The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [127]
The somebody else was Hugo van der Goes the painter, from Bruges. Behind him were two other men he knew from the same place. They all went back into the room and sat down. You couldn’t hear yourself think for Nicholas on the drum, setting the changes of rhythm. It went on for ten minutes and then Will Roger blared out a discord and threw his instrument down, collapsing on the floor. ‘It’s all very well for you bastards, but I’ve been at it since dawn. Nicol, be quiet.’
The kettledrum rose to a deafening rattle, and stopped. ‘You think that’s loud?’ Nicholas said. ‘You’ve gone rotten since I’ve been away. Where’s the other drum?’
They hammered him heartily, taking the drum away, and he gave as good as he got. His own friends were roughest, Gregorio noticed. The rest enjoyed it as well: he had entertained them before, you would guess. But he was still an important man, and a foreigner. When, reduced to their shirts, they were all lying back laughing and panting, Will Roger presented him with a flagon of unspecified liquid.
‘It should be wine; I’ll get some later. Gentlemen: I give you Nicholas de Fleury, Knight of some God-forsaken Order of Cyprus, and his wife and his son. What’ve you called the brat? James, I wager.’
‘I’m working on it,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ll cut you in, if you like. The first man with a ten-figure order gets to choose his own name for the child.’
‘Then there’s your man!’ exclaimed Whistle Willie. His calloused forefinger appeared to point through the window. ‘You don’t mind a combine? A ten-figure order among the whole castle? Hey! Lancelot! Would you like to christen a vander Poele?’
A passer-by, puzzled, turned round. Nicholas, breathless, was pulling, one after another, a series of pitiful faces. ‘Lancelot vander Lacu!’ Whistle Willie bellowed, elaborating his point. The farce played itself strenuously out.
Gregorio listened in silence. You thought that, for a while, he had forgotten the bitch. But, of course, he had not.
*
Later, someone sent out for food, and the talk lurched about between topics of high and low interest, such as women, and horses, and arrows, and women and plate gauntlets and women. Then Whistle Willie began to sing under his breath, and someone else took him up, and soon they were chorusing away in unexpurgated versions of a number of ditties Gregorio had heard, at night, in Jehan Metteneye’s house after a supper.
In the course of it, someone near the door scrambled up saying, ‘My lord Duke!’
But the red-headed youth, slipping in, said, ‘No, it’s Sandy. Go on.’
They broke up half an hour later, royalty being an inhibiting guest, and Nicholas accompanied the King’s brother of Albany into the courtyard. When he came back to collect Gregorio, they had all gone save for the man they called Whistle Willie who was sprawled in a settle, a broad smile on his earthy face. He said, ‘Well, Nicol. You got what you wanted?’
The malice was friendly. Nicholas pulled another of his comfortable faces and sat down, pushing a litter of ale-mugs out of his sight. Gregorio, heavily relaxed, brought a cushion and sat on it. What Nicholas had wanted and got from this meeting was gossip.
To wit: that Hugo van der Goes and the rest of his imported craftsmen were going to be worth what he had advanced them, because the Danish dowry money seemed likely to come, and the royal wedding would take place this summer at Holyrood Abbey next door to Nicholas.
That one of the results of the royal wedding was Sandy Albany’s new crop of pimples; due, it was said, to the marriage he was going to have to make with an elderly half-sister of Betha Sinclair’s. There was a prince, Willie Roger had said earlier, and now repeated, who would be glad if Nicol de Fleury’s