Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [24]
‘For you,’ said the captain immediately. He frowned. Colà had turned off from the steps, and had vaulted down to the pair of wheels, fifteen feet from top to bottom, that worked the machinery. When Paúel reached him, he had stepped into one and was seated, clasping his knees, between the rungs where men usually paddled. The wheel, which was made fast, rocked a little. Benecke stepped up-wheel and sat himself facing him.
Colà said, ‘They don’t know I’m here. I think they want to call in some favours from you. That pair saved your carcass in Ireland.’
‘After you’d half killed me,’ said Benecke, frowning more deeply. The wheels occupied the vaulted roof of a passage through to the wharf. People walking below heard his voice and peered upwards.
‘But you’ve forgiven me that, and your wife wants me to marry your daughter. So what do we do?’
Benecke thought. He knew when to pay no attention to Colà. He also suspected that his duplicity had been discovered. He had known that the little Kathi was coming. Below, six familiar caps walked through to the plankway and someone blew for a boat. He waited till they had gone. Ice was forming again at the edge of the water, and the opposite granary quay was quite white. The wheel trembled beneath him. Colà, his expression in shadow, was gently rocking the wood with his spine. Benecke said, ‘If you break the shackles, the whole drum will run. Ever seen that happen?’
‘Yes, in Bruges. Do you think you’ve got the only God-damned crane in the world? But that time, I was jiggling it harder. You were saying?’
‘I was going to mention the Council. They wouldn’t want you to upset Adorne. And they wouldn’t want me to interfere with the law. To me, there’s only one thing to do. So let’s do it.’
‘Break the shackles?’ said Nicholas de Fleury. He helped himself up, balanced, swung, and launched himself down to the slush of the passageway. Then he stood, grinning, while Benecke, with resignation, did the same. He changed direction on landing, and so escaped the vicious swipe that was meant to spin him over and into the water. Colà had guessed, all right, that something had been kept from him.
A COMPANIONABLE FELLOW, the Lübecker had said, who now spends his time raising hell with Paúel Benecke. That was all Kathi knew, but it was sufficient.
The day after the mission’s Grand Entry to Danzig, Katelijne Sersanders, lady of Berecrofts, left the splendid lodging they had been given at the Green Bridge and made her way to the great florid home of Filip Bischoff, there to eat marzipan and drink Malvasian wine with his second wife and two of his daughters, together with a selection of the women of Danzig.
For a century and a half, the Teutonic Knights had ruled Danzig, and it was not long since they left. The merchant families who had taken their place were, many of them, the same as those who had served the Knights as factors and agents, and their customs and tongue were still German. The husbands of these women knew every town of the Hanse, had lived in Veere and in Bruges, were familiar with London and Leith, Perth and Aberdeen, the Bay of Biscay and Brittany. Despite the hearty, disarming chatter, Kathi had to remember that they knew as much of her family as she did; and would wonder why she had married whom she had married, and what she was doing here. She would be regarded, of course, as her uncle’s spy.
Nevertheless, she was also a source of information and entertainment and they were not, she found, malicious in their enquiries as a Venetian, for example, would have been. They talked of her home town of Bruges, and their husbands, and invited her to trust them with any gossip attached to the members of the Kontor, the council of Hanseatic merchants living in Bruges. How could it be healthy, to demand that honest men live as monks, without their wives to console them? And such wine, such fabrics, such jewels, they said, could be bought for nothing