The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [5]
Her aunt and uncle were flattered by the attentions of someone so well connected. They were not truly relations of hers: just business friends who had helped her mother through early widowhood, and had offered to take one of her daughters into their household to be polished. Catherine de Charetty thought you could get polished quite as well in a dyeshop in Bruges as in a wool merchant’s mansion in Brussels, but her mother thought not. Her mother would be much against Catherine taking a lover, but her mother had a man in her bed. Or had, before Nicholas left. On a long trip. On a matter of commerce, everyone said.
Her mother wouldn’t have let Messer Pagano Doria come so often, because her mother always knew when Catherine had found a new attachment. Catherine was conscious of the power of love. Her confidence was not misplaced. In time, the lord Pagano Doria rewarded her with some of his delightful attention. While speaking he would smile at her and touch her cheek sometimes, so that her eyes crossed as she looked at his rings. He had better rings than the Bruges under-manager of the Medici company. Once he took her hand at a difficult place in the marshes and once, laughing and talking to everybody, he let her sit beside him in the cart going home.
They first began to become close at the jousting in the Grand Place when the cousins who had set out with her somehow got lost. Instead of joining the crowds, Messer Pagano and she walked about the streets and the markets, the river bank and the wharves, and never stopped talking. She heard all about London and Lisbon and Rome and Sardinia and Ragusa and Chios and Damascus and Constantinople. All the wonderful lands he had lived in. He talked about animals with tails front and behind, and rubies bigger than racket balls, and flowers whose one petal would scent a whole palace.
His clean, pink fingertips described things as he talked; or steered her shoulder; or attracted her attention by tickling her palm. She ate spicy pastries he bought from stalls for her, and consumed unknown drinks, fibbing when she disliked them. When he took her home, she wanted to embrace him from joy and from gratitude, and he smiled, seeing it, and held out his arms for a hug. His warm arms and his big, firm kiss reminded her of her father, except that Cornelis de Charetty was old when he died, and didn’t have skin like a rose-scented cushion, or wear dark pleated satin that slid under your touch. The lord Pagano’s hair under his feathered cap was dark and satiny too, but she daren’t touch that.
That was how it began. There followed four days of unexplained absence; days of mourning. Then he sent his black page to her aunt. It proved to be nothing. He had to entertain some kinsman or other: would the family help? Catherine wasn’t mentioned at all. When the evening came, he hardly addressed her. It was only at their return that, dragging behind in the darkness, she became aware that he had held back as well. Then he said, “But a tear, my sweet Caterinetta! No, no! I cannot bear that!” And his arm came warmly round her waist and he kissed the tear away, and then her mouth. Then her aunt called from inside the house and he smiled, and turned away to his lodgings.
The next meeting she arranged herself, and the two after that, alone with him. Not completely alone. In a park, or by the canal, or down on the shore, with their hoods over their faces, since it was autumn. Each time, he scolded her and told her he ought to take her