Niccolo Rising (74 page)

“Who else? The Gruuthuse family, I am told, have begun actively pressing young Guildolf to make his final choice. He is young. But he would, I think have swallowed his rebuff and come to you, except that
he and his parents are in Bruges and you have abandoned him to come here. Poor Guildolf.”

Jordan de Ribérac sighed. “And there is really no one else, is there? You disliked your parents’ other two candidates, so that you won’t be sorry to hear that they have each made a contract with the girl of their choice. I know of no one else who has been able to pierce the magic circle of your maiden reserve. Unless, of course, you count the young workman Claes.”

Katelina said, “Hardly.”

“Hardly?” said the fat man. “After you and your sister took such trouble to lift him –
twice
? – out of our canals? An act of mercy I commend, of course. If he had actually killed my son with his shears I might have felt differently.”

“I thought the fate of your son was the least of your worries,” said Katelina.

“No. No!” said the fat man. “I concern myself with him very much. I may not wish him in health, but I should like to be consulted as to the time and manner of his departure from it. I do not like to have my paternal rights in this matter pre-empted. Not that Claes, I believe, would have given me much concern. Claes is the underdog. He has beneath him the treadmill of perpetual ambition and perpetual failure. Look at his latest contrivance.”

She wouldn’t answer. She raised her eyebrows. The fat man sighed.

“Would you believe that he has induced his employer to marry him? Witnesses bribed, the son kept safely in ignorance, notarial documents prepared for all her property. With her loving acquiescence. I am told she is besotted. And that the only heir has now been tempted south, where he might discover a warrior’s grave. A scheme worthy of modest congratulation save that he made the error, in his excitement, of burning down his bride’s business, her house, her money and every one of her ledgers. It seems unlikely that she can rise to her debts. All is lost, save the marriage.”

Her stomach rose to her throat, and with anger, and hatred and fear and pride, she controlled it. She knew, from his face, that he could identify all these emotions, and was not abashed. She said, when she could speak, “I congratulate you. It’s a skill, carrying small items of news from one place to another. I trust your accuracy. I’m only surprised that the Charetty fire was an accident.”

He considered that, his face earnest. “You think it may not have been? Certainly, the young man had rivals. The pawnbroker Oudenin. Perhaps others. She’s a pretty woman, if no longer young. They made a touching picture, I’m told: the young husband, half-clothed, embracing his wife in her bedgown outside their shrivelling love-nest. So you understand why I say to you, Where is your husband?”

“I have no difficulty in understanding you, M. de Ribérac,” Katelina
said. “And I repeat. Are you proposing marriage again? Perhaps I should be interested.”

The pupils of his eyes, sharply black, pinned themselves to her face. “Would you now?” said Jordan de Ribérac softly.

“But on the other hand,” said Katelina, “I might prove to be barren, or you might prove to be incapable, and all your plans would come to nothing. No. On mature reflection, I really cannot imagine the circumstance which would bring me to stomach it. Now, what shall we talk about? Or perhaps there is nothing more we have to say to each other. Let me find out if the Dowager will see you now.”

He rose when she did and stood, without moving, looking down at her. For a moment she wondered what she would do if his hand rose, as it had done to Claes, and the ring cut its way down her cheek. But he simply turned on his heel and crossed the small room to the door, where he took up his courtier’s stance, prepared to be led to his audience. Afterwards she didn’t see him leave the rooms, or the building.

Antoinette de Maignélais found her later in the room she shared with the others, and taking her to a window seat, embarked on a harmless discourse. Halfway through she observed, “M. de Ribérac contrived to see you alone. Does he suspect you?”

“He wondered if I still wished to marry him. No. He showed no suspicions,” said Katelina. “But I trust him less and less.”

“You have an instinct,” said the Duke of Brittany’s mistress. “And you are correct. Discreet enquiries have been made. Messengers have been followed. Banks have had tales to tell. The story is not yet complete. Records have to come from Burgundian sources, and time and money are needed. But in two months, I fancy, it will not be a new wife that my lord of Ribérac has to think of.”

It helped, a little, to know that he might suffer some of the devastation that he visited with such ready artistry on his fellows. He had been angry, she thought, that Claes had aspired, even briefly, and to a small widow’s hand. But the anger had been soothed by the pleasure of telling her of it. He couldn’t know, surely, the use she had made of Claes. Of course she had used him, and should expect nothing more from a servant than this, that he should jump from her bed into that of the first person who could help him into the bourgeoisie, even if she were an old woman with a grown family.

Half-naked, he had embraced the widow. Perhaps she, too, had drawn him his bath, and kept his clothes from him. However old she was, however ugly, he would perform for her. Every girl in Bruges knew that. Mabelie. Herself.

And his name was Claes. It had never been Nicholas. Her firstborn had Claes for a father, the bastard workman with the beguiling tongue and the vast and innocent gaze which concealed a cunning, a ruthless ambition. The treadmill of ambition but not, surely, of failure. There the fat man was wrong. Building carefully, woman by woman, man by
man, Claes was raising the staircase that would take him from apprentice to merchant and from merchant to whatever pinnacle his self-esteem demanded.

He hadn’t needed Katelina. Her name and rank without money were useless to him. He needed what he had got: the owner of a small business whose standing, however minor, now became his. Arson might check him. There might be other attempts to hinder his rise. But unlike the fat man, she could judge Claes from many aspects. News of his marriage had completed the picture. Now she knew him. Short of death, nothing now would hold him. He didn’t need her, and still less would he want the baby she carried. The problem was solved.

Katelina van Borselen went quietly about her business. Those who knew and liked her noted that she was a little withdrawn, and spent more time in her room than had been usual. They had to call her from it to act, as she often did, as interpreter for one of the interminable talks about the Dowager’s dowry.

There was to be a meeting in France. The Scots commissioners, assembling their claims, were calling to discuss the King’s case with his sister. Sir William Monypenny, of course. Bishop Kennedy later. Flockhart, perhaps. And the handsome, yellow-haired man the Dowager claimed to favour, who had not called since Katelina had come, but who would put the roses back in Katelina’s pale cheeks.

“Come, Katelina!” said her friends. “Come and meet Simon of Kilmirren!”

June was then in its second week. All over Europe, forces already set in motion, like a game in a wooden box, began to hop and roll to their destiny.

Before June ended, Felix, heir to the Charetty company, arrived in Naples and joined his mother’s troops under captain Astorre and the notary Julius. With him as personal servant he took a magnificent negro called Loppe. With him also came a gift to the King from the Duke of Milan: eighteen hundred horsemen destined to reinforce the Pope’s army and help King Ferrante clear his foes out of the land about Naples. Emboldened, King Ferrante moved out of Naples and challenged the enemy.

It wasn’t wise, but the king of Naples was fortunate. Duke John of Calabria, with unusual caution, refused battle. When threatened, he fled with his army to the small town of Sarno, built on a river-girt hillside just thirty miles south of Naples, and allowed himself to be besieged. The army of King Ferrante, aided by the troops from the Pope and the Duke of Milan and their many hired companies, including that of captain Astorre, settled down to starve them out, as was usual.

They would have succeeded. It was unfortunate that King Ferrante’s mercenaries, in particular, had not been paid for quite some time, and that King Ferrante, at that moment, had no prospect of paying them.
Attractive offers began to arrive from the enemy camp. Men began to desert.

King Ferrante decided, with a certain amount of regret and a greater amount of reckless optimism, that instead of prosecuting the siege, he ought to attempt an attack. He meant it to be a limited one, or so he said afterwards. But, bored and unpaid, his soldiers thought otherwise. That was in the first week of July. That a decisive battle had been fought at Sarno was unknown for some time.

Decisive battles were being fought elsewhere at the same moment. A bloodless one occurred in England when, led by Bishop Coppini and the Earl of Warwick, the white-rose Yorkists crossed from Calais and entered London in triumph. It remained only to locate the person of the Lancastrian king (to whom, if roses were given, a red would be appropriate) and his queen, the sister of Duke John of Calabria.

The Duke of Milan was delighted. The Yorkists gave full credit to the advice and leadership of Bishop Coppini, Papal Legate to England and Flanders and secret agent of the Duke of Milan. Bishop Coppini, working hard for his Cardinal’s hat, ran out of sympathetic ink in his happiness.

James, King of Scotland, had long ago reached the conclusion that he ought to be dealing with both sides in the English war, in order to have a friend with a rose when it finished. A long-standing grievance was the English occupation of two good Scottish towns: Berwick on the eastern Borders, and Roxburgh to the south. It seemed to King James and his advisers that, while the English were currently so very busy, there might be something gained from a short, sharp attack on the English garrison in, say, Roxburgh.

King James and his artillery master had a serious talk, as a result of which the two great cannon from Mons were run out and prepared for a journey. King James went to see them himself: old Meg and new Martha. He fondled them. No one had guns like these. No one outside the Sultan of Turkey. If he had not been a King of Scotland with six stupid sisters, he would have been crowned master gunner.

Chapter 35

P
URSUING ALSO
his solitary course, Nicholas, once Claes and never solitary, made the long hard journey east and south across Italy from Milan to Urbino, and from there tracked, by the scars on the land, the route of two armies. To a man riding south through the Papal States in the choking heat of midsummer, there were everywhere to be seen the ravages of Count Jacopo Piccinino and his troops, hastening to help in the destruction of Naples. In early July, Nicholas reached the river Tronto, and crossed from the Papal States to the Abruzzi, the eastern territory between the Appenine mountains and the sea which belonged to the Kingdom of Naples. Here the burned farms and smoking castles were the work of the pursuing Papal and Milanese army under the Count of Urbino. It was this army that Nicholas overtook and indeed almost overran, for it had stopped.

South of and parallel to the river Tronto ran the river Tordino. And by the banks of the Tordino the forces of Milan and the Pope were encamped on level ground, confronting the army of Count Piccinino which had halted also, arrayed on the opposite hillside.

It was dusk when Nicholas reached the end of his journey. On his right the sky was still tinged with the dying sunset above the black spine of the mountains. Before him, lamplit in snapdragon silks, was a city of tents, the hosts of its banners stiffened like hog-thorns. He could see the viper and eagle of Alessandro and Bosio Sforza; the cross and crescents in azure and gold of the papal banner, and above all, the eagle of Federigo, Count of Urbino, the flag of the commander. On the hill, the tents of the enemy lay like embers, and the banner of Count Jacopo Piccinino could only be guessed at.

Nicholas had planned to defer his entry until morning, but he approached too near, and was challenged. His safe conduct was not the kind to be lightly ignored. He and his grooms and his horses were allowed into the camp under escort, and a little later, he was conducted to the pavilion he sought.

Tobie Beventini of Grado, the candlelight on his bald head, was seated in his doublet and drawers, with one foot in a bucket. The other was saddled between his two bony hands and he was studying it. Beneath the neat double curl of his nose, his lips appeared shorter than usual. Behind him was a camp bed, and to one side a field table with his medical box lying on it, as well as a litter of jars, a bowl and a sheaf of assorted papers. There was no one else in the tent with him.

Nicholas said, “Five is the usual number.”

The doctor looked up. His pale eyes, already round, didn’t alter. He said, “And about time. Unless you’ve got haemorrhoids.”

“My grooms have,” said Nicholas helpfully. “Are you specialising?”

“I’m buttock man to the Holy Roman Empire,” said Tobie. “They don’t want a doctor. They want a man to design a new sort of horse. You took my advice and married the woman.”

“I always take your advice,” Nicholas said. “Anyway, you took mine and persuaded the Count to bribe Lionetto. For a nice sum too – I checked at his Milan agent, Maffino’s. Astorre must be very annoyed. He probably thinks you’ve got half Lionetto’s glass rubies. May I come in, or will your leg run way?”

Tobie the doctor released his foot and placed it carefully beside the other in the bucket. He said, “You’re alone?”

“Apart from two grooms with haemorrhoids,” said Nicholas. He came in and dropped a saddlebag on the straw by the truckle bed. He said, “I’ve sent Felix on to Astorre in Naples.”

The tent was stifling. The staves of the bucket had misted. “More fool you,” said Tobie.

“He can’t stay a child,” Nicholas said. “A big Milanese contingent was leaving. They don’t expect fighting.”