But first, what was the situation in Bruges? She knew where the arsenals were. Walking swiftly and quietly, head down, she turned up towards the Grand’ Place but did not enter it, sliding westwards instead through the deserted egg-market and taking the street that ran past the Princenhof. The great gates were closed, behind which she had feasted with Nicholas on the Duke’s wedding day, and her own. She could see guards, and there were some silent groups in the street, looking up, but no threat of assault, or not yet. She slowed, crossing the street and turning at last to the south, into Silver Straete.
Here was the house rented once and now owned by her family. By her cousins: she had no family now, since her parents and sister were dead. Correction. She had a family she did not deserve, better by far. And as Clémence saw, she was attempting to do what Nicholas would have done, and what Jodi, one day, would hear she had done.
She did not stop there, other than to register that the doors and the shutters were closed. Men who turned against authority might turn against the van Borselens, too. But of necessity, surely, she could shelter there. She walked on.
Ahead lay the Palace of Louis de Gruuthuse, with the church of Nôtre Dame beside it. Within, a bridge of convenience ran from the house to the church, and underground, there were two other, more secret connections. No one, even a king, would be trapped in this place. Again she saw barred doors and a guard, but not a large one. Louis de Gruuthuse and his wife were not there, and his household militia were at the Burg, supporting Adorne.
Now she was almost ready to strike fully south for the Ghent Gate. She lingered, listening. This was an area where the streets were deserted of folk, and the winter dirt on the paving was crisp and whitening under her feet, with few lights about within the rows of huddled, dark houses. The sky, which had seemed full of snow, lay on the roof-tops like lead on a casket, and the occasional voice, from a window or yard, piped like the cry of a bird. Behind her, too, the shouting had dulled to the sound of a rookery, broken by small stabs of sound: someone was issuing orders through the Belfry’s official speaking-trumpet. She had sallied forth like a ship giving battle, and there was nothing for her to do. The mob was being contained. When her cousin came, with his orderly troop, the people would quieten, and tomorrow would send their elect to the bargaining table.
She hesitated, but being set on her course, decided to finish it. Louis should be told what was happening, and the Gate, now, should be easy to pass. On her way, she could still check on the two arsenals, the first at the Hospital of St John, where Dr Andreas once used to serve. The other was farther on, at the Abbey of Eckhout, better known for the great processions of May, when the White Bear jousters marched from the Abbey. Adorne had won the Horn from the Duchess one year, and Breydel the Spear. She hardly needed to visit either place, except that they lay on her road to the Gate. If there had been any trouble, she would be able to hear it from here.
She had almost come to the Hospital when she realised that there was a change in the air, but that it came from behind, not ahead. The faint sound of the rookery had altered. Straining to listen, it seemed to her that it had become uneven, and louder, as if it had found some sort of focus; had become an expression even of panic as well as rage. She turned, her heart beating, facing the quiet streets, her back to the vast hooded doorway of the Hospital complex. Then she gasped, for someone laid hands on her shoulders. Whirling, she saw that the door behind now stood partly open, and that Arnaud, one of the younger sons of Anselm Adorne, had her in his grasp, and was trying to hustle her towards it. He spoke breathlessly. ‘I saw you from above. Come quickly. In here. Someone has warned the crowd that Gruuthuse is coming. They’ll man the gates, look for arms. Will you come?’
The noise had swelled. Gelis ran, and the great doors of the Hospital slammed shut behind them.
Nearly four hundred years old, this was a hospital for the poor sick of both sexes, accommodated in clean, spartan halls tended by nuns of the Augustinian Order and brethren of the Knights Hospitalier of St John. It accommodated, from time to time, wounded soldiers. And because it was thick-walled and ancient, it had become, like all sacred buildings, a safe place to store arms. It was, after all, in the Order’s tradition to defend the Christian right. And Anselm Adorne had close connections with this particular place: thirty years ago, the Hospital’s guardian had been his father Pieter Adorne, Receiver-General of Flanders and Artois.
Arnaud had a young wife and a daughter born only last year. Phemie Dunbar had come from Scotland to care for them. Gelis said, ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ and he smiled and said, ‘Do you think I would have brought you in, if there had been an alternative? There isn’t time to go anywhere else. Listen.’
And now the roaring was loud.
She said, ‘Will you let them have what they want? There are sick people to think of.’
She had always thought of Adorne’s family as curiously ineffectual: from the eldest, a church lawyer in Rome, to the adolescents who had made their way, one by one, to this convent or that monastery. Two sons and two daughters had married, but were either childless or had only daughters. Margriet Adorne had died from trying to give him a last fertile, vigorous son who would bring him the grandsons who would continue his line. It seemed that all the spirituality of the Adornes had become invested in their descendants, and none of the other attributes: the courage, the wit, the authority of Anselm Adorne. Which existed, too, in Adorne’s young niece, Kathi Sersanders.
Arnaud said, ‘It seemed possible that this might happen. Father helped us move all the arms yesterday. We are to pretend we don’t understand, and hold the doors as long as we can. Father says that it will buy time until someone can rescue us.’
The Adorne courage was not, then, truly lacking. Gelis said, ‘How can I help?’
Soon enough, she had to maintain her own courage, when the torches were massed outside the door, and stones were cracking against the speckled brick and the elderly, exquisite carvings and the canopies of the small, adhesive shrines. That was when they were still parleying, and someone of sensibility had shouted crossly for the stone-throwers to cease. Then Arnaud, from his upper window, had reiterated his plea, on behalf of the sick, to be left in quietness, and had conveyed, for the second or third time, his incomprehension over what he was hearing. An arsenal? But that was long ago. Handguns and crossbows and culverin? Surely not.
‘Then let us in. Let us see for ourselves, and we’ll go!’
Then the Almoner took his place at the window, and a physician, and the crowd were told sternly to disperse. They didn’t, of course. They sent men round the back, who got in over the walls and ran between the ranges of buildings and smashed in the big door at the back, and came racing through all the dormitories, opening doors and flinging back the lids of the chests.
There were not so many patients to suffer the noise: Adorne had evacuated all but the dying, and those lay at the end of one hall, where one or two monks held them close, and a priest, on his knees, intoned softly. Gelis remained with the weeping maids in the kitchen, listening as the place was ransacked; hearing the shout of triumph as the underground storehouse was found; the roar as it proved to be empty. She wondered what rescue Arnaud expected. Any men his father could spare would certainly have been sent to the Gate, and to protect the arsenals that had not been evacuated.
This store was empty. Having been made free of the place, the attackers were not likely, surely, to endanger their souls by harming holy men and innocent people. They could only vent their disappointment on wood and stone and glass.
So she thought until, the noise receding, she was tempted to leave the kitchens and go seeking Arnaud. She found him on the floor of the dispensary with a doctor bending over him. The floor was spattered with blood and strewn with shards of smashed jars. She exclaimed.
The doctor said, ‘They wanted to know where the arms were. Then some horsemen came up the road, and they left him and ran. He’s taken a beating. He’ll be all right.’
>
Arnaud looked up and grimaced. He had lost a tooth, and everything about him looked painful and battered. Gelis said, ‘If you knew, you should have told them. By the time they find it, Louis will surely be here. Do you know how near he is?’
The physician looked round. ‘At least two hours away, these men were saying. They have better spies than you’d think. And whether they trace Master Arnaud’s arsenal or not, the mob have found some artillery somewhere, they say, and are going to use it at the Ghent Gate. I’m afraid your cousin is going to have a fine welcome.’
Gelis got up. Arnaud rose on one elbow. His mouth was bleeding. ‘Gelis, you can’t do anything.’ It emerged as a lisp.
She said, ‘I can try. That’s what I was going to do. Get out through the Gate somehow and go to meet Louis. Mobs are often divided. Not all of them may want violence. The Gate may be open.’
Someone said, ‘The spokesmen may want to be civilised, but the rest don’t. The portcullis is down, its cable cut. You won’t be able to get out that way, Gelis.’
It was Diniz Vasquez. He brushed past her and knelt. ‘Arnaud?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Adorne’s son. He sat up, the doctor supporting his back. Then he said, ‘Kathi!’
Gelis turned. It was Kathi, Arnaud’s cousin. Kathi, her eyes large and darker than hazel in a colourless face, within a long hooded cloak that shrouded her small frame like a quilt. Kathi, who had been safely locked with her children in the Hôtel Jerusalem, on the farther side of the town.
Diniz said, ‘I had to bring her. We’ve had some news as well. From the other direction, from Damme. They knew Gruuthuse had set off from Ghent. They also knew of someone else on the road: another party well on its way, and likely to get here before them. Gruuthuse’s is a troop of armed cavalry. The other is an ordinary convoy of wagons for Bruges, with a small escort, but no arms to speak of. They set off before Gruuthuse. They don’t know anything’s wrong.’
‘If it’s dark, the Gate will mistake them and fire,’ Gelis said. ‘Or they’ll be caught in the crossfire against Louis. Can anyone warn them?’
Then she saw the look on his face, and on Kathi’s.
‘I hope so,’ said Diniz. ‘The carts are from Nancy. Robin is with them.’
Chapter 6
Come of hir husband that was went fra hame
A fals tythand: hir husband suld be deid,
Scho wepit so and swownit in that steid
As sho ourcome and went furth at the zet,
All sudanly hir husband that scho met.
ONCE, A BOY of eighteen, Diniz Vasquez had travelled and argued and fought with Gelis and Nicholas and a woman called Bel on a journey to win gold in Africa, and there had discovered a hard-won maturity. Before that had come the long apprenticeship on the island of Cyprus, when Diniz had lost his father and watched Gelis’s own sister die, and had formed the undying bond of love and respect that he felt for Nicholas. It was Diniz who had fought and saved Nicholas at the battle of Nancy.
Now, standing in the ravaged Hospital of St John, he said, ‘That is why I am here. Lord Cortachy sent me. To make sure you were safe. And to get outside the town somehow with a warning. It must be done. And you will both wait here for me.’
Then Gelis said, ‘I will come with you.’ And when Kathi said ‘No!’ she rounded on her with roughness. ‘There must be two: one to go for horses and the other to keep to the road. And it must seem innocent, as it might with a woman and a man. And you are not to go because if you and Robin both die, then what of your children?’
The large eyes were chilled. Kathi said, ‘And I know the other reason. You think it is cold enough for the Minnewater to be bearing again.’
It was what she had thought. She had not said so. It was how Diniz had lost his mother, long ago: drowned in the broken floes of a little river by Berecrofts. It was how Gelis, too, had nearly died, below the ice of the Nor’Loch of Edinburgh.
It did not matter to her. It did not matter, either, to Diniz. He looked at her, struck. ‘Of course. You know the Minnewater, all the canals from your childhood. You will know where it freezes up first.’ And, of course, she did.
They went quickly, then. Kathi came to the postern and caught Gelis and kissed her, just before she stepped through. ‘That is for you,’ Kathi said. ‘And for Robin, if you see him.’
IT WAS DIFFERENT, now, from the dark empty road outside Spangnaerts Street. As the day grew towards dusk and the cold hardened, the chilled crowds had left the stinking, unprofitable barrier of the Burg for the warmer business of smashing into the places where pikes and hatchets were stored, and helping to drag the small culverin that someone had found, and cheering on a barrow loaded with gunpowder bales and some hackbuts. The roads to each of the southernmost gates were filled with determined people, and the way to the Ghent Gate was packed.
Gelis was dressed as she had been, and Diniz had cast off his half-armour and helm and wore a servant’s gear from the Hospital: a cap with flaps and a rough felted cloth over a worn leather tunic, hose and boots. Soldiers alone or in small groups could do nothing in this sort of crowd. Adorne must have had to regroup: leaving part of his force by the Grand’ Place and sending the rest to protect what they could; avoiding fire; avoiding bloodshed; spinning out time until Gruuthuse should come; hoping that darkness and cold would take the heart out of the rising. Battling through the crowds, anonymous in the flickering gloom, Gelis glimpsed now and then the flash of plate steel in the distance, where men were travelling swiftly to one danger point or another, to mass with their weapons. Some carried trumpets, and she saw saddle-drums: ready to rally, and parley. But the mob voice might prevail before then.
Diniz, his arm in hers, was half running now. They had faced death together before, but with Nicholas sharing it with them, and sharing the sense of exhilaration, of comedy, of high adventure which he brought to everything he did. She thought of a dangerous, exuberant piece of play-acting on an enemy ship in an African anchorage, and the sheepish joy in the eyes of Diniz and Nicholas, lurching on board from a night at Tendeba. Diniz said, ‘I wish Nicholas could be here,’ which made her look at him, beginning to smile. Then, ashamed, she saw that her mind had been seduced into a dream, while he was facing reality. They had to cross out of the town. They had to get horses. They had to waylay and stop everyone on the road, beginning with the slow convoy from Nancy, so near home at the end of its journey. And at best, in the darkness and cold, to turn it aside to find shelter while the battle between the town and the Duke’s former men played itself out. She did not speak, and neither did Diniz, for soon they were leaving the crowds and turning into the dark, by the water.
There were few people there, and those who laboured past, going home, were the elderly or the disenchanted or the cautious, who preferred not to see a protest escalate into a killing. She and Diniz were not the first, obviously, to try to cross the waterway since the gates had been blocked: the frosty grass on both banks was well trampled, and the canal lumpy with re-congealed blocks and a frozen litter of planks and random possessions. In war, the town employed men whose sole duty was to break up the ice to preserve the town from invasion. This drop in temperature had come too quickly for that, and in any case the ice was still soft. You could see black water swirl in the centre It was seven feet deep.
Diniz said, ‘Where?’ and Gelis said, ‘Follow me.’
You learned, as a child, which bits froze first; where the eddies were. The nearest place, the shallow pool that lay still, was not here, but far down the bank, where there were no people or lights. She had brought, tied in her apron, two pairs of footed leggings in wool from the sickroom, to drag over their footwear and offer some purchase. If there was enough ice, they would help. Diniz took her wrist as they stepped from the bank, and held it as they edged forwards.
One step; two.
At the first sign of a crack, they could help one another. Lucia, his fair, silly mother, had been riding, unaware that there was ice under the
snow. When it gave way, the weight of the horse took her straight down, and the cold of the water had ended it. At first, they had thought Nicholas had driven her on to the river, thinking her to be Simon, her yellow-haired husband, but it was not so.
Two steps; three. How close was the convoy with Robin? It might arrive when they were still in mid-river. But no. In this flat country they would see it. They would hear, far away, the shouts from the watchers on the gatehouse battlements, who would certainly see it. She realised that John, the other prisoner, would be with Robin, and Dr Tobie, Clémence’s husband.
Three steps; four. Five steps; six. She slipped, and Diniz’s hand tightened and held her, and she steadied. She had been thinking of Jodi. If she died, he had Nicholas. If Nicholas died …
She slowed. If she and Nicholas died, and Tobie didn’t survive, there was something else; someone other than Jodi whom she had forgotten about. She said, feeling foolish and frightened and cold, standing in the middle of the ice, ‘Listen. When my sister died, you were with her. You know that Nicholas has another son? An unacknowledged son by Katelina?’
She heard him draw breath. It was a difficult place. Then he said, ‘I guessed. No, I knew. But I haven’t told anyone.’ He paused, and the ice rocked. He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’re doing better than I am.’ He had begun again to draw her across.
She followed, still talking in gasps. ‘Tobie knows. There is a paper, lodged with Tobie’s notary.’ Step, slide and step.
‘I see,’ Diniz said. ‘But you speak as if Nicholas is going to die, too. I’m sure he isn’t. Gelis, can you jump?’
Gemini Page 14