Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [4]
Julius could see his mouth opening and shutting outside the bath, and hear Felix booming back from within. Julius didn’t join the discussion, which was on the usual subject. Of course, he liked watching a good-looking woman. He had his share of vanity. He knew his sort of looks drew attention. He had had to extract himself more than once from some developing situation with a client’s young wife. It was not, either, that he contemplated taking Holy Orders, or not up to the present. But if a good chance came along, a man ought to be ready. He was moderate. He didn’t raven, like Claes; or yearn like poor Felix when brought to sail the canalised river between Sluys and Damme, passing three miles of ankles and a handful of knees, if you were lucky.
Accessible ankles, what’s more. You didn’t find grand ladies with steeple headdresses and shaved brows and pearls on their slippers among the quays and sheds and warehouses and pens and tie-posts of the two ports of Bruges. You got pertly laundered white caps and slyly hitched work-gowns: enough of them to please even Claes, Julius thought. The liveliest girls called down to one youth or the other. Men sang out too, and boys ran alongside, keeping up with the rowers. One tossed a pebble into the bath, and it chimed like the tongue of a church bell. The tongue of the thrower soon drowned it, as his father hurriedly thrashed him. Even from Brussels, or Dijon, or Lille, Duke Philip could hear things.
Claes stayed on his feet beside Felix. Felix was signalling masterfully with his hat, from which Claes had adopted the feather. Three feet long, it waved from his thatch like a fishing line. On the other side of the boat, Julius helped throw up the ropes at the sealock, and heaved up the statutory can of Bruges beer to the lock-keeper.
The man looked at him twice before naming him. Without the gown he wasn’t Meester Julius the notary; he was just another young pest in his twenties. In his more sober moments, Julius was aware that exploits such as these were unseemly. In his less sober moments, he refused to be bothered. The lock-keeper had no trouble recognising Felix or Claes. Everyone in Bruges and Louvain knew the Charetty heir and his slavish attendant.
There were no other craft in the lock: another mark of the power of the Duke. The lighter entered, and behind it the tidal gates waded creaking together. The lock-keeper, stowing his beer, walked off to open the sluices. Perched high on the water, Julius looked ahead, beyond the shut wooden gates, to where the canal ran straight over the marshlands which led to the far spires of Bruges. Immediately outside the sluice another barge, seaward bound, lay double-moored to the bank, waiting for them to emerge.
It, too, lay low in the water. It, too, bore only one item of cargo: a single thickly wrapped object some fifteen feet long which did not, like the Princenhof bath, project beyond either gunwale, but lay snugly within the barge well, hardly moved by the swell of the water.
Above it, in a cleared and cordoned space on the bank, stood a group of undoubtedly very grand persons with an authentic steeple headdress drifting among them. From the superior height of the lock, Julius gazed upon them. So did Felix and Claes and the lightermen.
There were banners. There were soldiers. There was a group of well-turned-out local churchmen escorting the figure of a medium-sized, broad-shouldered bishop with precious stones winking all over him. Julius knew who he was. He owned the Scots ship St Salvator, the largest vessel they had seen back at Sluys. It had already unloaded and had been taking