Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [57]
Claes rose from his stool and waited, his lustrous eyes resting on Marian de Charetty as she seated herself. Julius left. Claes, obeying a gesture, sat down. There was a short silence, during which his mistress studied him. Then: “Well, Claikine,” she said.
It was a name he was used to: the name he had had as a child when, hard-used and filthy, he had come to the Charetty. She had taken him in for her sister’s sake. Her sister who had no connection with the unwanted child, but had married into the family that had produced it. The de Fleury family, of Dijon and Geneva.
Sitting by his bedside during the past weeks she had employed the boyish name now and then: to recall his attention when it was wandering, or to turn his thoughts when, in his confusion, they strayed in directions which offered small healing. But for the last two weeks, she had left his nursing to others.
He smiled. He said, “There’s no news to break to me, demoiselle. Of course not. I am only grateful you kept me and were so kind in these last weeks when I couldn’t serve you.”
She wondered what he remembered of the early days of his fever: of the late-night alarums when a frightened maid would come for her, and when she was not dressed in her daily uniform: this thick, moulded dress with the narrow sleeves and smothering neck; the velvet cap cuffed by stiff lappets with its wired widow’s peak which covered all of her hair. It was a blessing, really. When she grew grey, no one would know of it. When she became thick in the trunk, the folds of her train could be tucked up to disguise it.
Or did that matter, in any case? Neither Astorre nor Oudenin nor any of the several others who had offered for her knew what she was actually like, any more than Cornelis had, those last years of his illness. She was the widow de Charetty, a bit sharp of tongue, a bit hard of manner, who owned a thorough-going medium business capable of expansion.
To this young man whom she had known since he was ten, in the days when she was serenely married to a vigorous, cheerful Cornelis, she said irritably, “You guess you are to be sent off, and you make no complaint, you have no anxious questions to ask. Don’t you even want to know where?”
“You remember my great fault,” said Claes. “I’m easily contented.” And then, his smile widening, he said, “I don’t mean to annoy you. But I feel sure it must be somewhere of exceptional amenity if Felix wants to go with me.”
“You stood between him and Lionetto,” said the widow. “Or so I heard.”
He said nothing, but rested on her unaltered the same kindly gaze. He would not delude her about Felix, and she must not delude herself. She heard herself saying, “It is not Felix’s attitude which concerns me, but yours. You protected Felix, and from that stemmed the trouble that followed. To be turned off now must seem the height of ingratitude.”
Again, he cut through all she intended to say. He said, “Of course not. I had meddled long before that. I put myself in the market-place.”
He had been reared on French, and his Flemish still held an undercurrent of it. His own voice, when he was not play-acting, or mimicking, was soft and even and practical, even when uttering such a remark, which silenced her for a moment with the very complexity of its implications. Round a guild table; in the midst of some subtle, three-sided negotiation in a Hanse office, she sometimes thought of Claes, and of the dawning, in increasing numbers, of moments such as these.
She said, “Then you may be able to guess who has already approached me to ask for your services.”
The smile she received now was like none she had ever received round a guild table. “So I may,” he said. “But I don’t think you would expect me to tell you.”
She rearranged the papers before her. “I have had a request from Ser Alvise Duodo the Venetian,” said