Scales of Gold (86 page)

That said, it was to their credit that, from the moment of their formal betrothal, they observed the proprieties. Godscalc, self-appointed impresario (with Gregorio), was sentimentally entertained by the unaccustomed restraint of the pair: Gelis magnificently housed in the Bruges home of Henry van Borselen; and Nicholas sleeping, or not sleeping, in the excellent Hof Charetty-Niccolò by himself.

Remembering the dusty, indolent, sweetly benevolent harem of the Ma’ Dughu, Godscalc smiled. Considering everything, his two strong-minded children were behaving very well. As for their combined past, he knew that Nicholas had sent a message to Umar, through Portinari. It might take six months to reach him, but it would conclude, for Umar too, a long and sometimes troubled wait.

Nicholas and Gelis met in company, naturally enough, every day. Arrangements had to be made. It was not always easy, the English princess having arrived with her fleet at the town’s port of Sluys, and the ducal court passing and repassing on its way to the various ceremonies. The future Duchess was to stay there a week. Nevertheless, Henry van Borselen set aside time, and over several days the papers were drawn up which protected Catherine de Charetty and the Bank, while making of Gelis a very rich woman.

She had brought Nicholas a dowry, lodged long ago through the Florentine Monte which took care of such payments. It was not inconsiderable, and she had protested against further settlements. Gregorio, Godscalc thought, would have let her have her way, but Nicholas had been immovable. It was fair. If this was why he had brought back his gold, then he deserved to use it as he wished. It had cost him enough.

The meetings at the Hôtel Vasquez were of a more difficult nature. It was hard for Lucia de St Pol to oppose a marriage between Gelis and Nicholas who had, after all, brought her brother’s perfidy to light and had repaired it. He had also repaired the fortunes of Diniz.

Even so, Lucia possessed strong reservations. She did not enjoy the idea of her son being joined in marriage with a daughter of Marian de Charetty, and leading the life of a burgher instead of that of the landowning class he was born to. She explained her
objections, and both Nicholas and Diniz were soothing. She could do nothing about it, save complain.

Godscalc guessed, having met many of her kind, that in time she would forgive them. It crossed his mind to wonder what the journey from Scotland had been like, with Lucia and her brother and David de Salmeton confined together in mutual discord. It made him not unhappy.

Simon, staying with the other Scots merchants at Metteneye’s, had kept well clear, Godscalc saw, of his sister’s family. He had, however, sent his lawyer to register his formal dissent to both unions. He wished to forbid Diniz his nephew to marry a tradeswoman’s daughter. And he wished to establish the strongest legal and religious objections to the marriage of Claes vander Poele to Gelis van Borselen, orphan sister of Katelina, his poor, deceased wife.

They had expected it. The Vasquez lawyer had already ratified all the papers for Diniz, and nothing his uncle could do would make any difference. Lucia, however resentful, was capable of weighing up the income offered by a small estate in Madeira and comparing it with the yields of the Charetty company, in association with Nicholas. She was far from aiding her brother.

As for the rest, there was only one way Simon could stop Nicholas marrying. Some of them knew what it was. Simon’s lawyer, understandably, did not. He did what he could, but was amiably blocked from all quarters. To stop Nicholas marrying, Simon would have had to proclaim himself father to Nicholas. And in proceeding to marry, Nicholas in turn had surrendered that claim.

Godscalc was glad Nicholas had done with it; done with the contention even before this situation arose. For of course, there was no chance whatever that Simon would make such a proclamation.

Bel of Cuthilgurdy, who had been silent throughout, afterwards walked into the street with the priest, without holding his arm. Since Tobie came, Godscalc had been made to stop using his crutch, and depend on his limbs. Bel said, ‘I hope Simon can afford the fee for his lawyer. You know he’s hired him to get back the
Ghost
? What are the chances?’

Since Bel arrived, she had been twice to the Charetty–Niccolò house, and had spent a long time with himself, and with Diniz and Nicholas. She had sat with Tilde, mending a tablecloth.

Godscalc said, ‘They keep postponing the hearing. Now Simon and de Salmeton have come, and won’t agree to a date.’

‘Why should that be?’ she said. She stood, gazing upwards. On
the street corner before them, a group of men on a platform were rehearsing the marriage of Alexander the Great and Cleopatra.

‘I don’t know,’ Godscalc said. ‘Nicholas is high in favour just now. They may be waiting for the Duke to leave Bruges. They may be trying to get hold of our witnesses.’

‘Crackbene and Filipe?’ Bel said.

Godscalc looked at her. ‘How did you know?’

‘Filipe came to see me. All happed up in a great hood, poor laddie, but I knew who it was. I havena told anybody. Alexander and Cleopatra,’ said Bel reflectively. ‘Who were their children, again?’

Godscalc looked down on the top of her head. He said, ‘Crackbene seems to have befriended Filipe. Perhaps he was the right sort of man. A seaman, standing no nonsense.’

‘I think so,’ said Bel. ‘I liked what I saw. Although Nicholas had it right, as he usually does. The lad who died had more in him. The lad Lázaro. But this one ran away, and lived to give evidence. Or will, I hope. Ye didna see Simon’s boy Henry? He’s seven now.’

‘No,’ said Godscalc. ‘I heard you took him north.’

‘Part of the way. I come across him now and then, though not if Simon can help it. I was telling Nicholas.’

‘And Lucia thinks he’s an ogre,’ Godscalc said. ‘Or so Gregorio says.’

‘Yes. It’s a pity,’ Bel said. ‘Another Simon in the making. I’ll wager that lot couldn’t rear children either.’

‘What lot?’ Godscalc said.

‘Alexander and Cleopatra,’ Bel said critically. ‘Orgies. Sinister affections of the sensual appetite. Forbye, so far as I can see, they’re both men.’

Once, on a sunlit day in September, Nicholas had been surrounded by friends, and had been one of them.

Now, on this dawning day of Sunday, the third day of July nine years later, he stood among friends but was not one of them; as Gelis stood among friends, and was alone.

It had not been as hard as he expected, these twelve days, to keep apart from Gelis van Borselen. Nicholas supposed that she, too, was taking stock of what had gone. He saw in her a certain stillness he had not been aware of before, as if she were coming to the end of a long journey, and were half afraid.

They were to wed that afternoon. The Duke had married that morning, leaving for Damme in the grey dawn at four, and returning after the ceremony to snatch some sleep in the Princenhof, while his wife, in her golden litter, her glittering crown, her
surcoat and mantle of pale bridal gold heaped with ermine, set out with her retinue of English and Burgundians to make her dazzling state entry into Bruges.

As a van Borselen, Gelis rode with the retinue. As a merchant and burgher, Nicholas sat his horse knee to knee with a solid phalanx of velvet-dressed personages outside the Holy Cross port, waiting to greet and form a component of the procession

He felt, as he had felt arriving in Bruges, part of a continuity which had to be recognised, no matter how incongruous it might seem. Congruity, today, seemed a little uncertain. The skies above were smoking and curdling and dark, as if concealing a fire. There came, every now and then, a rumour of thunder, and a glimmer of light which made the horse beneath him move, its eye showing white.

Here on the ground, in the torrid warmth of July, there stood assembled the bourgeoisie of Bruges and the noblest blood of Flanders and Burgundy, cumbered with fine furs and expensive, deep velvet. Around every representative group stood sixty hot servants with torches. In the darkness of day they glowed like a burning forest of resinous pines; the dirt of their smoke spiralled to heaven.

During the Mass for the soul of Duke Philip, the lead in the church windows had melted, they said, from the heat of the massed, burning candles. Now, the thunder growled, the horses shifted, and Nicholas felt a sudden pity – for what, he didn’t quite know. Perhaps for the small, gleaming, golden train coming towards him, headed by heralds and archers, and followed by the ladies of Margaret of York, mounted on snow-white hackneys or carried in chariots. Followed by Gelis, who saw all this as no being could who had never moved from Bruges or Venice or Florence. Who had never ventured beyond the Sea of Obscurity, and into the Land of the Blacks.

As a Venetian banker, he could have joined the contingent, swathed in vermilion velvet, which waited to lead the merchant colonies. The Florentines stood assembled to follow in black figured satin, led by Tommaso Portinari in the different colours of Duke Charles, whose adviser he was. The Spaniards had produced thirty-four merchants in violet damask; the Genoese numbered 108 and had brought St George with them, and the maiden he saved from the dragon. The Hanse were grey-furred; the Scots followed. Nicholas knew every face.

He had chosen to appear not as a merchant but as a burgher, and so was crammed with the group who stepped out from the Holy Cross port to offer wine and wax to Margaret of York, and beg her
to be a gracious lady to their city. Above, from the turrets, musicians sang; and flowers floated into the still, sultry air; and doves, stark white against the black sky, rose in freedom and then, blenching, fled. Fled, because the heated skies, protesting, had opened. Rain, like a wall, fell upon the celebrating city of Bruges.

It put out all the torches. It uncurled the hair of the ladies and gallants, soaked their velvets, draggled their furs, made their costumes attractively transparent. It bounced from the ground in a haze of fine road-layer’s mud, and plastered rose petals to the nose and the lash, and made the grand procession through the streets, which stopped at every street corner, into a hissing misery of pantomime smiles and applause tangible as the spray of two thousand involuntary sneezes. There were real sneezes as well.

There was no one there with whom he could laugh. He hadn’t seen Gelis pass, for, after the prelates, the men of the town led the procession, followed by the suite of the Duke’s half-brother Antony, plastered with forty thousand francs’ worth of ruined livery covered with wet golden trees, which signified the theme of the tournament. Next, the musicians. Next, the Duchess. Next, the Knights of the Golden Fleece. Next, the ambassadors. And next, the foreign merchants. It pleased Nicholas to ride so far ahead of Tommaso Portinari.

In front of the Princenhof palace there stood a tableau of St George and St Andrew with two archers, one dispensing Beaune wine, and the other white Rhenish. Beyond them, on a tree, perched a pelican, from whose wounded bosom sprayed an efficient deposit of hippocras. Nicholas thought of John the Baptist and Julius, and wondered if happiness killed, or merely made you insensible.

Everyone went in to dinner. Gelis said, ‘I thought we were supposed to be getting married? What did you do to the weather?’

‘It’s a left-over prayer from Taghaza,’ Nicholas said. ‘Gelis? Could we consummate our marriage now, and hold it later?’

‘We have consummated it,’ Gelis said.

‘I can’t remember,’ Nicholas said. ‘I think I’ve forgotten how to do it. What about –’

‘What are you doing?’ said Julius with exasperation. ‘You know you’re hours late? You know everyone’s waiting? Come on. Or don’t you want to be married?’

‘Do we?’ said Nicholas.

‘Well, we’d better,’ Gelis said. ‘If you’ve forgotten, someone will have to remind you, or you will have a very odd life.’

The Hôtel Gruuthuse was very quiet, for the great officers were today at the Princenhof. Only Marguerite van Borselen had stayed
behind, and a few other faces from the past, Anselm Adorne and his lady among them. The legal hand-fasting was mostly witnessed by his own people: Tobie and Julius, Gregorio and Margot, Astorre and Diniz, Tilde and Catherine, Cristoffels and Henninc and Bonkle.

Melchiorre and Vito were there, and unexpectedly Lucia de St Pol, her arm in that of Bel of Cuthilgurdy. At the last moment, Henry van Borselen came, with his son Wolfaert, to kiss the bride and leave, with whispered apologies. Then the Mass was heard, with Godscalc, shaved, steady, unrecognisable, conducting it.

Then it was over, and his life had changed for ever.

Nicholas embraced his wife. It was the first time, for two months, he had touched her. She said, ‘I think you have remembered. What was all this about jousts?’

‘That comes later,’ he said. ‘As from now, we rejoin the ducal wedding and proceed with due care to the marketplace. I’ve taken a house for us all. We watch them all hit one another. We retire to the Princenhof for the grand Wedding banquet –’

‘Ours?’ she said.

‘No, the Duke’s. It’s better, and free. And then we go home to bed.’

‘The Duke’s?’ she said.

‘Well, you can if you like,’ Nicholas said. ‘But you’d have some competition. Why not stick with me?’

The rain slackened off for the jousting which, delayed by the entry and dinner, was not ready to start until six. The marketplace, lined with arcades and hung with silk and gold tapestries, was unrecognisable to anyone who hadn’t been toiling to make them, while the painted portals at either end and the vast gilded fir in the middle reminded the lieges yet again of the theme of the spectacle. The Tournament of the Tree of Gold was about to begin.

Nicholas, who had leased a whole house for the price of eight camels, was willing to explain it to anybody. ‘It happens all the time. Some princess of an unknown isle has proffered favour –’

‘What sort of favour?’ said Tobie.

‘Has proffered top prices at the next wine auction to any knight who will deliver a certain giant, kept in captivity by a dwarf. That’s the giant, that’s the dwarf, and that’s the golden tree the giant’s chained to. The participants arrive at the St Christopher end, bang the golden hammer, and issue their spirited challenge.’