The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [13]
At the same time, one should not allow oneself to be ignored. It was known that he was coming, yet despite the great flag of Burgundy that floated over his head, bright with fine silks and bullion, no boat had put off to guide them up the estuary. The navigator taken aboard at Newcastle was familiar enough with the coast, but might well have balked at attempting the haven, with its notorious sandbar, condemning them to a day or even more in the roads.
As it was, he brought them in on the dregs of the tide, but the anchor came down without direction or guidance in a river-mouth as devoid of activity as a port with the plague. He wondered, fleetingly, if that were the explanation, although Dr Andreas, his physician, thought not. A great ship arriving was an event which, anywhere in the civilised world, commanded a crowded jetty, a customs boat, a fleet of business-seeking skiffs. And this was not merely a great ship, but an embassy from Burgundy. The royal officials should have appeared there on the jetty at the first sound of his trumpets, and should be aboard, with the fellow Lamb, his host, amongst them.
Instead, as the sails were stowed and the ship swung to her anchor, he could see nothing but a few old men watching him over their fishing-lines, and some curious faces peering out of the boats. He sent his chamberlain, who spoke Scots, to hail one of them. A calm man, Anselm Adorne showed no alarm, but wished, not for the first time, that all his companions were mature like himself, like his officers, like Andreas and Metteneye.
Twenty-four, of course, was not so youthful, except to an ambassador who was twenty years older. Anselm Sersanders his nephew (who was exactly that age) said, ‘It can’t be the plague, or they’d have warned us. And they wouldn’t be sitting there.’ Sersanders was intelligent, and reliable, and five feet six inches in height.
Katelijne his niece said, ‘I expect it’s dinner-time.’ She too was small in the way that gadflies are small, with the hazel eyes and bark-coloured Sersanders hair mixed (her uncle was vain enough to know) with the comely looks of the Adorne doges of Genoa. Katelijne was fourteen and here to stay, because her parents were worn out with trying to keep pace with her. Anselm Adorne knew how they felt.
And Maarten, the last child in his company, although twenty and his own second son, was more of a child than the other two, because he had the sturdy good looks and the brains of Margriet, Anselm’s dear wife, which would ensure him a plain, decent living in some branch of the Church, but never more. Anselm Adorne was a good father to all of his many children, but did not bestow his dearest love on this child. Who doubtless knew it.
‘You always think it’s dinner-time,’ said his nephew, answering his sister.
‘It would account for it, though,’ said Adorne, returning to the present. ‘I imagine our hosts went to eat, thinking we should be held in the roads till next tide. We are staying with Lamb, isn’t that so?’
It was the case, of course. Lamb had the biggest house. He was a merchant, and used to putting up travellers, in the same way that Jehan Metteneye’s own home in Bruges acted as hostelry for incoming traders; as Adorne’s own palatial mansion did for others more princely. They would stay with Lamb, who would see they got to Edinburgh safely tomorrow. Meanwhile, they were stuck.
Or perhaps not. ‘They’re coming for us,’ said Maarten, Adorne’s son. ‘Look, they’re running.’
Three or four men of unprosperous appearance were hurrying down the bank of the river, intoning. A moment later, a boat had put off from the shore. A remarkably short time after that, the Burgundian embassy, its young and its officers were climbing the forestair to a large stone-built house whose owner was absent, and where the honours had been launched in his place by a courageously dignified wife with her head wrapped