Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [215]
Cristoffels had remained discreetly silent. He had described with accuracy what Felix had said, when planning to join his mother and his mother’s new husband. He hadn’t described the look on Felix’s face when he said it.
Felix himself, riding towards Dijon, showed the same face to his servants who, as a result, refrained from their usual chatter and resigned themselves to the sort of grim journey you always got when the jonkheere was sulking.
At Dijon, he didn’t stay long and came away without his mother and Claes. No. Nicholas, you now had to call him, or you’d get young Felix’s whip. In a state, the jonkheere was, and no wonder: all pride so that the old woman mustn’t be criticised, and crazy with anger, of course, over Claes. Nicholas. Holy God, how were you to remember to call him Nicholas when you’d won a girl’s garter off him at dice only two months ago?
So he’d missed his mother at Dijon and they had to go all the way to Geneva. And it wouldn’t tax you to know why. The old woman was showing off her new bridegroom, and the jonkheere wanted to spoil it for her. Or that was the way it looked, if you knew young Felix. Not a bad little bastard. To tell the truth, you felt sorry for him now and then. When he wasn’t lashing out with his tongue and his whip, at any rate.
It was mid-May, season of lambs and new-dyed greenery, of orchard blossom and fine, rushing rivers and deep forests full of bustling wild life. Riding south, Felix saw none of them. He slept at the inns his servants found for him, and put his hand in his purse for food and drink and bed and tolls and charity, and thought about his mother and Claes. Nicholas.
He arrived at Geneva and started to look for the house, yard, warehouse and stables of Jaak de Fleury, whose niece had borne Claes to a servant.
Felix had never met Jaak de Fleury or his wife Esota, for whom Claes had worked as a child. And whom Claes was coming to visit now, no doubt in all the finery the Charetty money could buy. Not Claes but Nicholas, married to the owner of the Charetty business and rich.
For everything, of course, was quite different from what Felix had expected that day in his mother’s cabinet when, adult to adult, he had accepted the presence of Nicholas in the family circle. Nicholas wasn’t in the family circle. He was head of it. He wasn’t his mother’s friend; he was her master. Nicholas, Felix’s servant, who had so bewitched his mother that she had begged him, Felix, to stand aside and give Nicholas his chance in life! His chance to parade his cheap triumph in front of their kinsmen. This is the old woman my wife. That’s her boy Felix, but pay no attention to him. I’m running the business now.
He’d heard through Cristoffels of this expedition of his mother’s. At first, the shock had been so great that Felix hadn’t known what to do. But now, if he wept at all, it was from anger. He tried to stop his thoughts before they got as far as that. A merchant never showed his feelings. That was how bargains were made. That was how you got the better of the man you were bargaining against.
When the house was found, the porter didn’t want to let them in, and Felix had to go forward himself and use all his authority. Jaak de Fleury might think himself a great merchant and broker, but he took Charetty cloth and bought and sold just like the Charetty company. And Felix’s mother, for what it was worth, was his sister-in-law. Although Jaak de Fleury set no store by the kinship, it seemed, and there was certainly no desire on the part of Felix de Charetty to claim any sort of concessions.
But still, you let in the heir to the Charetty business without any arguing. Unless his mother and Nicholas were already inside. Unless Nicholas was behind the delay, or even the refusal …?
No. Someone was coming. A tall man in a fine brocade gown with trailing sleeves over a high-necked doublet of figured silk, and a draped hat larger than his own and twice as expensive. There was a golden chain round his shoulders and a lot of discreet