Dorothy Dunnett - [House of Niccolo 01]

by Niccolo Rising

  He couldn’t fight two men. He hadn’t the skill to defeat Lionetto by himself, never mind with Jaak at his side. And however fast they ran, Julius and Gregorio couldn’t get to him in time. So he was going to die. Not from a beating. From the adult equivalent of a beating, which you got when you meddled with adults’ affairs.

  “Traitor!” Lionetto was shouting. “Whoreson! Rascally scum! Steal a soldier’s money, then! Break your trust! Empty his purse and betray him! Oh, yes. Do all of that. But not to Lionetto. Not to Lionetto, my friend.”

  Captain Lionetto had arrived. He stood, sword in hand, the third point of a triangle formed by himself and by Nicholas and by the glittering form of Jaak de Fleury. The merchant, one eye on Nicholas, stepped back a little, his sword disengaged. Nicholas watched Lionetto.

  But Lionetto’s eyes were on Jaak de Fleury. He said, “I didn’t believe it. Rumours, I said. But I thought I’d make sure, with all that new money I’d sent. The Pope’s money. The cash from all the booty. And there was your Milan agency closed. Your man Maffino absconded. No money. No money for Lionetto.” He smiled. His nose spread, glittering among the wholemeal crumbs of his skin. “So I asked about my money in Geneva. All my money. All the savings I’d lodged there. And what am I told? Gone as well. All gone. And why?”

  He said the word gently. As he said it, his right arm flashed out. A splash of blood appeared on Jaak de Fleury’s shoulder and the merchant made a sound and jumped back, his sword lifted.

  Lionetto lowered his, artfully. “Why? The Duke of Savoy, they say, has told Jaak de Fleury to hand over all Lionetto’s savings. That’s what they say. That’s what they want me to believe. But was Lionetto born yesterday? No.”

  Again, he moved. The sword flashed. It pirouetted past the merchant’s sword, wildly lifted, and touched and entered the merchant’s arm. Lionetto said, “I think you have all my money.”

  The pink in Jaak de Fleury’s face had altered, by measure of a small beaker, say, of diluted woad. He was gasping. He said, “Of course I haven’t. It’s your own fault. You changed sides. You moved from Piccinino to the Aragon side. The French heard. They gave orders. Everything you had was to be confiscated. Savoy ordered me.”

  “Really?” said Lionetto. He danced forward. The merchant moved back. “Perhaps they did. But of course, you got compensation.”

  “No!” said Jaak de Fleury. “They promised. They didn’t pay. I’d invested it all. The withdrawal bankrupted me. I’m a bankrupt.”

  “So I see,” said Lionetto. His sword flicked. A jewel flew from the merchant’s collar. “Penniless,” said Lionetto. “So where is my money?”

  Nicholas said, “It’s true. The King of France told Savoy to confiscate it. He is bankrupt. It’s Charetty money he’s living off.”

  Lionetto turned. “No money?”

  “No. Leave him alone,” Nicholas said.

  Julius said, “Nicholas! He was going to kill you.”

  “Oh?” said Lionetto. “Why was he trying to kill my little Nicholas? Perhaps I will spare him. I wouldn’t mind killing Nicholas now and then, myself. I nearly killed your doctor, did I tell you? I met him riding north. Your doctor Tobias. It was the money he brought that made me leave Piccinino. But he pointed out that he’d meant me no harm. He’d made me rich, which was true. Except that I’m not rich, am I? And whose fault is that?”

  Jaak de Fleury was not a cowardly man. His self-esteem had never made courage necessary. He stood, breathing quickly, and said, “I see no point in continuing this.” And turning his back, he walked away.

  Lionetto, on the other hand, was a mercenary. He said, “Nor do I, my dear monsieur.” And taking three unhurried steps after him, ran him straight through the back.

  Standing over the sprawled, athletic body, he tugged out his blade, examined it, and then wiped it carefully on a patch of grass. “I hope,” said Lionetto, “that you all observed. This poor Nicholas was fighting for his life when I saved him. What are all those people doing there?”

  “Watching you save Nicholas,” Julius said. He was breathing rather quickly as well. “Do you have urgent business in Bruges?”

  Lionetto cast his glance round, and scowled at Nicholas. “Not now,” he said. “Don’t I remember having cause to complain of you once as well?”

  “You did,” said Nicholas. “But another man fought me on your behalf. I think you could call the matter fully closed.”

  Lionetto grunted. “Did you win?”

  “No. I lost,” Nicholas said.

  Lionetto’s fiery eyes swept the field beyond Jaak de Fleury, to where a dead man lay on one side of the wall and another just over it. He said, “Well, you seem to have got the knack now. If you want to claim the old fellow’s death, I won’t contradict you. I need a coin to get me a lodging at Ghent.”

  Gregorio said, “Take my purse,” and threw it.

  Lionetto caught it and stared at him. So did the other two. Lionetto grinned. “Did you a service, did I?” he said. “Well, remember it. Some day I might want a service in return. Demoiselle?”

  He bowed to someone walking forward from the crowd that had gathered on the street side of the site. Then, sheathing his sword, he strolled off, hat in hand.

  The person walking forward was Marian de Charetty.

  Julius said, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  Gregorio turned from watching Lionetto. He said, “I think she saw who did the killing. I think perhaps Nicholas …?”

  Nicholas said, “Could you … Perhaps you could clear the crowd and get hold of the people who have to be told? I’ll bring the demoiselle back to Spangnaerts Street.”

  His heart beat heavily after the fighting, and his hands were shaking. He fought to stop the beginning of dizziness. He stood where he was, and collected his wits, so far as he was able. The further she came from the crowd, the more private they would be. She would still have to accept what he had to tell her in public. The spectators couldn’t hear, but they could see her.

  The fact that he waited for her, of course, told her what the news was. She was dressed as strictly as he had ever seen her; her gown tight to the wrists and the throat, and voile swathing her ears and her chin below the brim of her hat. The bright blue eyes were set in darkened skin, and her lips and her cheeks were both pallid.

  She stood beside him, looking up, and said, “He hurt you?”

  There was blood on the grass where he was standing. He remembered the blade in his back. It had been no more than a flesh wound, soon staunched. He said, “No. Julius and I – we bring you bad news.”

  “I’ve lost Felix,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes.

  “He had grown up,” said Nicholas. “Quite suddenly. He helped with the business at Milan, and wanted to fight at Naples. He did fight, and well. Astorre will tell you. Then instead of coming home, he chose to cross to Urbino’s army. The Count of Urbino and Alessandro Strozzi. They were fighting on the east.”

  “I know,” she said. “In the Abruzzi. You were there?”

  “He even had the chance to joust in the field,” Nicholas said. “And won. And was very happy. He died just after that, in the field. There was a battle, and he was hit by a crossbolt. It was very quick. We buried him there.”

  He could see her flinch. She didn’t want details yet. She looked at the other dead man lying limp on the grass. She said, “He wanted the business.”

  Nicholas said, “He hated the Charetty. He hated women, I think. Thibault married twice, and he despised him, and your sister, and my mother. He isn’t worth thinking about.”

  “No. Later,” she said, “you’ll tell me more. And about where he is buried. And – oh. The girls. They’re not in the house.”

  He said, “We could go for them now.”

  The house in Spangnaerts Street, redesigned since the fire, was familiar to them and unfamiliar to him. Tilde and Catherine, sought and brought back, showed none of their mother’s restraint but gave her work to do, soothing them. To Nicholas they
behaved as they’d done when he was the familiar companion walking in and out of their lives. His marriage to their mother might never have happened.

  Marian de Charetty behaved, too, as if her rôle of widow had never changed. She had known Claes for ten years. She had borne Felix, and bred him, and seen Cornelis melt, at last, in pride over his child, his son.

  Nicholas saw it, and without interfering went on with the business of clearing up the day’s wreckage.

  The reckoning over Jaak de Fleury he left to the two lawyers, who seemed to think it no trouble in such a case of unprovoked attack. His body was taken elsewhere. Gregorio, with efficiency, began to arrange for the release and disbanding of Jaak’s few servants. What the man had left would go to his brother.

  With circumspection, and without troubling the demoiselle or her family, Gregorio and Julius between them removed all the small valuables that had begun to accumulate, bought with the demoiselle’s money. Turned to silver, they would find their way back to her account. Towards the end, the effects of the journey made Julius stupid, and he was thankful when Gregorio agreed he should go off to bed.

  Nicholas, of the unimpaired engine, continued to work. Gregorio visited him, and was told to go home, which he did. The bereaved family had his sympathy. But he was not married to his employer.

  The demoiselle was aware of these things. From time to time, a tongue-tied Henninc or one or other of her household would appear and transmit an offer of help or notify a visit from someone. She returned polite thanks, but felt that today her place was with her daughters.

  She gave her remaining children supper in her own parlour, but didn’t have any herself. After a while, the girls ate with the appetite of the young. They were already recovering. Tomorrow or the next day, they would want to know all about the battle, and the joust.

  Later, after she had seen them to bed, she heard Tilde weeping, and went in and sat with her until finally she dropped off to sleep. Then she undressed herself, and put on her nightrobe and went to the chamber and sat at her unshuttered window, wanting Cornelis.

  But that was wrong, because Cornelis would have suffered terribly. His son. His heir. She had only lost her baby.

  With mild kindness, she remembered Cornelis. He had been as good a husband as any woman might expect. When her father had gone bankrupt, faute van den wissele, like Jaak de Charetty, Cornelis had taken the company, and made it thrive. He had never toubled her with it. The child and the household were her business.

  And so they would be today, if Cornelis hadn’t died. Of course at times she was lonely. She was lonely tonight. Only Tilde and Catherine knew Felix as she did, and they were too young to console her. So were his friends. She thought of Margriet Adorne with sudden thankfulness. She did have friends of her own age, who would understand. Tomorrow. But tonight had to be suffered first.

  In Felix’s room, she knew, was a chest with all his belongings, and a helmet with a red plume and an eagle’s head on it. She had found it for herself. Whoever had put it there hadn’t locked it away. She was being treated by the senior members of her household as a grown woman who could face a crisis, and ask for help if she needed it. She realised that someone had been near at hand all day, whatever she happened to be doing. Not speaking and not in the same room very often, but near at hand. Especially Nicholas.

  Until now, she had given no real thought to Nicholas. While he was away she had missed him. She had missed his strength to lean on, and his understanding. She had blamed him, secretly, for abandoning her and the company, as she used to blame Cornelis, she thought, when he went off to Antwerp and left her to deal with something.

  She had wanted him back for the same reason. No. She had wanted him back for the sort of intermittent companionship which had come to be part of her daily pleasure. If he felt the same pleasure, she didn’t know. She did know that he had found a taste for affairs, and was experimenting with it. Until recently, she supposed, he could, if he wished, have slipped back into anonymity. Instead, he had stepped forward and committed himself to the Charetty company and to her.

  So what must he be thinking tonight? He’d been with Felix. He hadn’t learned of his death in the yard among wool caps and stained skins and stinking aprons. The way Felix had met his end owed something to him. Guilt as well as thoughtfulness had sent him dragging Julius on that breakneck journey to bring her the news with least pain.

  Instead, his arrival had caused her to learn of Felix’s death in the most brutal way possible. Whatever he thought of Esota, he had learned of her death on his way. He had heard of the ruin of Jaak de Fleury. He had lived with them both, and had survived cruelty without apparent bitterness. It was not his fault that Jaak de Fleury was dead: Lionetto had killed him. But today he had learned that his life as well as his happiness meant nothing to Jaak. And today he had killed. Nicholas, who emerged ruefully from the Steen with the stripes red on his back, his face cloudless, had taken two lives.

  But she was forgetting. Men didn’t go to war and stay merchants. He had been taught to kill now, and so had Felix. And one of them had paid the price.

  She thought for a long time. The house was quiet. Along the passage, the door to the handsome chamber Jaak de Fleury had adopted as his own was shut and locked, his possessions piled in the empty room. Beyond it was the room Nicholas had taken when he and Gregorio made this house their office before the night of the fire. No light came from it, but the door was open.

  It had been open when she passed. She knew why. He was the man who had taken Felix from her. He was her husband. He was neither. There was no role for him in this tragedy, unless she wanted to make him one.

  Did she? Her memories tonight were of her family, of Cornelis and Felix, Tilde and Catherine. However long she had known the boy Nicholas, he was outside that small, tight circle. To admit him was a kind of betrayal. He had been to Felix what Julius had been: a mentor, a tutor if you like. He had been to Cornelis an apprentice. To her, he had shown the face of the ideal steward: loyal and hardworking and thoughtful.

  Outside in the street, someone passed with a lantern. The little glow swept her room, printing her hands and her robe with frail lozenges. Her hair, falling coiled to her lap, briefly gleamed. She looked down, smoothing it.

  I am a fool, she thought. Gregorio is an ideal steward. Julius is loyal and hardworking and thoughtful. But I made Nicholas marry me. And then I became the child, and he became the parent.

  She thought, Now I have no other child. And he has no one else, either, to understand the day it has been.

  The door was still open when she walked along the passage, shielding the small flame of her candle. He was resting, as she had done, at his window, but had turned his head from it on hearing her step.

  All the daytime energy had gone, pressed down below the surface to give room to the thoughts that had to be dealt with.

  She knew what they were. She walked to the window and looked down at him, so that he could see her dry eyes, her command of small things.

  He didn’t rise: a thing she found touching. But his face eased a little.

  She had handled children and husbands. She knew how to give comfort as well as receive it. She saw him recognise what she was about to do just before she blew out the candle, and laid it down, and sat, gathering her robe, at his side by the window.

  There was enough light to see where his hand lay. She took it lightly in both her own.

  He said, “I didn’t know what you wanted.”

  She said, “I need someone who needs me.”

  She was wiser than she knew. As it turned out, in this one thing she was the stronger. As doctors do, she forced him out of his composure and then, as she did with Tilde or Catherine, took him in her comforting arms.

  But he was not Tilde or Catherine, and she too was astray and bewildered and suffering. His embrace, gentle as hers, held within it something else, which she realised he was silently controlling. That was when she lifted his hands in hers and ran them thr
ough the warm, shining weight of her hair. Then she held them to her breast, in the hollow where the robe fastened. “Nicholas?”

  His fingers escaped hers but stayed, touching her robe. In his anxiety, he spoke in French. “Think.”

  “No,” said Marian de Charetty. “Don’t think.”

  Chapter 39

  HOW OR WHERE Marian de Charetty passed the first night of her second bereavement did not escape notice. Tilde, her daughter, disturbed by some small sound, rose before dawn to find her mother’s room empty. Nicholas had closed his door. Tilde had paused there only a moment when she heard her mother begin to say something inside. Whatever it was, she broke off almost at once, as if she were out of breath like Catherine, and crying. But the sob had not been one of grief. Tilde stole past the door. Then, curled tight in her bed, she wept not like her mother, but like Catherine.

  In the days that followed all the household grew to realise what had happened, for neither the demoiselle nor her husband tried to pretend that her bedchamber was not being shared. During the day, it was a house of black cloth and tailors and mourning. At night the demoiselle accepted the comfort that was legally hers. Where once her servants would have felt discomfort or resentment and would have resorted to obscene jokes and even hostility, now they excused and forgave. The death of Felix changed everything.

  Julius, consumed with curiosity, watched it happening. Not only was the marriage accepted, he saw, by Henninc and the men who used to work with Claes, but even the burghers they dealt with were apparently reconciled to the union, and had been even before this development. He spoke to Gregorio about it and heard a little, from the other lawyer, of how the marriage had been achieved. He was wary still about Gregorio, as any man was entitled to be with another in his own line of business, but he liked what he had seen of him at the time Jaak de Fleury was killed, and he had found him an unassuming, hard-working partner during the unpleasant tasks that had followed. In subsequent hours over the ledgers he had had to admit, as well, that the man was more than competent. At times, he thought that there was something more than competence behind the disconcerting black stare; but after he found that Gregorio had a mistress called Margot, he realised that he was just like everybody else. The woman was a good cook, as well. He wondered, after Gregorio had invited him, unprompted, to meet her, why he had the impression that Gregorio was secretly much amused.