The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [207]
Le Grant said, “Yes. The maiden points to the time. There are revolving openings, too, inside the roof of the howdah. If you look, you’ll see them change colour. For the rest…” He crossed the room to a long bench on one wall. On it were tools, laid out neatly as scalpels, and coils of wire and a vice. There was also a sand-glass. The engineer said, “I gather he made things in Bruges.”
The doctor said, “All the time. What happens here?”
“You’ll see,” said le Grant.
They had slipped into childhood. She watched the men more than she watched the elephant clock; and even when the performance began, and the bird whistled, and the mahout struck the elephant, and the Arab dropped a pellet into the dragon’s open mouth, she looked at them, curious about what she saw on their faces. The pellet, circulating, sprang from the dragon’s fundament into a vase and disappeared within the elephant, from which emerged, with sonority, the sound of a gong. A thing of delight. An explosion of fine controlled gaiety that a man with artisan’s patience had made.
Throughout, the engineer gazed, absorbed, intent on following each faultless move. The chaplain had begun to look, smiling, and then ceased to see, although his eyes remained on the clock. The doctor laughed once; then his smile fixed like the grin on a terrier and he turned aside, jabbing his fist like a man lost for words; or for a reason for something. Then, without taking leave, he let his arm drop and left.
The priest came to himself. He said, “Is that all you wished to say to us, Despoina?”
“Oh. Yes,” said Violante of Naxos. “And of course, I ought to tell you. The caravan from Tabriz will arrive in eight days. Messer Doria will be back in plenty of time to prepare for it.”
She returned, without event, to the Palace and was charming, that evening, to her great-uncle the Emperor and all her beautiful relatives. Caterino Zeno my husband, you have a wife beyond price. Everything, everything is as you wanted it.
Chapter 30
CATHERINE DE CHARETTY negli Doria, thirteen years old and the youngest of three, had never met a sick man in her life, let alone nursed one. When the halt and the blind and the mutilated came back from one of Captain Astorre’s wars, it was her mother who paid them their pension, and visited their wives with baskets of blood-sausage and puddings and eggs, and took their children into her ’prentice loft.
Catherine was surprised when her husband’s gallant fortitude hardly outlasted his visitors. They had barely gone before he began to fret for one reason or another. He had not enjoyed the interrogation, and seemed to blame her in some way for the incursion. Also, where was the hospice physician, now that he lay here exhausted? At his bidding, she limped off to find him, and received less than passionate thanks for that or the other services she found, in his servantless state, he required of her. When he considered there was not enough wine, or the brazier was smoking, or he wished to be helped to his bed, it was his little Catherine who, with a certain perfunctory charm, was recruited to serve him. When, in need of comfort, she pressed herself close, he asked her to keep off. He moderated his voice almost immediately, but there was no doubt it had been strident. It became apparent that he did not want to make love. Catherine resented every moment of the week they spent in the Sumela monastery. It reminded her quite often of those parts of her daily round at the Leoncastello which she also greatly disliked.
Of course, life in beautiful Trebizond was never less than glorious. Remembering her routine existence in Bruges, there could be no comparison. But it was not all a matter of feasts and fine clothes and dignified gossip. To look after the residence and the warehouse there was Paraskeuas their steward; and Pagano naturally had ordered him to see to everything without troubling the lady his wife. After all, her mother had run her business without doing her own daily marketing, or putting soles