Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [126]
There were so many lights and so many people that you didn’t really feel cold, but in any case there were braziers at the street corners and hot drinks and soup to be got at some of the booths, and even three men with an oven on wheels, pushing in dough at one end and raking out hot pies at the other with the speed of devils in hell, while their customers hedged them in shoulder to shoulder, eating and spluttering, red-faced in the glow from the embers.
There were braziers up at the other end too, on the rostrum cleared now for the town players – the trumpets and pipes and drums and timbals and fiddles – and the town singers, with the scarves of their hats spiralled round their valuable throats. The songs they sang were not the kind you would hear in a tavern, but when the drums and fiddles got going, the children would begin to dance up and down and then the older people, and a circle would start up somewhere for a country dance, and then break off, because it was early and everything was orderly yet.
The scaffolding, of course, had been taken down, Witken the weaver having completed his two days of penance and Poppe having reached, officially, the end of his mortification by barrel, although he was still wearing it, drunk, in the boisterous care of his friends. Then the seamen began to bring the ropes into the square for the tightrope walk they always did, with hoops, up in the belfry; and some of them were drunk as well, although not, you had to hope, the ones who were going to fasten the rope or the ones who were going to dance on it. By that time, Claes’ young ladies were becoming extremely excited.
By that time, also, a number of things had happened.
Jan Adorne had left, for one thing. He was not, as a student, wife-hunting; but at fifteen he was undoubtedly on the track of something other than a group of small girls. The small girls, who did not regard themselves as such, resented this.
The two Adorne daughters, as it happened, were well-behaved and at home with Claes. He talked to them and made them laugh, and invented things, and introduced them to funny people (if Father Bertouche didn’t stop him) and let them do interesting things that Mother would never allow, when Father Bertouche wasn’t looking. They liked his jokes and the feel of his broad, capable hands on their backs as he shepherded them through the crowd. They were, of course, too old to sit on his shoulder, but now and then he would put his two hands round Katelijne’s stripling waist and hoist her to get a clearer view.
When that happened, Father Bertouche coughed, or tapped Claes on the shoulder. He coughed partly from disapproval but partly because he had a raging cold. He also had aching feet, and was pining, explicitly, for his comfortable quarters in the Hôtel Jerusalem. The chaplain, therefore was little help, particularly as the Charetty girls paid no attention to him: Catherine because she had gone insane with excitement, and Tilde because she was Claes’ chosen lady and insulated from the rest of mankind for the evening.
This was Claes’ mistake. It arose, as his employer had suspected, from a very clear understanding of her elder daughter’s mind. To wound Tilde tonight by treating her as another child was unthinkable. He accordingly announced that, as the elder of Felix’s sisters, Tilde was to take the place of her mother this evening, and would be his official consort. At the time, it had seemed a reasonably good idea. Tilde had flushed with pleasure, and he had been careful to keep the other children amused while giving her, when he could, a mock-courtly attention that she could enjoy without taking it seriously. Then Catherine, spurred by the noise