Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [114]
Three of them in the end got him quietened, and ready to transfer his aggression to the bowling alley they currently favoured. On the way, Felix changed his mind and, skidding on frosted cobbles and frozen dirt-paths, led them unrelenting through a light blizzard of snow to the Burgh, where the lottery queue wound, cold and grumbling, along the wall of the Treasurer’s office and half round the church of St Donatien. A number of well-built men in town livery, patrolling in pairs, made sure that, however cold and however impatient the crowd, the queue remained orderly.
Standing stock-still, the heir to the Charetty company studied it fiercely and then suddenly grinned. Felix, it transpired, had been set upon during the last heavy snows and pelted outside his inn by a group of journeyman drinkers. There they were. Waiting for lottery tickets in their employers’ time. And caught helpless at that, unless they wanted to give up their places.
“Felix,” said Anselm Sersanders.
“Felix,” said Bonkle.
Felix, stooping, paid no attention, although he did, hazily, wait until the nearest patrolman had turned before he started to throw. His aim was not very good and Claes, with relief, saw a distraction. He said, “There isn’t enough snow, yet. Come on. There’s Colard waving.”
The makers and sellers of books were usually in the yard of St Donatien, but in bad weather they packed up their booths and went indoors. Colard’s little room was above the cloisters and imposed its own toll on visiting stomachs, being kept retching-hot by the fumes from his candles and brazier, not to mention the chemical reek of his inks.
Today being a work-day, fumes and flames were streaming inward, thrust by air and snow from the unshuttered window from which he had waved to them. In the few minutes they had taken to climb the stairs he had reseated himself at his desk, his knee-stockings twined round its frame like old pennants. He had pushed his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, and his tousled hair was plush on one side where he had been writing too close to the candle.
His tongue out, his face ruddy with health, he was completing a line of careful French script, his hairy wrist moving over the vellum while his eyes flickered up to the Latin work propped on his lectern.
“The Penitence of Adam,” read Felix. “Here! Any pictures?”
The translator’s lips opened at either end, leaving his tongue where it was, for some moments. Then he said, “Two words to finish. Wait. No. No pictures,” he added.
“Aha! Liar! I’ve found one!” said Felix.
“Put that down!”
Ignoring this, Felix had laid hands on a miniature and was examining it with authority.
He turned it this way and that. “Well, you’ve drawn a proper Adam,” said Felix. “But Eve! You’ll have to show that hand of hers in another place. Might not be Eve at all. Might be another Adam.”
“He needs a model,” said Claes. “You remember. He has a short memory, Colard.”
Colard swung round, his writing posture intact and his eyes lit with fury, one on either side of the beak of his quill. “Put that down. It isn’t my painting.”
“I could get him a model,” suggested John Bonkle.
“But it isn’t his painting,” Claes pointed out.
“Then who did it?” said Anselm Sersanders.
“No one you know. Anyway, he has a model,” said Colard, giving up. “She goes about with her hand there all the time. If he ever wants an Adam to match it, I’ll recommend one of you animals. I’ve got some beer, but if you don’t want it, just don’t do what I tell you.”
It was a well-rehearsed routine. They helped him find the beer and the drinking-pots, climbing over boxes and crates and bundles of papers and poking between rocking piles of manuscripts on his shelves. Anselm, who had just had a birthday, sent out to a roast shop for two brace of pigeons with mustard, again a matter of custom; and they sat baiting Colard while he devoured a good deal more than fell due to him.
“Make the most of it!” said Felix gloomily. “Eels from Wednesday onwards.