Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [269]
Nicholas, of the unimpaired engine, continued to work. Gregorio visited him, and was told to go home, which he did. The bereaved family had his sympathy. But he was not married to his employer.
The demoiselle was aware of these things. From time to time, a tongue-tied Henninc or one or other of her household would appear and transmit an offer of help or notify a visit from someone. She returned polite thanks, but felt that today her place was with her daughters.
She gave her remaining children supper in her own parlour, but didn’t have any herself. After a while, the girls ate with the appetite of the young. They were already recovering. Tomorrow or the next day, they would want to know all about the battle, and the joust.
Later, after she had seen them to bed, she heard Tilde weeping, and went in and sat with her until finally she dropped off to sleep. Then she undressed herself, and put on her nightrobe and went to the chamber and sat at her unshuttered window, wanting Cornelis.
But that was wrong, because Cornelis would have suffered terribly. His son. His heir. She had only lost her baby.
With mild kindness, she remembered Cornelis. He had been as good a husband as any woman might expect. When her father had gone bankrupt, faute van den wissele, like Jaak de Charetty, Cornelis had taken the company, and made it thrive. He had never toubled her with it. The child and the household were her business.
And so they would be today, if Cornelis hadn’t died. Of course at times she was lonely. She was lonely tonight. Only Tilde and Catherine knew Felix as she did, and they were too young to console her. So were his friends. She thought of Margriet Adorne with sudden thankfulness. She did have friends of her own age, who would understand. Tomorrow. But tonight had to be suffered first.
In Felix’s room, she knew, was a chest with all his belongings, and a helmet with a red plume and an eagle’s head on it. She had found it for herself. Whoever had put it there hadn’t locked it away. She was being treated by the senior members of her household as a grown woman who could face a crisis, and ask for help if she needed it. She realised that someone had been near at hand all day, whatever she happened to be doing. Not speaking and not in the same room very often, but near at hand. Especially Nicholas.
Until now, she had given no real thought to Nicholas. While he was away she had missed him. She had missed his strength to lean on, and his understanding. She had blamed him, secretly, for abandoning her and the company, as she used to blame Cornelis, she thought, when he went off to Antwerp and left her to deal with something.
She had wanted him back for the same reason. No. She had wanted him back for the sort of intermittent companionship which had come to be part of her daily pleasure. If he felt the same pleasure, she didn’t know. She did know that he had found a taste for affairs, and was experimenting with it. Until recently, she supposed, he could, if he wished, have slipped back into anonymity. Instead, he had stepped forward and committed himself to the Charetty company and to her.
So what must he be thinking tonight? He’d been with Felix. He hadn’t learned of his death in the yard among wool caps and stained skins and stinking aprons. The way Felix had met his end owed something to him. Guilt as well as thoughtfulness had sent him dragging Julius on that breakneck journey to bring her the news with least pain.
Instead, his arrival had caused her to learn of Felix’s death in the most brutal way possible. Whatever he thought of Esota, he had learned of her death on his way. He had heard of the ruin of Jaak de Fleury. He had lived with them both, and had survived cruelty without apparent bitterness. It was not his fault that Jaak de Fleury was dead: Lionetto had killed him. But today he had learned that his life as well