Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [37]
“Costing a lot of money,” said Claes. He dropped the ball gently into a socket, and inside the rough little box a number of trifling things started to happen, apparently of their own volition.
Felix cast it a fraught glance. “It doesn’t play a tune,” he said disparagingly. “The last one had bells there, and a drumstick. She’d save money if she took me out of university.”
“Well, you can’t have bells all the time. You’d have to work,” Claes observed.
“I worked at university!” said Felix indignantly. When Claes didn’t look up or answer, Felix picked up the newly-made box and dropped it on the floor, glaring at him. Bits of wire and slivers of wood fell about everywhere.
Claes looked up. Not with a hurt expression, or an angry one. Just obediently, thought Felix, furious. Claes was always making toys, and other people broke them.
For the same reason that people beat him. He didn’t mind.
Julius, downstairs, was having a worse time with his employer than he had anticipated. He had put himself into an untenable position, which made him resentful and angry. On the other hand, although young, he was intelligent, and he had had a lot of experience. One would not stay all one’s life with a pawnbroker and a dyeshop. But a dismissal would hardly advance him.
He adopted therefore an attitude in which courtesy, firmness and regret were equally mingled. Standing (she had not asked him to sit) before the tall chair in which was seated Felix’s mother, Meester Julius explained the business of the Duke’s bath, and the injustice of the judgement. He went on to represent, a little vaguely, the commonplace nature of Claes’ peccadillo which, a little unfairly, had caused some rather merry gentlemen to chase him and take the joke too far. He thought it most unlikely that Claes had touched the gentleman’s dog, but of course, it could not be proved. And as for the manipulation of the waterhuus supply and its piping –”
“He planned it with the rest, but my son was responsible for carrying it out. I had gathered as much,” said Marian de Charetty.
He disliked working under women. When Cornelis suddenly died, he nearly left forthwith, and then thought better of it. She might well stay a widow. She was ten years at least older than he was. If he could put up with her, he would have more scope for his skills than ever Cornelis would have allowed him. And so, in a way, it had turned out. Except that it was only his notarial skills that she needed him for. In most other ways, her brain was quite as sharp as that of her late husband, and because she hadn’t had the same time to establish authority, she was both harder and tougher. This year she had pushed them all, at the Louvain end and the Bruges end, and she had gone too far with Felix.
What was happening with Felix was a rebellion, caused by that, and the loss of his father, and fear of the approaching weight of the business. And come to that, it was probably true of himself. He was sorry for Felix and the other youngsters. He got tired himself, sometimes, of the long, solid hours of negotiation and ledger work and trying to drive Felix through alleyways of learning when all Felix was worried about was that he hadn’t yet managed a girl. Well, at least that was one problem that Claes didn’t have.
Meester Julius gazed at his employer as, in the yard, she had gazed at him, and with thoughts that were, in the long run, not so different. Tall commanding women he could dislike in comfort. He disliked the widow of Charetty quite a lot too, but he could see that others might not. Marian de Charetty was small and round and active, with a stare that was none the less of the brightest blue, and vermilion dye in her veins, which made her lips naturally scarlet and her cheeks naturally rosy under short