The
painted canal boat of Anselm Adorne waited for her at the foot of the
gardens,
with three servants to care for her.
with three servants to care for her.
She
had them row her home the long way, past the convent of the Carmelites,
and St Giles' church, and the great pile of the Augustines, and the handsome
church of St James, from which could be seen the towers of the
Prinsenhof,
to which the Duke of Burgundy's bath had been dragged with such trouble.
She would not think of that, or the considering gaze of the notary Julius.
She
made them row her almost as far as the Friday market.
They
said that Venice had bridges too, but Bruges must have a hundred:
in stone with almond eyed saints and dulled guilding;
in stone with almond eyed saints and dulled guilding;
in
wood, with treacled timbers and bosses of greenery. ...
And
on either side passed the crooked banks of tiled houses, drunkenly cobbled
with crazy windows and flower pot balconies and roofs fluted like pastry
crusts. Their feet, their watergates, their warehouse doors were set in
the canal.
The
van Borselens were Zeelanders, but Katelina understood how it felt to
be a Bruges townsman. Edinburgh was grey stone and grey, silvered wood
and every roadway was vertical. Bruges was flat. Bruges was speckled warm
brick, its roads cloistered with towered mansions and palaces .
Bruges
was the multiple voices of working water; and the quality of brick thrown
echoes, and the hiss of trees and the flap of drying cloths in the flat
country wind, and the grunting like frogs in the marsh, of quires of crucified
clothes, left to vibrate in the fields of the tenters. Bruges was the
cawing of gulls, and the bell-calls.
