Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [222]
Katelina was a fool.
At the end of the first week in June a messenger arrived in Bruges from the Medici manager in Geneva with papers for Angelo Tani. He also bore a letter which he delivered to Marian de Charetty. It was from her husband Nicholas. It hastened to assure her that all was well, and Felix safe in his company. It added that, because of the money they carried, it seemed best for Felix to travel with him to Italy and come home at the same time. The experience, it further added, might do Felix some good. There followed some detailed information and other cogent suggestions on trading matters. The greetings with which it closed were all that they should be. It was a pleasant letter. Marian de Charetty, reading it, deduced that Felix was misbehaving and that this was the way Nicholas had chosen to deal with it. She had no fears for Felix. The concern she felt sprang from the same source as Tilde’s. Felix, when thwarted, could harm people.
Being unconscious on the banks of Lake Geneva, Felix de Charetty was incapable of harming anyone at the time the pleasant letter to his lady mother was being composed and written. Nor, in the days that followed could he be said to be a danger to anyone but himself, as he tried to release himself from the horse to which he was tied, or drive it out of the convoy on one side or the other, his head still thunderously sore from the blow which had felled him in Jaak de Fleury’s house.
How Nicholas had got him out of the house and out of Geneva he still didn’t know. The precious money-box, of course, was in Nicholas’ hands. The men at arms around him were all hired by Nicholas. His own two servants were there as well, more lightly bound than he was since they had less incentive, he supposed, to escape and attempt a moneyless journey back home. From the moment he returned to consciousness, gripped on the back of someone else’s horse, they had been travelling as if the devil were after them.
Of course, Jaak de Fleury would have sent those armed men of his to follow and rescue him. Or at the very least, would have enlisted the help of the Duke of Savoy’s handiest officer. At any moment, they would be overtaken and stopped.
They were not. Whatever trick Nicholas had used, no troop of avenging horsemen swept past them. When, on stumbling horses, they left the lake and began to tackle the rising ground which led up to the pass, Felix saw that no one was going to help him. If he was going to take home that box, and find the rest of the Charetty money he had been cheated out of, he would have to do it himself.
That night his new enemy felt safe enough, it appeared, to risk taking a room at an inn. Sitting on a led horse, with his hands tied together and his feet roped beneath him, Felix saw the man at arms dispatched ahead to arrange it.
He had refused to give his word not to escape. He had refused to speak to anyone. At the first halt he remembered, he had spat back the wine Nicholas offered him, and when they loosed his hands he had used them to do his best to throttle him. So they didn’t dare take him indoors. They rested and took their food in the open air, well concealed from the road. Until now.
He had wondered how Nicholas expected to prevent him from making a disturbance in a public place, but it was simple: he was gagged as well as bound and helped in, cloaked and hooded, as if he were drunk. He smelt food and charcoal and ale fumes and heard a confusion of languages and the clatter of booted feet, and the banging of trestles and platters and tankards. His feet found stairs and he hit on the idea of kicking them, but before he could do it, powerful hands took him under the armpits and carried him bodily upwards. He remembered Claes being lifted like that. On board the Flanders galleys, it was. Just before they flung him