Dorothy Dunnett - [House of Niccolo 01]

by Niccolo Rising

  To give him time, she said, “You and Julius have always maintained that the mercenary troop ought to be the most lucrative side of the business. Astorre has given me good reason to think that is so. The Duke of Milan and the Pope are recruiting mercenaries for the Naples war: we have well-trained lances on reserve pay who have only to be called. Captain Astorre with the best of these will go overland to Milan before Christmas. If Astorre obtains a contract, he will send for more men by the spring.”

  He said, “But the Flanders galleys would take me out of reach of my lord Simon just as effectively.”

  That was to test her. But her thoughts on this matter had occupied many nights. She said, “Do you suppose you are being chased out of the city by Simon? There is no question of that. You maintain that the shears fell into the water and became entangled between you. My lord Simon, it seems, will say nothing, except that he regrets the disgrace to his rank in being led by his temper into chastising a servant. For him to seek you out now or attack you would make him a laughing-stock.”

  “And you don’t think I would attack him?” said Claes.

  “I think I know you,” she said. “That is why I have asked Astorre if he will take you. There are things you need to learn.”

  “Such as how to fight,” he said. His tone was neither joking nor bitter but idle, as if his thoughts were quite elsewhere. He said, “Demoiselle, I am content, as I told you. If you know me, you know that.”

  She said, “But you have put yourself in the market-place,” with a little sadness. And then, as he did not answer, she said, “And, you must know, the city is concerned. They won’t press charges for what has happened and they won’t order me to send you away. But it would be wise to leave Bruges for a while.”

  She broke off again. Claes said, “Geneva lies on the way to Milan. Will captain Astorre call there? Is that what you mean by having something to learn?”

  When Claes wanted to know something, there was no avoiding the vastness of his gaze. He did not look distressed, although his face was more hollow than it usually was, with the faint rainbow colours here and there that reminded Felix, he said, of St Salvator’s windows.

  Claes had come to her from the kitchens of Jaak de Fleury of Geneva, whose late niece’s bastard he was. Michelle her sister had been Thibault de Fleury’s second wife. Her sister was dead, and Thibault old and out of his senses, but Jaak de Fleury continued to flourish. And his horse and his ass and his wife and his fine trade and banking company with its headquarters in Geneva.

  Life was not fair. She had not seen Jaak for many years, not since Cornelis died or long before it. All she and the de Fleury company had in common now was their trading connections, stiffly maintained because both houses depended on them, but involving no warmth, no personal interest, no friendly contact. She did not like Jaak de Fleury, and he did not like her.

  And if she did not like him, she could imagine how Claikine must feel. Although he had never spoken of his time in Geneva. Not consciously, anyway.

  Now she was sending him there, however briefly. She looked directly at him and said, “Yes, Astorre will call at Geneva. What are you afraid of?”

  He was looking at his darned hose, and smoothing one knee with a finger from which the blue dye had almost worn off. In the small cabinet meant only for Julius, he seemed to occupy all the air and all the floorspace, even though he was folded double on the low stool. He laughed suddenly and said, “You’d be surprised, demoiselle. I suppose, of ridicule I haven’t invited.”

  “Then you should learn how to deal with it,” the widow said. “As I said, you have a lot to find out. Captain Astorre has no objection to teaching you. You will learn also from Julius. Indeed, I hope there are some things Julius might find himself learning from you. When you are not here, his totals for Felix’s scholastic equipment frequently depart from the credible.”

  The finger on his knee stopped, and he looked at her.

  She answered the query with a calmness she did not need to pretend. “Yes. Julius wants to go to Italy also. I hope, by the way, that you thanked him for what happened at Sluys.”

  Claes said, “Yes, of course. Why does he want to go with Astorre? What will you do? Who would help you here with the business?”

  Her anxiety dissolved, for a moment, in amusement. She said, “Why shouldn’t he go? Julius is ambitious. A well-led band needs a notary, a paymaster, a treasurer. He would do well, and it would give him the authority he longs for. And as for the business, I don’t believe Julius really thinks that pawnbroker Oudenin will supplant him before the end of the contract. But Julius does know that I will not make him a partner, now or in the future. I need someone cleverer.”

  Silence.

  Everything she said, she knew, had been understood. Everything she thought … almost. She said, “I think I can manage. I may make a temporary appointment. That is my concern. Your concern is your immediate future. You have three offers. Which will you take?”

  She could see him physically take the decision: straightening his arms so that his big hands hardened on his knees; firming, with a long inhalation, the muscles which had held him politely at attention on the low, backless stool.

  He said, “You have considered that, by law, you would receive a fee from the galley commandant or the Dauphin for releasing me from my apprenticeship?”

  She was answered. She kept her voice, in spite of it, steady. “Every time I look at my debit column, I consider it,” Marian de Charetty said. “If you go to Milan for me instead, I shall demand large profits in compensation. Do I take it you have decided for Astorre and Italy?”

  His resignation was marked. “I have no alternative,” he said. “I was brought up obeying your every word. You send me to Milan. I go there.”

  “Such martyrdom!” said the widow. “We shall try to survive your departure.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Claes said abstractedly. His mind, it appeared, was on the business. He said, “As to the dyeshop, I think I’ve heard you and Meester Julius suggest that if the fulling and the finishing were to be farmed out, Henninc would enjoy giving all his attention to the dyeing, with Lippin to help him. And a cheerful sort of clerk – we all know they are about – could work with jonkheere Felix, now he’s ready to be interested in what goes on in the business. The investment side at Louvain can run itself for a bit, but it really needs to attract more money. Julius says. I wonder if Astorre and Julius and I could help?”

  She said, “You can certainly help. If you get a contract to garrison Naples, it will give the business here some real capital.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course. But I was thinking of something else. If you like, you could send us south with a trading caravan. You know. Merchants and men of business going to Italy and needing protection. Merchandise to be escorted over the mountains. And what would pay best – the job of taking boxes of letters and bills and bulls from the Flanders banks to their Italian headquarters. A winter courier service. The banks would give you a fee, and I could carry them all on this trip. They could send silver even, with an armed escort this size. And if they were impressed by us, they might approach you to hire men another time. You’d have to train your own couriers.”

  “I should,” said Marian de Charetty slowly. Slowly, in tribute to the implications of all he was saying and the scale, she began to suspect, of the decision he had actually reached. He was eighteen.

  She had known she was sending him from Bruges, and security. She had known she was forcing him to go to Geneva, where all his early misery must have been. And despite Astorre’s prediction that the Naples war was defensive, that there would be no fighting next year if ever, she had known that she was sending Claes to learn the business of war, and take part in it, and that when or if he returned, he would be altered.

  Yet he had to learn to defend himself. And he had meddled, as he had said.

  She looked at him, and he said, “It is for the best, demoiselle,” and gave a quick, comical grin of rea
ssurance.

  She smiled in return, with composure. She was good at that.

  Among the merchant-princes of Bruges, the most useful social event of that autumn was the banquet given for the commander of the Flanders galleys by the Duke’s wealthy Controller Pierre Bladelin. It was held in the Controller’s russet brick palace with its octagonal tower and steeple in Naalden-Straate.

  If the Duke had been present, it would have been held in the Princenhof, which would have been more interesting because, as everyone knew, there was a new bathing basin and several sumptuous retiring rooms (they said) filled with fruit and flowers and sweetmeats and perfumes and other unusual luxuries, for the use of the bathers before, during and after immersion.

  While in residence in the past the Duke had been known at least twice to pick a new mistress from the society invited to meet him at the Princenhof. If such a lady proved fertile, the fortune of that particular family would be made. The Duke was quite prodigal towards all his bastards, and none of his mistresses or their previous or subsequent husbands had ever been known to censure him.

  Katelina van Borselen had heard it all discussed often enough in her own family, and in that of her cousins. The subject came up again now, with their handsome invitations from Bladelin. The de Veeres had accepted, and so had her father. Her mother being in Zeeland, Katelina, regally trained, proposed to attend in her place.

  The de Veeres agreed that, as it was, Controller Bladelin’s house was grand enough, as it had cause to be, considering the appointments he held and the years he had enjoyed the Duke’s favour, in spite of being born to a dyer of buckram.

  Katelina, who had forgotten this detail, added it to the others already occupying her as she swept through the Controller’s doorway, and under the wrought tabernacle and the shield and the handsome sculptured effigies of the Madonna and her host in adoration.

  At this function she did not expect to meet dyers, or their sons or their notaries. But did dyers stick to dyers, and hence might ostracise the enemies of their own kind?

  She had learned from Margriet Adorne (but not from her father) that the Scotsmen had closed ranks round Simon of Kilmirren after his excess of high spirits at Sluys, when he had given a beating to that impertinent lad. It had been a fair fight, they said, although marred at the end by some accident. Since then the victor, however mutinous, had been constrained to stay decorously at Jehan Metteneye’s, or Stephen Angus’s, or in the company of the Bishop or his factor. Once he had called on her cousin, because the Scottish king’s brother was staying there. She knew, because apparently my lord Simon had asked Wolfaert about her.

  That was something her father had not forgotten to mention. She understood that she was still in his town house at Bruges and not yet dispatched to Zeeland or Brussels because he was displeased with her, and hoped, while Simon was still in Flanders, that she would repent and repair matters between them. Oddly, she was in two minds about that. For a man gently reared, Simon’s behaviour in the garden had been crass (she told herself). He was spoiled with easy conquests – but who wouldn’t be, with such looks? She had been … She had been aware of his power herself.

  If, as was rumoured, the girl found in Metteneye’s cellar had been his property, then at least he had handled the matter with style. And as for the business at Sluys – the Charetty’s rollicking labourer had by all accounts been the first to draw blood, and deserved whatever had happened thereafter.

  She had noted the faint reserve with which men spoke of Simon. He was well over thirty. He had a long record of dalliance and only a short one of practical stewardship. She recalled, certainly, that she had met his unwelcome attentions on their last meeting with an insult which had sent him off in a temper. Afterwards, she wished she had managed it better. But it was marriage … marriage she had to engineer, not what threatened to swamp her that night.

  Now, if she wished it, she had a second chance. Now, for example, he could not so well afford to reduce his circle of well-wishers. If she met him tonight, she would be amiable.

  She had nothing to lose. She had no desire to enter a convent. She had served the Queen of Scotland without gaining a husband. The Duchess of Burgundy lived at Nieppe apart from her husband and surrounded by handsome Portuguese. Simon’s sister had married one of them. But there was no guarantee that the Duchess’s entourage would bring her a husband: it was just as likely to bring her the Duke.

  She wondered if in that event her father would be shocked, and realised that he was probably hoping against hope that such a thing would happen. He had no heirs apart from Gelis and herself. He had borrowed heavily, she knew, to raise even the small dowry which would have gone with her hand to the objectionable – the abominable Scottish lord she had rejected. She had costly gowns. She had family jewels of some value, and some even rarer, presented by the princesses she had served. She had been allowed to keep these. They enhanced her value.

  She wished she were a widow; independent; in control of her life and her intelligence.

  She looked about. Soon, according to custom, the Controller’s trumpeters would announce the principal guests, and a procession would form which would lead them to the banqueting-room. The commander of the Flanders galleys would, one assumed, accompany the Controller. The Dauphin Louis, they said, had also consented to be present.

  She had met him once in Brussels, a sharp-featured man in his thirties. She had been about to leave on her three-year exile to Scotland. He had just fled to Burgundy to escape the court of his father in France. One day he would be king of that country. He was welcome to it. Meanwhile …

  Ah. Dyers did not, then, ostracise the antagonists of other dyers. There, on the other side of the hall, was Simon of Kilmirren.

  Steering her father discreetly from group to group, Katelina van Borselen made her way across Controller Bladelin’s crowded hall to where gleamed the remarkable hair of Simon of Kilmirren under a leafy concoction of taffeta. Trailing leaves feathered his oversleeves, and his jacket was buttoned with acorns. He had his back to her.

  His stance was unwontedly stiff, as if in the presence of royalty. Yet he was one of a casual circle. It included Giovanni Arnolfini, the silk merchant. The short dark man was her father’s friend Joao Vasquez, the Duchess’s secretary and a kinsman by marriage to Simon’s sister. The two wearing damask with hat-jewels of vegetable proportions were without doubt Venetians. Conversing in halting French, they would now and then turn to Arnolfini for help, or to the seventh of the group, whom she could not see, but whose Italian sounded like Tommaso Portinari’s efforts at French. Her lips twitched.

  Then her father entered the circle and Simon turned and saw her. He frowned. Frowned!

  “My lord Simon! How delightful,” said Katelina, “to see they have released you. Were you in prison for long?”

  She spoke in French. Even the Venetians, she hoped, would manage to translate most of that. To her gratification, the volatile face of her suitor went white with anger. Her father, gripping her arm, said, “Katelina, what are you thinking of? Monsieur of Kilmirren has not been imprisoned!”

  She looked puzzled. “For killing that youth? Oh, forgive me! As a foreigner, of course you would be exempt from our laws. What am I thinking of?”

  A sonorous voice at her ear said, “Madame, whatever your thoughts, they cannot fail to enchant by virtue of their delectable instrument, your noble person. Perhaps I might beg to be presented?”

  The speaker could only be the seventh man, he of the Italian-French. She turned, amused, and felt her confidence dwindle.

  The florid words had not come from a smiling gallant, but from a man in his early to middle fifties, whose substantial height was only matched by his stoutness. The fur-trimmed velvet which fell to the ground would have made the sails for a good-sized cargo-vessel, except that few fleet-owners could have afforded its price. The jewelled chain round his shoulders was worth a castle and the fur on his plain hat was sable. Below it, his clean-shaven face was many-chinned
like some fat friar’s, but unlike the traditional fat friar, held no geniality. The lips which had paid her the compliment were politely smiling, but the eyes were wintry.

  “Ah, your pardon.” The Duchess’s secretary. “Madama Katelina, may I present le sire Jordan, vicomte de Ribérac? Monseigneur lives in France, and is here on business to do with the galleys. Monseigneur, Der Florence van Borselen and his elder daughter Katelina. And Madama, may I make known Messer Orlando and Messer Piero of the Flanders galleys?”

  A slight movement of the fat man’s broad shoulders appeared to constitute a bow. “Then continue, Madame Katelina, with your lively history,” said the vicomte. “A Scottish war has broken out, here in Bruges?”

  Someone laughed – the Lucchese Arnolfini. “Not quite, monseigneur. An episode involving an apprentice with no harm done on either side. Madame Katelina has clearly heard some false rumour.”

  “I am afraid she has,” said Simon clearly. His face was still rather pale, with its frown firmly imprinted. He said, “Indeed, I see friends I must rejoin. Will you excuse me?”

  He turned without waiting for leave. “Friends?” said Katelina as he passed her. And in a voice pitched to carry no further, “Female friends, perhaps? The other kind seem to be lacking.”

  He paused. His back to the company, he kept his voice low, as hers was. He said, “Your apprentice friend has them too, you know. Indeed, you might well blame yourself for what happened to him. It was you, after all, who passed on his good opinion of me in the first place.” Then she was left, frowning in her turn, gazing after him.

  “Madame can tell us,” said the mellow voice of the vicomte de Ribérac, again in her ear. She turned round resentfully. She understood, she thought, why Simon had looked so ruffled when she arrived. His anger had not been directed at her. And yet – he did have a temper. How had he discovered that it was the apprentice who had spoken those disparaging words in her hearing? It worried her. Because it made her responsible, too, for what had happened.