Niccolo Rising (42 page)

“You should be able to stay thirteen for ever,” Lorenzo said.

She did not know what to say, and let him go when he bowed and rejoined his companions.

In the afternoon, when it grew colder, she took the girls home for a rest, and something to eat, and so that she could set their robes to rights and comb their long hair and place upon each smooth hairline the rim of each expensive bag-cap, Tilde’s in crimson, Catherine’s in blue. The velvet wings, touching each shoulder, lent to the face of each child an engaging purity; and the back-fall, fringed with gold thread, showed off the straight childish shoulders under the cloak. Below that, the tight, square-necked dresses were of velvet with ermine on the tight cuffs. The Adorne would not be ashamed of her daughters.

Twelve and thirteen they were now; and no longer children. That angry glance from gentle Tilde had reminded her of that. What was to be done? She understood all too well how Felix had bestowed the task of escort on Claes. But he had done such things before and Claes was well able to outmanoeuvre him. She did not believe, either, that Claes was ignorant of Tilde’s feelings. More than most, he was able to put himself inside the minds of other people. It was Tilde who had told her of the chest she had seen open in Claes’ room, and the silver-gilt warming apple that had lain in it. A gift from Milan. But for whom?

But the silver-gilt apple had never been presented, at least not in this household; and she was afraid she knew why. And by the same token, he had found it convenient to engage himself for this long-awaited Carnival evening, neutrally, with her daughters. When he came to collect them, however, he was at his most cheerful: his face cloudless
around the angry scar, his blue hose and doublet and jacket in order, and one of Felix’s ermine-tails stuck in his cap.

Apart from this serviceable livery he had bought no new clothes that she had seen, except for a good purse and low boots, which he was wearing. To his friends, this was merely old Claes, the walking dish-rag. To the eye of Marian de Charetty, it was the fruit of a conscious decision: a signal of non-aggression to smooth his passing return to the herd. She could imagine Felix’s reaction, if Claes had returned in the latest Milanese fashion.

She wondered if Claes ever longed for these things, and decided that he didn’t. Or hadn’t, so far. If he did, it would be some woman, no doubt, who would teach him. The little serving-girl Mabelie had taken up with John Bonkle – so Felix had let slip. And Felix himself, she was fairly sure, had found a girl of the same sort. She could not deal with that. Julius, so good in many ways, had failed her too in this respect. And it was one of the few areas where pride would not let Felix learn from Claes.

Did youths grow out of these wayward passions? Would the pretty face in the hedgerow always tempt them, up to and after the time when good sense said that they must found a family, or old age would find them with nothing? At what age did a man come to himself, and see that he must have security? Perhaps, for some men, it never happened.

Her home was empty. As Cornelis’s wife, she would have kept open house for his friends, while the young went out in their carnival clothes and passed the night in undisclosed pleasures. A widow, she had already accepted the hospitality of the other dyers: she did not want, a widow, to join them in their houses this evening as one of the older generation, Cornelis’s generation, which was not hers. She did not want, either, to join the throng in the market place, the throng of couples, of lovers, as a mother, a widow, a chaperone. But to stay in, alone, was not pleasant.

So she was surprised and delighted when, an hour or two after nightfall, a servant came to her door from the Adorne family, requesting her company at the Hôtel Jerusalem for the evening. The young people, said the servant, had all left, and the demoiselle Margriet had thought she might be alone, and free to join them until her daughters returned. Or, indeed, to stay overnight should it please her.

She asked the servant to wait while she prepared herself quickly and, locking and double-locking her doors, left the house to her porter. Then she stepped into the familiar street, and took time to pause for a moment. Beside her, the Adorne servant stopped too, obediently, his torch in his hand. But tonight, there was no need of light. The snow had vanished, except as a sparkling design upon buildings, tinted peach and rose and lilac and leaf-colour by the paper lanterns that clustered like birds by windows, doorways, walls and corbels in every street.

Tonight every gate-lamp was lit, and the corner niches with their holy statues shone bright and tended. And so, in answer, did all the towers and spires of the churches, outlined tonight in twinkling candle-lamps against the black, icy sky. The street, even here away from the centre, was crowded with thickly-cloaked, rosy people, and, somewhere, she could hear music.

Marian de Charetty stepped out. The night, which had promised nothing, now promised companionship. At the very least.

Under the same magical sky the former apprentice called Claes was entertaining, with artistry, a number of disparate young whose attendants knew less about children than he did. He had the sheer delight of the lanterns to help him. They walked about, their faces upturned. From the hump of each bridge, with its painted statues, its branched lights, its evergreen, they looked down on a fairyland reflected in water. The canals were tinselled like ribbons, and so were the children’s faces, catching the light from them.

But then, after the lights, there was the rapture of the market place, far more exciting than it had been during the lottery-draw, with the booths all taper-lit, and selling everything that was wonderful – fruit and sugar almonds and nuts and figs and raisins. The stalls had flags on them, and there were flags all round the square and on the roof of the Waterhalle and the Old Hall, all lit by lanterns.

There were so many lights and so many people that you didn’t really feel cold, but in any case there were braziers at the street corners and hot drinks and soup to be got at some of the booths, and even three men with an oven on wheels, pushing in dough at one end and raking out hot pies at the other with the speed of devils in hell, while their customers hedged them in shoulder to shoulder, eating and spluttering, red-faced in the glow from the embers.

There were braziers up at the other end too, on the rostrum cleared now for the town players – the trumpets and pipes and drums and timbals and fiddles – and the town singers, with the scarves of their hats spiralled round their valuable throats. The songs they sang were not the kind you would hear in a tavern, but when the drums and fiddles got going, the children would begin to dance up and down and then the older people, and a circle would start up somewhere for a country dance, and then break off, because it was early and everything was orderly yet.

The scaffolding, of course, had been taken down, Witken the weaver having completed his two days of penance and Poppe having reached, officially, the end of his mortification by barrel, although he was still wearing it, drunk, in the boisterous care of his friends. Then the seamen began to bring the ropes into the square for the tightrope walk they always did, with hoops, up in the belfry; and some of them were drunk as well, although not, you had to hope, the ones who were going to fasten
the rope or the ones who were going to dance on it. By that time, Claes’ young ladies were becoming extremely excited.

By that time, also, a number of things had happened.

Jan Adorne had left, for one thing. He was not, as a student, wife-hunting; but at fifteen he was undoubtedly on the track of something other than a group of small girls. The small girls, who did not regard themselves as such, resented this.

The two Adorne daughters, as it happened, were well-behaved and at home with Claes. He talked to them and made them laugh, and invented things, and introduced them to funny people (if Father Bertouche didn’t stop him) and let them do interesting things that Mother would never allow, when Father Bertouche wasn’t looking. They liked his jokes and the feel of his broad, capable hands on their backs as he shepherded them through the crowd. They were, of course, too old to sit on his shoulder, but now and then he would put his two hands round Katelijne’s stripling waist and hoist her to get a clearer view.

When that happened, Father Bertouche coughed, or tapped Claes on the shoulder. He coughed partly from disapproval but partly because he had a raging cold. He also had aching feet, and was pining, explicitly, for his comfortable quarters in the Hôtel Jerusalem. The chaplain, therefore was little help, particularly as the Charetty girls paid no attention to him: Catherine because she had gone insane with excitement, and Tilde because she was Claes’ chosen lady and insulated from the rest of mankind for the evening.

This was Claes’ mistake. It arose, as his employer had suspected, from a very clear understanding of her elder daughter’s mind. To wound Tilde tonight by treating her as another child was unthinkable. He accordingly announced that, as the elder of Felix’s sisters, Tilde was to take the place of her mother this evening, and would be his official consort. At the time, it had seemed a reasonably good idea. Tilde had flushed with pleasure, and he had been careful to keep the other children amused while giving her, when he could, a mock-courtly attention that she could enjoy without taking it seriously. Then Catherine, spurred by the noise and the lights and the strangeness, began to run wild.

When Felix exploded, Claes got him out of public view and then found a way for him to get rid of his energy. It was different with a young girl, who kept dragging her hand from the miserable chaplain’s and hurling herself into the thick of the crowd – a crowd which by this time was not quite so orderly, or so sober, and which was beginning to be pushed this way and that by another element – the young nobility, in their silks and their furs and their grotesque and marvellous masks, walking in groups to and from their chosen mansions with their servants and their musicians and in the mood to slap aside a careless child who cannoned into them – or to take her by the arm and lead her with them.

Claes caught her twice and fetched her bodily back in a whirlwind of squealing and laughter. The second time, Tilde brought up her arm and slapped her sister open-handed on the side of the head so that Catherine screamed in earnest and glared at her, hand to cheek and tears in her eyes. The Adorne daughters stared at them both and the chaplain made a noise like a horse trotting in mud.

“Hey!” said Claes, closing his warm hand round Tilde’s wrist and taking Catherine round the shoulders with his other arm. He shook Tilde’s wrist a little, and tilted up her clenched hand. “Look at that fist! You frighten me! How can I escort a lady who might beat me at any moment?”

Catherine giggled. He turned to her. “And oh dear, look at Father Bertouche. He can’t look after everybody, can he, while I’m running after you? He’ll have to take everyone home, and we’ll miss the tightrope walkers, and the bonfire and the fireworks. And you haven’t even had your fortunes told yet.”

“I want my fortune told,” said Catherine.

“But I can’t trust you, can I?” said Claes. “So I’ll just have to see that you don’t run away again.” And holding her arm tightly in his, he unbuckled his belt, and adding it to her girdle, shackled her loosely to him.

It was what she wanted. Tears gone, she took his arm and dragged him across to the astrologer’s. Beside him, Tilde walked stiffly. She said, “Mother would have slapped her.”

She was no longer his undisputed partner. Catherine skipped on his other side. Claes said, “Of course you must slap, if everything else fails, and there is some danger. But it’s quite good to try other things first.”

“Felix hits you,” said Tilde. She paused, and then went on before he could answer. “But of course, my mother doesn’t.”

A roar went up. The tightrope walkers had appeared at the top of the belfry. The heads of Marie, Katelijne, Catherine, Father Bertouche and even of Mathilde turned involuntarily upwards. Claes blew, invisibly, a sigh of relief and amusement that made his cheek crack. A commanding voice, shrill as a whistle said, “Ah, there you are! Where have you been? You were told to look out for me! You haven’t been trying!”

Herod, where are you? Packhorses crossed the Alps with less trouble. Dragging her expensive furs to his side was a short, stout party he had seen before … Ah, Gelis. The young van Borselen girl with whom he had skated, and who had tried to command his services for this evening. Pushing through to stand behind her, thank God, came a liveried manservant and a cloaked maid in a white coif. Beside him, Tilde’s head turned, and a moment later, the chaplain’s.

The van Borselen sprig looked up at him sternly. You put a bag over their faces, that was all. A bag with a few oats at the bottom and they were perfectly happy. The van Borselen girl said, “I brought a cloak and
a mask, in case you couldn’t afford them. Here.” The manservant, catching no one’s eye, transferred to his mistress a long roll of extremely good cloth, with a vast concoction of feathers settled on it. She held the armful to Claes.

Claes said, “Demoiselle, you are welcome to join us. We were hoping you would. But there are too many of us for a masquerade. You know the demoiselles de Charetty? And of course, the demoiselles of Adorne. Father Bertouche …”

Father Bertouche, his inflamed nose in his kerchief, gazed with animosity at the threatened increase in his flock. He said, “Certainly, we are not joining in any masquerade. Indeed, we were considering whether, at the end of this performance, we should not make our way home.”

“I should like to go home,” said Tilde flatly. On Claes’ other side, Catherine’s face appeared, frowning. Beside the priest, the two Adorne girls were whispering. The older, Marie, flushing, murmured something.

“What?” said Father Bertouche.

The van Borselen girl looked at him with impatience. “She says her sister needs to go home,” she said. “Don’t you have a maidservant with you?”

The chaplain removed the kerchief from his nose, and his upper lip glistened ochre in the lamplight. He looked stricken. Claes smiled. “It’s a common problem,” he said. “I don’t mind taking her, if she wants to be comfortable. I know a lot of girls here.”