Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [122]
The square was lined with houses of passive service like this one, whose owner vacated it in times of public festival so that eminent persons might, seated, enjoy the view from the windows and refresh themselves from the buffet provided. A comfort one ought to appreciate when, as today, it had been snowing. The tapestries hung over the sills were all powdered with white, and snow sat on the crow-steps of all the red gables, five or six storeys up, and flecked the brown brick and lodged in all the fancy stonework round the windows and doors.
The roof of the covered dock opposite was a long, smooth slope of white, and white capped the statues on the public well in front of it, and prinked the four-square bastion of the old trading hall filling the end of the square, with the bulk of the belfry tower straddling it.
It was the speaking-trumpet from the belfry roof they were using now, to relay all through the day the results of the lottery. The Bailli and the Ecoutète and both the burgomasters were there, on the wooden tribune erected in front of the hall, with the treasury officials of course, and some échevins and the constables of the sections. They all wore their fanciest hats and their heaviest robes in blue and green and expensive red and extremely expensive black, crowded together under the canopy with its swagged greenery and painted flags. The braziers crackled on either side and small tables stood at hand upon which pewter jugs appeared from time to time, and dishes from which steam was rising.
It was not, for the City Fathers, the most comfortable way of spending Shrove Tuesday. On the other hand, the lottery, properly run, could raise an excellent sum for the city. There were always generous donors, especially now, on the eve of the weights-test.
A porcupine in a cage had just been held up, with some care, by two officers. The crowds were so thick in the square and the roads leading out of it that the spectators were nearly immobile. They released their excitement by shouting, and by a jostling of coiffed and capped heads, like a field of clover whipped by a down-draught. Hoisted children flapped their arms, the only beings with freedom to do so.
A porcupine, of course, was no use to a laundress or a brick-maker or a lad from the fishing-boats, any more than would be a pair of gloves, or a wineglass or a drum or a falcon. In such cases the handsome prizes were turned into money in a matter of minutes. Katelina saw her own father’s steward standing patiently in the crowd, among the well-dressed, waiting to see who won the right to the good Spanish horse. Others, she knew, would have their eyes on the gospel the Duke had offered, or the hound, or the holy picture. Sometimes a wealthy guildsman – a shoemaker, a butcher, a tailor, a carpenter – would win and keep such a prize, or a nobleman from inside Bruges or outside its boundaries, for the lottery was advertised far and wide. But mostly the prizes were money, and each announcement was greeted with screams of bemused joy.
The porcupine caused two commotions, she saw: one within a group of turnkeys from the Steen who appeared to have won it, and another in an assortment of people dressed in the identical blue of the Charetty company. The women of the Charetty household, she saw, were wearing new shawls, and the working men had fresh caps, with knots of ribbon lacing their jackets. The demoiselle their employer, small and round and polite as she had found her on their single encounter, had the reputation of being a sharp businesswoman, harsh with her staff and not afraid to stand toe to toe with a man and speak her mind if she felt like it. But she knew, too, it seemed, the mark of good management: to relent on occasion, and be generous.
The Widow herself was not, naturally, in the market place although, peering, Katelina observed the son, Felix, dressed in an astonishing pleated garment trimmed all over with black and white fur, and with a lopsided fur hat apparently