“I wish I could favor you, Signor Angelos. I’m bound to that price.”
“Consider that she’s sixteen. Consider that she’s branded on the foot. Consider that most buyers don’t want beauty of her sort. But I’ll go one step further—to cut in half the distance between your price and my offer. That will mean nine hundred pieces of gold. There’s no dealer in Venice that wouldn’t dub me a fool.”
“I can’t accept less than one thousand.”
Angelos smiled faintly, sighed, rose to his feet. I would have believed this was a trick of his trade if I had not seen him rubbing his hands together as though he were washing them.
“Thank you for letting me see her, Signor Polo,” he said. “Good-by, Miranda, and may you have your heart’s desire.”
“That last is denied me, Paulos, but you may have a good profit from me, if you’ll be bold.”
Paulos gave her a great wondering glance. It seemed almost a moment before he could speak.
“First, why do you address me as Paulos? Is that fitting in a slave?”
“Signor Polo has caused me to forget, for a while, that I’m a slave. I pray your pardon.”
“You must be accustomed to calling wealthy merchants by their given names.”
“Whatever I was accustomed to is gone. I won’t do it again, signor.”
“How did wealthy merchants address you, if you’ll tell me?”
“It will do no harm to tell you, and it may do good. They called me ‘my lady.’ ”
“By Saint Theodore, I should have known it! But what did you mean by saying that I’d make a good profit from you?”
“Buy me at Signor Polo’s price, a thousand pieces of gold. Venice is only one dot on the face of the earth—don’t weigh me by its scales. If you’ll offer me only to buyers of my liking, I’ll bring you two thousand.”
“By Heaven, I believe you will!”
I started to speak but the hand of Fate clutched my throat. I saw Paulos turn slowly, his eyes glimmering.
“Signor Polo, I’ll meet your price of three thousand lire, payable in gold bezants within thirty-six hours. In earnest thereof, I pay into your hands the usual three per cent, which comes to thirty pieces of gold.”
He counted them out from a leathern bag and put them in my cupped hands. I gazed at them in soul-sick dread of a miracle sent from on high whereby they would change to thirty pieces of gilded silver. But they remained the good gold coin of Byzantium, of fair and lawful fineness. My weakness passed away.
2
On All Saints Day, four days distant, my cousin Leo would celebrate his twenty-first birthday. I remembered the date well for having repeatedly measured his exact seniority to me. The occasion would justify a feast at the home of my uncle Zane, and it was almost as sure that Nicolo and Maffeo Polo would be invited as that I would be left out. However, as brazenly as might one of the blackbirds in the Polo coat of arms, I intended to intrude. At that feast table would sit witnesses to my bargain with Nicolo, and long-eared servants with long memories would wait on them. It would be a good time and place, I thought, to seal the deal.
To anticipate the scene did not chill me as much as it would have before I received my mother’s legacy. It was as though my temperature was somewhat higher.
Meanwhile I had other business of moment. It caused me to waken at cockcrow on the morning following Miranda’s sale. The merest milky mist on the eastern waters betokened the waning of the night, but I was glad to get up and shed my troubled dreams. A dream witch had tried to persuade my spirit that the maiden was still mine, but a stubborn, dark-browed fellow with his hard head on the pillow spoiled all the sport.
Paulos Angelos would no doubt take possession of her sometime today. I thought to open her door softly and gaze upon her at the last hour of her last sleep in our house, but I mastered the impulse, or else the fear of needless pain mastered me.
Making for the gardeners’ market that Rosa frequented, I wore my best raiment instead of the plain clothes I had worn before. In my purse were five gold pieces of the earnest money for a gift to her, such a sum as she might have dreamed of possessing when she was young and hopeful, but in these late years as remote as the moon. I thought that her face would light up at the sight of me, and she would be pleased by the people watching when I greeted her, and a little later, when I slipped the lordly gift into her hand, she would not believe her eyes. Such a worn old hand to hold so much red gold!
How gladly and proudly then would she perform her last service to Lucia’s son—only to signal to me, from an upstairs window, as Nicolo sat at meat with his kinsmen.
But at the market I looked for her in vain. I waited long past her wonted time, then went to inquire for her at a certain stall where the lentils were extra-fine.
“I’m looking for old Rosa, whom I think you know,” I said to the gardener.
“Aye, I know her well, and I saved some leeks for her that she’d ordered, but she hasn’t come.”
A tall, thin woman, older than Rosa unless I missed my guess, sniffed at some garlic and laid it down.
“Are you speaking of the beldame who always wore a tirewoman’s habit, and spoke oft of her dead mistress Lucia?”
“That’s the one,” the gardener answered.
“She won’t come for the leeks.”
“I’d like to know why not.”
“Leastwise, if she does come, you wouldn’t see her, or if you did see her, you’d faint.”
“What news do you have of her?” I asked in a firm voice.
“According to Amelia, a charwench who’s friend to my granddaughter, she died in her sleep three nights past.”
The conversation between the two went on. I heard it, thin and strange, like voices in a dream.
“Why, I’m sorry to hear it,” the gardener announced.
“In the midst of life we are in death, the Good Book says.”
“Only three mornings past she was standing where you are now, looking at white turnips.”
“She’ll look at them no more, unless they’re planted in the churchyard, and she gazes up at ’em.”
“I could count on her Tuesdays and Fridays, as sure as the bell peal of San Marco. She’d only a few coppers to spend, but ’twas worth counting at year’s end. Signor, she’d be pleased to be asked for by a gentleman of your kidney. ’Tis a pity she won’t know of it, and that the business you had with her—to her benefit, I don’t doubt—has come to naught.”
I found my voice at last.
“Is she buried yet?” I asked the lean old woman.
“Why, gentleman, this is the third day! What would they be keeping her out for, an old bag of bones like her and me? The wench told my daughter she was buried the very day they found her. They can’t get us into the ground fast enough, us who’s out-lived our use.”
I gave Rosa’s survivor some silver and walked away. When my head had cleared a little, I made for the Church of the Last Supper, where she had worshiped ever since she had first come to Venice in my mother’s service. Moneywise, this church was poor, its congregation mainly folk of humble station, but, to my joy, it had an ample cemetery, where the dead need not lie crowded, and their bones could stay undisturbed till they molded away. A young priest spoke so warmly of the crone that it brought tears to my eyes; then he showed me her tomb.
“I should like to have Mass said every fortnight for a year, and on the anniversary of her death every year for ten years, for the forgiveness of her sins.”
“I didn’t know she had any,” was his surprising answer.
“You’d never guess it, it was true. You’d think she’d been shrived of every one by Father Time himself. But she did have. She died hating one who had done evil to one she’d loved.”
“She needs no praying for that. It’s a sin of the flesh, and when the flesh is off her bones, she’ll be rid of it.”
“Worse than that, she died praying that the son of the one she loved would take vengeance on the one she hated.”