Free Caprice and Rondo by Dorothy Dunnett Page A

painting?’ said Kathi, slow for once.
    Someone coughed. Bischoff’s lady wife said, ‘A picture of men, unsuitable for unmarried girls. You do not need to reply. Give me a few hours to arrange it, and you and Elzbiete may surprise our wicked Colà z Brugge before supper.’
    ‘Wicked?’ said Kathi.
    ‘In charm,’ said Barbara’s stepmother. ‘In the extent of his charm, and his escapades. Look how Elzbiete is bewitched. And now, of course, our girls can command a good dowry.’
    Someone else coughed. ‘That’s nice,’ Kathi said, and smiled at Elzbiete.
    W HEN HER UNCLE and Robin returned, Kathi was sitting alone, half undressed, in her room. With dusk, the din outside her windows had reduced itself to the constant tramping of feet, and the roar of men’s voices in song or obscenity. Danzig was well provided with ale. Then a door banged from inside the house, and she heard her husband’s light voice, and the velvet timbre of her uncle’s polished German. The Patriarch, it seemed, was not there.
    In a moment, Robin would leap upstairs to find her. She did not want that. Her gown lay by her bed. The opulent ladies of Danzig had already examined, in silence, its meagre proportions: she had always been small, with the slight, wiry build of a child. Her eyes were hazel, not blue, and her hair plainly brown, against the flaxen bounty of Elzbiete’s, for example. She smiled, thinking of Elzbiete, and then did not smile. The drunken voices had risen outside. Does he make do with inexpensive bought favours, as here? She dressed and walked down.
    Anselm Adorne was angry. Even now, alone with his niece and her husband, he would not burst into speech, but the grooves in his cheeks were bitten deep, and the brows above his eyes, normally amused, or detached, or quizzical, were heavy and straight. Since his wife died he had not touched a lute, or written verse, or laughed aloud. The mourning ought to be over, and Kathi knew that it might have been, but for something else he could not forget. Also, Margriet’s family had traded in Danzig — not that the Danzigers would allow that to affect them. Kathi said, ‘What happened?’
    It was the usual problem: the Danzigers’ unshakeable determination to preserve their trade at all costs: even against the interests of their fellow Hanse cities. And against the Danzigers’ single voice, the divided one with which Anselm Adorne had to speak. On behalf of the Duke of Burgundy, a threat to clear the Hanseatic Kontor out of Bruges, unless he obtained the trading concessions and the redress for the ship that he demanded. And in private, from Adorne’s well-liked and respected fellow burghers and office-holders in Bruges, the brief to promise anything, do anything, so long as the Baltic trade came to Bruges uninterrupted. And all, of course, had come to focus upon this stupid case of Paúel Benecke and the San Matteo .
    ‘It sailed under a Burgundian flag,’ Adorne said. He recited it, as if she were a jury. ‘It had been Italian-built, with its consort, to go on PopePius’s Crusade, and when Pius died, the Medici leased the two ships from the Duke, who had not paid for them yet. This voyage was one of their regular trips between Pisa and Flanders. Both ships had a Florentine crew: one was captained by a Strozzi, and one by a Tedaldi. They left Flanders freighted for Florence, but also intending to stop at Southampton to pick up English wool, and to sell a consignment of alum from Tolfa worth forty thousand gold florins. Because the Hanse towns were at war with England —’
    ‘In reprisal for their unlicensed fishing in Iceland,’ Kathi said.
    ‘— in reprisal for Iceland, I agree. Because there was a war, Paúel Benecke and his Saint Pierre de Rochelle —’
    ‘His Peter von Danzig ,’ Kathi said. ‘Or Das Grosse Kraweel , if you prefer. It’s outside the window.’
    ‘I have seen it. It carries over three hundred men. It intercepted the Burgundian ships and boarded