Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [66]
Katelina stared back at him. Forgetting her training she said, “I don’t need your account to bear the brunt of any falling-out between me and that precious pair. If I were an official of Bruges, I’d expel them.”
He did not answer or smile. The Widow said gently, “I think, Claes, you should thank the lady and return to your room, unless she has more to say to you. Madame Katelina? You would allow him?”
He had been standing. She should have remembered his sickness. But one does not ask an artisan to sit, except among children. She said, “I’m sorry. I hope your health is restored in full, quickly. And that you prosper in your new occupation.”
He thanked her briefly, and left. After he had gone, Katelina sat gazing at the wine the widow had poured for her and said, “You will miss him, I imagine. Despite all the trouble, he is an amusing fellow.”
There was a little silence. Then the Widow said, “Yes. He is an unusual being. The trouble is … The trouble really is that he cannot protect himself.”
Katelina smiled. “Well, he will be able to do that very soon,” she said. “He will make a good soldier.”
“No,” said the Widow, and her chestnut brows drew together, as she tried to make her meaning plain. “It is not that he can’t protect himself, but that he won’t. He is like a dog. He thinks every man is his friend.”
But one did not devote thought, like that, to an apprentice. Or if one did, one did not discuss it with an acquaintance. “And every woman too, by all accounts!” said Katelina, smiling. “Indeed, it is time that boy left Bruges and learned common sense. Now tell me your plans for this son of yours. What about Felix?”
She did not know, after she left, how long Marian de Charetty stood in her doorway, looking across the deserted courtyard, before she came in at length and, shutting the door, made her way back to her room.
On the way, she passed the foot of the stairs to the apprentices’ quarters and stopped for a moment, as if divining the quality of the silence which, upstairs and downstairs, invested all the rooms of her house.
Then she went, alone, back to her room, and sat down in the chair, and picked up and spread open her papers.
Chapter 10
A BOLD LITTLE business-woman, that Marian de Charetty, the burghers of Bruges said to one another. Sending her captain and the pick of her company off over the Alps before Christmas. And her notary, who probably knew more of her business than she did. And persuading the Medici and the Doria and the Strozzi to confide their goods and their letters to the same Astorre, together with anyone else who had to travel south and wanted a safe journey. A gamble her man would never have taken, the Widow’s friends said, compressing their shaven chins inside their furry collars. But a gamble, mind you, that might make her a fair fortune if they came back.
As the notary in question, Julius felt less alarm than they did. It was unpleasant, but nothing amazing to cross the mountains in winter, and in the short, bow-legged and violent Astorre they had the most experienced of caravan leaders. Whatever it looked like, assembling in the yard in a mess of carts and mules and sumpter horses and crates and barrels and packages, the cavalcade would be licked into shape long before it had completed the jolting three-week journey south through the lands of Burgundy to the freezing, windy and lucrative city of Geneva, where all the merchants and half the goods in the carts were to be deposited.
After that, sure enough, they had the long lake to skirt, and then the plunge up through the snow to the pass that would take them to Italy. But by then it would be a Charetty party. Astorre and his twelve cavalry and his six mounted bowmen and his eighteen varlets with their horses and mules. And with them (because