Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [143]
Tilde had spent it crying. No one could blame Father Bertouche for bringing home the four little girls (he was in his bed today). It was a pity that the van Borselen child had broken into the party so forcefully, but no doubt Claes had been rescued eventually from her attentions. Someone – a servant; the sister Katelina perhaps? – would have to find the child Gelis and take her off home. It was not Marian de Charetty’s concern.
She supposed Felix had spent the whole night with his new girl. Now he had got the knack she supposed, also, that she would have to speak to him, or half the servants in Bruges would claim to be bearing to him. Failing his father, the best regulator of that situation was a wife.
She needed help with Felix. But wives had fathers. As it was, she kept falling over the pawnbroker Oudenin at every step. She returned home after the dinner in time for the annual inspection of weights and measures, and found Claes had forestalled her and was already busy in the yard, stripped to shirt and a very old doublet. She left him alone and went to the kitchens, where she found Felix cajoling one of her women. He had won a sack of bells in the lottery and wanted them sewn on Claes’ clothes.
Claes’ clothes were already in the kitchen being pressed, and a great tear repaired. He had been pushed into the canal, said her woman, clearly believing it. Felix, his eyes brilliant with sleeplessness, clearly didn’t. Neither did she. Claes had the same look as Felix, and his red scar crossed a cheek healthy as tallow.
Ash Wednesday. A day she had always hated.
Later there was a brief scene when Claes came in for his clothes and found bells all over the doublet and jacket. Forced by Felix and his friends to get into them, he went straight out of the door and came back in due course with a flock of goats, which he led jingling into the house and up to and through Felix’s room, where they stood bleating and defecating anxiously. Felix was angry, but his friends, screaming with laughter, made him see the joke. A man, debited, no doubt, to Felix’s educational equipment, came later to clean up the room, while someone snipped off the bells and Claes, in his old clothes again, got the keys of one of the cellars, and had a cart harnessed. A moment later, the Widow saw it rumbling out of the yard with Claes driving and one of the yard lads beside him.
Felix had gone off, without seeing her or asking her permission. Henninc, queried sharply over the cart, reckoned that no good had come of trying to make an apprentice into a soldier. Six months ago that was a good boy, who would never have thought of driving out of the yard in his mistress’s cart, in his mistress’s time, without asking.
“So why did he want it?” she said.
“Why, he’s gone to get his lottery winnings,” said Henninc. “A mail glove was all he got, but that’s but the token. It could be a shield he has to collect, or a helm maybe.”
“Or just the other glove,” said Marian de Charetty. “In which case he’ll look a fool with a cart, won’t he? All right. We’ve got other things to bother about. Show me the scales that were altered.”
The cart did not come back for some time. Catherine was fetched by friends, and returned later to say that there were dried-fruit stalls in the market place, and the van Borselen girl had been there in a worse temper than ever. Gelis, the fat one. Gelis had nothing to say about having Claes as a squire at the Carnival, except that she had had the dullest time she had ever had in her life, and had gone off home by herself. She didn’t say who Claes had gone off with, but guess what. Gelis had a new hand-warmer. And guess what it was?
Naturally, a silver-gilt apple. Marian de Charetty wondered, wearily, if Claes had handed it over before or after his clothes were covered in