Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [193]
He said, “I think you will probably sleep. I’ll stay in the yard or the office all morning. Send for me if you want me.”
He gave her one of his lavish, sudden smiles. His eyes were still drowsy. She returned the smile and said, “Good-night, Nicholas,” and watched him make his way to the door. He turned, his hand on the latch, and drew breath to say something, and then smiled instead.
She should have left it alone. Instead, she said, “What remark was that going to be?”
He stood, still smiling a little. “A favour I decided not to ask for.”
She was pleasantly curious. The tone of his voice declared quite clearly that there was no need for her to be disturbed. She said, “Well, now you have changed your mind. What is it?”
He said, “I don’t know what colour your hair is.”
She felt her chin coming up. Her skin burned with the heat of the fire. The large gaze, dwelling sleepily on her, held every disarming quality: of affection, of mischief, of appeal. The scrubbed face at Mass, with the hair flattened down, and the glance full of merriment over some innocent conspiracy.
Marian de Charetty rose from her place by the fireside and, smiling, held the eyes of the child Claes with her own as she unpinned the round padded hat she had worn all that day.
There had been no time that morning to pin it underneath as she usually did. She lifted off the solid frame and shook the folded hair under it so that it unrolled and fell over her breast and her back and her shoulders. It was the colour of her sleeves: the deep brown of lampblack mixed with yellow earths, with the vermilion echoes of cinnabar. It was the first thing she had learned: how to dye cloth to flatter her hair. When she let it down at night, Cornelis had compared it to Cathay silk.
Now her second husband looked at it with his large, restful gaze, and said, “Yes. I thought I was right” with simplicity.
Remotely she realised that, of course, he had known the shade of her hair. It might be covered, but one day or another a hairline would show under the wiring. And hence he had been sure that there was no grey there, to shame her. It had been, wordlessly, the coda she had dreaded. But even though she might discern his reasoning, she couldn’t fault him for the thought that had prompted it. She smiled and said, “Next time, it will be black. I change it every five days. Why else own a dye business?”
He grinned. “I think,” he said, “that would be cause for annulment. Until tomorrow.”
He closed the door and she sat down, her hair glowing about her.
Chapter 29
HAD IT NOT been for Easter falling midway between her astonishing alteration in status and the joust of the White Bear Society, matters might have been harder for Marian de Charetty. As it was, from the morning after her marriage, the owner of the Charetty company doggedly went about her usual affairs in warehouses and markets and offices where the streets rattled with the furious clacking of looms, the wheeze of pumps, the rumble of barrows and carts as the city pressed its business to a close in readiness for the demands of the Church, and the pleasures of the festival to follow.
From sheer curiosity, of course, people welcomed her; and those who were genuine friends did their best to make her feel she had chosen rightly, whatever they privately thought. Businessmen were apt, beginning a transaction, to make a cheerful if cursory remark about having to watch their step now she had that young man to advise her. Those who were friends of the Adorne family, or who respected them, were both polite and careful.
Only the children were neither. There were not many, but she knew, when she heard the giggling from behind a bridge wall, or under a flight of steps, or from a doorway, that it echoed an adult response: the conversation of a shocked mother or an astounded housemaid. Only once was she truly hurt; when three childish trebles set up a chant of Mankebele! Mankebele!