Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [289]
It began with a project so properly his that he hardly needed a cry for help from the town’s master carpenter to engage on it. From that followed other requests, tentative, plaintive or actively frenzied. Accustomed to the sufferings inflicted on all the Guilds and city technicians by the normal celebrations of a Bruges year, Nicholas had missed the Duke’s father’s funeral and was not born when the Duke’s parents had married at Sluys. He had had no idea until now of what was actually entailed in a royal wedding involving two weeks of festivities, six banquets, and a joust every day in the marketplace. When he found out, he went to the master of ceremonies and said, mildly, ‘Use me.’
When he was not there to greet Julius, and had not entered the Charetty-Niccolò doors for two days, Julius lost his temper. ‘Where is he?’
They were eating in the Charetty common-room, because it was bigger. The premises, once enough for Catherine and Cristoffels and Tilde, had already overflowed in the form of sheds into the gardens. Tobie said, ‘How should I know? Ask Gregorio. With the blacksmiths designing the waterworks, or the carpenters producing the show-pieces. At the Fox with Goeghebuer and the masons. Getting tents out of the sail-makers, or tapestries out of the weavers. On the streets putting up booths, or up a ladder painting something elaborate with Hennekaert or Coustain or Hugo or Colard.’
‘The bastard!’ said Julius enviously. ‘He’ll be pissed from morning to night. I remember.’
‘You remember him at eighteen,’ said Gregorio dryly.
Nicholas had not been drunk since the work started, which had been quite a feat, considering the company he kept. He felt he owed them his best: guilds were guilds, and but for the emergency he would never have been allowed to meddle. As it was, he was working side by side, day and night, with the best and most ingenious craftsmen there were. Hence, when he did actually arrive in the middle of the meal, Julius, viewing him critically, saw a kind of vitality which had been lacking in Venice, even if coupled with a disappointing sobriety.
Julius got up and, walking to Nicholas, greeted him with a slap on his back, which was dirty. ‘Well, thank God you’ve put the hermit behind you. What have you found to waste your time on now? And you’ve packed the lady friend off, so they tell me. That was a damn fool escapade. Stick to the Mabelie type.’
Even to Julius, the silence was startling. Then Nicholas began, quite genuinely, to laugh. ‘Welcome back, Julius,’ he said. ‘Give me a Mabelie, and I’ll stick to her. Do you know what else you’ve missed? Remember the bath you and I floated to Damme? I’ve just floated another from Brussels.’
‘Another bath?’ said Julius, sitting down, cheered.
‘No. What do you think of a timber banqueting-hall seventy feet wide by a hundred and forty feet long by sixty feet high, with five double windows fourteen feet high, and two gables? Horses bolted and women gave birth as we passed.’
‘But you did it.’
‘I did it. It is here.’
‘And what else?’ Julius said.
‘Come and see,’ Nicholas answered, smiling.
It would have been better if he had had Nicholas to himself, but Gregorio wanted to go, and then Diniz – the boy, the foreign boy who had somehow got round Tilde. It was too late, Julius assumed, to do anything constructive about that; but he was extremely glad (as, after all, he had said) that Nicholas had stopped making a fool of himself over the van Borselen girl, who had no money, and who had chased him all the way to Africa on the pretext that he was murdering his rivals in business.
Well, she’d had a change of heart, from what he heard. And having made the most of it for six weeks, Nicholas had shown her what he really thought by throwing her out. That was the interpretation Julius had heard. He had tried to pump Father Godscalc about it, and Father Godscalc had dropped off to sleep.
The work Nicholas was doing proved to be all over Bruges: they’d tented the streets near the marketplace where the lists were going