Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [7]
He was speaking to Claes. Julius looked round. Now they were sinking more rapidly. The mooring-rope slid through the lightermen’s hands. The group of dignitaries on the lower bank vanished from view, every head turned in their direction. The wall of the lock towered above them, green with weed.
As always, there were leaks in the wall. Gorged with water, it spewed carefully into the barge, splattering Felix’s smartly stuffed lap. It found and spiralled down the favourite toque Julius was wearing. It hit the Scotsman’s hound, which skipped aside, growling. The hound had been standing, Julius saw, astride the Kilmirren crest of its own unstrapped back-cloth, now spread like a bathmat beneath it. It was glaring at Claes. The crest was not what it had been. Claes said, “I’m sorry, Meester Julius, but I had to do something. The Duke of Burgundy wouldn’t like it.”
Julius began to laugh, just as a jet of real virulence suddenly sprang from the wall and cascaded over the barge. It increased in power. It began to fill, with dynamic effect, a corner of the Duke of Burgundy’s bath, which proceeded to urge its barge sideways. The lightermen, already mesmerised, allowed the slack in the rope to run upwards. A further discharge, more violent than any so far, hit the opposite side of the bath. It started to spin just as the lock gates on the inland side proceeded to open, and the mooring ropes fell.
Far above them the Scotsman was saying something, his face pink and white with annoyance. Beside him, the girl Katelina bit her lip, the beer standing forgotten between them. In the lighter, equally, no one was thinking of picking up money. It was Felix who said, “We’re going backwards.”
“Sideways,” said Claes. He said it thoughtfully.
“Forward,” said Julius.
The lock gates continued to open and the Duke of Burgundy’s bath prepared, giddily, to emerge into the canal. The lightermen jabbed with their paddles. The leaden rim of the bath rose, sank and rose. The slop in the bath flowed backwards and forwards, soaking their sandy boots and their hose and the rabbit-bag and cleansing the Kilmirren crest as it rippled. The bath-rim struck the wall with a clank and drove itself and its barge swirling out of the lock where it bounced off one gate and bucked off to visit the other. The dog, staggering, barked.
From the corner of his eye, Julius saw the Scotsman make his way quickly down to the group on the bank. There, every startled face was turned to the lighter. The dog redoubled its barking, and on the shore men began to shout very loudly.
Julius could see what they were shouting about. He could see – everyone could – what was going to happen. He had time to wonder what was in the ducal parcel so handsomely stowed in the long barge at the side of the waterway. He had time, even, to examine it as the Duke of Burgundy’s bath leaped towards the shuddering outward-bound lighter containing the Duke of Burgundy’s personal cargo. The two boats collided. The lighter, held by its ropes, had no way to escape as the boat containing Julius, Felix and Claes pitched into its planks and sheared its side off.
The bath tilted, ejecting Claes and Julius briskly into the waterway. It sluiced Felix down to its deep end where he wallowed, his submerged hand firmly clutching its coping. Then it righted itself.
The crippled outward-bound lighter tugged its mooring ropes, burst them, and shed its cargo with languor into the watery gloom, capping it with its own weedy bottom.
As it went, Julius rose to the surface. His eyes opened on horrified faces, Burgundian and Flemish. His ears, streaming water, caught the first ejaculation of moment which did not come from the Flemings at all, but from the Scottish Bishop. “Martha!” exclaimed that figure in a voice of bronchial protest. “What have you done? What have you done? You have sent Martha, you fools, to the bottom!”
No one laughed. Especially Julius didn’t laugh. For now he knew what had been in the barge, and what they had ruined.
There was no one