Niccolo Rising (41 page)

“Perhaps,” said Claes. He knew the tower the armour was kept in. He looked up at it, consideringly, as they passed. “Unless, of course, the arms are old, or in bad repair.”

“On the contrary,” Adorne said. “I have no key, or I would show you. Brigantines, helms, leg armour. Coats of mail from Hannequin’s time, in good condition. Pikes and lances. Even some swords.”

“Well, I can tell you, monseigneur,” said Claes, “there are many who would be glad of them. There’s little money for armour, once new guns have been bought. Captain Astorre is purchasing from Piacenza at this moment. From Messer Agostino, who is casting cannon for the Holy
Father himself. One to be called Silvia after his own name, one Vittoria after the Pope’s mother, and the third Enea after the Pope’s name in the days of his … Before he had need of cannon. It can throw a stone ball through a twenty-foot wall, can Enea.”

“Better than the cannon from Mons? You would hear,” said Adorne, “that it found its way safely to Scotland, as it was bound to do in the end. Here we part. Or at least, here we must part, if you are to make sure of your lottery ticket. And tomorrow, you will bring your mistress’s children to the Hôtel Jerusalem, prepared for the Carnival. Say at sundown?”

“At sundown,” repeated Claes; and ducked his head, and watched Adorne walk away. He was happy.

He had the Dauphin’s letters to fetch for Messer Arnolfini, and the bale containing the Dauphin’s redeemed armour. He had to walk back to the Burgh and acquire (another) lottery ticket. He had to get hold of Felix, and sober him, and start finding out what was wrong with Meester Olivier, the disturbing manager at Louvain. He had to begin, cautiously, to sound out various tradesmen whose names had been mentioned as having property they might wish to part with.

Skating had made him hungry, but in other ways had restored him. The morning was far away, and the threats of the morning. He stopped for twenty minutes at one of his own favourite taverns and had a dish of tripe and a pot of beer with a lot of people he knew, including Thomas, who seemed pleased to see him. Then, full of energy, he set off on the programme he had made for himself.

Chapter 18

T
HE COMING OF
the Venetian galleys, and Carnival-time. The two marvels of a child’s year which Katelina van Borselen had missed, exiled with an exiled queen in Scotland. She remembered thinking as much, in her father’s house here in Bruges, just before Simon of Kilmirren had taken her into the garden and had tried to embrace her. And she, independent fool that she was, had resisted him.

That had been in September, and galley-time. Now it was February, and time for the Carnival which would decide whether or not she was to be packed straight off to Brittany to be maid of honour to the widowed Duchess, who was yet another sister of the Scots king. Another fortunate widow, now some thirty years old. At her betrothal, they said, her future husband wasn’t upset when they warned him his fiancée was more than a trifle dim-witted and didn’t know much of the language. It suited him, said that nobleman. All she needed to know was how to tell his shirt from his pourpoint. He made her a mother twice before he made her a widow, so she must have sorted it out.

Well, if she, Katelina, wanted to be a widow, she would have to be a wife first and tonight, of course, was her chance. So said her mother: a forceful woman whom Katelina disliked, and who had now taken in hand the matter of her daughter’s future. From a list of suitable cavaliers, three had been chosen in face of Katelina’s determined indifference, and friendly visits had been paid by her mother to the mother of each. Even now, as she sat with her parents looking down on the market square, young men of good family were probably eyeing her from below, and agreeing which would stand masked in her path after nightfall this evening, a scroll in his hand. Or agreeing, all of them, to plead a previous engagement.

The square was lined with houses of passive service like this one, whose owner vacated it in times of public festival so that eminent persons might, seated, enjoy the view from the windows and refresh themselves from the buffet provided. A comfort one ought to appreciate
when, as today, it had been snowing. The tapestries hung over the sills were all powdered with white, and snow sat on the crow-steps of all the red gables, five or six storeys up, and flecked the brown brick and lodged in all the fancy stonework round the windows and doors.

The roof of the covered dock opposite was a long, smooth slope of white, and white capped the statues on the public well in front of it, and prinked the four-square bastion of the old trading hall filling the end of the square, with the bulk of the belfry tower straddling it.

It was the speaking-trumpet from the belfry roof they were using now, to relay all through the day the results of the lottery. The Bailli and the Ecoutète and both the burgomasters were there, on the wooden tribune erected in front of the hall, with the treasury officials of course, and some échevins and the constables of the sections. They all wore their fanciest hats and their heaviest robes in blue and green and expensive red and extremely expensive black, crowded together under the canopy with its swagged greenery and painted flags. The braziers crackled on either side and small tables stood at hand upon which pewter jugs appeared from time to time, and dishes from which steam was rising.

It was not, for the City Fathers, the most comfortable way of spending Shrove Tuesday. On the other hand, the lottery, properly run, could raise an excellent sum for the city. There were always generous donors, especially now, on the eve of the weights-test.

A porcupine in a cage had just been held up, with some care, by two officers. The crowds were so thick in the square and the roads leading out of it that the spectators were nearly immobile. They released their excitement by shouting, and by a jostling of coiffed and capped heads, like a field of clover whipped by a down-draught. Hoisted children flapped their arms, the only beings with freedom to do so.

A porcupine, of course, was no use to a laundress or a brick-maker or a lad from the fishing-boats, any more than would be a pair of gloves, or a wineglass or a drum or a falcon. In such cases the handsome prizes were turned into money in a matter of minutes. Katelina saw her own father’s steward standing patiently in the crowd, among the well-dressed, waiting to see who won the right to the good Spanish horse. Others, she knew, would have their eyes on the gospel the Duke had offered, or the hound, or the holy picture. Sometimes a wealthy guildsman – a shoemaker, a butcher, a tailor, a carpenter – would win and keep such a prize, or a nobleman from inside Bruges or outside its boundaries, for the lottery was advertised far and wide. But mostly the prizes were money, and each announcement was greeted with screams of bemused joy.

The porcupine caused two commotions, she saw: one within a group of turnkeys from the Steen who appeared to have won it, and another in an assortment of people dressed in the identical blue of the Charetty company. The women of the Charetty household, she saw, were
wearing new shawls, and the working men had fresh caps, with knots of ribbon lacing their jackets. The demoiselle their employer, small and round and polite as she had found her on their single encounter, had the reputation of being a sharp businesswoman, harsh with her staff and not afraid to stand toe to toe with a man and speak her mind if she felt like it. But she knew, too, it seemed, the mark of good management: to relent on occasion, and be generous.

The Widow herself was not, naturally, in the market place although, peering, Katelina observed the son, Felix, dressed in an astonishing pleated garment trimmed all over with black and white fur, and with a lopsided fur hat apparently hanging with ermine-tails. He was howling with laughter and clutching the arms of two friends, one of whom, in dutiful blue, was the large apprentice called Claes. The one who had gone to fight in Italy and then had inexplicably returned. The one whose skating had so entertained Gelis yesterday.

You could see from here the thick red cut on his face, although today the swelling was less. He had been rude when she had enquired about it. She had not phrased the enquiry, naturally, as she would have done to one of her own kind, but he had no right to resent it. She had, after all, made a special journey to the Widow’s house that night last autumn, because she had thought him ill-used by Simon. Well, at least Simon was not responsible for fighting him this time. Simon was in Scotland.

The boy Felix howled again, drawing her eye. She perceived that the youth Claes had won something. A piece of armour. No, a token; a single mailed glove, being presented to him by one of the yellow-caps, a convalescent from the Hospital of St John, which must have donated it. Standing on the rostrum, answering questions and smiling with his Bock cap pulled off, Claes looked like the soldier he wasn’t. Some of the squealing from the spectators undoubtedly came from feminine throats. He looked as if he was very aware of it, but didn’t turn round and wave.

The truth was, thought Katelina van Borselen, accepting a sweetmeat and passing it to her small, omnivorous sister – the truth was that this young womaniser was rather clever, the last thing one wanted in a servant. Wit was for your lover, if any. For a husband, it was too much to hope.

She thought again of the three names on her mother’s list of possible suitors. Two were the middle-aged heirs to modest seigneuries, one near Ghent, and the other near Courtrai. The third, and the best catch, was a member of the Gruuthuse family, one of the oldest and greatest in Bruges, into which her cousin Marguerite had married four years before. Guildolf de Gruuthuse, a charming boy of fifteen, was already well experienced. If she married him, she would have twenty years of child-bearing ahead of her, to a husband four years younger than herself. She was unlikely to become a rich widow.

It crossed her mind that she had been short-sighted in rejecting so
passionately the mature spouse produced for her in Scotland. She even saw, with a pang, that her father had not been as unfeeling in the matter as she had believed. She realised that, at last, she had grown out of the rosy world of childish romance. Real life was different. One adjusted to it, while working to gain what advantages from it one could.

She turned her eyes from the fevered stew in the market place, and began to scan the more favoured windows and balconies for the devices of seasoned lords from Ghent and from Courtrai, and for the warlike cannon, the vigorous symbol of Gruuthuse.

Marian de Charetty spent the day with Tilde and Catherine, her two little daughters. With other members of the Dyers’ Guild and their wives and children, she had watched part of the lottery prize-giving and, as it drew to an end and the crowd loosened, she allowed the girls to take her from stall to stall, and buy and eat what they wished. They watched the dwarves and the tumblers, and threw coins in the cap of the man with the performing dog, and guessed the weight of a pig, and saw a man with two heads in a cage, and a girl with a beard and an animal that was half a horse and half a cow, with a mane at one end and udders at the other that could be milked. They were selling cheeses from it and Catherine wanted to buy one, but her mother wouldn’t let her.

It was there that she came across Lorenzo Strozzi and, reminded, asked civilly how he was getting along with his plans for importing the ostrich for Tommaso. Listening to his answer (he had learned from a sea captain that the bird was still in Barcelona, and had sent off messages by land and sea to have it shipped to Sluys instantly) she studied the tension in the narrow shoulders and sallow, earnest face, and thought, as ever, of Felix. Juvenile, irresponsible, maddening – at least Felix did not look haunted, as the young Italians did, operating in the full glare of cousinly rivalry from the other trading branches of their huge families in London, in Florence, in Naples, in Rome.

As a mother, she tried to rule and educate her only son Felix, and when he defied or resisted her, it drove her wild with annoyance. But was this the alternative? Lorenzo’s mother Alessandra, stranded in genteel poverty in her native Florence after the exile and death of her husband, had never stopped pushing her three sons and two daughters.

Her youngest son was now dead. Filippo, the eldest and ablest, had received the best training and was now honourably settled in Naples in the family business of his father’s cousin, Niccolò di Leonardo Strozzi. Lorenzo had left Spain to come here to work for Niccolò’s brother, head of the Strozzi business in Bruges. But, taught by Alessandra and their own pride and ambition, her sons saw this as servitude. In Florence, Alessandra sold off property; sent them money and advice while, writing between Naples and Bruges, Lorenzo and his brother plotted and planned and struggled and were unhappy.

None of them could go back to Florence, which had exiled them as well as their father. None of them, she noticed, attempted to marry, any more than Tommaso Portinari had done. Unless you could get a good Florentine wife, you made no binding arrangements. And if old Jacopo Strozzi died here in Bruges, would Lorenzo, son of a cousin, inherit? No, the business would go to the brother in Naples. And the brother in Naples, looking at Lorenzo, twenty-seven years old and hungry for money, might think it safer to appoint his own manager, and leave Lorenzo to run errands for the Medici on matters like ostriches.

She said, smiling, as Lorenzo finished his recital, “And I’m sure you have a partner for this evening? Felix tells me he is accommodated, although I haven’t been told the girl’s name.”

Catherine, her mouth full of gingerbread, said, “We’re going out with Claes.”

To Lorenzo, children were a closed book. Remembering, no doubt, a number of heated arguments, he flushed and said, “Yes, I heard.”

Marian was amused. Without thinking she said, “Arranged by Felix, I gather,” and caught the flash of Tilde’s upturned eyes. She went on, smoothly, “In fact, they’ve been invited to join the Adorne party, which they will all enjoy. Oh, to be thirteen again.”