Niccolo Rising (25 page)

The exodus to Sluys came later, by decorated barges and skiffs, making their way by glittering torchlight along the river, through the
Damme gate of Bruges and out by the canal to where the two Flanders ships lay outlined in light.

Moving along the canopied deck of the flagship, winecup in hand, the chosen guests would watch from the rail as sailors performed high on the rigging of the sister-ship, and tumblers somersaulted, and tightrope walkers moved dancing from mast to mast, and from mast to quay. And the walls and wharves of Sluys itself would be packed with all those who had not been invited, but who flocked every year to the extravagant theatre brought them every year by the generous, the hospitable, the inestimable Republic of Venice.

Only Katelina did not go. Pleading indisposition, she received no reproaches from her father, who understood perfectly, and who was content to have her taken back to his house by two stout men at arms and her own sensible maidservant. He did not know, therefore, when she changed her mind, and instead of making directly home, had them take her to the dyeing establishment of Marian de Charetty.

The iron lantern over the courtyard doorway was lit, but knocking at first brought no response. She had turned to leave when light footsteps approached on the other side of the door, and a woman’s voice made itself heard in civil apology, overlaid by the sound of withdrawing bolts.

The door, when it opened, revealed the short, neat person of Marian de Charetty herself, lamp in hand and, after the first flash of surprise, pleasantly collected. The Widow said, “Madame Katelina! Forgive me – all my household are off to gape at the galleys at Sluys. Please come in. What can I do to serve you?”

Katelina paused in the courtyard, her maid standing beside her. “It’s late. I’m sorry. I wonder if your apprentice is here?” she said directly.

“This way. Please,” said the widow Charetty. Holding open the door of her house, she ushered her visitor through a passage and up a few steps to a low-ceiling room where a fire burned and a single, high-backed chair littered with papers showed where she had been sitting. Clearing these with one hand, she gestured to Katelina to sit, and directed her maid to a stool in the background. Then, still standing herself, she said, “I have several apprentices, madame, and all but Claes are at Sluys. Which did you wish to see?”

Things done on impulse are not always easy to carry through. Her head in its elaborate veiling held high, Katelina said, “I have just heard in a little more detail what befell your apprentice Claes at Sluys. I feel some responsibility … The disagreement which led to his injury began with another incident in which I was involved. I wished to ask how he was.”

The round high-coloured face opposite her broke into an open smile. “Don’t blame yourself,” said the widow Charetty. “There are few people as exasperating as Claes in the midst of some prank. He brings most of it on himself. And he is much better. Well enough indeed to have gone to Sluys, but the physician thought it best to harbour his
strength for the journey. Wait. I shall call him. You will see for yourself.”

“Journey?” said Katelina. But the Widow had gone, and when she came back, it was to usher the large figure of Claes himself to stand before Katelina.

Because, she supposed, he was not working in the yard, he was better-smelling than usual, in worn doublet and hose which were clean, and showed no change that she could see in the physique beneath them, which was broadly powerful. Lifting her eyes to his face she thought at first, on her little acquaintance with it, that nothing had altered. Then, as a log shifted, she saw by the flame that his eyes were set deeper than she remembered. Then the dimples appeared, like two thumb-prints, and he said, “But how kind of the lady to trouble! Or was it by wish of my lord Simon? I heard Controller Bladelin had invited him.”

Beside Katelina, Marian de Charetty’s lips tightened. It was enough to set the thing in proportion. Amused, Katelina said, “That’s the second time this evening I have been put in my place. The first time it was my lord Simon, as you call him.”

“One must call him something,” said the apprentice.

Marian de Charetty, sitting, said, “We hoped the matter was over. It created more gossip than it was worth.”

“It will die when Simon has gone,” Katelina said. “And Claes is leaving also?”

“Very shortly,” said the widow de Charetty. “He is forsaking the dye vats for Italy.” She glanced, smiling at her apprentice. “He is joining my captain, Astorre, on a journey to Milan. If it falls out as we hope, he may make his career in the field for a season. He is, you will agree, built for it?”

That, at least, was true. Gazing at the pleasant, firelit face of the apprentice, Katelina wondered what therefore seemed odd about the arrangement. Claes had never fought, rumour said. He had hardly known what to do against Simon. An apprentice such as this had no training. She said, “You will have a lot to learn. Do you ride?”

The dimples deepened. He shook his head. He said, “They’re planning to put the horse on my back.”

Katelina removed her eyes. She said to the Widow, “You think it better for him to leave Bruges. I think you are probably right. He has an enemy, I’m afraid, in my lord Simon, and another in the vicomte his father.”

Chafed by her own recent ignorance she was soothed to note that here, too, there had fallen the silence of bafflement. The widow of Charetty said, “My lord Simon’s father?”

“Jordan de Ribérac. He was at the banquet tonight. I’m told he lives in France.”

“And he shares his son’s … attitude towards Claes?” said the Widow.

“Yes. As I have cause to know,” said Katelina abruptly. She turned to the apprentice, who appeared to have left the discussion. “There is something I have to apologise for. I quoted an expression of yours – an uncomplimentary expression – to my lord Simon. I did not tell him its source, but he seems to have discovered. Part of his anger against you is because of that. I am sorry.”

He stirred, and then smiled fleetingly at her. “But there’s no need. If it’s the expression I think, I called him that myself on another occasion. An occasion which by itself angered him a good deal more, I think, than the names he was hearing. Don’t concern yourself. And especially, don’t fall out with my lord Simon or his father on my account.”

Katelina stared back at him. Forgetting her training she said, “I don’t need your account to bear the brunt of any falling-out between me and that precious pair. If I were an official of Bruges, I’d expel them.”

He did not answer or smile. The Widow said gently, “I think, Claes, you should thank the lady and return to your room, unless she has more to say to you. Madame Katelina? You would allow him?”

He had been standing. She should have remembered his sickness. But one does not ask an artisan to sit, except among children. She said, “I’m sorry. I hope your health is restored in full, quickly. And that you prosper in your new occupation.”

He thanked her briefly, and left. After he had gone, Katelina sat gazing at the wine the widow had poured for her and said, “You will miss him, I imagine. Despite all the trouble, he is an amusing fellow.”

There was a little silence. Then the Widow said, “Yes. He is an unusual being. The trouble is … The trouble really is that he cannot protect himself.”

Katelina smiled. “Well, he will be able to do that very soon,” she said. “He will make a good soldier.”

“No,” said the Widow, and her chestnut brows drew together, as she tried to make her meaning plain. “It is not that he can’t protect himself, but that he won’t. He is like a dog. He thinks every man is his friend.”

But one did not devote thought, like that, to an apprentice. Or if one did, one did not discuss it with an acquaintance. “And every woman too, by all accounts!” said Katelina, smiling. “Indeed, it is time that boy left Bruges and learned common sense. Now tell me your plans for this son of yours. What about Felix?”

She did not know, after she left, how long Marian de Charetty stood in her doorway, looking across the deserted courtyard, before she came in at length and, shutting the door, made her way back to her room.

On the way, she passed the foot of the stairs to the apprentices’ quarters and stopped for a moment, as if divining the quality of the silence which, upstairs and downstairs, invested all the rooms of her house.

Then she went, alone, back to her room, and sat down in the chair, and picked up and spread open her papers.

Chapter 10

A
BOLD LITTLE
business-woman, that Marian de Charetty, the burghers of Bruges said to one another. Sending her captain and the pick of her company off over the Alps before Christmas. And her notary, who probably knew more of her business than she did. And persuading the Medici and the Doria and the Strozzi to confide their goods and their letters to the same Astorre, together with anyone else who had to travel south and wanted a safe journey. A gamble her man would never have taken, the Widow’s friends said, compressing their shaven chins inside their furry collars. But a gamble, mind you, that might make her a fair fortune if they came back.

As the notary in question, Julius felt less alarm than they did. It was unpleasant, but nothing amazing to cross the mountains in winter, and in the short, bow-legged and violent Astorre they had the most experienced of caravan leaders. Whatever it looked like, assembling in the yard in a mess of carts and mules and sumpter horses and crates and barrels and packages, the cavalcade would be licked into shape long before it had completed the jolting three-week journey south through the lands of Burgundy to the freezing, windy and lucrative city of Geneva, where all the merchants and half the goods in the carts were to be deposited.

After that, sure enough, they had the long lake to skirt, and then the plunge up through the snow to the pass that would take them to Italy. But by then it would be a Charetty party. Astorre and his twelve cavalry and his six mounted bowmen and his eighteen varlets with their horses and mules. And with them (because Astorre was a man with a passion for food) an energetic Swiss cook called Lukin. And Astorre’s smith, a German called Manfred. And Astorre’s deputy, a grim-faced English professional who answered to Thomas, to whom poor Claes had been presented as helper and pupil. Felix had grudged that. Felix’s face, watching Julius and Claes riding out of the yard, had been a study of anger and wistfulness.

All the men were familiar to Julius. Between contracts they came about Bruges or Louvain, and he interviewed them and paid them. He had assumed that was to be the total of the party, before he heard the Widow’s new plans. But not a bit of it. They now had a black servant. The one who had dived for the goblet. The one the pawnbroker Oudenin had given the Widow. And whom the Widow, not wishing to offend minen heere Oudenin or be indebted to him too greatly either, had sent on the expedition. A touch of luxury.

Nor was that all. They had the offices of a monk. A musical monk called Brother Gilles who, inconveniently, was part of the Medici consignment for Florence. In addition to three suits of tapestry, a quantity of Paris goldsmithwork embedded in fleeces, a satchel of letters and four expensive hackneys with breakable legs, a gift for Cosimo’s nephew, Pierfrancesco.

And finally, and almost as disturbing, the baldheaded physician Tobias. Who had fallen out, it seemed, with the captain Lionetto and had applied, with success, to serve his rival Astorre instead. It was Master Tobie, indeed, who was busiest on the trip to Geneva, cutting lay corns and administering purges, or powders which, it was hoped, would produce the opposite effect. Julius, observing the daily training of Claes, was reassured when the surgeon showed no alarm, even in the earliest days when the embittered Thomas showed him small mercy.

Kill or cure it undoubtedly was, considering the sickbed Claes had left behind him; but it was amazing how weapon-play hardened him. The more punishment he got, the quicker he became to avoid it. And soon he could hang on to his horse at a gallop, even when they made his saddle fall off. You would see him jolting along, the iron brim of his round basin-hat clapping up and down on his nose like a pot-lid. It made everyone cheerful.

Later, Thomas found the boy an old two-handed sword and showed him a few tricks with his own blade before he knocked him out with the flat of it. And the horse-soldiers, discovering Claes didn’t bear them a grudge and was a born teller of jokes into the bargain, accepted him round the fire in whatever barn they got into for the night (while Astorre and Thomas and the rest, naturally, slept five to the bed in the comfort of the inn) and were easier on him next day. Even the African seemed to take to him, and had to be beaten once or twice for sneaking off to the barn instead of staying on the floor beside Julius’ bed.

He and Claes appeared to converse mainly in sign language and Catalan, which they all knew bits of from Lorenzo. He was a very large negro, with shoulders like mattresses, and Brother Gilles was afraid of him and prayed when he came too near, which the negro seemed to enjoy. So they rode on sedately south, glittering with helmet, cuirass and leg-armour under the banner of Astorre, nobly horsed, with the nose-piece of his helmet supplying a profile of astonishing dignity, considering the convulsed and furious face that worked beneath it.

On the way to Geneva, Claes was thrown to the bowmen, and it was discovered that he had an accurate eye, which allowed a respite to some of his bruises. This lasted for a day, at the end of which an outburst of maniac inventiveness got him thrashed by Astorre himself. It had very little effect. His superabundant energy, it was apparent, had returned. He was cured. That was the night before they entered Geneva. Once settled in their chosen inn, the doctor tossed a phial-end of salve to Julius’ African and told him to smear some on Claes’ lacerations. The black man, who answered to Loppe rather than Lopez, appeared to understand well enough, and went off with it. The doctor said, “You know Geneva well and so do I, but what must these two, Loppe and Claes, make of it all? Or do we keep them too busy to think?”