Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [54]
Now, his patient at rest, Tobie slipped out quietly to rejoin the pawnbroker and his daughter at their table, since they had invited him. The daughter kept talking about the boy called Felix, and he wondered if there was an affair going on there, but was too bored to pursue it.
He had left a light by the youth’s pallet, and the door a little ajar so that he could enter the room without sound. So it was that on returning he saw, without being seen, that his patient was awake, and had somehow moved on the pillow, so that the light came from behind him. But it was a wax candle, especially clear and brilliant, that Tobie had left. It shone into Oudenin’s brass pots and copper kettles and they returned the light, mellowed, to the helpless man’s face.
Tobie studied it. The broad low brow and discoloured cheekbones and swollen, extravagant lips. The darkened eye-sockets, big as candle-cups, and the repressive loop of the nostrils. The hair which had dried like dragged wool. The face of a buffoon, pressed to the pillow, where something glistened, ceased, and then glistened again.
Till he was sure, Tobie stood watching. Then he retreated with care. The voice the boy needed was not that of a doctor. The voice he needed didn’t exist. There was nothing Tobie could do. And in any case, the poor, silly fool wanted no help. Or this would not be happening, as it was, in painful and absolute silence.
Chapter 9
THE DANGEROUS business of the Charetty apprentice and the Scotsman was reported to the city that night, and was briefly debated. It was decided to wait and see if Nature might dispose of the difficulty. It was recognised, on the other hand, that Master Tobias Beventini of Grado was an excellent surgeon.
Considering that he was wrestling most of the time with his own problems, the surgeon Tobie lived up to their fears, or expectations. He gave his patient the required amount of expert attention. And when the time came to dispatch him to Bruges, he found something to render the boy insensible, both to the rigours of the trip and to any attempts to interrogate him. It had already struck the shrewd surgeon Tobie that there might be trouble ahead, depending on who was supposed to have tried to kill whom. Tobie had, before now, patched up a man and seen him go to the gallows. That was, however, no business of his.
In Bruges he deposited the boy in the house of his employer, saw him settled, and went off with the announced intention of (at last) getting drunk. He had earned, Tobie saw, the contempt of the Charetty heir Felix. That for Felix. If anyone needed help, there was Quilico. Tobie wondered, from his experience of the inside of Quilico’s box, what Quilico had actually been treating, all those years in the colonies. He promised himself a long talk with the Levantine physician.
His interpretation of Felix’s glare had been correct. Surprisingly, it was Felix whom the whole affair had cast into a frenzy. His passionate intervention on the quayside had come of course from wounded dignity: a compulsion to defend his mother, her business, and Claes, the property of that business. In themselves, these emotions were new to him. Whether any of these protective feelings applied to Claes as a person Felix did not consider, and would have been offended if asked.
Felix overslept on the essential morning. Otherwise at first light he would have set out