Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [123]
You could see from here the thick red cut on his face, although today the swelling was less. He had been rude when she had enquired about it. She had not phrased the enquiry, naturally, as she would have done to one of her own kind, but he had no right to resent it. She had, after all, made a special journey to the Widow’s house that night last autumn, because she had thought him ill-used by Simon. Well, at least Simon was not responsible for fighting him this time. Simon was in Scotland.
The boy Felix howled again, drawing her eye. She perceived that the youth Claes had won something. A piece of armour. No, a token; a single mailed glove, being presented to him by one of the yellow-caps, a convalescent from the Hospital of St John, which must have donated it. Standing on the rostrum, answering questions and smiling with his Bock cap pulled off, Claes looked like the soldier he wasn’t. Some of the squealing from the spectators undoubtedly came from feminine throats. He looked as if he was very aware of it, but didn’t turn round and wave.
The truth was, thought Katelina van Borselen, accepting a sweetmeat and passing it to her small, omnivorous sister – the truth was that this young womaniser was rather clever, the last thing one wanted in a servant. Wit was for your lover, if any. For a husband, it was too much to hope.
She thought again of the three names on her mother’s list of possible suitors. Two were the middle-aged heirs to modest seigneuries, one near Ghent, and the other near Courtrai. The third, and the best catch, was a member of the Gruuthuse family, one of the oldest and greatest in Bruges, into which her cousin Marguerite had married four years before. Guildolf de Gruuthuse, a charming boy of fifteen, was already well experienced. If she married him, she would have twenty years of child-bearing ahead of her, to a husband four years younger than herself. She was unlikely to become a rich widow.
It crossed her mind that she had been short-sighted in rejecting so passionately the mature spouse produced for her in Scotland. She even saw, with a pang, that her father had not been as unfeeling in the matter as she had believed. She realised that, at last, she had grown out of the rosy world of childish romance. Real life was different. One adjusted to it, while working to gain what advantages from it one could.
She turned her eyes from the fevered stew in the market place, and began to scan the more favoured windows and balconies for the devices of seasoned lords from Ghent and from Courtrai, and for the warlike cannon, the vigorous symbol of Gruuthuse.
Marian de Charetty spent the day with Tilde and Catherine, her two little daughters. With other members of the Dyers’ Guild and their wives and children, she had watched part of the lottery prize-giving and, as it drew to an end and the crowd loosened, she allowed the girls to take her from stall to stall, and buy and eat what they wished. They watched the dwarves and the tumblers, and threw coins in the cap of the man with the performing dog, and guessed the weight of a pig, and saw a man with two heads in a cage, and a girl with a beard and an animal that was half a horse and half a cow, with a mane at one end and udders at the other that could be milked. They were selling cheeses from it and Catherine wanted to buy one, but her mother wouldn’t let her.
It was there that she came across Lorenzo Strozzi and, reminded, asked civilly how he was getting along with his plans for importing the ostrich for Tommaso. Listening to his answer (he had learned from a sea captain that the bird was still in Barcelona, and had sent off messages by land and sea to have it shipped to Sluys instantly) she studied the tension in the narrow shoulders and sallow, earnest face, and thought,