Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [106]
He had been away often before. Every few months, the Charetty cavalcade had left Bruges for Louvain. Then had followed the weeks of trying to persuade Felix in from the hunting-field, away from the kennels, out of the taverns and brothels to attend his lectures. Julius, of course, had helped too. Some of the time they had both been successful. Some of the time they had all grown impatient of the responsible world at the same moment, and had embarked on some escapade which got them all into trouble. Well, now Julius was with Astorre, and that was possibly where he ought to have been all along. And he himself was back in Bruges after three months. After an absence no different from any other, as far as time went. It should all look the same.
There had been heavy snow not so long ago. It lingered in darkened wedges on cellar-steps, and it edged towpaths like tarnished drawn-thread work. Where river-water still flowed, ice followed the frozen mud of its banks, faithful as a lace collar. Where the water was still, the middle was crazed with welded floes, broken and broken again to let barges through. The thudding of ice-breakers’ hatchets went on all day. There, the water’s edge was dark and liquid from the warmth of the houses, and cats prowled, watching for comatose fish to rise gasping. And there too, you saw, as you saw every winter, a child’s dress on a pole stuck by a canal bank, hanging stiff and frozen. Clothes were not easy to come by for some folk, but no one would take it: not until the parent of the drowned child had been found, and the child named. Sometimes, of course, it was an infant, and there were no clothes to hang on the pole.
He passed the Crane, idle this morning, but although the men recognised him in spite of the blue jacket, he walked on with a cheerful wave of apology. It wouldn’t do to keep the demoiselle waiting. The gates of the Charetty business were open, but whatever train the Widow had brought back from Louvain was already disbanded and invisible. Claes saw men in the yard he had spoken to yesterday, but today they didn’t look round. It was odd, in fact, how little attention they paid.
In the house it was the same. He saw the Widow’s cook pass in the distance. He caught the flash of her face, then she hurried off. A bad sign. Not even Henninc, to tell him where he was expected to present himself.
Commonsense told him that she wouldn’t receive him in her parlour, although her son had. The storm, whatever it was, waited for him no doubt in her office. He reached it, and hearing nothing, tapped with caution. “Demoiselle!” he said. Here, one word was enough to identify him.
“Enter,” said the voice of Felix’s mother. There, too, one word was enough.
He gazed at the latch in his hand. Then he rapped it down like the spring of a stone-thrower, and made his way in. She sat behind the desk. Her face, matching her voice, was chilled and rigid. There was a man seated beside her. The man smiled. “Perhaps,” he said, “you are going to claim that you don’t know who I am?”
The thought had entered his mind but he had dismissed it. There was no doubt who this was, even although he had never met him face to face. A man of perhaps not more than fifty, but of so large a framework and so heavily fleshed that he topped his reed chair like a marrow. But an opulent marrow. His robe fell to the floor, lined with marten. His jowls sank into the layers of muslin, quilting and fur which lay on his solid shoulders. His hat, a double cartwheel infilled with drapery, had an enamelled crest set with gems on its underbrim. The same crest hung from the jewelled chain over his shoulders. The face under the hat was fresh-coloured and vast; the mouth small; the eyes sparkling.
Jordan, vicomte de Ribérac, wealthy and powerful merchant of France who had attended (so he had heard) the autumn banquet for the commander of the Flanders galleys. Yes, there could be little doubt. Monseigneur de Ribérac: the French father of the Scots nobleman Simon.
No one spoke. The fat man’s eyes, fixed on him, continued to sparkle.