Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [253]
On Ash Wednesday, the Duke accepted the honourable surrender of Grandson, the significant little mountainside fortress at the west end of Lake Neuchâtel; but thought it necessary, to the distaste of the foreign ambassadors, to hang or drown four hundred of the defenders. Three days later, faced with twenty thousand of the Swiss confederation and its allies, the Burgundian army took flight, and the Swiss re-entered Grandson, reverently to clip the thickets of dead from the trees. The Duke and his ageing half-brother the Grand Bastard Anthony escaped with their lives, as did most of the army. Among the thousand slain was Jean de Lalaing.
Overrunning the Burgundian camp, the Swiss soldier boys broke into Paradise. All the riches of Burgundy had been brought to the field by its Duke and lay now abandoned, to the tune of hundreds of millions of marks, together with artillery, handguns, thousands of axes, crossbows, lances, horses and tents. There were more than six hundred precious banners and standards, many with the Duke’s device Je l’ay emprins; I have dared.
In their counting-houses and their clubs, the merchants of Flanders heard the news with muted scorn and bilious fury. Diniz Vasquez, describing it to his family and partners, still found it hard to believe. ‘Astorre says they lost everything. The Duke’s clothes, his jewels, his manuscripts, his tapestries, the gold from his chapel. The rabble had it cleaned out before their officers could collect it, and as a result, the whole of the Confederation has turned into a vast underground amateur market, with twenty-thousand-ducat jewels changing hands for three francs. They also got two thousand Burgundian whores, but they knew the value of those.’
‘So is the Duke retiring?’ said Gelis. Now, with Moriz and Govaerts away, she and Tobie were the only ones left he could talk to.
‘You don’t mean it,’ said Diniz. ‘After a slight reversal like that? It only happened because of a misunderstanding. No. He’s off to Lausanne, to muster an international army and do some real damage. I wish we could get Astorre and John out.’
‘So do I,’ Gelis said. ‘But the good commanders are all that is holding Burgundy together.’ She let the subject drop, for these days she did not talk very much.
It was much the same, that winter, with Katelijne Sersanders. Stoically, she ministered to the morning sickness of her cousin’s child bride, both before and after the wedding; and as the weather improved, Agnes reciprocated, in a gingerly fashion, by coming to gaze at the encouraging sight of Katelijne tramping about, looking virtually normal, after presenting her husband with a second child. Aware, herself, of the necessity of producing a son for Arnaud and Anselm his father, Agnes was shocked by Kathi’s apparent insouciance. If her own first-born was a daughter, she would die. But Kathi didn’t even seem to think it mattered: she had greeted the appearance of a son exactly as she had welcomed Margaret. Incomprehensibly, her husband Robin had behaved no differently either. You would think that sons and daughters were the same.
Had she been a little older, Agnes might have detected, beneath a layer of anxiety, a certain well-concealed satisfaction in both parents. In truth, Kathi was properly sensible of the need for heirs for the family business, and Robin was not blind enough to think this unimportant, although personally he preferred little maids. They disagreed, amiably, about the child’s name (wait till it’s ripe, and then boil it through twelve Ave Marias) before agreeing, amiably, on a compromise. Kathi had an idea that Tilde was planning already to marry it to her new daughter Lucia, which would give the Berecrofts family a nice interest in Madeira, and that of the Vasquez a nice interest in Scotland. She pondered, in between worrying, over the amazing