. She is under the age of puberty.”

  The letter from Florence was there, too, on her desk. She lifted it in her sturdy fingers and held it, a little at arm’s length, to find the passage she wanted. Then she read aloud:

  You may imagine my sorrow and hers at forgoing a mother’s blessing. I wished her to return to you a child, until she could come as a woman and join me. You do not need me to tell you of our Catherine’s impetuous nature. Where I would have wished for an absence, she insisted that we should not be parted. I need not tell you, I hope, that for as long as your daughter was a child, she remained an innocent, guarded from all that might corrupt. In Florence my patience has been rewarded. She is a woman, and wished the privilege of a woman, t
o marry where she loved. Because of that, I trust you will forgive her and me, and when, one day, I have the happiness to bring her home, that you will receive her as your ever-loved daughter, and me as your ever-loving son.

  At that point, Gregorio of Asti said, “Demoiselle. Forgive me.” And left the room quickly and in time not to vomit before her.

  He knew he would do her no service by going back before he was ready. When he returned, he knew what to say and to do, and knew from her face that she was arrested by what had clearly happened, and thought differently of him because of it. He said, “After the morning you have had, such a lapse was an impertinence. Forgive me. But let me make you a promise. This is the last weakness that you or I will show in this matter.” He paused. “It is, I assume, Catherine’s half-inheritance he is after?”

  “I should think so,” she said. “Nicholas, as you know, falls heir to nothing.”

  He frowned. “But even Catherine’s share will only fall to him after you have gone. And Nicholas may still be there to manage it.” He looked up. “Nicholas was in Florence over the winter. If Doria didn’t know that, or was careless…Your next letter could be from Nicholas, to say he has her safe.”

  She shook her head wearily. “No. Read the letter yourself. It is the work of a silly, cruel man. He knew Nicholas would be in Florence. He hid Catherine from him. By the time he wrote this letter to me, she was married and they had left Florence. He has promised her, he says, a messa del congiunto in Sicily.”

  Gregorio took the letter and held it. “Why is he going to Sicily?”

  “Oh, read, and you will see,” said Marian de Charetty. “It is only a trading stop. His real destination is Trebizond. He has been made Genoese consul. He wants to get there before Nicholas, and give him, he says, a stepson’s embrace.”

  They looked at one another, and this time nothing was said. Then Gregorio said, “I shall go there.”

  She shifted a little in her tall chair. “Perhaps,” said the demoiselle. “Later. Just now, I need you to look after the business. I have sent off a message already to tell Nicholas what has happened. It may never reach him. At best it will take months. You could be no quicker. Meantime, the harm has been done; the marriage has taken place; they have consummated it. And at least in Trebizond he cannot hide her as he did in Florence. Sooner or later Nicholas will find out what has happened, and will do what he can.”