The monk gazed at me with sober interest. “Ethlebight?” he said. “There is a monastery in that city.”
“All taken,” I said.
“I shall try to organize a ransom for our brothers,” he said.
Because, I thought, what Ethlebight most needs now is more monks. Still, I suppose Ambrosius’s actions will save the city money that may be used to ransom others.
“I see now how you became distressed and in need of his grace’s aid,” Blackwell said. “But his grace spoke of bandits as well as the pirates?”
“Sir Basil of the Heugh and his band,” I said. “Who one day I hope to see hanged, along with the rogue who betrayed Ethlebight.”
The duchess was surprised at this last. “Who was that last?” she asked. “I had not heard there was a traitor.”
I explained how the reivers had attacked with foreknowledge of the channel, the city’s defenses, and its chief inhabitants.
“There has to have been a renegade among the pirates,” I said. “A dog I hope to send to a new kennel in hell.”
Blackwell frowned at his plate. “You don’t know who that person would be?”
“I do not,” I admitted. “Though I think that it would not be hard for a someone in the reivers’ home port to find out. He would be richly rewarded, I’m sure, and that sort of money would attract attention.”
The duke frowned at me. “Is it your intention to seek this traitor yourself?”
“I know not,” I said. “The pirates have deprived me of all attachments and affections, and nothing holds me in Duisland. There is nothing to hinder me from crossing the seas on a mission of vengeance—nothing but the likelihood that I would fail. I’m a lawyer, not a soldier or assassin or spy.”
The abbot looked at me and stroked his white beard. “He who embarks on vengeance,” he said, “should first dig two graves, one for his intended victim, the other for himself.”
“Before I can dig a grave for myself,” I told him, “I have other duties. I must try to rally as much help to my city as I can. I must see my family properly buried. After all that, I can worry about what follows.”
“I should not like to see you throw your life away on some foolhardy adventure,” said the duchess.
I looked into her crystal-blue eyes. “I am touched by your grace’s concern.”
And I was touched, too, and a little puzzled at how to view the young duchess, and from what perspective. She was attractive, bright, lively, and kind, and married to a man much older than she. It was not entirely unknown for women in these circumstances to view me with a degree of tenderness.
Were I in Ethlebight, I would understand my position. But as she was a duchess, and I a nobody far from his home, I was at a loss as to how to proceed.
And besides, I rather liked her husband, who had furthermore been very kind to me. I did not wish to abuse hospitality, nor did I wish the duke an injury. So, I restrained my gallant instincts insofar as I could.
“I agree with you,” her husband said. “The identity of the renegade will come out in time.”
“The Chancellor tomorrow, then,” I said.
The duke nodded. “Indeed.”
And then the conversation shifted to other topics. The duke was giving to the Queen’s war a pair of giant bronze cannon, enormous weapons that fired stone cannonballs weighing sixty-eight pounds. Impractical on the battlefield—they would have to be drawn by trains of forty horses—these were intended for the sieges that were considered almost inevitable. Ransome had been engaged for the casting, and he discoursed at some length on the miraculous recipe for the metal. As I had guessed from the discussion of essences, distillations, and the Nurse of Caelum, Ransome held himself an expert in alchemy, and to his own private mixture of copper and tin added orpiment, philosopher’s wool, magnesia alba, and ground diamonds for strength, all in combinations held in close secret.
Abbot Ambrosius, for his part, would make his own contribution to the enterprise, and would send twenty-four of his monks to pray and chant over the metal for twenty-four days before, during, and after the casting, to infuse the weapons with strength, accuracy, and the power to smash walls to rubble.
“For exalted power such as this,” he said, “can only be summoned by those in a state of absolute purity, and I flatter myself that the discipline of the Path of the Pilgrim Monastery is second to none.”
The monks in Ethlebight, I reflected, made no magic that I know of, so perhaps their purity was not up to standard. Certainly, they did not perform sorcery upon artillery.
I wondered what the Pilgrim himself would say about such practice. I understood his philosophy to aim at personal perfection, not the ability to knock down city walls.
As for the actor Blackwell, he was a principal of the Roundsilver Company, one of the capital’s leading bands of players. The duke was sponsoring Blackwell’s performance of The Red Horse, or the History of King Emelin, which would be performed for her majesty.
While the discussion wandered from play-acting to alchemy, from poetry to siege artillery, dinner arrived in its many courses. Herbed tarts, pies stuffed with pork belly, rabbit simmered in its own heavily spiced blood, sirloin of beef basted with orange juice and rose water, a fine mess of eels, curlews with ginger, badgers with apricots, porpoise and salmon. Every dish was a beautiful display, surrounded by fruit or flowers in a dazzling design, the pork pies topped by pastry sculpture in the shape of a hog’s head, the sauces laid out in intricate patterns on the plate. Each course came with its own matched wine. Most of the dishes were highly seasoned with imported spices, a practice I find dubious. (As a display of wealth, it has much to recommend it; but a salmon hardly needs to be covered with shavings of nutmeg, or a beefsteak with sugar and cinnamon, in order to please the palate. But perhaps my tastes are hopelessly plebeian.)
The great culinary moment occurred with the Presentation of the Cockentrice—not the monstrous cockatrice such as that hung in the duke’s cabinet, but a chimera of a gastronomic kind: the front half of a piglet sewn to the rear half of a capon, then stuffed and roasted till its honey-brown skin crackled. This prodigy was wafted before our noses so that we might admire it, before being taken to the Master Carver to be sliced and served.
I watched my hosts carefully, all to learn proper behavior at this elite level of our commonwealth, to discover how to eat some of the novelties, and to find an example to follow amid all this extravagance: I imitated their graces and ate sparingly. Having been in their household for several days now, I knew that even the most intimate suppers featured this kind of lavish abundance, besides which the Queen’s roast swan dressed in its feathers seemed poor fare indeed.
And besides, I knew I’d have to go through all of this again for supper.
The thrift with which I had been raised protested against the waste and extravagance, but this was somewhat assuaged by my knowledge that the remains of the feast were given to the poor that daily lined the alley behind the palace. The duke’s leavings fed a multitude.
I wondered what the ragged, hungry poor thought of the marzipan castles, the pastry sculptures, and the fanciful chimerae like the Cockentrice. To a pauper these bestowings must have seemed as fantastical as if they descended from the banquet-tables of the gods.
I waited till the meal was ending, with a custard served on a dish made of sugar-plate, and eaten with a knife and fork also made of sugar. I turned to the abbot.
“Reverend sir, I begin to wonder at your erstwhile title. How is it that a servant of the Pilgrim can be a Philosopher Transterrene? Did not the Compassionate Pilgrim say that the proper study of man is man? And how is that man to be studied outside the bounds of the world?”
Ambrosius considered this question with the same serenity with which he had contemplated everything, except perhaps his dismissal as royal advisor. He frowned, then spoke.