Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [30]
Alone, because the lad Claes had got away somehow. That is, he’d totally vanished.
A pity, you’d say. But Christ, he’d given them all sport enough. So had Simon, standing dripping and reeking, so that you had to go upwind to talk to him. Of course he was angry. He even accused the dog-killers of shielding the youngster.
He had a point, if it mattered. There had been a circle of men – it was hard to see how the youth slipped between them. But where else could he have gone? Not over the bridge. Not back into the river. Not down the quayside along which they themselves had been advancing. Unless he had risen into the air?
It was John of Kinloch, recipient of too many slights, who expressed the kind hope that friend Simon’s own hound was uninjured. Baying after another, Simon had forgotten his dog. He looked round for it. It was easy to find by its collar: a magnificent beast, lying dead at the feet of the hound-chief.
The hondeslager blanched. To touch the dog of a knight meant a flogging. A collared dog, a branded dog must be distinguished at night from all others. Therein lay the skill of their office. And here, in the half-light, he had killed the hound of a noble Scots merchant. He said the only thing he could say. He said, “My lord, you saw your dog, jumping about. It could have hurled itself into the path of anyone’s club. None of my men killed it directly. I swear to you. As for myself, how could I? There is no club in my hand.”
“A hondeslager without a club?” said a cynic.
“The boy took it. The apprentice. You saw him,” said the dog-man to Simon.
Simon said, “And he killed my dog? It must have been him or you.”
The dog-killer was silent. A decent man, he kept his gaze strictly level. Simon started to speak, his face darkened. From the wall of the lodge high above them, a cheerful, resigned voice forestalled him.
“Oh, the shame; the shame of it!” said the Charetty apprentice. “Friends, I have to admit to it all. For the lawyers will never believe you.”
The crowd of men lifted their eyes. From its tall, hooded niche on the corner, the oldest burgess of Bruges, the White Bear, the het beertje van der logie, does not look down at his peers but up, to the clouds and the rooftops. He wears a high golden collar, and golden straps cross the white painted fur of his chest, and between his two paws he clutches the red and gold shield of the city.
He stood there that night, his gaze lofty, and ignored the two battered arms which encircled him; the thicket of dun-coloured floss at his cheek-bone; the amiable chin which pressed on his shoulder. From one of the embracing fists, hopelessly damning, dangled the stained leaden club of the hondelager.
“Take me. I’m yours,” said Claes peacefully. “I don’t deserve to have a nice girl like Mabelie and then go off killing dogs; and I’m giving a terrible smell to your beertje.”
“Come down,” said Simon softly.
The youth embracing the bear nodded agreeably. “But when the sergeant arrives, if you don’t mind. And if there’s a Christian among you, would you tell Meester Julius I’m in the Steen again, and he’ll need to have a word with a bargeman?”
Chapter 5
THE GROUP OF apprentices outside the Steen the following morning was even bigger than it had been the day before. Weavers running to work, wellwishers on their way home paused to grin through the window-bars. The two crane-repairers were among them.
This time, there was no Mabelie to put butter for Claes in the begging-bags, but her name hung in the air, as if written on bunting. Even when the work bell rang and the space outside the prison reluctantly cleared, there remained one or two curious burghers who stood on their toes to spot the stolid face of the apprentice and who, before passing on, threw him fruity reprimands in voices less than severe.
Left standing also was a tall, black-bearded man of mild aspect who was not a Fleming. “Well, Claes vander Poele?” he said to the prison. The inmates, who owed Claes the