Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [239]
Half-naked, he had embraced the widow. Perhaps she, too, had drawn him his bath, and kept his clothes from him. However old she was, however ugly, he would perform for her. Every girl in Bruges knew that. Mabelie. Herself.
And his name was Claes. It had never been Nicholas. Her firstborn had Claes for a father, the bastard workman with the beguiling tongue and the vast and innocent gaze which concealed a cunning, a ruthless ambition. The treadmill of ambition but not, surely, of failure. There the fat man was wrong. Building carefully, woman by woman, man by man, Claes was raising the staircase that would take him from apprentice to merchant and from merchant to whatever pinnacle his self-esteem demanded.
He hadn’t needed Katelina. Her name and rank without money were useless to him. He needed what he had got: the owner of a small business whose standing, however minor, now became his. Arson might check him. There might be other attempts to hinder his rise. But unlike the fat man, she could judge Claes from many aspects. News of his marriage had completed the picture. Now she knew him. Short of death, nothing now would hold him. He didn’t need her, and still less would he want the baby she carried. The problem was solved.
Katelina van Borselen went quietly about her business. Those who knew and liked her noted that she was a little withdrawn, and spent more time in her room than had been usual. They had to call her from it to act, as she often did, as interpreter for one of the interminable talks about the Dowager’s dowry.
There was to be a meeting in France. The Scots commissioners, assembling their claims, were calling to discuss the King’s case with his sister. Sir William Monypenny, of course. Bishop Kennedy later. Flockhart, perhaps. And the handsome, yellow-haired man the Dowager claimed to favour, who had not called since Katelina had come, but who would put the roses back in Katelina’s pale cheeks.
“Come, Katelina!” said her friends. “Come and meet Simon of Kilmirren!”
June was then in its second week. All over Europe, forces already set in motion, like a game in a wooden box, began to hop and roll to their destiny.
Before June ended, Felix, heir to the Charetty company, arrived in Naples and joined his mother’s troops under captain Astorre and the notary Julius. With him as personal servant he took a magnificent negro called Loppe. With him also came a gift to the King from the Duke of Milan: eighteen hundred horsemen destined to reinforce the Pope’s army and help King Ferrante clear his foes out of the land about Naples. Emboldened, King Ferrante moved out of Naples and challenged the enemy.
It wasn’t wise, but the king of Naples was fortunate. Duke John of Calabria, with unusual caution, refused battle. When threatened, he fled with his army to the small town of Sarno, built on a river-girt hillside just thirty miles south of Naples, and allowed himself to be besieged. The army of King Ferrante, aided by the troops from the Pope and the Duke of Milan and their many hired companies, including that of captain Astorre, settled down to starve them out, as was usual.
They would have succeeded. It was unfortunate that King Ferrante’s mercenaries, in particular, had not been paid for quite some time, and that King Ferrante, at that moment, had no prospect of paying them. Attractive offers began to arrive from the enemy camp. Men began to desert.
King Ferrante decided, with a certain amount of regret and a greater amount of reckless optimism, that instead of prosecuting the siege, he ought to attempt an attack. He meant it to be a limited one, or so he said afterwards. But, bored and unpaid, his soldiers thought otherwise.