The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [8]
The lord Pagano caught his fiancée’s hand and lowered it, smiling. Alas, they were not yet in need of a priest. In any case, he already knew which priest he wanted. He said, “What, my darling? It isn’t someone you know?” While he spoke, he nodded to Crackbene his master, and drew her a little apart, while the others moved gently off. All the time she was speaking, he saw to it that her back was to the blue livery.
It seemed bad news, although it might have been worse. The man was a Charetty chaplain. The fellow had served a short time in Bruges, but most of his time had been spent with Marian de Charetty’s cavalry company, now passing the winter in Italy. He would, she thought, be on his way home.
The lord Pagano rather thought not, but had no intention of saying so. The priest, of course, must not see her. She saw the importance of that. It was agreed, in the end, that she should return to the ship with the master, while he rode on to their lodging in Pisa. There, with the priest safely gone, she would join him.
It didn’t strike her, he saw, that a man leaving on horseback for Flanders was bound to ride north, and not eastwards to Pisa and Florence. There were times when he loved Catherine just for her ignorance.
Chapter 2
IT TOOK AN HOUR to get Catherine de Charetty settled back on the ship with her servants, and longer for the lord Pagano to make a few essential enquiries, and then to get himself en route for Pisa again. The priest, of course, was ahead.
The lord Pagano Doria rode quickly, to the discomfort of his muleteers and servants, although he took the black page Noah up in his saddle once or twice. It was not in his nature however to be bad-tempered, although the towpath was dusty and busy. Until the winter floods came, the river road to Pisa and Florence was the quickest way from the coast, and there were plenty of travellers to talk to.
The lord Pagano Doria didn’t linger, but he produced a joke or shared a piece of chaffing with most people as he passed, and men turned to look at him with pleasure, for he was a delightful man, although on the small side. They passed a donkey train carrying flour from the water-mill. A stocking-maker with his shears and his needles was happy to answer his greeting, and then two unemployed caulkers on their way to the ship sheds at Pisa. Then, taking the width of the road, a carter with jars of the new season’s oil was attempting to pass somebody’s factor just come from checking the vintage, and with a liverish stare and two willow jars at his saddle to prove it. When the factor scowled, the lord Doria lifted his brows at the carter, who laughed. A gentleman of the sea, Messer Pagano Doria; alert as a whippet; bright as the sun upon brass.
They were still jogging along, an assortment of travellers, when they were stopped in their tracks by a galley. All those on the towpath shouted abuse. Messer Pagano Doria, full of sudden optimism, merely thought how much his little Catherine would have enjoyed witnessing one hundred and thirty-eight feet of empty Florentine galley being tree-warped upriver to Pisa where, between the two bridges, she would be prepared for her next season’s trip. Here, all around him and beyond, the road was a mess of dead leaves and mud. Where the road and river bent round ahead there was, as always, the group of quarrelling unshaven men in canvas shirts and burst hose attempting to solve some obscure problem of leverage and in no mood to stand aside to let shoremen go by. Around Pagano Doria everyone (apart from the caulkers) continued to shout as they covered the short final space between themselves and the obstacle, where one or two travellers had already halted. Among them was the employee of the Charetty company called Father Godscalc.
He was standing on the bank of the Arno, looking down on the galley, which was stranded. From the long shining structure, high in the water and