Niccolo Rising

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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.”

  “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 a
pprentice 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.