He met Angelo Tani, the Medici manager, before he had crossed the threshold of the handsome, towered building by the Bourse. Tani said, “I’m off to a meeting, but go in. Tommaso’s there somewhere. There was a message for you – why here, I don’t know. A boy brought it. You’re wanted at Silver Straete this afternoon, at Florence van Borselen’s house.”
Nicholas heard his voice saying, “I thought he was away.”
“He is. His daughter Katelina wants to see you. Hangings for the accouchement, perhaps. They’ve bought some fine christening silver from me already. They pay, too.”
“So they do,” Nicholas said. He stood looking after Tani, and was bumped once or twice by people coming out or in. A boy of fourteen, a giovane, said politely, “If you want Messer Tommaso, he’s gone to the stables.”
The civility was not unmixed with something else. Looking again, Nicholas saw it was the boy he and Felix had spoken to, the day they had taken the Medici barge with Lionetto to Damme. Nicholas said, “I hear you’re keeping the whole company right these days. What’s Messer Tommaso doing? Taking a journey?”
The youth became a little less guarded. The power of Milanese manager Pigello, it was easy to see, hung over the Bruges branch of the Medici. The boy said, “Oh, no. He’s gone to look at the ostrich again.” One of his eyes gleamed.
Nicholas said, “Again?”
“To look at its droppings,” the youth said. Both eyes gleamed.
With a gigantic effort, Nicholas detached his mind from everything else and said, his chin on his chest, “Messer Tommaso is doctoring it?”
The Medici giovane gave a sudden and seraphic grin. He said, “No. He’s just watching its droppings. It’s eaten Messer Tommaso’s hat jewel and two of his rings.”
Nicholas said, “I should have thought it was the giovane’s job, to help your under-manager with a problem like that.”
The boy looked at his face, and then, relieved, grinned again. “He tried to make me, the first day. But he got the idea I wasn’t looking closely enough.”
“Poor Messer Tommaso,” said Nicholas. “Well, suppose you and I both go and help him? We could hold his jacket. I suppose he takes off his jacket?”
“One of the grooms gives him an apron,” said the boy. “But some of them say the rings could stay inside the ostrich for ever.”
“Or emerge as an extra, late gift for the Duke of Milan,” Nicholas said. They were walking through the house to the stable yard. He said, “Is the bird better, then?”
“They say so,” said the boy. “You heard about the shellfish?”
“Yes,” said Nicholas. “Who on earth fed it shellfish?”
“It ate them itself,” the boy said. “Wading ashore from the wreck. Then it worked through a whole field of corn before they could catch it. It runs very fast. It took eight horsemen to get hold of it, because they had to watch not to damage its feathers. It likes little birds.”
“That’s rather charming,” said Nicholas.
“To eat. And insects. And grasses. They’ve had to keep it in its travelling box, or it steals all the feed from the horses. It has this very long neck. And long legs. It kicks with its legs when Messer Tommaso tries to look in the box.”
“How did – how did it get hold of his rings?” Nicholas asked. They had emerged into the yard. From the furthest stables came the sound of thudding, accompanied by a low, booming roar. Nicholas said, “Not the bird?”
“That’s the ostrich,” said the boy. “It roars when it’s unhappy. It usually hisses when it sees Messer Tommaso. Sometimes it cackles. His rings came off when he pulled his hands too quickly back from the bar.”
“I expect it cackled then,” Nicholas said. “This stable? Well, the horses look all right. And that’s the travelling box. It’s very tall.”
“It’s a big bird,” said the boy. “Five feet to its back; eight feet to its head. A cock. You tell by the black and white plumes. That’s what makes them so valuable. The big black and white plumes.”
Tommaso Portinari was not, at the moment, peering into the box where the ostrich stood. He was not, either, inside the box inspecting its droppings. He had not even replaced his jacket with the leather apron which hung from his hands as he stood, his back to a post, contemplating his feet. He looked up, with deliberation. Adversity suited him. He was pale. The dark, ruffled hair, cut round his brow and across the top of his ears, framed the long-nosed antelope face with its fine arched brows and high cheekbones. His expression was one of a man pushed beyond endurance.
Nicholas said, “Your boots. It’s eaten your boots?”
For answer, Tommaso Portinari merely turned his head on one shoulder and nodded towards the box. It was an extremely stout box, as befitted a cage for a 300-pound bird. The sides were solid, with windows let into them. The top consisted of open spars. The whole contraption stood filling a horse-stall and emanating a smell of rotting fruit, bruised grass and ostrich. Nicholas jumped for the frame of the horse-stall and straddled its wall, looking down at the far-travelled captive. Then he started to laugh.
It was what Julius saw as he crossed the yard into the stables, having set out with many misgivings to track down someone called Nicholas de St Pol who was still married to his employer. He expected to find him in some sort of extremity. Instead he heard the fearsome sound of Claes in a fit of idiot laughter. A sound which had enticed him into many a scrape in the past, and had maddened him equally often.
The noise came from the top of a horse stall. Claes … Nicholas was sitting there, bowing up and down and exploding, while down below, Tommaso Portinari and a boy were gazing up at him. Next to the stall was a strong-smelling box from which came thudding noises, accompanied by spitting and hissing. Julius reached Tommaso and looked up and said, “What? The ostrich?”
“Go and look,” Nicholas called. He stooped for a hay-rake and pointed. “There’s a window at the side.”
Julius went and looked. The boy was already there. The boy’s face had gone red. Tommaso stood where he was, apparently studying the rafters. Nicholas, whining with laughter, handed himself to the front edge of the wall from which Julius could see his expectant face, the dimples like nutshells. Julius peered into the box.
The ostrich hissed back at him. It had a small, fuzzy head, a beak like a hinge and pale, hostile eyes that reminded him of Tobie. The head topped a long twitching neck like a bellrope. Both were being carried up and down the box by a pair of thick, stalking legs with powerful elbows. Between neck and legs was something like a large chicken joint crossed with a pincushion. A shell-pink naked flap depended from either flank.
The pincushion was its plucked body. The sore-looking rump, the silly flaps, were where forty snow-white plumes and a mantle of fine glossy black had once proudly been flaunted. Someone, in the night, had pruned the Duke of Milan’s present. The ostrich was there, but there wasn’t a feather left on it.
It danced on its strong legs. It darted its beak through the spars, its eyes flashing. Every now and then it would kick, and the side of the box would vibrate and echo. Nicholas, weeping with laughter, reached down with the hay-rake to prod it.
And the door of the ostrich-box opened.
Tommaso, lost in bitterness, didn’t notice. The boy whooped. Julius leaped but was far, far too late. Neck stretched, the bird took its first step outside, and then its second. Tommaso whirled round. The boy ran forward shouting. The ostrich delivered its low, booming roar. And Nicholas, just as it took its third step and swung a leg for its fourth, launched himself from his perch and landed fair and square on its back as it passed him.
Julius yelled, and started to run. Nicholas yelled too, but in a different way – in a crowing sort of way that was all too familiar. The ostrich burst from the stables, toed its way over the paving and sprang, like a haunch escaped from the oven, through the big double doors and into Vlamynck Straete, with Nicholas crazily bouncing and hugging it.
Julius gave a gasp. He raced for the street w
here the ostrich, not yet into its stride, was darting from side to side in a haphazard way, impeded by vehicles trundling down from the Waterhalle. The ostrich boomed. The street blossomed, like a garden of sunflowers, with pale, turning faces. Capped heads and white-coifed heads began to surge up steps on either side, vanish through doors, squeeze between houses. A man with two bales on his back staggered out of the way and found himself jammed under the jut of a building. A wheelbarrow, left overturned, disgorged a torrent of round, glossy cheeses. One of them struck the ostrich on the leg and the ostrich lifted its foot and kicked irritably. A cask of quicksilver, left at a trapdoor, began to spout a glittering stream of liquid which almost certainly spelled ruin for somebody. Nicholas, still clinging, looked round as it happened. His face was pink with effort and happiness.
Julius croaked. He turned and raced back into the stables, sending grooms staggering. He wrenched open stalls and jumped bareback on the first horse he found with a harness. Then, already followed by others, he made out into the street and after Nicholas. Claes. After another mad escapade.
By then the ostrich wasn’t in sight, but you could tell where it had been from the split bales and dropped parcels. Balconies sported a sequence of cropped vines and munched pot-flowers and, twice, empty bird-cages hung drunkenly open. A corner shrine had toppled, leaving only a vase with some stalks in it.
Julius turned his horse and rode for the canal and was in time to see the ostrich emerging from the Augustinians’ gateway with Nicholas still on its back. It was moving extremely fast but was now wearing some sort of rein. It looked, from the distance, like the cord from a cassock.
One of the reasons why it was moving so fast was that there were by now several dogs at its heels. Every now and then the ostrich would pause to kick, and the dogs would skid out of the way. Then the ostrich would set off again, hissing and cackling. Julius, still some way behind, could see Nicholas clinging on with one hand and wielding the looped cord with the other, trying to prevent the bird from crossing the bridge into Spangnaerts Street.
He failed. The bird set off up the street, kicking bales as it went and stabbing grilles with its beak. Two quilts, hung out for airing, started to fall in a cloudburst of feathers. Nicholas caught one of them and, single-handed, attempted to stuff it between the cut quills and his bottom. Julius, crying with laughter, raced behind him. Towards the Tonlieu. The weigh-houses. The market.
The bird checked now and then: for a stall loaded with berries; when, twice, groups of determined men barred the street or attempted to corner it. The delays were only brief. Two swipes of those powerful legs, and everyone scattered. The Crane went by, and the Hall and the belfry. The bird darted over the bridge to the Steen, with screaming people running before it. Soon it would come to the fields and gardens between the Ghent and Holy Cross bridges where it would be free to run as fast as it liked. An ostrich could cover forty miles in an hour, so they said – fast enough to kill any rider it threw off. Nicholas didn’t seem to be worrying. Every now and then he turned upon Julius a wild, ridiculous grin, and once he freed a hand and gestured ahead and to the left. What he meant, Julius couldn’t yet fathom.
Behind, now, other horsemen were coming. They’d halt the creature by converging on it from side streets, and using thrown rope to hamper, then bind it. Except that ahead lay open ground. Julius spurred his horse and slewed round a corner and saw, at last, what Nicholas was trying to tell him.
Ahead was the shallow, turgid water of one of the spoke canals that joined Bruges’ encircling river. Pushing hard, Nicholas was shoving the bird off the road and down one of the slopes in the canal bank. The ostrich galloped into the water and slowed. Its head swung from side to side. A group of swans, busily feeding, came upright with an agitated splash, stared, and then rose to tread water hissing round the intruder. The intruder hissed back, struck, and a swan hurtled into the air. The others, necks outstretched, advanced uproariously. The ostrich, outnumbered, struck twice more and then set off up the canal, wings labouring. Occasionally it dipped and rolled, with a streaming Nicholas so far still adhering.
By now there were half a dozen horsemen with Julius. Ahead, the canal flowed under a bridge to join the circling river. Ahead, also, the ground rose to a broad embankment on which the windmills were planted. Horses could move quicker, now, than the bird in the water. Julius sent two ahead, to cross the bridge and threaten the bird from the east. Then he drew the others carefully back in a half-circle beside the only place it could leave the water, a sloping ramp leading to one of the windmills.
He forgot that the purpose of windmills is to grind, and that the ostrich was hungry. Up to a point, the ruse worked perfectly. The bird, scared by the horsemen on the left bank, turned for the ramp on the right. It emerged, its naked pink body effulgent; its rider a living cascade of canal water. Julius and the rest moved gently forward. The ostrich saw the sacks of corn in the yard, and the grain heaped and strewn all about it, and ran straight under the wheel of the sails to get at it.
Julius yelled a superfluous warning. He expected Nicholas to kick; to drag the bird away by its rope; to abandon it and roll off its back. The sails, creaking and thudding, moved round; missed the bird; threatened it; missed it once more. The ostrich lowered and raised its neck, feeding, looking about it, diving to feed again. It moved a little, one leg and then the other, but always close to the mill, mesmerised by the feast spread before it. And, as all action and all need for action came to a halt, so Nicholas returned to his senses.
Julius had no means of knowing. Filled with alarm, and even anger, he saw Nicholas sit, his face blank, his hands loose on the cord and do nothing.
The horsemen with Julius, staring, hung back. Julius didn’t. Julius, his head down, his body clamped in the saddle, forced his horse forward and under the sails to where the ostrich was feeding. He used his spurs, bloodily, to push himself between the bird and the mill. And then, disregarding the open beak, the stamping feet, he rammed his horse into the flank of the bird, so that the creature came flailing out into the yard, hissing and kicking, to where the other horsemen were waiting.
It took five minutes more to corner it between them and truss it. Before then, Nicholas left its back. He couldn’t, at first, stand at all. Julius relinquished him, and went to help with the bird, and saw it set off, safely held, on its journey back to the Florentine stableyard. The riders, drunk with excitement, did an admiring lap of honour round Nicholas first and Julius had to say to him “Wave!”
He looked up then, and gave some kind of a wave. He was shaking like a man with a disease; but after exertion, or a fright, men often did that, and they would think none the worse of him. But of course it wasn’t that, or marsh fever. And yet … Nicholas had, he knew, tripped the latch of the bird’s box himself.
To begin with, Julius had been happy to think that he was in the company of lunatic Claes, restored to them again. But of course, that freedom could never come back. If it had come back even for an hour, it was for the wrong reasons. A moment’s reflection had told him that. A moment’s reflection, added to what had happened under the windmill.
Now Julius said, “Why don’t we get the miller to find a spot where you can rest? We’ll send a boy for dry clothes.”
He expected, and got, no reply. Speech had no part in this sort of crisis. He was ready for anything, but in fact Nicholas neither fainted nor wept nor collapsed in any spectacular way. Simply, once in the mill, he sat on some straw, curled tightly and erratically shivering. Someone brought a blanket for him and a drink, and then sensibly went away at a gesture. Julius sat down beside the demoiselle de Charetty’s former apprentice and tried, unusually for him, to fathom what had happened. And then, to conceive what to do about it.
Trained to deal at second hand with critical events in the lives of others, he seldom found himself, like this, a participant. He cleared his throat. He looked at what little he could see of Nicholas, which consisted of segments of arm for the most part. Jul
ius said, “Well, some people get drunk and some ride ostriches. But we all have to get back to real life some time. I don’t see that you need be afraid of it. We all agree, you know, that you were quite right to do what you did, under the circumstances. Tobie thinks so. And Goro. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t all go on just as we did before. The demoiselle would agree.”
He paused. From what he could hear of his breathing, Nicholas was still unlikely to speak. On the premise that his ears must be working, Julius studiously went on with his monologue.
“The trouble is, of course, that you get carried away. You know. Like … Like Felix did. The demoiselle understands that as well. In fact, she’s asked us to help you. Whatever ideas you have, you won’t be alone in acting on them. If they go wrong, then we’ll all be to blame. Soon, you’ll have as much experience anyway as we have. So forget what you’ve done. In the future, it’s going to be different.”
While he was speaking, he could see Nicholas compel himself to be still. Elbows on knees, he sat with his palms over his face. His hair, in wet coils and rings, dripped over his brow and neck and shoulders, where the blanket had shifted. He spoke at last. He said, “You don’t know what I’ve done.”
Julius paused. Then he said, “Then I don’t want to know. Start afresh. You can.”
Silence. Nicholas cleared the wet from his face with one hand, then brought up a corner of blanket and rubbed his face and hair slowly with it. He said, “I suppose I can.”
It was an agreement for the sake of form only. But at least it meant that he had a grip of himself again. Nicholas with his brain working was easier to deal with than Nicholas defenceless, when you had no idea how to help him.
Julius said, “Don’t do anything silly again. It isn’t worth it. It’s unfair to the demoiselle, too.”
“Yes. Of course you’re right,” said Nicholas slowly. He stopped rubbing his hair and found a smile, quite remarkably. “But I’ll pay for the damage, not the demoiselle. I only hope none of the dogs belonged to Simon.”