Free The Unicorn Hunt by Dorothy Dunnett

the stackyards of Leith could have supplied it with timber.
    The scores of people lolling, weaving, chorusing round the bonfire were also from Leith, Adorne’s nephew Sersanders could see. Dogs yapped and bayed, and someone was playing the pipes to the merry patter of several drums. While the lords had been indoors, decorously eating from platters, the families who belonged here had brought out their food and a barrel of ale, and were continuing, in their own cheerful mode, the pleasures of the King’s play.
    Clouds of smuts, billows of heat swirled from the fire. Outside its range, the air was fresh but not piercing, although the sullen waters sounded cold. Sersanders began rather quickly to look about him for the youth Alexander, for Nicholas, and especially for Katelijne his sister.
    They were with Will Roger on the other side of the fire. Sersanders saw the King’s brother, secure within the sturdy group of his household, and the young women of title were there, laughing as well. They were harnessing dogs to the porters’ ship-sleds and the young people were climbing aboard – his cousin Maarten, the Scots boy Robin, his own Katelijne. And Alexander, the heir to thethrone. Older people strode about, lending a hand. He could hear the wagers being laid, and see the families leaving the fire to crowd round.
    If the heir to the throne was to take part, surely the rest would be safe. His uncle Adorne, standing quietly behind, said, ‘I don’t think you could stop it. Maarten will take care of your sister. Don’t you want to join in? You used to do things like that with Nicholas.’
    He had, long ago, when he was twelve and Nicholas a sophisticated sixteen, an apprentice called Claes who knew every kitchenmaid and was the source of every inventive exploit in Bruges. Sersanders had known Julius too, partly as the Charetty lawyer who could chastise them both; partly as the young man who, off duty, was not averse to some adventure himself.
    Today, he had exchanged hardly a word with Julius or with Nicholas vander Poele, once Claes, apart from that silly exchange about Katelijne. The camaraderie had gone. With his uncle, too, there had been a change in the old kindly relationship. Of course, wealth and power made men cold, even cruel. It wasn’t surprising. Only he found himself thinking of the man by his surname this time. He was vander Poele: he was not a friend you called Claes. Sersanders said, ‘At least they don’t seem to be going to swim.’
    He missed the first race, but joined the next one, and did quite well, with Maarten this time running beside him and yelling. They had a donkey race next, and then the pinners’ men took them on at the tursing, which meant a race with a two-hundredweight load on your back. The professionals won that, but vander Poele and Julius led the laymen behind them, and vied with each other over the last hundred yards, using every dirty trick of toe and knee and shoulder anyone had ever heard of, accompanied by a stream of unquotable badinage. The boy Duke had tears streaming from his pale eyes, and Katelijne was white with delight and exertion.
    Then Liddell said, ‘Why don’t we sing?’
    So, as the moon shone on the sea, they settled round the red glowing mound of the fire, and the young gentlefolk sang, as Master Lamb had predicted. Now the families had begun to walk back through the sand to their cabins, and the artisans, for whom the day started at dawn, had with reluctance plodded back to the workshops. But many stayed, young men mostly, with a few elders hoping to catch a royal glance, plus a few who had snored themselves into their night’s happy sleep. All the royal party was there, and the Flemings, even to Dr Andreas.
    Anselm Sersanders was not a great man for music, although he had heard plenty of it in church and had a full student’s repertoireof verses and rounds and choruses, dirty and clean. The Adornes, because of their family church, were painfully assiduous