Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [60]
She said, “You can certainly help. If you get a contract to garrison Naples, it will give the business here some real capital.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. But I was thinking of something else. If you like, you could send us south with a trading caravan. You know. Merchants and men of business going to Italy and needing protection. Merchandise to be escorted over the mountains. And what would pay best – the job of taking boxes of letters and bills and bulls from the Flanders banks to their Italian headquarters. A winter courier service. The banks would give you a fee, and I could carry them all on this trip. They could send silver even, with an armed escort this size. And if they were impressed by us, they might approach you to hire men another time. You’d have to train your own couriers.”
“I should,” said Marian de Charetty slowly. Slowly, in tribute to the implications of all he was saying and the scale, she began to suspect, of the decision he had actually reached. He was eighteen.
She had known she was sending him from Bruges, and security. She had known she was forcing him to go to Geneva, where all his early misery must have been. And despite Astorre’s prediction that the Naples war was defensive, that there would be no fighting next year if ever, she had known that she was sending Claes to learn the business of war, and take part in it, and that when or if he returned, he would be altered.
Yet he had to learn to defend himself. And he had meddled, as he had said.
She looked at him, and he said, “It is for the best, demoiselle,” and gave a quick, comical grin of reassurance.
She smiled in return, with composure. She was good at that.
Among the merchant-princes of Bruges, the most useful social event of that autumn was the banquet given for the commander of the Flanders galleys by the Duke’s wealthy Controller Pierre Bladelin. It was held in the Controller’s russet brick palace with its octagonal tower and steeple in Naalden-Straate.
If the Duke had been present, it would have been held in the Princenhof, which would have been more interesting because, as everyone knew, there was a new bathing basin and several sumptuous retiring rooms (they said) filled with fruit and flowers and sweetmeats and perfumes and other unusual luxuries, for the use of the bathers before, during and after immersion.
While in residence in the past the Duke had been known at least twice to pick a new mistress from the society invited to meet him at the Princenhof. If such a lady proved fertile, the fortune of that particular family would be made. The Duke was quite prodigal towards all his bastards, and none of his mistresses or their previous or subsequent husbands had ever been known to censure him.
Katelina van Borselen had heard it all discussed often enough in her own family, and in that of her cousins. The subject came up again now, with their handsome invitations from Bladelin. The de Veeres had accepted, and so had her father. Her mother being in Zeeland, Katelina, regally trained, proposed to attend in her place.
The de Veeres agreed that, as it was, Controller Bladelin’s house was grand enough, as it had cause to be, considering the appointments he held and the years he had enjoyed the Duke’s favour, in spite of being born to a dyer of buckram.
Katelina, who had forgotten this detail, added it to the others already occupying her as she swept through the Controller’s doorway, and under the wrought tabernacle and the shield and the handsome sculptured effigies of the Madonna and her host in adoration.
At this function she did not expect to meet dyers, or their sons or their notaries. But did dyers stick to dyers, and hence might ostracise the enemies of their own kind?
She had learned from Margriet Adorne (but not from her father) that the Scotsmen had closed ranks round Simon of Kilmirren after his excess of high spirits at Sluys, when he had given a beating to that impertinent