Niccolo Rising (83 page)

In Felix’s room, she knew, was a chest with all his belongings, and a helmet with a red plume and an eagle’s head on it. She had found it for herself. Whoever had put it there hadn’t locked it away. She was being treated by the senior members of her household as a grown woman who could face a crisis, and ask for help if she needed it. She realised that
someone had been near at hand all day, whatever she happened to be doing. Not speaking and not in the same room very often, but near at hand. Especially Nicholas.

Until now, she had given no real thought to Nicholas. While he was away she had missed him. She had missed his strength to lean on, and his understanding. She had blamed him, secretly, for abandoning her and the company, as she used to blame Cornelis, she thought, when he went off to Antwerp and left her to deal with something.

She had wanted him back for the same reason. No. She had wanted him back for the sort of intermittent companionship which had come to be part of her daily pleasure. If he felt the same pleasure, she didn’t know. She did know that he had found a taste for affairs, and was experimenting with it. Until recently, she supposed, he could, if he wished, have slipped back into anonymity. Instead, he had stepped forward and committed himself to the Charetty company and to her.

So what must he be thinking tonight? He’d been with Felix. He hadn’t learned of his death in the yard among wool caps and stained skins and stinking aprons. The way Felix had met his end owed something to him. Guilt as well as thoughtfulness had sent him dragging Julius on that breakneck journey to bring her the news with least pain.

Instead, his arrival had caused her to learn of Felix’s death in the most brutal way possible. Whatever he thought of Esota, he had learned of her death on his way. He had heard of the ruin of Jaak de Fleury. He had lived with them both, and had survived cruelty without apparent bitterness. It was not his fault that Jaak de Fleury was dead: Lionetto had killed him. But today he had learned that his life as well as his happiness meant nothing to Jaak. And today he had killed. Nicholas, who emerged ruefully from the Steen with the stripes red on his back, his face cloudless, had taken two lives.

But she was forgetting. Men didn’t go to war and stay merchants. He had been taught to kill now, and so had Felix. And one of them had paid the price.

She thought for a long time. The house was quiet. Along the passage, the door to the handsome chamber Jaak de Fleury had adopted as his own was shut and locked, his possessions piled in the empty room. Beyond it was the room Nicholas had taken when he and Gregorio made this house their office before the night of the fire. No light came from it, but the door was open.

It had been open when she passed. She knew why. He was the man who had taken Felix from her. He was her husband. He was neither. There was no role for him in this tragedy, unless she wanted to make him one.

Did she? Her memories tonight were of her family, of Cornelis and Felix, Tilde and Catherine. However long she had known the boy Nicholas, he was outside that small, tight circle. To admit him was a
kind of betrayal. He had been to Felix what Julius had been: a mentor, a tutor if you like. He had been to Cornelis an apprentice. To her, he had shown the face of the ideal steward: loyal and hardworking and thoughtful.

Outside in the street, someone passed with a lantern. The little glow swept her room, printing her hands and her robe with frail lozenges. Her hair, falling coiled to her lap, briefly gleamed. She looked down, smoothing it.

I am a fool, she thought. Gregorio is an ideal steward. Julius is loyal and hardworking and thoughtful. But I made Nicholas marry me. And then I became the child, and he became the parent.

She thought, Now I have no other child. And he has no one else, either, to understand the day it has been.

The door was still open when she walked along the passage, shielding the small flame of her candle. He was resting, as she had done, at his window, but had turned his head from it on hearing her step.

All the daytime energy had gone, pressed down below the surface to give room to the thoughts that had to be dealt with.

She knew what they were. She walked to the window and looked down at him, so that he could see her dry eyes, her command of small things.

He didn’t rise: a thing she found touching. But his face eased a little.

She had handled children and husbands. She knew how to give comfort as well as receive it. She saw him recognise what she was about to do just before she blew out the candle, and laid it down, and sat, gathering her robe, at his side by the window.

There was enough light to see where his hand lay. She took it lightly in both her own.

He said, “I didn’t know what you wanted.”

She said, “I need someone who needs me.”

She was wiser than she knew. As it turned out, in this one thing she was the stronger. As doctors do, she forced him out of his composure and then, as she did with Tilde or Catherine, took him in her comforting arms.

But he was not Tilde or Catherine, and she too was astray and bewildered and suffering. His embrace, gentle as hers, held within it something else, which she realised he was silently controlling. That was when she lifted his hands in hers and ran them through the warm, shining weight of her hair. Then she held them to her breast, in the hollow where the robe fastened. “Nicholas?”

His fingers escaped hers but stayed, touching her robe. In his anxiety, he spoke in French. “Think.”

“No,” said Marian de Charetty. “Don’t think.”

Chapter 39

H
OW OR WHERE
Marian de Charetty passed the first night of her second bereavement did not escape notice. Tilde, her daughter, disturbed by some small sound, rose before dawn to find her mother’s room empty. Nicholas had closed his door. Tilde had paused there only a moment when she heard her mother begin to say something inside. Whatever it was, she broke off almost at once, as if she were out of breath like Catherine, and crying. But the sob had not been one of grief. Tilde stole past the door. Then, curled tight in her bed, she wept not like her mother, but like Catherine.

In the days that followed all the household grew to realise what had happened, for neither the demoiselle nor her husband tried to pretend that her bedchamber was not being shared. During the day, it was a house of black cloth and tailors and mourning. At night the demoiselle accepted the comfort that was legally hers. Where once her servants would have felt discomfort or resentment and would have resorted to obscene jokes and even hostility, now they excused and forgave. The death of Felix changed everything.

Julius, consumed with curiosity, watched it happening. Not only was the marriage accepted, he saw, by Henninc and the men who used to work with Claes, but even the burghers they dealt with were apparently reconciled to the union, and had been even before this development. He spoke to Gregorio about it and heard a little, from the other lawyer, of how the marriage had been achieved. He was wary still about Gregorio, as any man was entitled to be with another in his own line of business, but he liked what he had seen of him at the time Jaak de Fleury was killed, and he had found him an unassuming, hard-working partner during the unpleasant tasks that had followed. In subsequent hours over the ledgers he had had to admit, as well, that the man was more than competent. At times, he thought that there was something more than competence behind the disconcerting black stare; but after he found that Gregorio had a mistress called Margot, he realised that he was just like everybody else. The woman was a good cook, as well. He
wondered, after Gregorio had invited him, unprompted, to meet her, why he had the impression that Gregorio was secretly much amused.

To the rest of Bruges, of course, Nicholas was the new hero. Now everyone knew what a rogue Jaak de Fleury had been. Several had spotted it right away, when the man appeared so suspiciously, taking over the demoiselle’s business and claiming to own it. Nicholas and Julius between them had the facts and figures to show that he didn’t, and what’s more, had been cheating the poor Widow for years. And young Felix’s servants, if you questioned them, were very ready to tell just how and why Nicholas had got Felix safely away from M. Jaak in Geneva, and how well Nicholas and jonkheere Felix had got on from then on.

Everyone, of course, was sorry about what happened to the jonkheere, but agreed that his city and his family could be proud of him, fighting for King Ferrante and winning the laurels in a great joust in the Abruzzi. It was only a pity it hadn’t been here, so that his own friends could have cheered him. But if a young man had to die, what better way was there?

And as for Nicholas, who used to be Claes, who would have thought it? Held his own against two armed men and killed them, and then fought that bandit de Fleury to the death, no matter if another man had finally finished him. And so careful of his new wife, you wouldn’t believe, as well as showering her with all the money he’d made in Italy. You only had to hear the stories of the money credits he’d sent her through the summer, so that all her debts were paid, and the two girls could look forward to fine dowries. A good boy, Nicholas had turned out to be.

The only person who didn’t seem to want to rhapsodise about all this was Nicholas, who spent a dazed morning being slapped on his bandaged back and congratulated, and then took desperate refuge in work. Julius and Gregorio shared his long hours and the succession of hard-bargaining meetings without objection. Decisions made by Jaak de Fleury were corrected or reversed and new ones made in their place. The courier service was inspected, renewed and reorganised. Everything Gregorio had done since April was assimilated and discussed, including the purchasing programme for the Flanders galleys. And the vital meetings began with Bembo and the Venetian merchants.

Within a week, sanction should come from Venice for the acquisition by the Charetty and the Genoese merchants of the prescribed amount of the Flanders galleys’ cargo of alum. Being only ballast, it was not great. But the principle would be established, and the next round ship carrying bulk supplies from Constantinople would put in here, and the demoiselle’s new stockrooms would begin to fill up. Even if the authorities found the new mine tomorrow …

The only people in Bruges who didn’t seem happy about Nicholas
were all the girls he used to go about with, who must have been hoping that he would get tired of the Widow and begin to chase them again. Once, Julius had passed the time of day with a high-ranking party from Veere with whom he thought he had no particular quarrel, until he saw the venom on the face of a fat little party he remembered as the younger Borselen girl. Nicholas, at whom she was staring, looked back at her with no expression at all, which was one of his commonest gambits these days. No longer were you able to track down Nicholas by the sound of other folks’ laughter. But, of course, it wouldn’t be right anyway, when you remembered poor Felix.

In the middle of all of this, the bald-headed doctor Tobias arrived from the Abruzzi, having presumably patched up Count Federigo and all those of his army susceptible to cure. Like Julius himself, Tobie was red-brown from the Italian sun and impressed, you could see, by the Spangnaerts Street house which, like Julius, he hadn’t seen before; and also by Gregorio, who was new to him. Gregorio and Tobie weighing each other up was a study which Julius rather enjoyed. He thought they might be a match for each other.

Nicholas wasn’t there, so Tobie had a session alone with the demoiselle about Astorre and his winter quarters, and the winding up of the contract and, presumably, Tobie’s recruitment to Nicholas’ alum venture and his share in it. Of them all, the doctor had shown least interest in the demoiselle’s marriage, but that was presumably because he hardly knew her anyway. After all, their only previous encounter was ten months before when he had applied to join Astorre instead of Lionetto.

He emerged from the meeting apparently unscathed, and from the way he walked into the office, evidently had reason to think he belonged to it. The clerks were away at the time, but the room looked businesslike enough, with its tables and cupboards and orderly litter. Tobie glanced round, nodded to Julius and Gregorio, and said, “And where is the young master?”

Julius frowned. Gregorio remarked in a voice of truly organ-like pitch, “You will find that, in this house, the young master is dead. Nicholas will be back soon. He is presiding, with some reluctance, over the burial of a great-uncle.”

Tobie lifted a hand and passed it over his bald head, removing his sober black bonnet. He said, “I nearly had to be buried myself. That’s why I didn’t exactly hurry here. My late captain overtook me on the road and tried to make out I’d deliberately ruined him. I left him looking for Jaak de Fleury instead.”

“He found him,” said Gregorio dryly. “If your late employer was Lionetto.”

Julius noticed that Tobie and Gregorio were staring at each other. Tobie said, “It’s Jaak de Fleury who’s being buried?”

Gregorio nodded gently. “Killed by Lionetto. Who departed the
same day at speed. He must regret he changed sides. If he’d stayed with Piccinino, none of this would have happened.”

Julius said, “Never mind Lionetto. Have we got a new condotta?”

Tobie looked back. “Oh, yes,” he said. “At least, we’ve been offered one. Astorre is everyone’s favourite captain, since he got himself safely out of Naples and rushed straight to the feet of Urbino. This year’s campaign against Piccinino is over. Urbino’s accepted a renewed contract as well, and is taking his army to winter just north of Rome, in Magliano, so that he and Alessandro can see the Pope over Christmas. Astorre will go with him until he hears what we … what the demoiselle wants him to do.”

Julius said, “If you mean Nicholas, why not say so?” He was saying it when Nicholas came in, but he didn’t seem to have heard it, and was looking instead at Tobie, and then greeting him.

Tobie’s eyes, returning the look, were round and pale with a nasty black dot in the middle: the kind you saw if you were a weasel with a goshawk coming for you. Tobie said, “What’s all this about Jaak de Fleury?”