Scales of Gold: The Fourth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  After the audience had dragged to its end, it was made known to Nicholas that the Duke expected him to attend the bridal celebrations. ‘As the ape,’ Nicholas said, describing the complete scene to Gelis. ‘I come on between the dwarves and the unicorn. I’ve become the Guinea Minstrel of Burgundy. Why won’t you take your clothes off?’

  ‘Because I can’t,’ Gelis said. ‘As at Easter. Nicholas, I’m sorry. I’m as sorry as you are.’

  ‘Christ!’ said Nicholas, and gave a half-laugh. ‘No, you can’t be as sorry as I am.’

  It was the last night he and Gelis had together before her ship sailed for Scotland, and they spent it in the Charetty-Niccolò mansion, where Tilde had kept her a chamber. The reason was genuine enough: the houses of Gruuthuse and Borselen were full of knights and their retinues. The excuse by that time hardly mattered. Before the household was fully abed, Gelis came to his room.

  He had known he would pass the night awake, but not seated in stillness at a window, with Gelis in her chemise, white as his, at his knee, her head and arms laid in his lap. She said, ‘You would make a very good ape.’

  ‘I have been practising,’ Nicholas said.

  Her head moved under his hand. In the moonlight, he could see the curve of her cheek, and her lashes, and the profile of her nose. It was red. ‘You’re not a plaything. Don’t pretend you could be,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you’ve reached perfection. You don’t need to practise.’

  ‘I enjoy it,’ he said. His throat ached. He said, ‘I wanted more. Tonight. Or even always.’

  ‘I know,’ Gelis said.

  He waited, as he had learned to wait, and gazed out of the window. The stars were different. It was hard even to discover the stars, because of the glow of the city. Hung on the sky, he could see the ghosts of coquettish gables, and the round glass eyes of casements, and a branch of lilac blossom, swaying in lamplight. He thought of space, and slowly everything quietened, even his cheated senses.

  Gelis said, ‘Sometimes, I am afraid of your patience. If I said – I still don’t know; wait for me twenty-five years? What would you do?’

  ‘Express astonishment,’ Nicholas said. ‘Anyone who can act as you do doesn’t need twenty-five years to decide whom to marry. I’ve seen you shoot to kill with a crossbow. This should be easier.’

  He felt her cheek move as she smiled, but she didn’t change her position. She said, ‘We are discussing marriage?’

  He said, ‘I thought we had managed to come round to it at last. You said, I think, that if you didn’t want me, you’d tell me. You also said …’ He didn’t finish.

  ‘That I was going to Scotland, unless I couldn’t manage without you. You know this Princess Mary in Scotland?’ Gelis said. She lifted her head. The place where it had lain felt damp and rather cold.

  Nicholas said, ‘You’ve been serving her. She’s seventeen, and the Scottish King’s older sister, and has married into a family who have rather a questionable grip on her brother’s kingdom just now. They say King James wept at her wedding.’ He recited it. Gelis was sitting apart on the floor, her hands on her knees. She wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘Thomas Boyd,’ she remarked. ‘Boyd is the name of the family who are trying to dominate Scotland. King James is sixteen, and his brother, the one who stayed in Bruges, is three years younger. Bishop Kennedy, who would have helped them resist this, is dead.’

  ‘And you want to advise them?’ Nicholas said. ‘Canals and carpet-weaving, and how to get their fountains in order?’ She had spent endless hours rearranging the table fountains he had had made in Venice.

  Gelis said, ‘Mary’s husband is to go away in July. Thomas Boyd. He’s to go to Denmark to arrange a royal marriage. She could be pregnant.’

  ‘I understand all that,’ Nicholas said. ‘Gelis. Would you sit on a chair, and let me look at your face? It’s a nice face, and I feel I shan’t be seeing it for very much longer.’

  He stayed quiet. After a moment, without otherwise moving, she turned her face to him. Then he said, ‘Wait,’ and rose.

  The brazier glowed by the bed. He lit a lamp from a taper and, bringing it back, stood it on the table beside them. She didn’t protest. After a moment, he sat down again.

  He said, ‘At least, if you are weeping, it hasn’t been easy. I can say goodbye, Gelis, if I must. We exhaust one another. We quarrel. The bond we have from what we found on the journey may come to mean less. And you cannot forgive me, or forget.’

  It seemed better that he should say it. She kept her eyes fixed on him throughout; pale blue eyes liquid with tears. Before he finished, her eyes on him still, she gave a short, barking sob, followed by others. Then she gulped and silenced herself. Her face was still contorted.

  Nicholas said, ‘Oh, no, Gelis!’ and made to kneel with her.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s … I don’t know what it is. I need a handkerchief.’

  He gave her one, and she used it. He said, ‘It’s the time of the month; I should know. I always get –’

  ‘You always get hurt then,’ she finished. Her face, roughly dried, was patched and pink, and her eyes were deep-set and enormous. She sniffed, and rose to her feet. The front of her chemise was soaked. He could see the pink and dark-pink of her breasts, as if through buttered silk. He found he was very tired.

  Gelis said, ‘Now I shall sit at your desk, and you will stay where you are, and I shall say to you what has to be said. Do you know that Godscalc spoke to me tonight?’

  She had reached his desk by now, on its dais, and was perched where he usually sat. She picked up the quill he had picked up when Diniz came.

  ‘About us?’ he said. He had shut the casement and turned, so that he could face her.

  ‘About you,’ she said. ‘He said that, whatever I felt, you had a destiny that must be fulfilled, and that nothing petty should stand in the way. He said he felt you had found the way you were looking for, and wanted a partner. He said that he was not surprised that your choice had fallen on me, for I was in all things your complement.’

  ‘That at least is true,’ Nicholas said. ‘Here and there, we have proved it.’

  ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Nicholas, don’t. He said that you would accept me, without question, if I offered myself. He said the responsibility was mine, to bring you what was sound, and not what was secretly blighted. He said if I had any doubts about this at all, I should leave you for ever.’

  Nicholas said, ‘What it is to have friends. I carried him …’ He shut off the words, and his eyes, with his palms.

  She said, ‘Oh, Nicholas. Nicholas.’

  He took his hands down. He said, ‘Tell me, then. Gelis, I won’t blame you, or harm you, or think ill of you. After all – did I tell you? – I love you. As it happens, I have said that to nobody else.’

  She looked at him. She said, ‘I am going to Scotland. I have a duty. I want to fulfil it. I am afraid, too, of exactly the things you have mentioned. We may be natural mates, but not partners. What we have gone through together may run through our fingers. You have found a way of thinking, and I might destroy it. We need to separate for a while.’

  He drew a long breath, and held it. Then he said, ‘Not outright rejection? Look. I am sitting prepared for it.’ His head swam.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, my idiot Nicholas, no. But a space of six weeks to consider. I am going to Scotland. You will hear my answer from Lucia.’

  ‘Lucia?’ he said. He thought of Lucia: the perfect hair, the screams in the bedroom in Lagos.

  ‘She is travelling to Bruges for the Wedding. If I stay to lead my own life, she will tell you.’

  ‘And if not?’ he said.

  ‘Then,’ she said, ‘I shall be on the same ship.’

  She left presently: the shortest night but one they had ever spent together. The next day he went to Sluys to see the Scottish ship sail, and Godscalc, riding awkwardly on an old mule, accompanied him. Gelis was already there, surrounded by her van Borselen family. She
kissed him chastely goodbye, and commanded her page, as she went, to deliver to him a leave-taking parcel. A gift, she said, in token of the many small kindnesses she had received from him.

  Long after the ship had moved out, he saw her face as she said it, the deep-set eyes wide, the lips pinched and curled at the corners.

  When he was home, he opened the parcel. It was a working model, in wood and metal, of a table fountain. It solved the Baroviers’ three problems of linkage. He could hear, now, the critical van Borselen voice, and his own belated, tolerant answers. Godscalc said, ‘What is that?’

  ‘A reproach,’ Nicholas said. ‘But a clever one.’

  Those who knew Nicholas, and suspected what had happened, treated him each according to their natures in the six weeks that followed. Tobias Beventini his physician arrived, accompanied by Captain Astorre, the head of his mercenary army. Tobie, having summed up the communal health problem of the double company, threw himself into the hilarious revival of friendships, interspersed with long sessions with Father Godscalc, spent partly on manipulating his hands, and partly on arguing about medical literature. From Godscalc, he learned all he needed to know about Nicholas and, as a result, left Nicholas to himself.

  Astorre, to whom Nicholas was a mascot, slapped him on the back, asked a couple of questions (purely anatomical) about the Empire of the Blacks, and demanded to be taken to the seigneur of Gruuthuse, seeing that he had the right sort of men for the seigneur’s cannon.

  Julius arrived three weeks later, disinclined to be apologetic about having left the Bank to itself in order to attend the Duke of Burgundy’s wedding. He said if Tobie came, he didn’t see why he should miss all the fun. He wanted to know if it were true that Tilde de Charetty was going to marry the Portuguese boy, and the Charetty and the Bank were to merge? He wanted to know why Nicholas hadn’t come back to Venice.

  Gregorio, acting as a one-man Bruges reception committee, assured Julius that he would see Nicholas soon, and that they had all found it hard to plan, because of the upheaval caused by the Wedding. ‘I can see that,’ Julius said. ‘Every street being repaved and scaffolding everywhere else. All the same. Is Nicholas doing any work? The Ghost. The Fortado. The missing gold. Nothing done about anything. I don’t know how you’ve found it in Bruges, but in Venice he just walked through the day as if it didn’t much matter. Of course, the Bank does run itself, in a way.’

  ‘What more do you want?’ Gregorio said. But, of course, it was true in Bruges as well. Gregorio had tried to set up enquiries and meetings, but so far nothing had come of them, because Nicholas largely ignored them. Nicholas worked, but not as he once had.

  During this period Nicholas worked mainly, truth to tell, on the contrivances for the Duke of Burgundy’s wedding.

  It began with a project so properly his that he hardly needed a cry for help from the town’s master carpenter to engage on it. From that followed other requests, tentative, plaintive or actively frenzied. Accustomed to the sufferings inflicted on all the Guilds and city technicians by the normal celebrations of a Bruges year, Nicholas had missed the Duke’s father’s funeral and was not born when the Duke’s parents had married at Sluys. He had had no idea until now of what was actually entailed in a royal wedding involving two weeks of festivities, six banquets, and a joust every day in the marketplace. When he found out, he went to the master of ceremonies and said, mildly, ‘Use me.’

  When he was not there to greet Julius, and had not entered the Charetty-Niccolò doors for two days, Julius lost his temper. ‘Where is he?’

  They were eating in the Charetty common-room, because it was bigger. The premises, once enough for Catherine and Cristoffels and Tilde, had already overflowed in the form of sheds into the gardens. Tobie said, ‘How should I know? Ask Gregorio. With the blacksmiths designing the waterworks, or the carpenters producing the show-pieces. At the Fox with Goeghebuer and the masons. Getting tents out of the sail-makers, or tapestries out of the weavers. On the streets putting up booths, or up a ladder painting something elaborate with Hennekaert or Coustain or Hugo or Colard.’

  ‘The bastard!’ said Julius enviously. ‘He’ll be pissed from morning to night. I remember.’

  ‘You remember him at eighteen,’ said Gregorio dryly.

  Nicholas had not been drunk since the work started, which had been quite a feat, considering the company he kept. He felt he owed them his best: guilds were guilds, and but for the emergency he would never have been allowed to meddle. As it was, he was working side by side, day and night, with the best and most ingenious craftsmen there were. Hence, when he did actually arrive in the middle of the meal, Julius, viewing him critically, saw a kind of vitality which had been lacking in Venice, even if coupled with a disappointing sobriety.

  Julius got up and, walking to Nicholas, greeted him with a slap on his back, which was dirty. ‘Well, thank God you’ve put the hermit behind you. What have you found to waste your time on now? And you’ve packed the lady friend off, so they tell me. That was a damn fool escapade. Stick to the Mabelie type.’

  Even to Julius, the silence was startling. Then Nicholas began, quite genuinely, to laugh. ‘Welcome back, Julius,’ he said. ‘Give me a Mabelie, and I’ll stick to her. Do you know what else you’ve missed? Remember the bath you and I floated to Damme? I’ve just floated another from Brussels.’

  ‘Another bath?’ said Julius, sitting down, cheered.

  ‘No. What do you think of a timber banqueting-hall seventy feet wide by a hundred and forty feet long by sixty feet high, with five double windows fourteen feet high, and two gables? Horses bolted and women gave birth as we passed.’

  ‘But you did it.’

  ‘I did it. It is here.’

  ‘And what else?’ Julius said.

  ‘Come and see,’ Nicholas answered, smiling.

  It would have been better if he had had Nicholas to himself, but Gregorio wanted to go, and then Diniz – the boy, the foreign boy who had somehow got round Tilde. It was too late, Julius assumed, to do anything constructive about that; but he was extremely glad (as, after all, he had said) that Nicholas had stopped making a fool of himself over the van Borselen girl, who had no money, and who had chased him all the way to Africa on the pretext that he was murdering his rivals in business.

  Well, she’d had a change of heart, from what he heard. And having made the most of it for six weeks, Nicholas had shown her what he really thought by throwing her out. That was the interpretation Julius had heard. He had tried to pump Father Godscalc about it, and Father Godscalc had dropped off to sleep.

  The work Nicholas was doing proved to be all over Bruges: they’d tented the streets near the marketplace where the lists were going up, and near the Princenhof where the Duke would give the banquets for his bride. Some of the guilds were still trying to work in their houses, but wagons kept coming in from Dijon and Lille with harness and tapestries and furnishings to be fixed: all movement in the centre of Bruges was reduced to a compressed and bad-tempered crawl.

  The mechanics were in a warehouse near the Princenhof, remarkable for its size, the number of people in it, and the sheer volume of imprecations filling the air. The sound of hammering was interspersed with curious noises which turned out to be a group of mermaids, squeezed out from neighbouring premises, who were attempting a chorus.

  ‘Bloody awful lyrics,’ said Nicholas equably. ‘They’re to sit in the whale. All that is the labours of Hercules. Don’t go near them; they broke their mountain, and they’re all blaming Theseus. That’s the fire-eating dragon, and that’s a man with a spit, toasting the birds that were meant to fly out of the griffon. That’s a copy of the tower of Gorcum, and that’s a goat playing the flute. There is also a consort of wolves, apes and boars. They’re terrible too, but I’m working on them. Now come and see this. Mind the dwarves.’

  They passed a unicorn, a singing lion, and a leopard with a daisy in its hand. Gregorio lingered.

  ‘A marguerite. Her name’s Margaret,’
Nicholas said, ducking. An acrobat hurtled over his head, calling to him in English. Everyone knew Nicholas, and he knew everybody by name. Julius recognised some of the names. Andries. Pieter. Adrien. Joos. They passed some imaginative dispensers of wine, human and bestial. They passed Colard Mansion, up some scaffolding painting a giant, and Hugo vander Goes, on his knees before a row of wet escutcheons. He gave a roar as Nicholas passed, and Nicholas joined him in amiable chorus. ‘Fourteen puking sols a day for all this!’

  ‘Is that all he gets paid?’ Julius said.

  ‘I hope so,’ Nicholas said. ‘It’s going to come out of our taxes. You know Canon Scalkin?’

  Clearly, Gregorio and Diniz were familiar with the man smiling before them. Long ago, Julius had met the canon of St Peter, maker of miracles. There was one standing in front of him now: a pair of candelabra. Or rather, a pair of towering castles perched upon flowery slopes and backed by seven immense mirrors. Round the slopes spiralled a path, slowly moving, up which rode or walked the effigies of men and women and animals. From each creation extended eight arms ablaze with wax tapers.

  The figures moved; a windmill appeared; a dragon leaped, and then vanished. Diniz said, ‘How is it done?’

  ‘Ask your friend,’ said Canon Scalkin. ‘Without the seigneur vander Poele, all would have been lost. It is done from within, by a man. By, you understand, different men. It is a thankless task. Come and see. Nicholas, open the door.’

  Later, it seemed to Julius that Nicholas really did not expect what he saw when, moving round to the back of the object, he gripped a projection and turned it. By then, they were all gathered round him. Nicholas opened the door, and stood back.

  Within, naked but for his drawers, was a fair-skinned man of powerful build, his legs and arms still forcing onwards the mechanism, his head purposefully down.

  The canon said, ‘Michael? You may halt now.’ The man stopped. The man turned his head. And Julius found he was staring at Michael Crackbene.