The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [20]
‘I offer candles,’ said Katelijne.
‘I’d prefer a percentage of your contract,’ he said. ‘But I dare say I shall get some good of it all. Here they are. Look exhausted.’
‘I am exhausted,’ she said tentatively. She had stopped trembling, she found.
‘You couldn’t do it again?’
Willing hands, reaching her, had taken the child and found a cloak for her shoulders. Soon, she was able to dismount and wade, the other riders splashing and shouting beside them. Someone took her arm, and she removed it.
‘You’d need two other idiots,’ she said. ‘One to hit the ball out to sea, and the other to try to ride after it.’
The child was already on shore, and set at the feet of a square, kneeling nurse and a gentlewoman in the robes of a prioress. The child, struggling free, looked back and called to Katelijne. She said, ‘I wasn’t running away.’ She was hugging the ball. Someone was trying to give her another one.
‘You know, I saw that,’ said Katelijne in answer. ‘But there are easier ways of getting a ball.’ She smiled, and the child, hoisted again, returned the smile over a retreating manservant’s shoulder.
She had missed something: a gesture. The man beside her put up his hand and the spare ball, flung from nowhere, smacked into it. ‘Well?’ he said, and glanced suggestively out to sea.
She said, ‘Well, why not? But shouldn’t it be something more exciting? And I’m hungry. I’ll race you to Master Lamb’s house, if you like.’
He said, ‘And that would be exciting? Once you wouldn’t have thought so.’
She looked up. ‘Upside down on our hands?’ He was scanning the crowds, without listening.
Now that nothing but streaming cambric was left, she could see that, within his considerable frame, he was spare as a man in severe training might be. His hair, tamped down with water, was an indeterminate brown, but cut so well that it was already lifting round his temples and neck. His brow and cheekbones were broader than those of the men of her family, and his eyes wider set on either side of the slender bridge of his nose. Below that, his lips were as rounded and full as a woman’s.
He said, ‘You will know me again,’ and she said quickly, ‘I was afraid I might need to, Ser Niccolò.’ She added, ‘You think I’m Anselm Adorne’s daughter.’
He said, ‘Of course you are. But if you’re not, how do you know who I am?’
‘Doesn’t everybody, even the horse?’ said Katelijne. ‘You’re Nicholas vander Poele, and I’m Anselm Sersanders’s sister. If I had a lisp, I couldn’t say that.’
‘Deserts would hire you. By my God and Creator … I saw your revered uncle, and Maarten and Metteneye. But what is your brother doing here? He isn’t working in Scotland as well? Julius! Anselm Sersanders is here!’
‘I know,’ said the man in red. ‘And the windmills. And the water-wheels, I have no doubt. If the rest of Bruges is coming over, we’d better tell the magistrates to board up the markets. Nicholas, you know you’ve caused mayhem and that poor lad is standing there, waiting to thank you?’
Indeed, on the shore, backed by his courtiers, the Duke of Albany was waiting to greet them; his blackened doublet and hose caked with sand; his braid and buttons protruding like baitworm.
Nevertheless, his chin high, his auburn hair blowing, the Prince knew the duty due to his blood. He allowed Katelijne to kiss his hand first. Although they were of the same age and he was praising her, there was no doubt that he was the King’s brother, and she was merely the Flemish demoiselle appointed to his young sister’s household. Then he turned to Nicholas vander Poele.
The words of gratitude he used were almost the same, but the tone was subtly different. Of course, a youth of fourteen spoke to a man of twenty-seven. Also, they knew one another. More: there was a relationship there, or one just beginning.
And now Katelijne’s own family were around her, asking questions, hugging her anxiously. Her brother said, ‘You