Niccolo Rising (61 page)

With darkness came exhaustion for Marian de Charetty. The talk, the arrangements had gone on all evening. Tilde, who had not come to the parlour for wine, had appeared there at suppertime, joining Felix and Catherine and Nicholas and her mother at the table. Her face set and
swollen, Tilde had at least answered when spoken to and, sitting next to her mother, had held her hand tightly. Nicholas left her alone, and talked about jousting.

You could see the idea enter Felix’s head, and take shape there. You could see him, instead of speaking in monosyllables, begin to guide the conversation. It was no surprise when he said, rather loudly, “You did say, didn’t you, that Mother and I would find the business doing remarkably well? I presume in that case it would support an extra horse or two, and a shield, say?”

Nicholas’s reply, agreeing placidly, clashed with her own sharp refusal. She looked at Nicholas. He said, “I don’t see why not. He’s the head of the business. He ought to make a show at the White Bear.”

She stared at him. She said, “I thought –” and stopped abruptly.

“You thought the business couldn’t afford it. So did I. But they didn’t drink half as much wine as I thought they would this afternoon, and the wedding came cheap.” He grinned at her. Tilde was looking from one side to the other, puzzled. Marian realised that, of course, they would expect him to economise, to reduce their spending. He had tricked her into allowing him an act of generosity.

It was later, when the meal was over, and Tilde and Felix had gone and Catherine was already asleep in her big bed, that Marian found herself alone before the parlour fire for the first time with her husband. He had been with her all day and yet, in a sense, it might have been Henninc. Except that never in a thousand years would Henninc have contrived to achieve all Nicholas had achieved from last night. Or Cornelis.

Although, of course, Cornelis had given her a bridal night. And she herself had made it plain to Nicholas that there was to be none. He had acquiesced: had even arranged for Catherine to stay with her. And had engineered, too, all those joint anouncements which made it clear to the world the basis on which his marriage stood. For her sake, she knew.

For the same reason, he would have to leave her room soon, to find the chamber he had arranged for himself in another wing. Returning from seeing to Catherine, she had given him a last cup of wine and saw, by the firelight, that his eyes were heavy. She wondered if his night, too, had been sleepless, or if he had passed it in dreamless, confident rest. He said suddenly, “I’m sorry. You must be tired as well.”

He spoke as if they had never been in company except when vigorously and formally entertaining one another. As if she had never tended him, lying in feverish dreams on the pillows upstairs during his sickness. She said, “I don’t think there is anything in the world I want to talk about. Yes, there is. The joust?”

“He won’t take part,” said Nicholas. “Take my word for it.”

“After all that expense?” she said, her smile wider. “Two horses? A shield?”

He said, “Notice how generous I was being with your money. It gives him … it will help him with his friends.”

“You mean,” she said, “he can boast about how he is taking advantage of you?”

“Something like that. He deserves it, anyway.” His eyes closed. He said, “Dear Christ, I must go,” and opened them and got up.

He hesitated. Sitting, aching with weariness, she tried to will him to say nothing more. Not to offer some skilled, manufactured coda to the whole business, to which she would be expected to respond equally skilfully.

He said, “I think you will probably sleep. I’ll stay in the yard or the office all morning. Send for me if you want me.”

He gave her one of his lavish, sudden smiles. His eyes were still drowsy. She returned the smile and said, “Good-night, Nicholas,” and watched him make his way to the door. He turned, his hand on the latch, and drew breath to say something, and then smiled instead.

She should have left it alone. Instead, she said, “What remark was that going to be?”

He stood, still smiling a little. “A favour I decided not to ask for.”

She was pleasantly curious. The tone of his voice declared quite clearly that there was no need for her to be disturbed. She said, “Well, now you have changed your mind. What is it?”

He said, “I don’t know what colour your hair is.”

She felt her chin coming up. Her skin burned with the heat of the fire. The large gaze, dwelling sleepily on her, held every disarming quality: of affection, of mischief, of appeal. The scrubbed face at Mass, with the hair flattened down, and the glance full of merriment over some innocent conspiracy.

Marian de Charetty rose from her place by the fireside and, smiling, held the eyes of the child Claes with her own as she unpinned the round padded hat she had worn all that day.

There had been no time that morning to pin it underneath as she usually did. She lifted off the solid frame and shook the folded hair under it so that it unrolled and fell over her breast and her back and her shoulders. It was the colour of her sleeves: the deep brown of lampblack mixed with yellow earths, with the vermilion echoes of cinnabar. It was the first thing she had learned: how to dye cloth to flatter her hair. When she let it down at night, Cornelis had compared it to Cathay silk.

Now her second husband looked at it with his large, restful gaze, and said, “Yes. I thought I was right” with simplicity.

Remotely she realised that, of course, he had known the shade of her hair. It might be covered, but one day or another a hairline would show under the wiring. And hence he had been sure that there was no grey there, to shame her. It had been, wordlessly, the coda she had dreaded. But even though she might discern his reasoning, she couldn’t fault him for the thought that had prompted it. She smiled and said, “Next time,
it will be black. I change it every five days. Why else own a dye business?”

He grinned. “I think,” he said, “that would be cause for annulment. Until tomorrow.”

He closed the door and she sat down, her hair glowing about her.

Chapter 29

H
AD IT NOT
been for Easter falling midway between her astonishing alteration in status and the joust of the White Bear Society, matters might have been harder for Marian de Charetty. As it was, from the morning after her marriage, the owner of the Charetty company doggedly went about her usual affairs in warehouses and markets and offices where the streets rattled with the furious clacking of looms, the wheeze of pumps, the rumble of barrows and carts as the city pressed its business to a close in readiness for the demands of the Church, and the pleasures of the festival to follow.

From sheer curiosity, of course, people welcomed her; and those who were genuine friends did their best to make her feel she had chosen rightly, whatever they privately thought. Businessmen were apt, beginning a transaction, to make a cheerful if cursory remark about having to watch their step now she had that young man to advise her. Those who were friends of the Adorne family, or who respected them, were both polite and careful.

Only the children were neither. There were not many, but she knew, when she heard the giggling from behind a bridge wall, or under a flight of steps, or from a doorway, that it echoed an adult response: the conversation of a shocked mother or an astounded housemaid. Only once was she truly hurt; when three childish trebles set up a chant of
Mankebele! Mankebele!
… Limping Isabelle, the legendary usurer and procuress. She didn’t look to see what family they came from, and she told no one about them.

As he had promised, Nicholas had spent the first morning after the marriage on the premises, and part of every day since. It was of the greatest importance, of course, that he should do so. Feeling in the yard had to settle: upset dignity be nursed back into health; a new regime created that would be acceptable, and that would continue when he was not there.

For that they both needed Gregorio, and it was on Gregorio that he lavished most of his time and tact. Of the lawyer’s ability there was no
doubt. But he had to show, too, that he could come to terms with her work-people and understand them. Nicholas had aroused his curiosity, but it was a cynical interest, she could tell. Before taking him deeper into the operation of the business, his loyalty would have to be engaged. In two weeks, not counting Easter. With Gregorio, Nicholas proceeded with the restructuring of the business that he had already begun. Tenants were found for some of the new property. Workmen were set to repairing and altering some of the rest. He wanted still larger storerooms, more centrally accessible. Hence the dyeshop, under Henninc and Bellobras and Lippin, and with Marian de Charetty in control, stayed in its present sprawling premises on the canal bank, where the discharge and the odours offended less.

The living premises remained there, and her office. But the expensive house in Spangnaerts Street became the administrative centre of the business. There she had a cabinet too, large enough for her to use for clients or friends if she wished. The most commodious room was given over to the secretariat. In it, Nicholas and Gregorio each possessed tables, and two further clerks were taken on, and a boy to run messages, as well as a housekeeper and a man for the heavy work, and to tend the small stable.

In all that, she knew he was right. Even when the business was smaller, it had been a constant struggle to maintain even the barest of records, and she had hardly helped matters by insisting that Julius spend half his time assisting Felix. Astorre’s muster, the first for a year, had made matters worse. Contracts meant registers, and in duplicate at the very least. A man who fought for you must have his name recorded and the place where his home and kinsmen were, as well as his arms and armour and details of his horse down to its markings. The books for that were currently piled on shelves along with the ledgers for the dye business and the pawn business, and the duplicate books for Louvain, which would have to be checked and corrected. Nicholas had asked her, in one of the many brief, concentrated meetings which occurred in those days, if she would object to his sending for the broker Cristoffels, so that the future of Louvain could be discussed.

In all that, Gregorio too had some say. The longer-term plans Nicholas didn’t confide in him, but took on his own shoulders entirely. Most of what he was doing Marian de Charetty thought she knew. He reported to her faithfully. But sometimes, as she saw the superscriptions on the letters he was sending to Geneva, to Milan, to Venice, to Florence, she found it hard to control her uneasiness. That particular venture was too big. He had reassured her. It was being done in his name, and if it failed only he and his other partners would suffer. But she was still concerned.

She could imagine, too, that all was not plain sailing. Where he went to do business without her, men often asked his authority, either because they didn’t yet know his new standing, or to discomfit him.
Once, a runner was sent to ask for her confirmation. She had been angry, but Nicholas had treated the whole business equably. He preferred that, he said, to the dealers who offered him smiles and false figures.

From the English Governor she heard that Nicholas had been seeing Colard Mansion, and had wondered if he was employing his friend for the letters he couldn’t entrust to his scribes. It was only later, reading some sheets that he left her, that she realised that his own writing, once too swift for clarity, was changing to a hand equally fast but distinctly more legible.

He had found time, extraordinarily, to do other things as well. The archery society of St Sebastian, which was not an exclusive one, had admitted him as a member, and he spent an hour there every day, shooting at the mark and becoming known to his fellow members. He was also visiting the small founder who had made up some of Astorre’s requirements of armour, and who had been a master at arms in his day. It was Felix who told her that Nicholas was apparently reviving his recent brief acquaintance with the military arts. To protect all the money he intended to make, Felix had suggested.

The truce of the marriage-day had not lasted. Now, Felix threw her, from time to time, all the scraps of gossip he could glean about Nicholas. Short of walking out of the room, which she sometimes did, she couldn’t prevent him. So far, there was little she hadn’t known. Blessedly, in any case, Felix was out most of the time, practising. He had acquired the rest of his jousting equipment, far more splendid and far more costly than was sensible, but she had not objected, since Nicholas hadn’t. As the days passed and the time for the tournament neared, she tried not to think of it, even when at every meal Felix related, with glittering eyes, the names of the great ones who were to take part in it.

With glittering eyes and frightened defiance. If he had been vulnerable before her marriage, he was twice as vulnerable now, in his bravado. She ached for him, wondering how he was managing, torn between despising her and defending her. Once, he had come back to the house with a bruised cheek, but had not explained it. And the wife of one of her clients had offered her an admiring account of how her dear son Felix had stood up for his mother the other day, when one of those ill-bred girls from Damme had forgotten her manners. The pawnbroker’s daughter, it had been. The daughter of Oudenin the pawnbroker.

When at home, Felix spent his time with his sisters, or with Henninc and his deputies. He ignored Gregorio, assuming (rightly, she supposed) that he was in process of being won over to Nicholas. Nicholas himself he did not speak to, but he often watched him for lengthy periods. When he did, there was a look in his eye that reminded Marian oddly of Cornelis. A calculating look.

At Easter she didn’t entertain: she had rarely done so, in any case, since Cornelis died. Invitations did, however, come. One was from the Adorne family to spend the day at the Hôtel Jerusalem. Tilde and Catherine went with their mother and Nicholas. Felix was otherwise engaged. They were treated quietly and kindly, and she was grateful.