Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [189]
His mother didn’t answer. Then she said, “How could I choose you instead of him? You are my son. Wherever you are, you are chosen. And Felix, how are you better off if Nicholas leaves, with all his opportunities lost, and the company fails, and my way of life has to end? Is that the way a man takes his place in the world?”
He knew then from the cold at his chin that he was crying. He said, “It was at the Poorterslogie,” and pursed his lips against the pain in his throat. He glanced, through flickering eyes, at the table and saw that she had lifted her hands again to her mouth, and then to her brow. Under their shadow she said, “I would go through this whole day again, to spare you that. You should have been told. I was wrong. To be fair, I should be the one really to leave. Perhaps one day you and Nicholas will decide to leave me. I deserve it.”
Below her hands, her lips had twisted as if in a wry smile. But then she took her hands down, and he saw that her face was striped with tears, and that the tears ran over skin already shiny with weeping. Then he was beside her, and they had their arms round each other, and their wet cheeks were pressed together. It was the first time ever that she had admitted to being wrong. Adult to adult. She had said so.
Somewhere during the disconnected exchanges that followed, he heard himself telling her that he wanted her to be happy. Somewhere in the same passage, he learned, without anything being said, that some of his mother’s happiness was bound up with Nicholas. It was not entirely news. It was what, after all, had been behind much of his misery. But he had shared Nicholas before, especially with women. His head on her knee, he let her stroke his hair until her composure came back. Then he said, “It’s done, I suppose. If you really want it, I’ll help you.”
An adult could afford to be magnanimous. He was her son, and chosen. She was a woman, and weak enough to need the help of Claes, his servant. He could spare her that. Of what, in detail, it would entail: of how, in detail, he was to face the events that lay ahead, he would rather not think. Today, his poor mother could rely on him.
He waited for her to drop a kiss on his brow. She hesitated, and then just massaged and patted his shoulder, as he got to his feet. Her eyes were wet and anxious, watching him. He sniffed, and bent over and kissed her firmly instead.
Chapter 28
MESSER GREGORIO, working quietly with one eye on his open door, heard his mistress’s step and had already risen when she came into the room. It was to request him, as arranged, to summon all her workers and her household to the biggest of the dyesheds and to put a box there, beside the pay-trestle, for her to stand on. She spoke calmly and without a tremor, although her lids were a little red. She added, “Henninc will help you. I have asked him to come to my room so that he may receive the news first.” Impeccable. Impeccable from beginning to end as a piece of sheer human management. Only the deferred breaking of the news to the son had been a mistake. One could hardly see how the son’s own servant could remedy that.
Gregorio of Asti did as he was asked, and soon Henninc, his face flushed, his lips pursed, came to join him. Like himself, Henninc, he noticed, answered no questions from his underlings. Soon, noisy as starlings, there streamed from house and yard into the dyeshop the whole sum of the Charetty employees, from the journeymen dyers to the boys who cared for the tack; from the regal authority of the cook to the maids who swabbed floors and cut vegetables.
Then the demoiselle, in her good clothes, came out. Not escorted by her new husband. The youth who followed her into the yard and, catching up, gave her his arm was, Gregorio saw with fascination, her own son, Felix de Charetty, with a rather pale face and a jacket that didn’t assort with his doublet. They had reached the dyeshop when a door banged and the architect of the whole affair came purposefully over the yard.