• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2256 0

Steen, although he would not connect his distaste with incidents which had occurred once in Trèves, and in Scotland. He liked jokes, and singing, and stories, and had a taste for drawing, caught from his early childhood in Scotland: if mislaid, he was often to be found in some kindly workshop, tied into a smock smeared with paint. He still visited Mistress Clémence in her new house from time to time, but was never made to accompany her when she went to see his wee younger aunt’s second baby, which Mistress Cléce helped with now and then, even though the baby had a very good nurse of its own. Jodi didn’t like boy babies at all, but found Margaret innocuous enough; and his Robin always had time for him.

Gelis also missed John le Grant and, against her will, felt concerned for his safety. Now, in the high season of fighting, the great, coagulating mass of the Duke’s troops, with their quarrelling Burgundians and Picards and Lombards, their companies of trained English archers, their packs of loot-seeking Italian mercenaries, seemed to move from blunder to blunder, and with them trundled the hapless foreign envoys, the court, and the Duke’s entourage. The low point of the campaign came in June, when — having made a pact of perpetual peace with the Emperor and his son — the Duke resolved, against all advice, to risk his whole Swiss campaign in an attack to free Morat, a Savoy fief occupied by a strong army from Berne.

It failed. In the ensuing battle with the rescuing armies of the Confederation and Lorraine, hampered by torrents of rain and a witless intelligence service, the Burgundian army endured defeat followed by carnage in which the Duke’s soldiers had their throats cut in their tents, or were drowned in the lake; noble commanders and condottieri were cut down; and the Spanish ambassador received two sabre cuts on the head. The Duke and the Grand Bastard escaped, and so, it was later learned, did the greater part of Captain Astorre’s company, including his master gunner.

Gelis was not present at Salins when the Estates of Upper Burgundy, harangued by the Duke, agreed to pay to defend their own frontiers provided that the Duke should no longer risk his person in battle, and that he should make peace whenever the chance should occur. She was in Ghent, later in the same month, when the Estates of Flanders not only rejected all the demands of the Chancellor Hugonet, but proposed to withdraw their grants to the army, on the grounds that the army no longer existed.

This was optimistic. Whatever happened, Duke Charles was determined to master Lorraine, and make of its capital, Nancy, the seat of all the Burgundian states. The King of France, who had spared himself the effort of fighting, pityingly watched the Duke doing it for him, and mentioned that he thought the poor man was mad. The Milanese, his allies, agreed. A Milanese, carrying messages, called in to Bruges and was entertained by the burgomaster of councillors in the Hotel Jerusalem, where, for the period, Anselm Adorne had again made his home.

Adorne, although polite, made a distracted host, as his son’s wife had been brought to bed of a child, and the health of both was giving Dr Andreas concern. Even when his Italian visitor had gone, it was a day before matters settled, and Adorne felt free to ask Gelis van Borselen to call on him.

She came, full of concern for young Agnes, and genuinely thankful, he saw, that the child at least was well. It was a daughter. Adorne did not make much of the fact, and neither did his guest. Of all his vast family, every son was childless but one, and that son had nothing but girls. And now Arnaud, too. Anselm Adorne had once, to his bitter shame, betrayed how much he yearned for a son who might carry his name, and his wife, striving to please him, had died of it.

This young wife of Arnaud’s would have the best nursing his nuns could provide, and the infant as well. He had already thought he might invite Phemie from Scotland. Kathi would enjoy her company, and being only of the tertiary order in her priory, she could mix with