Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [53]
It had worked, for a bit. Even when the Estates of Holland, swept by local fervour, proposed to end the tenure of Gruuthuse (not a Hollander) as their Governor, Gruuthuse merely acceded, and the office was passed, without fuss, to his brother-in-law. Wolfaert van Borselen was cousin to Gelis, and so was Gruuthuse’s own wife. She still felt safe.
Then had come the ill-advised attempt to cajole or buy off the King of France, or at least win time to rebuild the Burgundian armies. King Louis, that masterly tactician, had received the pitiful letters of the little Duchess and the Duke’s widow the Dowager; had listened to the Burgundian envoys—Gruuthuse, the Chancellor Hugonet, Wolfaert van Borselen—and had finally lent ear to the worried envoys from Flanders, who were not in immediate danger from the advancing French armies, and who were thriftily unwilling, as always, to pay for yet another Burgundian war.
The King of France had responded very simply by demonstrating, with sorrow, that the little Duchess and her stepmother had no intention, whatever happened, of consulting the States-General of the Low Countries about her wars, her future marriages or her alliances, but was obediently following the advice of her (English) stepmother and her late war-crazed father’s advisers. The storm over that blew up in Ghent, where the little Duchess was being politely immured by a number of strong-minded officials. But already Gruuthuse had been forced to leave Ghent to help Anselm Adorne deal with the situation in Bruges, where the clacking of looms was giving way to the sound of arguing voices, and merchants gathered, low-voiced, in private rooms over taverns, and fewer men than usual ran out of their houses when the work-bell clanged, and sometimes those who did were visibly being pushed by their wives. Adorne took the leaders into the Hôtel Jerusalem and talked to them, and they were given a proper hearing in the Hôtel de Ville in the Burg, where Gruuthuse and the Provost of St Donatien listened to them, and made certain adjustments and certain promises, and in the end it died down. But for a while the communal cavalry and the companies of archers and crossbowmen had been waiting uneasily on call: uneasily because most of them, too, were merchants, and those who were not were now supposedly employed by a girl who didn’t know what she was doing.
About this time also, the Dowager had been compelled to move out of Ghent, which left the little Duchess alone there. What was not yet commonly known was that the same little Duchess, entertaining her suitors, had (on Gruuthuse’s advice) remained loyal to her late father’s scheme to marry her to the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor Frederick. And that the Emperor had not only reaffirmed the contract, but was sending an Imperial embassy to clinch it.
France wouldn’t like it.
It was a simple choice between two husbands: between encroaching France and paternalistic Germany, you might say. Personal proclivities didn’t come into it. Maximilian was two years younger than she was, and inexperienced at that. The Dauphin was not quite seven, and a hunchback. It was what God liked that mattered.
By then, it had become advisable to keep children off the streets of Bruges, and Gelis did not allow Jodi out, even well guarded, any more than Tilde risked her two little daughters beyond the yards and gardens of the Hof Charetty-Niccolò. Living with Diniz and his family in the great house that had once belonged to Nicholas, Gelis employed her time, profitably, in the company’s business, and took what precautions seemed sensible. At least no one now had to be concerned about Tilde’s sister Catherine who, miraculously certificated and married at last,