My husband and I are determined to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Our preparations are made, and he has taken every precaution, including the arranging of a special dispensation at Avignon. His intention is to join the crusade at Venice. My intention is to travel with my children. Please be kind enough to inform me when the legate thinks that the fleet might sail, so that I will not be late. I will come with my own household, and my own knights.
But be assured that I will come.
Emile d’Herblay
I looked up. Juan was glaring like a basilisk at Nerio. He turned and looked at me.
‘He just said you were a peasant!’ Juan said.
‘No,’ Nerio shook his head. ‘I said he worked like a peasant.’ The young Italian realised he’d gone too far.
I beamed my happiness at them all. ‘Let’s go out and have a cup of wine,’ I said. ‘On me.’
Under my happiness was the knowledge that she had also sent me a warning. But I’d already seen the man. I knew what I was up against. I thought of him as the man I’d bested at Brignais, the man who wouldn’t face me in an alley in Avignon. He wasn’t worth spit.
Or so I thought.
From Padua we turned back south, so that we had wasted two days travel.
Father Pierre merely shrugged and said it was God’s will, and that he had reason to visit Chioggia. Now, today, every soldier in Europe knows of Chioggia, but then, it was merely a prosperous town, the southern land-link between the Serenissima and the mainland. The town was well walled, with a drawbridge and a long causeway road across a series of dykes all the way back to the mainland. It had a beautiful central tower of red brick and two fine churches, as well as a monastery on a nearby island and a forest of ships in her port. It was a fine place, with two central canals, and it gave me a taste of Venice without overawing me all at once.
We arrived late in the day, and Father Pierre went to the island monastery by boat with Fra Peter and Fra John and Sister Marie. The rest of us had to make shift. We stood on the central square — a square that would have graced London or York, let me add, with fifty palaces and great houses fronting on it. They formed an unbroken facade, and every house had a covered, arched portico on the ground floor, so that a man could walk all the way around the square and only be exposed to the elements at the places where the roads came between the houses. Most were three storeys tall, and fronted in stone. All had magnificent chimneys like Turk’s heads atop poles, and in every case, curious to the English eye, the chimneys rose off the front of the house and came down almost to the front door. I later learned that this was a Greek style. The whole town smelled of fish.
I am prosing on. At any rate, there we stood in the main square, having just seen the legate into his boat at the piers, and Ser Niccolo grinned his evil grin at me. ‘And where do you imagine you’ll stay this night, Messire Englishman?’ he asked.
‘An inn?’ I asked.
Ser Niccolo shook his head. ‘There are two inns in Chioggia. They are fine establishments, but we will fill them both to overflowing. Come, let me introduce you to my friends, the Corners of Chioggia.’
The Corners, a cadet branch of the mighty Venetian family, lived in mercantile splendour in a three-storey palazzo fronting on the square. It had room after room and the whole house seemed to me to be an endless profusion of blue and gold, bronze and aqua, over and over. The donna Signora wore jewels of lapis and aquamarine, and her husband was one of the richest men in the town. They were very deferential to Ser Niccolo and Ser Nerio, and I was delighted to be drawn in with them. I slept in a magnificent covered bed with Ser Nerio and Juan, and we drank Candian wine and played dice and went to Mass, which was said in a Latin so touched with the tongue of the Veneto that I understood little but the Kyrie.
Really, the only reason I remember Chioggia — except for what came later, of course — is that night, Madonna Corner was complaining to her husband that the house was overstaffed with male servants. This led to a long, rambling account of the process by which one man had been disciplined for some crime so arcane I couldn’t get the gist, but was too old a family retainer to be dismissed. Again, they all spoke the Venetian dialect, Veneziano, of which I understood so little that I had to constantly ask my hosts to explain.
Ser Niccolo was his usual debonair self in green wool and gold silk and fur, and he was wearing tall boots — up to the top of his hose, in fact, which matched his clothes. I remember this, because when he rose he was oddly discordant with the blue and gold house.
He rose to his feet because the erring manservant had come in. The man was short and portly, but not fat; he had a cherubic face and a shock of bright red hair.
‘Come,’ Ser Niccolo said. ‘William Gold, I have found you the perfect page.’
The man had the good grace to appear abashed.
‘What’s your name, sir?’ I asked.
‘Marc-Antonio,’ he said softly. ‘You are English?’
I nodded, a little surprised at his boldness. ‘I am.’
He dropped his eyes, but he couldn’t hide his smile.
‘We cannot cast him out, as he is one of my husband’s bastards,’ the lady of the house said. She rolled her eyes. ‘Judas Iscariot, I call him.’
Hah. When I was a boy, that’s what they called me.
After evening prayer, I was throwing dice with Nerio and Fiore, who were still not friends. It was exhausting, keeping them from blows. But it passed the time.
‘I had an eight, until you jarred the dice box,’ Fiore stated.
‘Why were you so clumsy as to strike me with it?’ Accaioulo asked.
‘Why were you so clumsy as to allow it to touch you?’ Fiore asked.
Juan was lying on our bed, playing with the points of his doublet while I sewed a new metal aiguillette on one. ‘Why don’t you two get a private room?’ Juan asked. ‘Then you can have your lover’s quarrels without troubling your elders.’
Believe me, his Catalan accent made him sound even more arrogant.
‘I suppose you’d prefer if I was in the eaves with the servants,’ Fiore asked, clearly stung. Fiore’s relative poverty weighed on him far more than it need have, but he was very proud.
Juan swung his legs off the bed. ‘I said nothing of the sort. William, you are a fine tailor, whatever I may think of you as a knight.’
Nerio was looking down his nose at Fiore, but he couldn’t resist an opportunity. ‘I hear he’s a fine pastry cook, too,’ he jibed. ‘And he does leatherwork.’
The room was too small for so many young men. But rain was falling like the wrath of God on Noah, and we had nowhere to go.
Ser Niccolo knocked and was admitted, at which time everyone had to shift, we were packed that close. ‘William, can you afford to keep a page?’
‘Can he fight?’ I asked. ‘If so, yes.’
If I wondered why the richest man in Italy, the chancellor of the Kingdom of Naples, was working on finding me a servant, I didn’t ask. I sensed that Accaioulo was a matchmaker at heart: it may have been the key to his success at negotiations.
Nerio smiled to himself and turned away.
Ser Niccolo nodded. ‘I’m sure he can fight, or if not, you can teach him, or your Friulian can. But he needs to leave here. Madonna is a fine woman, but her natural inclination leads her to be …’ He paused, looking for a word that would not be indelicate or unchivalrous.
‘To be petty?’ I asked.
Ser Niccolo waved a hand in front of his face, the universal Northern Italian sign for a word or phrase that was too strong. The he frowned. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted.
Well, I needed a servant.
Fiore glared at Nerio. ‘Why is your father planting a spy on Sir William?’ he asked.
Nerio stood up suddenly and put a hand on his dagger. ‘Withdraw that!’ he spat.