‘You are not the fair lady that Master Machaut expected,’ she said when she recovered.
Of course, I’d only met Guillaume de Machaut through Emile, and she knew all his music. With only a little importuning from the company, Emile sang, and the elder of the Corner girls picked up her tune and even the words in one repetition — a quick ear and no mistake. They sang two rounds and a motet. Then I joined them for a third.
Alors, it was a fine evening. I was with Emile — how could it be anything else? And when the wine had gone round and the girls gone to their beds, the padrone rose and toasted me. ‘You’ve made a fine young man of my wastrel son,’ he said. ‘My house is at your service. It is like a miracle from God.’
I shrugged; no man deals well with heartfelt praise. ‘He was a fine young man to start,’ I said.
Husband and wife glanced at each other and the wife’s sister looked at Marc-Antonio and snorted.
But my squire rose and bowed. ‘Thanks you, my lord, for your work. I am sensible of my debt,’ he said, with more gentility than I had expected.
If I needed a reward for my labours — and I don’t pretend I worked so very hard on Marc-Antonio — if I needed a reward, Emile’s appraising look and smile were beyond price.
At any rate, a fine evening. And when the countess had retired, I took Corner aside in his hall and asked him if the shops of the town could produce a doll. In a story, he’d have produced one in the morning, but instead, he sent my squire out and he returned empty-handed and defeated.
Italians are the most hospitable men and women in the world — they will never allow you to buy wine, and Corner obviously felt that the failure to provide a doll was a slight on his good name. He offered to have the attic ransacked for one of his daughter’s.
‘They’re all grown,’ he said. ‘All they think of now is shoes. And husbands.’
But somehow, in this empris, I suspected that little Magdalene needed a new doll.
That day, before we were ferried to the Lido, I sent a letter to Pisa, to John Hawkwood and Janet. And then we rode took the ferry to Pellestrina, and rode along the islands to Venice.
I think that, if the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and sixty-five deserves to be remembered, it is as the year in which nothing — nothing I imagined, anyway — ever seemed to occur as I had expected it.
I left Chioggia the happiest of men, and we rode the sandbanks and orchards of the outer islands like a company of pilgrims, telling stories and singing, and each time we dismounted for a cup of wine, I caught Emile around her waist, and her smile would take her like a flush of surprise. The gulls cried, the sardines were delicious, and I would have had that ride go on forever.
But all too soon we came to Venice. And in an hour, a boat ride, I lost Emile and her children and her men-at-arms to an island convent, where lodging had been prepared for them, and I was separated from her by a stretch of water that was as effective a barrier as the Alps. There was no goodbye, no touching farewell, no kiss. She was a great lady, and she and her party were greeted by officials of the Doge and I was treated … well, as what I was, a gentleman-servant.
The Doge’s secretary was kind enough to take me aside and tell me that the lapal legate wanted to see me as soon as I was at liberty. I sent Marc-Antonio to find us lodging with all our horses, and I walked across the square to the Doge’s palace where the legate had been given space to work.
As homecomings go, it was quite good. Fra Peter embraced me in the guardroom, and there were Juan and Miles and a dozen other men I knew, as well as most of the Knights of the Order that I had met and trained with at Avignon, here for the mounting of the Passagium Generale.
Fra Peter waited with what proved to be staggering patience while men embraced me, admired the Emperor’s sword, or praised my fighting at Krakow or warned me of the dire penances that the order demanded for breaking the rule against private warfare. I might have been more terrified if these threats hadn’t almost always been accompanied by a gruff laugh or a significant stare, and I had no idea I was in a hurry, but when I’d told my story three or four times, and I was just starting to describe the banquet to one of the Venetian captains, Fra Peter’s iron-hard right arm locked on my left and I was frog-marched to the stairs. As soon as we were safe on the first landing, I handed over the leather bag of scrolls and letters from Avignon.
‘Avignon!’ Fra Peter bit his lip. ‘We sent you to Vienna!’
I nodded. ‘I went to Nuremberg, heard the king was in the east, and I chased him all the way to Krakow,’ I said. ‘He sent me back to Avignon with letters patent and missals for the Pope.’
Fra Peter’s patience ran out. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.
‘The Pope? Still in Avignon — what in the name of all the saints?’ I asked, as my misunderstanding had been genuine, and Fra Peter was breaking my arm.
‘The king, you young fool. Where is the King of Jerusalem?’ he demanded.
‘On his way here,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I left him at Nuremberg. I rode to Avignon. He should have been here three weeks ago.’
Fra Peter shook his head and put two fingers to the bridge of his nose. ‘By Saint George and Saint Maurice and Holy Saint John, it has been a difficult two months. The soldiers-’
We both bowed to one of Father Pierre’s Italian clerics, who returned my bow with a smile, and then I saw Sister Marie and she allowed herself a broad smile.
‘Now that, my brother in Christ, is a sword,’ she said. She grinned. ‘When we have a moment, I’d like to fondle it.’ She laughed and retired to her cubicle by the legate’s office.
‘It’s very grand, after Avignon,’ I said to Fra Peter. In Avignon, Father Pierre had owned a cell like any serving brother and in it he kept his books and his desk, his prie-dieu and his sleeping pallet. I have known eight or ten men in that cell, or in the hall outside, waiting to confess, or waiting with messages or looking to consult.
The Doge was considerably more helpful than the Pope. The legate had a suite of rooms, so that Sister Marie had a closet to herself, and a brazier to fight the freezing damp; Father Pierre himself had a room with beautifully stuccoed walls, a simple pattern in red and blue that pleased the eye and gladdened the heart like the cry of gulls. He was dressed in a plain brown robe, but he had a fur hood and a magnificent enamelled set of prayer beads on his belt. He still looked very plain amidst the magnificence of Venice, and I would say that it was not that he had made his clothing more sumptuous, as much as he had risen to the challenge of being a papal legate in Venice.
He rose and embraced me.
Then, after I had kissed his episcopal ring and knelt, he waved me to a chair. Italians have the best chairs. They have a dozen types, from thrones very like our own to my favourites, the folding chairs made of dozens of frame supports that fold into each other like two sets of human ribs interlocked and unfold into a chair. The Doge had provided the legate with a complete set of camp furniture for the crusade. He had set it up in his office and I confess that the Doge of Venice’s camp furniture was better than anything I had seen in the palaces of Poland and Bohemia or England.
At any rate, I settled comfortably into my chair and told my story, leaving out nothing but venal sins.
Father Pierre motioned to Fra Peter to sit, and it was just the three of us, and Sister Marie, scribbling madly away. She wrote so fast that when she dipped her pen, she did so with her whole body, and her pen case, hung round her neck, would tap against the desk; our whole conversation was punctuated by that ‘click’ that came every seventy or eighty heartbeats.
When I spoke of leaving the king, Father Pierre winced and steepled his hands.
When I spoke of Bishop Robert, Father Pierre put his face in his hands for a moment and then exchanged a long look with Fra Peter.