“To the very kingdom of Cathay on the shores of the Ocean Sea! Zane—Flora—neither of you can dream what we’ve seen! And I must tell you now—in our first hour together—that in just a little while we must go again. Such we have promised the King—Kublai Khan we call him—the greatest king on the earth.”
“He’s made us the bearer of great tidings to his Holiness the Pope,” Maffeo explained when my father paused. “He entreats him to send one hundred priests, learned men and pious, to his Court, there to instruct and baptize the heathen hosts—and we, Nicolo and I, are to lead them there.[3] I want you to be the first to know of the great honor paid us, and anyway, it can’t be kept secret any longer.”
“Not only honor,” my father added. “The one of us whom he favors most will be made his viceroy—virtually the king—of a realm as great as France, to have and hold its revenues for five years. The other will sit on his Council for the same period. Then we’ll both return to Venice, rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”
This was the news I was waiting for. It was natural enough for my father to reveal it in the first half-hour of his own and Maffeo’s return. It was the meat of the coconut, as Mustapha used to say.
The news itself was of such prodigious moment in my fate that I did not instantly perceive a strange fact of its transmission. I had not merely overheard it, as seemed the case with the previous announcements; I had been included in the audience. Perhaps he had become conscious of my presence without realizing or even suspecting who I was. It might be so, but I did not believe it. Instead I believed that the news was for my ears more than any, and in this degree he had acknowledged me at last.
At that instant, Aunt Flora took notice of me too. Perhaps she had never forgotten I was here, but one shock after another had caused her to neglect me until now. The immediate stimulus was some echo of the silent communication between my father and me. She stiffened and changed color.
“I’ll leave my boys here, with allowances for their care and schooling,” my father was saying. “Then when the new Pope is elected——”
Aunt Flora gave forth a gasp so deep it sounded like a sob. “Nicolo!”
“What is it, Flora?”
“You haven’t spoken to Marco!”
She spoke rapidly in an excited tone. That caused the slow voicing and quiet of his reply to be all the more marked.
“No doubt you mean this young man.” And very slowly he turned and looked me in the face.
“Don’t you know who he is? Blessed Jesus, forgive my sin!”
“If he’s the one of whom you have written me—you call him Marco Polo—I know only too well who he is.”
“Oh God, there’s some awful mistake. He’s your son. Nicolo, he’s your firstborn, by your wife Lucia. Your own begotten——”
“I regret to tell you, Flora, that Lucia bore me no son. De mortuis nil nisi bonum—yet I must speak.”
“Jesus, mercy!”
“If this is Lucia’s son, which I have no doubt, he’s the son of her lover, one Antonello, a wandering jongleur from Perugia. Only for the sake of her fame have I suffered him to bear my name.”[4]
3
The great consternation created in our company by my father’s words caused a long, heavy, almost breathless silence. I was deeply grateful for it, because it gave me time to rally my faculties and act. The action was in my head, but it was no less positive than many by my hands, and hardly less violent. I forced my thoughts through a welter of hopes and fears, weaknesses and strengths, to a sure conclusion. I was quite certain that I need never question it in the future.
Certainly to us, and perhaps to himself as well, my father, Nicolo Polo, had told a black lie.
My father’s gaze was fixed on my face. I did not return it—my instinct was to refrain from any act of defiance. He was red in the face, his stunned hearers white. The silence stretched for second after second and I wondered if I would be the one to break it. I did not wish to and looked to my aunt Flora.
She remained aghast, but out of the corner of my eye I saw a sudden darkening of the dull-white face of my uncle Zane.
“God’s wounds!” he burst forth like a thunderclap.
“Oh, my lord!” cried his wife.
“What’s this you’re saying?” Zane persisted, turning with great energy to my father. “That Marco’s your wife’s bastard? Then what of the message you sent him in the secret writing?”
A perverse impulse to laugh aloud swept me from head to heel, but I contained it, and only a gasp came out.
“What secret writing?” my father demanded in a loud voice.
“In your last letter to Flora. You spoke of your dear son Marco—how you’d make him your heir——”
“By my saints, we’ve all been bitten by tarantulas! I sent no secret writing. Would I endow the living monument, the very witness, to Lucia’s infidelity and my own pain?”
“Then it was the Devil’s work. It was a wicked enchantment, to ruin me, worked with the Devil’s fire. Flora swore to the handwriting. On the strength of it I’ve spent God knows how many lire on Marco’s care.”
“Was it signed and sealed before an officer of the Court?”
“No it wasn’t, and why should I expect it to be, when ’twas sent from some heathen land? You’d never told us of his bastardy. You let us go on thinking he was your own——”
“When I left here—and it was the cause of my leaving—I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone of the disgrace. I was not even sure that Lucia was with child—she swore she wasn’t. After I had gone, I dared not write the truth, for only a fraction of my letters reached you—most of them were rifled and no doubt read by rogues and rival merchants.”
“That may be, but I’ll have my money back, fair weather or foul.”
“Uncle Zane, I’ll pay you every dinero,” I said.
My voice was more firm than I dared hope. To my surprise, it worked another silence, not as explosive as the other, but more strained. Aunt Flora looked deeply distressed and my father tense. There was malice in Leo’s eyes. He was not sure that the secret writing was the Devil’s work.
“I’ll fetch the letter, Papa, if you’ll give me leave,” he said.
“I think that would be best,” my father said gravely.
In a moment it was in his hands. He looked at it with knitted brows, then called for a lighted candle. After he had toasted it a moment, he examined it carefully, reread the doctored writing, and put it down.
“It’s not the Devil’s work,” he told Zane. “Only a clever trick.”
“Who’s the trickster? By heaven, he should hang!”
“It’s someone who’s acquainted with alchemy—Arabian, most likely—or who knows someone of that ilk.”
“Uncle Nicolo, Marco has been seen hundreds of times at the house of an old Arab in Spinalunga,” spoke up my cousin Leo.
“Then I don’t think we need search much further for the forger. However, I am seeing the offense in a little different light than at first. The truth is—and I admit it freely—I’ve not dealt altogether fairly with Lucia’s son Marco. The sin was wholly on her head, not in the least on his, yet it has been visited upon him in no small measure.”
“I’m not sure that I follow you, Brother Nicolo,” said my uncle Zane. His polite tone did not mean that he had forgotten the small sum I had bilked him of, rather that he remembered the vast sum to accrue to my father from his coming venture.
“Pardon me a moment. Marco, did your mother confess to you, before she died, that you weren’t my son? Did she boast of it, I’d better say? ’Tis true you were hardly four years old, still it’s possible that you’d remember.”
“No, your Honor, she didn’t.”
“And the notion never entered your head?”
“No, sir. How could it?”
“Then of course you were puzzled and hurt that I made no mention of you in my letters. Finally you succumbed to temptation to forge a mention, for your pride’s sake——”