Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [18]
And on either side passed the crooked banks of tiled houses, drunkenly cobbled with crazy windows and flower-pot balconies and roofs fluted like pastry-crust. Their feet, their watergates, their warehouse doors were set in the canal. Their boat-steps led up to small secret gardens whose roses still tumbled over the wall, and swayed to the draught of a passing boat, and posted their mingled scents after it.
The van Borselens were Zeelanders, but Katelina understood how it felt to be a Bruges townsman.
Edinburgh was grey stone and grey, silvered wood and every roadway was vertical. Bruges was flat. Bruges was speckled warm brick, its roads cloistered with towered mansions and palaces and tall houses, laddered with windows, where the businessmen lived. Bruges was the multiple voice of working water; and the quality of brick-thrown echoes, and the hiss of trees and the flap of drying cloths in the flat-country wind, and the grunting, like frogs in a marsh, of quires of crucified clothes, left to vibrate in the fields of the tenters. Bruges was the cawing scream of the gulls, and the bell-calls.
Bells rang from all the towers in Edinburgh, but a Bruges man was born to the beat of the womb and the belfry-hours. The work bell four times a day, when mothers rescued their young from the feet of the weavers. The watch bell. The great bell for war, or for princes, that you could hear from the poop-decks in Damme. The marriage bell. She would not think of that either. She had come back from Scotland in disgrace, having refused the lord whom her father had picked out for her. No one did that. A daughter’s duty was to marry as her family’s fortune directed, and her father had no sons. So now she had only two choices. The cloister, or a marriage to someone else of her father’s choosing. And she knew who the likeliest suitor would be.
Simon, heir to Kilmirren had not so far declared himself. Back in Scotland, she had attended the Queen wherever the court might find itself, and that was not always in Edinburgh, where Simon’s uncle kept a town house, and where he did all his business. She knew all about Simon for several reasons. His sister Lucia had been maid of honour in her time to two Scots princesses, one married to France and the other to Katelina’s cousin Wolfaert.
A child then herself, Katelina did not remember her. In any case, Lucia had very soon left, betrothed to her Portuguese nobleman. But gossip about Lucia’s brother, the handsome blond Simon, had entertained the Borselens for a long time after that. So Katelina knew that he had had a wild youth in France, and had been sent home in disgrace to his uncle, the head of the family. She had met Alan, lord of Kilmirren. A mean and slow-witted man, comfortable with the gun-masters who were his gossips and ambitious for nothing more than an easy life, he was not the man, clearly, to handle someone like Simon.
It had been left to the family steward, she heard, to take Simon in hand. For five years, they said, he had resisted every effort to tame him, and had made what splash he could with his French dress and manners, on the small income his uncle allowed him. What had changed his mind one could only guess. The need for money, Katelina suspected. The steward died, and Simon took over. By the time Katelina came to Scotland, Simon was steward of his uncle’s lands in Kilmirren and Dunbar: a reasonably rich man with a flair, intermittently exercised, for ideas and management, who earned enough for his needs, and employed a factor for business that bored him.
He enjoyed, she knew, a roving courtier’s rôle in Scotland and Flanders, but had been careful to shackle himself with no public offices. He had no wife, and they said he was a libertine. This appeared to be true. On the other hand, the uncle