Niccolo Rising (14 page)

At the same time, he had no doubt at all how he was going to pass the rest of the night. He had already brought down, in a roll, the papers he required to study before his first purchasing mission. He asked and received from the demoiselle Metteneye permission to use the innkeeper’s office, with its lamp and its worktable, where Jehan kept his chests and his ledgers.

She was fifty and her smile made him flinch, but he smiled back when she trimmed the lamp, and brought him a better stool, and asked if there was anything of which he had need. He said no, and then changed his mind. He asked whether Mabelie could bring him a flask of the wine she had put specially aside for him. It was a risk, but a small one. Jehan was unlikely to let his wife come running here twice.

He unrolled his papers and opened the inkstand, but after the door closed, made no attempt to read or to write. As always, coming back to a town, he had run through his mind the tale of his past conquests and part conquests, and had arranged them, half in idle anticipation, half in amusement at himself, in descending order of attack.

Mabelie this time stood at the head. He had found her in his last days at the Metteneyes, a virgin of splendid charms and piquant simplicity, from which status he had led her with quite unwonted enjoyment. She was a servant, of course: one of the myriads of poor cousins and children of cousins which provided the staff for every good burgher’s household. There would be no hurry therefore to find her a husband. He had hoped, when he came back this time, to find her still in the house. When he saw her with her pail on the quay, still bright-eyed, still blushing, he had been quite touched.

Last time, she had come to him here, and later he had bribed the two other maids to sleep elsewhere, while he came to her attic. Sometimes, such were the pleasures of Bruges that the dormitory stayed empty all night, and they could take their ease there. It was the only way he could pass such a night, without leaving the house. Women were not permitted in the inns and halls of the merchants.

When a quarter of an hour had passed and Mabelie had not come, he became impatient, and opened the door. One of the menservants was passing, and he shut it again. Five minutes he tried again, and nearly knocked over the demoiselle Metteneye, advancing to knock with his wine. He produced a brilliant smile, and detaining her chatting, asked after Mabelie. The girl, she said, was a trial to her at times, as all girls were, but a hard worker for the most part, and earned her keep in times like these, when everyone wanted service and didn’t care whom they ran off their feet. She would be off perhaps making up beds for the new gentlemen who had come in that day. She couldn’t say. But my lord Simon would no doubt see her about, tonight or tomorrow.

He tried again ten minutes later, and this time found a maid that he knew, whom he avoided as a rule because of the leer with which she accepted his bribes. She giggled and said that, of course, she would tell Mabelie that the gentleman was working late. But indeed, monseigneur, Mabelie was working late herself. Leer.

She was a fool. There had been no mistaking the look he had given the wench on the quay, or that she had come there on purpose to see him. He let the girl go and, wine in hand, wandered idly all through the house, from the servants’ quarters to the kitchen, being charming to everyone, and growing angrier. A game of cards was in progress in the commonroom. He stood and watched, chatting and drinking. Other servants came and went, but not Mabelie. He would have to go out. He had almost decided when the courtyard bell jangled and jangled, so that the cardplaying stopped and heads turned.

Voices. Barking. Someone had disturbed his hound. Metteneye’s voice, and then Metteneye’s face round the doorpost. “No need, gentlemen, to be alarmed. Someone has reported open bales to the mercers’ men, and they have come to search. It will not take long to prove their mistake. Everything is in order.”

They groaned. It happened every now and then. Foreign merchants
had to abide by strict rules. Goods might be sold in their lodgings on certain days and at certain times only, and must be corded up when that time was over. Uncorded goods meant fines and confiscation. The native traders of Bruges were well protected. One was polite – as now – to the officials who came in with their strapped caps and heavy jackets and broad shouldered servants standing behind. And agreed, of course, to descend to the cellars where the great bales were kept, and from which light, said a passerby, was showing at every trapdoor.

The tramp of feet was sending his dog hysterical, so Simon let it out and took it down the cellar steps with the rest, his fingers tucked under its collar. It snuffled and tugged, even when the cellars proved, of course, to be totally empty but for merchandise, and all the merchandise neatly corded and baled as it should be. Metteneye crossed to snuff the rogue lantern, which some fool had left burning untended.

The dog nearly knocked him over. Wrenching itself from Simon’s hand, it leaped past Metteneye, round a pillar, through an archway and, scrabbling, vanished behind a great stack of kegs. They followed it. It had stopped before five bales of forest and brown and middling wool and a sack of skins which had just been inspected. It was barking in front of the bales as if they either threatened its peace of mind or contained its dinner.

Simon walked forward. Between the bales and the wall was a space. Upon the space, a makeshift bed appeared to be laid, composed so far as he could see of an assortment of fox, cat and hare skins, imperfectly cured. The portions of fur obscured a single undulating shape which separated, as he watched, into two distinct forms. A white article, evincing itself at one end, resolved itself astonishingly into the cap on the winsome head of the servant called Mabelie, followed jerkily by her shoulders.

She would have stopped there, but crowding round her, the mercers’ men and the Scots merchants had already begun to break into laughter. They dragged her out, guffawing, while she kept her eyes shut and her scarlet face hidden as best she could. She had her stockings on. Otherwise the only part of her clothed was her waist. Metteneye, smiling angrily, took off his jacket and flung it over her.

Simon took three steps off. He stood at the other end of the warm heap of furs where his dog was still barking, and he had in his hand the little dagger which foreign merchants were permitted to carry, to protect themselves against robbers. He bent, perhaps to probe with the blade, or perhaps to defend himself. He had no need to do either. Under his eyes, there emerged slowly a dishevelled head of dust-coloured hair, a pair of brawny shoulders and a sweating chest half encased in a madeover shirt of limp canvas and, over this, an even cheaper pourpoint whose laces did not seem to be entirely attached to their stockings.

Simon knew the face. He knew the broad brow, the moon-like eyes,
the nose, precise as an owl’s between the dimpled cheeks, and the deprecating, disarming smile.

Claes, the Charetty apprentice. Claes, whose expression at this moment was neither apprehensive nor rueful nor mischievous, but something of all three. Who said, shutting his eyes with a sigh, “I won’t deny it. I admit it. I’ve the conduct of an oaf and the talents of a girl, and there’s nothing surer than this, that I’m a mortification to my father, wherever he is.”

It was the biggest joke of the evening, thought the mercers. Instead of a nasty scene with the Scots, a court case, a lot of ill feeling, there was a serving-wench being given her business by Marian de Charetty’s great smiling lout Claes, lying there in his undone laces, talking his way into his next beating.

It made you wonder, too, when you saw how the fellow Simon was taking it, whether the noble Scots lord might not have had an eye on the lassie as well. He had certainly gone a queer colour. Indeed, for a moment, the knife he had in his hand flashed once or twice, as if he wouldn’t mind using it.

And perhaps the fellow Claes thought so too, for all of a sudden, with a heave and a jerk, he was out of the furs and thrusting past the dog and between two of the lads standing laughing at him, and through the arch and round the pillar and up the steps and off through the house in the direction that led to the courtyard. The merchants and the mercers’ men looked after him guffawing, and someone slapped Metteneye on the back. Then the noble Simon seemed to come to himself, and he burst out laughing as well, and sheathed his knife, and called to his dog and said, “Well, what are we waiting for? That’s a rogue needs a beating, and all we have to do is catch him!”

Immediately, his companions saw what he was after. The joke was good, and it needn’t be over yet. Apprentice Claes, the great lover, was a long way from his attic at the Charetty house. The least they could do for poor Metteneye, with his trust abused and a good servant maybe in the family way, was to catch the fellow and make him regret it. Crowing and hallooing, they streamed out of the cellar, leaving Metteneye to grip the little piece by the arm and drag her up the steps to his lady.

The trouble was, of course, the odour of fox, and cat, and hare, and even a faint residual tincture of rabbit. And yet the lad was inventive, by God. He nipped round into St John’s Place and past the English merchants’ house before you could blink, and then dived straight across and into the Englishmen’s tavern, where they were not at all welcoming as he dashed through, spilling the beer and the dice and the card tables, and still less so when a quantity of pursuers burst through the door, including those well able to see what the dicing stakes had been. By that time, Simon’s dog had been joined by another.

By the time they fought their way through to the back door, Claes had gone, but there was a wicket door swinging loose in Winesack Street
with both dogs barking before it, so they flung it open and poured through, and across a courtyard, and up to a door which opened courteously when they hammered on it, revealing a stout, shiny gentleman in towelling robes, loosely – too loosely – swaying at dog-height.

No one consoled him. Ignoring advice from the better-informed, merchants and mercers pressed past him, following Simon. They bounded from passage to parlour and into a medley of chambers furnished, like Paradise, with nothing but white clouds and seraphic pink bodies. Among them were several more mercers, a midwife, two counsellors, the chief clerk of the tonlieu, a Grand Dean, two guild-sisters and a bell-founder with muscles like anchor-chains.

No fleeing apprentice was visible through the steam or, indeed, rigorously sought. Two of the pursuers had the misfortune to miss their footing on the slippery tiles and fall into the baths, overcome with the heat, the noise and the inadvertent movements of bathers. Those who emerged, streaming, into the September night might have gone home at that point but for the sight of Simon, running fiend-faced and light-footed before them, with three or four dogs at his heels.

They followed, and were rewarded with the sight of the boy, the randy big bastard who had caused all the trouble, dashing through the darkness to the quay and down the steps to the water. A moment later, one of the long barges moored there swung out and began punting out into midstream, pointing towards Damme. On the steps, Simon paused and then, turning, sprang up to the quay and began running hard with the dogs for the next bridge, followed at an increasing distance by the breathless merchants and mercers, to whom had added themselves a curious householder or two and the porter of the bath house, exuding general goodwill and a willingness to be bribed by almost anybody.

Powerfully though the apprentice might drive his oar, he was only one man in a barge too broad for punting. The boat came sluggishly up to the bridge just as the Scots lord, perfectly trained, flung himself on to its incline and, balancing, jumped.

The reek must have met him in mid-air. Before he hit the laden barge, he would know what it was he’d jumped into. As it was, he first crashed into the boy, who dropped his oar in the water. Then the lord Simon’s feet hit the cargo, and he stumbled and sank into something which responded with squeals and forced grunts and queer pipings, each of them borne on a belch of unpleasant vapour. Air from the bellies and bladders of Bruges’ deceased dogs and cats and the little dead pigs of St Anthony, retrieved from the water each night by this, the regular scavenging barge.

Sadly, the Scots lord was lying among them. The only oar was overboard. And so, in an ungainly plunge, was the youth Claes, forging, for the second time in two days, through the doubtful water of the canal to the far bank. Choking audibly, Simon of Kilmirren rose to
his feet also, stepped up and, diving, began with ease and style to overtake the flapping apprentice.

On both banks the merchants followed him, and the dogs. By their lanterns they saw him master the interfering cross-sway of the water, and follow the darkened head jerking through the water ahead of him, beyond which was the bridge of the Poorterslogie, and the tall latticed bulk of the building itself, the clubhouse of the great White Bear Society.

The lad was no swimmer. He must know how swiftly the lord Simon was gaining on him. The youth would have to land at the Poorterslogie, and if he got there – and he might – before Simon, he wouldn’t get there ahead of the dog-pack. A pity. A pity to let it go so far, poor silly boy. For the water might rinse off the worst of the odour, but plenty would stick. Every brute in the place would be there on the bank with a welcome. And swimming coolly, effortlessly, at his back, the Scots lord Simon wasn’t going to rescue the apprentice. Not after all that had happened.

Simon got to the bridge a little after the dogs. Above the racket of barking, opening shutters rapped one after the other. Squares of light fell from their windows and showed the dogs grouped, growling and yapping at the head of the steps and the apprentice half out of the water, hesitating at the foot.

There were men there as well. They weren’t householders, because the light shone on badges. Drawn by the barking, they were a passing party of hondeslagers, the patrolmen paid by the city to clear the streets of stray dogs. Obligingly, they were cuffing the beasts from the steps; holding them back from young Claes. It annoyed the Scots lord, you could see. Thinking the youth might escape, he drove himself swiftly forward and lunging, seized the boy by the ankle and wrenched. The youth toppled off-balance and hit the steps with his shoulders. He exclaimed. The dogs, driven to frenzy by the redoubled odour, broke loose and pounced on the two men, one fallen, one upright. Claws ripped down the lord’s doublet and he took out his knife. The men, swinging leaden clubs, set about them, and dogs hurtled squealing, and dropped as the apprentice got to his feet, threequarters naked. The Scots lord straightened behind him.