‘Well, it’s what I expected him to do,’ Wodman said. ‘He didn’t. It makes you feel anxious, doesn’t it? Whatever he’s planning, it’ll be a lot worse than that.’
‘You bastard,’ said Nicholas, and got up. It was as difficult as he had expected. Bed, when he got there, was blissful. He was almost asleep when he remembered his saddlebags, and a passing impression, as he emptied them, that something was missing. He lay for a moment, swore, sat up, and then stood. By the dying light of the brazier, he could see something that he hadn’t noticed before, pinned on the wall. A square of paper.
A letter.
No, a drawing. A careful drawing, beautifully done in two colours, of a fox and a hare and two dogs.
‘I thought,’ said Henry’s voice from the door, ‘that you liked to look at it, maybe, at bedtime. You sleep better, don’t you, with a little something from home? I have an old bit of blanket, myself. Good night, Uncle. Sweet dreams.’
The door shut. Nicholas crossed over and looked at the drawing, then took it down. Apart from the pin-holes, it was perfectly smooth and intact. For a moment, he had an impulse to crush it; then sensibly didn’t.
He had been going—he was still going—to Leith, to send it tomorrow, along with the other letter, which was next to his skin and had never left there. The letter, in Phemie’s level writing, to Anselm Adorne.
TO GELIS VAN BORSELEN, looking back to the halcyon years, Bruges had seemed a fine place to rear a child, with its ranks of handsome brown and red houses, ribboned with silvery water and knotted with bridges and wreathed about with its churches, its abbeys, its gardens. Warm and compact and thronged; full of vigour; full of surprises; the richest and most cosmopolitan small business town in the world, Bruges flowered all through the year, but never more so than in September, at the coming of the Venetian galleys, and at Carnival-time, just before Lent. The two marvels of a child’s year; of Gelis’s year, when she was small. There, up on the Belfry, was the platform from which the speaking-trumpet announced the results of the lottery. There, on the Minnewater, once filled with laughing, tumbling skaters, was where she, a fat child, had first met and been enchanted by Claes the apprentice, soon to be Nicholas.
There, within the walls of the Hôtel Jerusalem, was the lovely church built by the Adornes, where Nicholas, brave and young, had entered into his first marriage, with Marian de Charetty. And there, in the great Palace of Louis de Gruuthuse and his van Borselen wife were the rooms where her own wedding contract to Nicholas had been signed, just a few streets away from where Gelis’s sister Katelina had wilfully made him her lover, in the hapless affair that had ended in the birth of a child.
Katelina had died in Cyprus, long before Gelis’s own marriage to Nicholas, blighted for eight years, but now mended. Katelina’s child had another name, in another country, and believed himself to be another man’s son. It was small Jordan, born to Gelis and Nicholas, who should be growing up here as his parents had done, revelling in the whole noisy life of the town: the clack of the looms and the chime of the work-bell; the chanting of children and fullers; the barking of dogs and the cry of the moneychanger wheeling his cart. The rattle of horses bearing officials and merchants about their business. The thunder of wagons and carriages crossing the drawbridges and entering the various portals. The creak and splash of the mills on the water; the rickety chorus of the mills on the walls. The market smells of fish and fruit and butcher-meat. The odour of paint from the book-stalls and the workshops and Colard Mansion’s window, and of ink where the printing-presses had been set up. A town of merchants and artisans. A town where children lived with their parents. A family town.
It should have been like that, but the Duke’s death had brought Lent in Epiphany. Mourning did not enter into it: every municipality, every province with whom the late Duke had been at odds instantly saw a chance for advancement, and seized it. In Bruges, there was a disturbance almost at once, only reduced when the little Duchess, advised by Louis de Gruuthuse, assured them that their traditional privileges were secure. To keep Bruges calm and safe, she appointed four captains, one of whom was Anselm Adorne, lord of Cortachy.
It had worked, for a bit. Even when the Estates of Holland, swept by local fervour, proposed to end the tenure of Gruuthuse (not a Hollander) as their Governor, Gruuthuse merely acceded, and the office was passed, without fuss, to his brother-in-law. Wolfaert van Borselen was cousin to Gelis, and so was Gruuthuse’s own wife. She still felt safe.
Then had come the ill-advised attempt to cajole or buy off the King of France, or at least win time to rebuild the Burgundian armies. King Louis, that masterly tactician, had received the pitiful letters of the little Duchess and the Duke’s widow the Dowager; had listened to the Burgundian envoys—Gruuthuse, the Chancellor Hugonet, Wolfaert van Borselen—and had finally lent ear to the worried envoys from Flanders, who were not in immediate danger from the advancing French armies, and who were thriftily unwilling, as always, to pay for yet another Burgundian war.
The King of France had responded very simply by demonstrating, with sorrow, that the little Duchess and her stepmother had no intention, whatever happened, of consulting the States-General of the Low Countries about her wars, her future marriages or her alliances, but was obediently following the advice of her (English) stepmother and her late war-crazed father’s advisers. The storm over that blew up in Ghent, where the little Duchess was being politely immured by a number of strong-minded officials. But already Gruuthuse had been forced to leave Ghent to help Anselm Adorne deal with the situation in Bruges, where the clacking of looms was giving way to the sound of arguing voices, and merchants gathered, low-voiced, in private rooms over taverns, and fewer men than usual ran out of their houses when the work-bell clanged, and sometimes those who did were visibly being pushed by their wives. Adorne took the leaders into the Hôtel Jerusalem and talked to them, and they were given a proper hearing in the Hôtel de Ville in the Burg, where Gruuthuse and the Provost of St Donatien listened to them, and made certain adjustments and certain promises, and in the end it died down. But for a while the communal cavalry and the companies of archers and crossbowmen had been waiting uneasily on call: uneasily because most of them, too, were merchants, and those who were not were now supposedly employed by a girl who didn’t know what she was doing.
About this time also, the Dowager had been compelled to move out of Ghent, which left the little Duchess alone there. What was not yet commonly known was that the same little Duchess, entertaining her suitors, had (on Gruuthuse’s advice) remained loyal to her late father’s scheme to marry her to the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, son of the Emperor Frederick. And that the Emperor had not only reaffirmed the contract, but was sending an Imperial embassy to clinch it.
France wouldn’t like it.
It was a simple choice between two husbands: between encroaching France and paternalistic Germany, you might say. Personal proclivities didn’t come into it. Maximilian was two years younger than she was, and inexperienced at that. The Dauphin was not quite seven, and a hunchback. It was what God liked that mattered.
By then, it had become advisable to keep children off the streets of Bruges, and Gelis did not allow Jodi out, even well guarded, any more than Tilde risked her two little daughters beyond the yards and gardens of the Hof Charetty-Niccolò. Living with Diniz and his family in the great house that had once belonged to Nicholas, Gelis employed her time, profitably, in the company’s business, and took what precautions seemed sensible. At least no one now had to be concerned about Tilde’s sister Catherine who, miraculously certificated and married at last, had left for Veere, her new home in Zeeland. For Gelis herself, it was also an option, in the last resort, to go to her kinsmen at Veere, but the last resort had not yet occurred. And no one had yet heard from Nicholas.
This was natural. It was not so long since he had sailed. And now, although it was March and the gales had abated, a wintry cold had returned which, she knew, slowed down cargo handling and
the transit of goods. She suffered the unending questions of Jodi, who was not interested in frozen rigging, but who knew that ships could sink, and that the Narrow Sea was full of French and English and Polish and Portuguese pirates. She told him of his father’s friend Paúel Benecke, who was a professional freebooter and would never harm Papa.
She did not tell him that the ship from Scotland, when it came, would not bring his father, but only news of what he was doing. His father had gone to Scotland for his sake and for hers, to deal with the men who had become the stuff of Jodi’s nightmares: the fat man of his own name, who had once had him captured at knife-point; the handsome man known as David, who had caused the death of Raffo, Jodi’s friend.
Nicholas could not be expected to deal with it quickly; until it was safe, she and Jodi had to stay. She had promised. Had she been alone, she would have broken the promise.
As it was, during the day, Jodi experienced no nightmares, being busy with his books or his riding lessons or his exercises with his small bow. Jodi worked hardest of all when Papa was away, so that Papa would not be disappointed when they were together again. Gelis was not envious of the bond between Nicholas and his son, but anxious at times, feeling Jodi too young to bear the passion of love that he felt.
Kathi, observing it, had reassured her. ‘At the moment, it’s all trained on Nicholas, and fortunately Nicholas is a good teacher as well as a parent. He will make sure that Jodi learns to make his own friends.’
‘But if he loses Nicholas first?’ Gelis had said.
And Kathi had said, soberly for her, ‘He will forget. It might be worse, in effect, if Nicholas were to lose him.’
The thought stayed with Gelis, and frightened her, sometimes.
THEN THE REAL trouble started.
It began, one frosty morning, with a change in the quality of noise outside her windows. The Spangnaerts Street house was a big building, office, warehouse, stables and domicile at once, set between the canal at the foot of the street and the merchant club at the top, which in its turn was a dogleg away from the slope of the great market, the Grand’ Place of Bruges. Because the canals conducted sound, upraised voices were audible in several different directions, and very clearly from below her own windows, where groups of men were hurrying uphill. From the Grand’ Place itself, a breathy sound spoke of a sizeable and increasing crowd.
Diniz came in. ‘Trouble. I’m sorry. I’ve called everyone in and barred the doors, and sent a runner to warn the dyeyard. Kathi and the children are safe at the big house, and Adorne spent the night down the road and is up at the Poorterslogie, trying to knock sense into the eminent brethren of the White Bear.’
His olive skin had darkened to red. Ever since Africa, Gelis had owned to an aunt-like tolerance for Diniz, who was half a St Pol, and who loathed the corpulent Jordan, his grandfather. He was a year younger than she was. She said, ‘What are they agitating about this time?’
Diniz said, ‘Oh, the usual. Past ducal injustices. Specifically, the good people of Bruges would like the Franc’s special privileges stopped, because they’re competing too closely with us. If the Duchess does rescind them, of course, the Franchosts will be out there complaining instead.’
The Franc, the Liberty of Bruges, was a collection of neighbouring parishes with inappropriate feudal affiliations and a controversial freedom from tolls. Ostend and Sluys were among them. The Franc was under the direct control, not of Bruges, but of a lieutenant answering to the late Duke. Gelis said, ‘You’ll be all right. Rich merchants won’t break down your doors.’
‘No, but their employees might,’ Diniz said. ‘And the said rich merchants won’t stop them. Tommaso Portinari is in there, complaining with the best. The Duke died owing the Medici Bank six thousand groats.’
‘Stupid Tommaso,’ Gelis said. ‘But it must have been good while it lasted. If Tommaso breaks your windows, I’ll send someone to spit on all the oils of himself that he commissioned.’
‘You couldn’t even count them, never mind spit on them,’ said Diniz. ‘Damn!’
She also had heard it. Breaking glass. Painted glass, expensive as painted gold. ‘It wasn’t Tommaso,’ said Diniz, beginning to move, ‘but I’d better find out.’
Gelis went to the counting-house, then to the kitchens, then went to Tilde’s rooms and found Clémence and Jodi with Diniz’s wife. Gelis said, as she’d said to everyone else, ‘It isn’t personal, Tilde. We represent a rich business that won’t be worried by competition with the Franc, and they resent it: it’s as simple as that.’
‘I’d feel safer with something more logical,’ Tilde said. ‘Some day they won’t let Anselm Adorne calm them down. They’ll get their pikes out and start wrecking in earnest.’
There was another crash. Jodi looked from one face to the other. He said, ‘Papa will save us.’
Clémence said, ‘I’m sure he would, if we needed saving. But that’s just window-glass breaking, not us. And the door is barred. No one can get in.’
It was true. It would also be true of Kathi, behind the high walls of the Hôtel Jerusalem, well away from the centre of town. But other houses were less well protected.
Diniz came in. ‘Good news. Adorne sent to Gruuthuse last night, and he’s bringing an armed troop from Ghent.’
Tilde said, ‘Won’t that make it worse? If they feel they’re being rounded up before being given a hearing?’
‘He knows the dangers,’ Diniz said. ‘Adorne does understand his people, and they respect him. All it needs is some face-saving. An excuse to stop the violence and talk.’
When he left the room, Gelis went with him. It would be dark by late afternoon. If the unrest lasted longer, they would keep all the staff overnight. There was food, and bedding of sorts. She wished that Andreas was with them, a wise man as well as a doctor, but he was somewhere in battle-torn France, called to the side of some friend in distress. Dr Tobie, Clémence’s husband, was in Nancy. It didn’t matter. They were hardly going to need doctors.
She listened. Now the noise from the south was coming in waves, suggesting single voices followed by massed shouting. Diniz said, ‘Adorne’s troops and Breydel are at the Grand’ Place, protecting the way into the Burg. Look, I’ll have to go and help. Don’t tell Tilde.’
The Burg was the Duke’s territory. A fortified square, washed on two sides by the river, it held the prison known as the Steen. Also the Hôtel de Ville, the Duke’s collegiate church of St Donatien, and the elaborate, defenceless town hall of the Franc.
The prison held prisoners, ripe for releasing by compliant jailers. The Hôtel de Ville held the burgomasters and magistrates of Bruges, including those appointed by the late Duke. The church of St Donatien, although bearing the ducal arms on its doors, had yet objected so strongly to paying the last lot of ducal war taxes that half its canons had ended up in the Steen. And, finally, the Palais du Franc was a sitting target to everyone.
Gelis said, ‘Diniz, one man won’t do much for those odds.’ Clémence had quietly joined them.
‘If they break through, no one can stop them,’ Diniz said. ‘Or not until Gruuthuse comes. But if they can’t break through, they’ll try something else. The arsenals. The Belfry—it’s got the town seals. The houses of men from the Franc. I can take some men and reinforce the worst places, or get people out.’
‘They don’t know Gruuthuse is coming?’ Gelis said. ‘It might even stop them. Or—Who holds the keys to the gates? Adorne and the other captains, I suppose.’ There were five miles of ramparts and nine gates into Bruges, each with its drawbridge and portcullis, and some with a depot of arms. The Ghent Gate, by which Gruuthuse would come, was approached by a bridge and consisted of a collection of massive drum towers, battlements, platforms and spires, with a gold weathercock trembling on top: come quickly, Louis de Gruuthuse; the wind has changed.
She said, ‘The Carpenters’ Guild looks after the Ghent Gate, doesn’t it?’ There were fifty-two trade-guilds in Bruges. She knew the Dean of the Carpe
nters.
Diniz said baldly, ‘No.’ Then remembering whose wife she was, he said, ‘If one man couldn’t help in the Burg, then one woman couldn’t help in a hand-to-hand fight at the Gate. And not even you could change the Dean’s mind in front of his own guild.’
‘I could watch,’ she said. ‘And report, if you’ll tell me where. A servant’s cap, and a cloak and an apron, and I can go where you can’t. If it gets difficult, I have places to go—the van Borselen house in Silver Straete, and Gruuthuse’s own place, and the Hospital of St John—Adorne’s son might even be there. Arnaud.’
‘He will be. It’s one of the chief arsenals,’ Diniz said. ‘I can’t let you. Think of Nicholas.’
‘Do you imagine he is thinking of me?’ Gelis said. ‘He is doing what he has to do. And I am doing the same.’
Clémence said, ‘That is true. Before he went, Nicholas took care for Bruges. It is not to say that, then and now, he does not think of you, as you think of him while you breathe.’ She smiled, and Gelis, remembering Tobie, looked at her with softened eyes, and smiled in return.
To Diniz, she said. ‘Thank you. But whatever you say, I am going. Nicholas would understand.’
IT WAS WORSE, outside, than she had expected, partly because of the gloom. It was hardly midday, but windows glowed orange behind her, and at the top of Spangnaerts Street, every floor of the White Bear was lit, casting flickering light on the congealing mud on the streets. The streets before and behind her were empty, but massed roars ahead, by their compact nature, made her think that the crowd was still in one pack, and had not yet broken through to the Burg. Adorne of Cortachy and Jan Breydel and their firm, loyal crossbowmen must be holding it. The third officer, Gruuthuse’s own son, might also be there. Holding on; trying to make themselves heard; offering to talk over their grievances; restraining their impulse to respond when the first missiles started to come. Gelis sent them a silent message of goodwill.
Her hope was that the Ghent Gate was open, and that the porters would be keeping slack watch. They would stop any horseman from leaving, but a woman on foot might slip out. And a woman with money could pick up a horse of sorts, once outside, and ride to meet her good cousin Louis with an exact report of the situation in Bruges. And then might return, in equal secrecy, with Louis’s orders.