The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [7]
Fairly early in the voyage, she had to tell him she wasn’t a woman, and she thought he was going to be angry, because he left her chamber without really discussing it. However, when he came back he just said that of course he didn’t mind waiting for her or the wedding, and the papers wouldn’t reach them till Genoa anyway.
She hadn’t known that weddings needed papers, but evidently they did. After that, she got lovely food and more presents, although he didn’t sleep in her bed as she thought he would. Still, he came quite a lot and played cards and told her more stories, and tickled and kissed her, which she liked very much. He had bought her a beautiful gown and he would walk up and down the ship with her, showing her off.
There were other women on board. Sometimes they winked at her but Catherine, brought up in a seaport, knew better than to respond. They were there, of course, to go to bed with the seamen. The master of the ship was decently cordial. The black page was polite, after Messer Pagano had taken him off for a few words, no doubt with a cane. It was all like a very good daydream, except for the old Flemish nurse he had bought her who kept boiling her baths in a bucket and producing purges to brighten her skin. Catherine took the baths and the powders. She intended to do him credit with the princes of Florence. And she had his assurance. Marriage as soon as was fitting. She would be a wife before Tilde. She would be married to a man older than Nicholas. Older and richer and better born than the man her mother had taken to bed.
So, as the ship sailed past the harbour for Bruges, round France and alongside Portugal and through the Pillars of Hercules to their landfall, Catherine de Charetty prayed her particular prayer. And praying, remembered, uneasily, the shrill voice and identical prayers of Felix her brother. And he had been sixteen that birthday.
At home in Bruges, Marian de Charetty, owner of the Charetty dyeshop, prepared with determination to give an excellent Christmas to Tilde her older daughter and all her servants and clerks; and tried not to mourn her only son Felix, who had indeed enjoyed manhood at last and had died of it; or her young husband Nicholas, forced by circumstance to take himself off to Florence; or her small daughter Catherine who was (as infrequent, rather indirect letters of vague content informed her) content in Brussels, and in no hurry to finish her polishing.
If Catherine de Charetty was happy, the lord Pagano Doria was also amazingly content. The voyage had been pleasant and profitable. The solitary misfortune would, please God, soon be remedied. And he had barely set foot in Italy before half his remaining problems were solved. He met Father Godscalc.
At the time, it didn’t seem like good luck. It happened at Porto Pisano, the harbour for Pisa and Florence. They had only just anchored. He had his hands full with matters to do with harbour dues and customs and cargo, not to mention persuading his Catherine that it was not suitable, yet, for her to walk ashore in public. Not until they were married. Not until no one could part them.
It was the old Flemish bitch in the end who got her to see the sport of dressing up as a page: if he had a black one, why not a white one as well? Then he had dear Noah to console, whose little black heart he had broken already. It was a wonder that they were all on shore and ready to set out for Florence as soon as they were. Indeed, they were just mounting to ride when Catherine, in her pretty page outfit, brought her little horse close and said, “Look!”
He thought for a moment it was her aunt, or her mother. Instead, her finger pointed over the quayside crowd to where a boatload of pilgrims from Rome had newly landed. Among them was a priest: a tall, broad, youngish man in a stained hooded cloak of good quality, who was haggling with someone over