Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [297]
As a van Borselen, Gelis rode with the retinue. As a merchant and burgher, Nicholas sat his horse knee to knee with a solid phalanx of velvet-dressed personages outside the Holy Cross port, waiting to greet and form a component of the procession
He felt, as he had felt arriving in Bruges, part of a continuity which had to be recognised, no matter how incongruous it might seem. Congruity, today, seemed a little uncertain. The skies above were smoking and curdling and dark, as if concealing a fire. There came, every now and then, a rumour of thunder, and a glimmer of light which made the horse beneath him move, its eye showing white.
Here on the ground, in the torrid warmth of July, there stood assembled the bourgeoisie of Bruges and the noblest blood of Flanders and Burgundy, cumbered with fine furs and expensive, deep velvet. Around every representative group stood sixty hot servants with torches. In the darkness of day they glowed like a burning forest of resinous pines; the dirt of their smoke spiralled to heaven.
During the Mass for the soul of Duke Philip, the lead in the church windows had melted, they said, from the heat of the massed, burning candles. Now, the thunder growled, the horses shifted, and Nicholas felt a sudden pity – for what, he didn’t quite know. Perhaps for the small, gleaming, golden train coming towards him, headed by heralds and archers, and followed by the ladies of Margaret of York, mounted on snow-white hackneys or carried in chariots. Followed by Gelis, who saw all this as no being could who had never moved from Bruges or Venice or Florence. Who had never ventured beyond the Sea of Obscurity, and into the Land of the Blacks.
As a Venetian banker, he could have joined the contingent, swathed in vermilion velvet, which waited to lead the merchant colonies. The Florentines stood assembled to follow in black figured satin, led by Tommaso Portinari in the different colours of Duke Charles, whose adviser he was. The Spaniards had produced thirty-four merchants in violet damask; the Genoese numbered 108 and had brought St George with them, and the maiden he saved from the dragon. The Hanse were grey-furred; the Scots followed. Nicholas knew every face.
He had chosen to appear not as a merchant but as a burgher, and so was crammed with the group who stepped out from the Holy Cross port to offer wine and wax to Margaret of York, and beg her to be a gracious lady to their city. Above, from the turrets, musicians sang; and flowers floated into the still, sultry air; and doves, stark white against the black sky, rose in freedom and then, blenching, fled. Fled, because the heated skies, protesting, had opened. Rain, like a wall, fell upon the celebrating city of Bruges.
It put out all the torches. It uncurled the hair of the ladies and gallants, soaked their velvets, draggled their furs, made their costumes attractively transparent. It bounced from the ground in a haze of fine road-layer’s mud, and plastered rose petals to the nose and the lash, and made the grand procession through the streets, which stopped at every street corner, into a hissing misery of pantomime smiles and applause tangible as the spray of two thousand involuntary sneezes. There were real sneezes as well.
There was no one there with whom he could laugh. He hadn’t seen Gelis pass, for, after the prelates, the men of the town led the procession, followed by the suite of the Duke’s half-brother Antony, plastered with forty thousand francs’ worth of ruined livery covered with wet golden trees, which signified the theme of the tournament. Next, the musicians. Next, the Duchess. Next, the Knights of the Golden Fleece. Next, the ambassadors. And next, the foreign merchants. It pleased Nicholas to ride so far ahead of Tommaso