The Spring of the Ram Read online

  The Emperor David of Trebizond, reports said, was sending a merchant to the West seeking Florentine trade, and offering to house a Florentine agency. I put it to Niccolò, whom the Flemings call Nicholas: what had he to lose? He required to leave Bruges. He required to put his talents to use, otherwise his wife and her business would suffer. Where better than Trebizond? At least, he should take some companions and go to Florence and meet the Emperor’s emissary.

  He agreed. He has, I believe, no idea what is really going to happen. He may arrive in Florence and decide the longer journey is not worth the trouble. He may prove to be less exceptional than I think him to be. He may be more than I think him, and defeat me. But no. That is impossible.

  Let us see, then—beginning with an event which appears to have very little to do with him at all. I shall not address you again, although I shall be present. I am still present, in the Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum, The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, where they call me Nicholai Georgei de Arcassoune, Grecus cum pede ligneo. My name is in fact Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli. I have a wooden leg. Niccolò broke it at our first meeting. He is making amends.

  Chapter 1

  CATHERINE DE CHARETTY, having chosen a lover just after the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (a festival highly regarded in Bruges), was much put out to learn that, at nearly thirteen, she did not possess all the required qualifications. She began immediately praying for puberty. She prayed through her plans for elopement and, indeed, for a quite inconvenient period afterwards. The power of prayer, she had been taught, was invincible. By the time she and Messer Pagano Doria were beyond the reach of her mother, she would be (but surely) all woman.

  Messer Pagano Doria thought she was one already. That had emerged at a critical stage of his courtship, and was one of the many things she liked him for. Another was his long eyelashes. Another was his regular teeth. Another was the expensive handkerchief he always tucked in the belt of his doublet, but never blew his nose on. She liked him for all these things even before he began calling on her aunt’s house at Brussels, and then started asking her aunt and uncle and her cousins and herself out for supper, or to fish with him, or to join a party for fowling.

  Sometimes he brought his own hounds and his own servants, all with the family crest on their livery. Sometimes he brought a little black page, who wore a turban and carried his falcon. Sometimes he came alone. At first, he hardly seemed to notice her there at his elbow, admiring his teeth and his tales about the Moorish princes in Spain who had three hundred ladies to sleep with; and the Genoese lords in the East who were much sought-after, too. Messer Pagano Doria was a sea prince of the best Genoese family there had ever been, and rich enough to be buying a round ship at Antwerp. Messer Pagano Doria had been everywhere.

  Her aunt and uncle were flattered by the attentions of someone so well connected. They were not truly relations of hers: just business friends who had helped her mother through early widowhood, and had offered to take one of her daughters into their household to be polished. Catherine de Charetty thought you could get polished quite as well in a dyeshop in Bruges as in a wool merchant’s mansion in Brussels, but her mother thought not. Her mother would be much against Catherine taking a lover, but her mother had a man in her bed. Or had, before Nicholas left. On a long trip. On a matter of commerce, everyone said.

  Her mother wouldn’t have let Messer Pagano Doria come so often, because her mother always knew when Catherine had found a new attachment. Catherine was conscious of the power of love. Her confidence was not misplaced. In time, the lord Pagano Doria rewarded her with some of his delightful attention. While speaking he would smile at her and touch her cheek sometimes, so that her eyes crossed as she looked at his rings. He had better rings than the Bruges under-manager of the Medici company. Once he took her hand at a difficult place in the marshes and once, laughing and talking to everybody, he let her sit beside him in the cart going home.

  They first began to become close at the jousting in the Grand Place when the cousins who had set out with her somehow got lost. Instead of joining the crowds, Messer Pagano and she walked about the streets and the markets, the river bank and the wharves, and never stopped talking. She heard all about London and Lisbon and Rome and Sardinia and Ragusa and Chios and Damascus and Constantinople. All the wonderful lands he had lived in. He talked about animals with tails front and behind, and rubies bigger than racket balls, and flowers whose one petal would scent a whole palace.

  His clean, pink fingertips described things as he talked; or steered her shoulder; or attracted her attention by tickling her palm. She ate spicy pastries he bought from stalls for her, and consumed unknown drinks, fibbing when she disliked them. When he took her home, she wanted to embrace him from joy and from gratitude, and he smiled, seeing it, and held out his arms for a hug. His warm arms and his big, firm kiss reminded her of her father, except that Cornelis de Charetty was old when he died, and didn’t have skin like a rose-scented cushion, or wear dark pleated satin that slid under your touch. The lord Pagano’s hair under his feathered cap was dark and satiny too, but she daren’t touch that.

  That was how it began. There followed four days of unexplained absence; days of mourning. Then he sent his black page to her aunt. It proved to be nothing. He had to entertain some kinsman or other: would the family help? Catherine wasn’t mentioned at all. When the evening came, he hardly addressed her. It was only at their return that, dragging behind in the darkness, she became aware that he had held back as well. Then he said, “But a tear, my sweet Caterinetta! No, no! I cannot bear that!” And his arm came warmly round her waist and he kissed the tear away, and then her mouth. Then her aunt called from inside the house and he smiled, and turned away to his lodgings.

  The next meeting she arranged herself, and the two after that, alone with him. Not completely alone. In a park, or by the canal, or down on the shore, with their hoods over their faces, since it was autumn. Each time, he scolded her and told her he ought to take her back to her aunt, but he didn’t. The second time, he kissed her when they met as well as when they went away. The third time, he brought her a present. It was a little ring with a carbuncle in it, and a lace to string it on. She was to wear it tucked into her gown, in case her cousins were jealous. It had belonged to his mother, who would have thought of her as a little daughter had she lived. Catherine tied the ring in place herself although he offered to help. She knew, even then, that he believed her chest to be prettier than it was.

  That day, he was tired from buying his ship, and they sat down almost at once under a tree in the orchards not far from Ste Gudule, and stayed there until nearly dusk. To keep her from cold, he wrapped half his splendid cloak round her shoulders, and kept her hands warm in his. She watched him all the time that he talked, and admired his buttons, and when she wanted to stroke the fur of his collar he let her provided, he said, she would allow him reciprocal privileges.

  It was as exciting as he made it sound: he held her close with one hand and reached under her hood with the other to pull forward her long, hard-brushed hair, one swathe on each side of her neck. Then he combed it all smooth with his fingers, arranging it over her chest and forward down to her lap. She had nice hair: longer than Tilde’s, although Tilde was older. She sat still and let him stroke it like that for a little. After a bit he said, “Caterinetta. You are a lovely woman. You are a woman, aren’t you?”

  She had been overwhelmed, and surprised. “Of course I am!”

  He looked very serious.

  She must have smiled out of nervousness, for his face suddenly changed. He heaved a sigh and, bending his head, dropped a little kiss on her throat through the modesty gauze. “I’m glad. I’m glad, Caterinetta; for a Doria lord…you know a Doria lord could never show his love to a child. It would be against the family honour.”

  Then it had come to her what he had meant. She dismissed it. She heard herself repeating, “Love?” Then she couldn’t say anything else, be
cause he lifted his mouth from her chest and put his lips on her lips and pressed them heavily, with his arm tight round her shoulders.

  It was stifling, but she knew what it was. It was the kind of kissing that Nicholas and her mother did. She wanted him to stay like that till she got used to it. Instead, her mouth opened, spoiling everything. She tried to shut it again, but the weight was too much. She felt her teeth were exposed. She might even bite him. She drew off and so did he, quickly. He let his hands go. He said, “Of course it’s too soon. It’s wrong and too soon. Let me take you home.”

  She was too appalled even to cry. She said, “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t. You can do it again.”

  “Don’t you think I want to?” he said. “Princess, I want more than that. But after next week, you won’t see me. And by the time I come back, many years may have passed.”

  She was seized by a cramp in her stomach. She said, “You’re sailing.”

  He nodded. “To Italy first, then who knows where? My greatest adventure, I think. And I have to make it alone.”

  “Take me with you,” she said.

  She could see the shock on his face, and an exquisite longing. Then he said, “No. No, how could I? There’s no time for a betrothal, far less for a contract of marriage. Your aunt has no powers: I couldn’t send to your mother in time. I can’t take you, my loveliest girl, although I’d give a ransom to do it. I can’t even see you again. I mustn’t. I would go too far: I couldn’t help it. And then you would hate me.”

  Madonna Caterina de Charetty negli Doria.

  “You want to marry me?” Catherine said. She had to look down, for he was kneeling before her, his cap off, his warm, satiny head on her knee.

  “I want you to be my lady wife. I want to show you the world. I want to spend Christmas at your side and show you to the princes of Florence,” said Messer Pagano Doria in a whisper. “But how can it be?”

  They were off in a week.

  Her aunt and uncle wished them Godspeed, thinking he was escorting her homewards to Bruges. They went to Antwerp instead. There he paid off her woman, and he and she and his retinue rode round to the harbour and climbed aboard his new ship. His huge and wonderful ship called the Doria.

  Fairly early in the voyage, she had to tell him she wasn’t a woman, and she thought he was going to be angry, because he left her chamber without really discussing it. However, when he came back he just said that of course he didn’t mind waiting for her or the wedding, and the papers wouldn’t reach them till Genoa anyway.

  She hadn’t known that weddings needed papers, but evidently they did. After that, she got lovely food and more presents, although he didn’t sleep in her bed as she thought he would. Still, he came quite a lot and played cards and told her more stories, and tickled and kissed her, which she liked very much. He had bought her a beautiful gown and he would walk up and down the ship with her, showing her off.

  There were other women on board. Sometimes they winked at her but Catherine, brought up in a seaport, knew better than to respond. They were there, of course, to go to bed with the seamen. The master of the ship was decently cordial. The black page was polite, after Messer Pagano had taken him off for a few words, no doubt with a cane. It was all like a very good daydream, except for the old Flemish nurse he had bought her who kept boiling her baths in a bucket and producing purges to brighten her skin. Catherine took the baths and the powders. She intended to do him credit with the princes of Florence. And she had his assurance. Marriage as soon as was fitting. She would be a wife before Tilde. She would be married to a man older than Nicholas. Older and richer and better born than the man her mother had taken to bed.

  So, as the ship sailed past the harbour for Bruges, round France and alongside Portugal and through the Pillars of Hercules to their landfall, Catherine de Charetty prayed her particular prayer. And praying, remembered, uneasily, the shrill voice and identical prayers of Felix her brother. And he had been sixteen that birthday.

  At home in Bruges, Marian de Charetty, owner of the Charetty dyeshop, prepared with determination to give an excellent Christmas to Tilde her older daughter and all her servants and clerks; and tried not to mourn her only son Felix, who had indeed enjoyed manhood at last and had died of it; or her young husband Nicholas, forced by circumstance to take himself off to Florence; or her small daughter Catherine who was (as infrequent, rather indirect letters of vague content informed her) content in Brussels, and in no hurry to finish her polishing.

  If Catherine de Charetty was happy, the lord Pagano Doria was also amazingly content. The voyage had been pleasant and profitable. The solitary misfortune would, please God, soon be remedied. And he had barely set foot in Italy before half his remaining problems were solved. He met Father Godscalc.

  At the time, it didn’t seem like good luck. It happened at Porto Pisano, the harbour for Pisa and Florence. They had only just anchored. He had his hands full with matters to do with harbour dues and customs and cargo, not to mention persuading his Catherine that it was not suitable, yet, for her to walk ashore in public. Not until they were married. Not until no one could part them.

  It was the old Flemish bitch in the end who got her to see the sport of dressing up as a page: if he had a black one, why not a white one as well? Then he had dear Noah to console, whose little black heart he had broken already. It was a wonder that they were all on shore and ready to set out for Florence as soon as they were. Indeed, they were just mounting to ride when Catherine, in her pretty page outfit, brought her little horse close and said, “Look!”

  He thought for a moment it was her aunt, or her mother. Instead, her finger pointed over the quayside crowd to where a boatload of pilgrims from Rome had newly landed. Among them was a priest: a tall, broad, youngish man in a stained hooded cloak of good quality, who was haggling with someone over the hire of a horse. Two servants stood quietly behind him, and a modest amount of salt-crusted baggage. The servants wore livery of a peculiar blue, but no blazon.

  The lord Pagano caught his fiancée’s hand and lowered it, smiling. Alas, they were not yet in need of a priest. In any case, he already knew which priest he wanted. He said, “What, my darling? It isn’t someone you know?” While he spoke, he nodded to Crackbene his master, and drew her a little apart, while the others moved gently off. All the time she was speaking, he saw to it that her back was to the blue livery.

  It seemed bad news, although it might have been worse. The man was a Charetty chaplain. The fellow had served a short time in Bruges, but most of his time had been spent with Marian de Charetty’s cavalry company, now passing the winter in Italy. He would, she thought, be on his way home.

  The lord Pagano rather thought not, but had no intention of saying so. The priest, of course, must not see her. She saw the importance of that. It was agreed, in the end, that she should return to the ship with the master, while he rode on to their lodging in Pisa. There, with the priest safely gone, she would join him.

  It didn’t strike her, he saw, that a man leaving on horseback for Flanders was bound to ride north, and not eastwards to Pisa and Florence. There were times when he loved Catherine just for her ignorance.

  Chapter 2

  IT TOOK AN HOUR to get Catherine de Charetty settled back on the ship with her servants, and longer for the lord Pagano to make a few essential enquiries, and then to get himself en route for Pisa again. The priest, of course, was ahead.

  The lord Pagano Doria rode quickly, to the discomfort of his muleteers and servants, although he took the black page Noah up in his saddle once or twice. It was not in his nature however to be bad-tempered, although the towpath was dusty and busy. Until the winter floods came, the river road to Pisa and Florence was the quickest way from the coast, and there were plenty of travellers to talk to.

  The lord Pagano Doria didn’t linger, but he produced a joke or shared a piece of chaffing with most people as he passed, and men turned to look at him with pleasure, for he was a delightful man, although on the
small side. They passed a donkey train carrying flour from the water-mill. A stocking-maker with his shears and his needles was happy to answer his greeting, and then two unemployed caulkers on their way to the ship sheds at Pisa. Then, taking the width of the road, a carter with jars of the new season’s oil was attempting to pass somebody’s factor just come from checking the vintage, and with a liverish stare and two willow jars at his saddle to prove it. When the factor scowled, the lord Doria lifted his brows at the carter, who laughed. A gentleman of the sea, Messer Pagano Doria; alert as a whippet; bright as the sun upon brass.

  They were still jogging along, an assortment of travellers, when they were stopped in their tracks by a galley. All those on the towpath shouted abuse. Messer Pagano Doria, full of sudden optimism, merely thought how much his little Catherine would have enjoyed witnessing one hundred and thirty-eight feet of empty Florentine galley being tree-warped upriver to Pisa where, between the two bridges, she would be prepared for her next season’s trip. Here, all around him and beyond, the road was a mess of dead leaves and mud. Where the road and river bent round ahead there was, as always, the group of quarrelling unshaven men in canvas shirts and burst hose attempting to solve some obscure problem of leverage and in no mood to stand aside to let shoremen go by. Around Pagano Doria everyone (apart from the caulkers) continued to shout as they covered the short final space between themselves and the obstacle, where one or two travellers had already halted. Among them was the employee of the Charetty company called Father Godscalc.