Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [283]
He brought out, that first evening in Brittany, his handsomest doublet, cut short to the waist in the French style, exposing silk-covered haunch and fine codpiece. For the silk, he had chosen his shapeliest hose in two colours, embroidered from knee to thigh with spiralling roses. It was as if contrite angels had remodelled, for him alone, that humiliating episode in the smoke-ridden garden. What Bruges had denied him, Brittany now gave with both hands on that first night. In the drowsy company after the meal, close by Katelina, he had filled her glass over and over, introducing one by one the invisible, critical caresses, the hints of desire in his murmuring, until he saw that the moment was coming already.
The Duchess had no objection to his leading the lady Katelina to take the air in the warm moonlit garden. This time Katelina’s trembling fingers were already deliciously wooing him as he moved down the steps from the house, and the last of the lamplight from its windows showed him the anxiety in her face. Then they were alone in the bower, and no man knew the art of forcing anxiety to the point of anguished exultation better than Simon of Kilmirren.
In a fortnight, she had suspected she was pregnant. Half reluctantly, he had heard her frightened appeals, and had married her. Only half reluctantly, because already he could not have enough of her. When the pregnancy was later confirmed, his cup was full.
He didn’t mind who saw that he had fathered a child before marriage on Katelina van Borselen. He would give her one a year. Day and night, he would give her reason for one. She was, now, the way he spent his time.
The church of Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk, when they got there, was shrouded in black and already filled, except for the chief mourners. The Duke’s representatives waited at the door for the party from the house of Veere. The Duke whose niece, Mary of Guelders, was now Dowager Queen of Scotland.
The Princess Mary walked first, led by her father-in-law Henry van Borselen, comte de Grandpré, seigneur de la Veere, Vlissingue, Westcapelle and Domburg, together with his wife Jeanne de Halewyn. Next came the Princess’s husband Wolfaert van Borselen and the Scots Bishop James Kennedy. Between Wolfaert and the Bishop walked the two children: Alexander Duke of Albany, middle son of the late Scots king, and Charles van Borselen, his nine-year-old cousin.
Alexander, Duke of Albany and Lord High Admiral of Scotland, was only six. Conducted by his father’s cousin, Bishop Kennedy, he had arrived this summer at Bruges to be reared at the Burgundian court. Now his father was dead, but no one had taken him home. Bishop Kennedy, detained by an illness, was still at his side: skilful ambassador; agile diplomat, reporting back all the nuances of Burgundian response to the new Scottish régime.
Perhaps the child, thickly dressed in dark jewelled doublet and bonnet, had no desire to go home. He looked harried and sullen, walking there with his cousin. The Scots in the party studied him and the Bishop, and pondered. Including Simon of Kilmirren and his lady, walking behind with the others. The fifteen years between them could hardly be guessed at. Ripened with marriage, his wife now looked older than twenty. And he, all his life, had kept the style and looks of his golden youth.
Politics mattered. But once pacing down the aisle with his wife, Simon had remarkably little thought for the dead king. He could feel people looking at Katelina, beautiful even under her veiling. And at himself, in cut black velvet tied with grey ribbons, and the hat of cocks’ feathers which he held in one hand.
The Mass was a long one, and the music tedious, but afterwards they would go to the adjoining palace of Louis de Gruuthuse and his wife, Wolfaert