Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [28]
Immediately, his companions saw what he was after. The joke was good, and it needn’t be over yet. Apprentice Claes, the great lover, was a long way from his attic at the Charetty house. The least they could do for poor Metteneye, with his trust abused and a good servant maybe in the family way, was to catch the fellow and make him regret it. Crowing and hallooing, they streamed out of the cellar, leaving Metteneye to grip the little piece by the arm and drag her up the steps to his lady.
The trouble was, of course, the odour of fox, and cat, and hare, and even a faint residual tincture of rabbit. And yet the lad was inventive, by God. He nipped round into St John’s Place and past the English merchants’ house before you could blink, and then dived straight across and into the Englishmen’s tavern, where they were not at all welcoming as he dashed through, spilling the beer and the dice and the card tables, and still less so when a quantity of pursuers burst through the door, including those well able to see what the dicing stakes had been. By that time, Simon’s dog had been joined by another.
By the time they fought their way through to the back door, Claes had gone, but there was a wicket door swinging loose in Winesack Street with both dogs barking before it, so they flung it open and poured through, and across a courtyard, and up to a door which opened courteously when they hammered on it, revealing a stout, shiny gentleman in towelling robes, loosely – too loosely – swaying at dog-height.
No one consoled him. Ignoring advice from the better-informed, merchants and mercers pressed past him, following Simon. They bounded from passage to parlour and into a medley of chambers furnished, like Paradise, with nothing but white clouds and seraphic pink bodies. Among them were several more mercers, a midwife, two counsellors, the chief clerk of the tonlieu, a Grand Dean, two guild-sisters and a bell-founder with muscles like anchor-chains.
No fleeing apprentice was visible through the steam or, indeed, rigorously sought. Two of the pursuers had the misfortune to miss their footing on the slippery tiles and fall into the baths, overcome with the heat, the noise and the inadvertent movements of bathers. Those who emerged, streaming, into the September night might have gone home at that point but for the sight of Simon, running fiend-faced and light-footed before them, with three or four dogs at his heels.
They followed, and were rewarded with the sight of the boy, the randy big bastard who had caused all the trouble, dashing through the darkness to the quay and down the steps to the water. A moment later, one of the long barges moored there swung out and began punting out into midstream, pointing towards Damme. On the steps, Simon paused and then, turning, sprang up to the quay and began running hard with the dogs for the next bridge, followed at an increasing distance by the breathless merchants and mercers, to whom had added themselves a curious householder or two and the porter of the bath house, exuding general goodwill and a willingness to be bribed by almost anybody.
Powerfully though the apprentice might drive his oar, he was only one man in a barge too broad for punting. The boat came sluggishly up to the bridge just as the Scots lord, perfectly trained, flung himself on to its incline and, balancing, jumped.
The reek must have met him in mid-air. Before he hit the laden barge, he would know what it was he’d jumped into. As it was, he first crashed into the boy, who dropped his oar in the water. Then the lord Simon’s feet hit the cargo, and he stumbled and sank into something which responded with squeals and forced grunts and queer pipings, each of them borne on a belch of unpleasant vapour. Air from the bellies and bladders of Bruges’ deceased dogs and cats and the little dead pigs of St Anthony, retrieved from the water each night by this, the regular scavenging barge.
Sadly, the Scots lord was lying among them. The only oar was overboard.