‘To the mother of a child who wants a doll?’ Nerio asked. ‘How very Italian of you, William. My mother used to tell me, when I was young and amorous, only lie with matrons and never virgins, and no damage is done. Eh?’
I suppose I flushed. I’m a redhead with a vicious temper and my face often gives me the lie.
‘Well, be back by tonight,’ he said. ‘Remember Juan!’
Which made me feel a guilty fool, a bad friend. We had all decided to throw Juan a little feast before he was knighted — Nerio thought it would be amusing to make the Spanish boy drunk.
‘I’ll be back,’ I insisted. In fact, I was too fond of Juan to want to make him drunk and foolish.
In the end, I had to ask Sister Marie for help. It was she who provided me with the visiting hours of the convento, although she did so with a wry look that told me that I’d intrigued her a little too much. Or that she saw right through me.
It cost me six solidi I could ill-afford to get a gondola to the island, but my gondolier was young, tough, talented, had a fine singing voice and new many of the newest songs. I gave him wine from my canteen and we had a fine trip out from Saint Mark’s.
Landing at the convent’s brick pier gave me pause. But Jean-Francois rescued me from a sense of sacrilege by greeting me like a long-lost brother. Escorted by a silent sister, we walked past the great convent church to the two dormitories as I regaled Jean-Francois and Bernard with my doings.
I invited them to join me — and my brothers — for a dinner.
‘We’re all of us ready to die from boredom,’ Jean-Francois allowed. ‘I went to Mass three times yesterday.’ He rolled his eyes, and our escort glared at the brick walkway.
Bernard smiled his soft smile. ‘What brings you, messire?’ he asked.
I produced the doll, and both men clapped their hands. ‘Par dieu!’ Jean-Francois said. ‘Perhaps we’ll have some quiet out of miss yet! Where’d you find such a treasure?’
I was part way through my story and had got to the tale of the search for Juan’s surcoat as we reached the dormitory receiving room. I must explain: this was a convent for well-bred Venetian girls, and most of the sisters were from the best families of the lagoon. No one was sworn to silence, and some novitiates wore fashionable clothes and had servants. Each dormitory had a fine parlour with good oak panels and paintings or frescoes as fine as the piano nobile in a Venetian palazzo for receiving brothers and fathers — and lovers.
Our escort blushed and didn’t look at me, but she bobbed her head for my attention. ‘Perhaps my lord has been led here,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I make ecclesiastic vestments. Indeed, we have just made a chasuble for the new Bishop of Aquila, even though he is no friend of ours.’
I unlaced my own and the nun sat down and turned it over. She wrinkled her nose, but smiled, and I imagined her as someone’s sister.
‘You wish a line of gold edging the cross, perhaps?’ she asked.
‘It is for his formal knighting,’ I said.
Emile came in through a barred door. I felt her enter the room, turned, and bowed.
‘So,’ she said. With the smile for which I would die.
She was happy I had come. What more did I need to know?
‘Are you the same size?’ my nun asked. ‘Oh, my lady countess, I did not mean to intrude.’
I grinned — Emile was so prettily confused. ‘Countess, this pearl among Christ’s brides thinks that she and her sisters might solve my pressing duty to have a surcoat made for my friend’s knighting.’ Emboldened, I said, ‘It is on Christmas Eve, at Saint Mark’s. You should attend!’
Emile laughed. ‘Indeed, my people would accept an invitation from Satan to get off this island, although we have been treated with every courtesy.’
I produced the doll. She pounced.
‘You didn’t forget!’
I confessed. ‘I did forget, madonna. My lord sent me on a mission, and it is only this morning that I found this. But I came as soon as I could.’
She wasn’t listening. She swept out, and there were peals of laughter, giggles, a shriek!
And then nothing for so long that I feared that I had lost her again. I filled the time explaining to the sister that yes, I was very much of a size with Juan.
She went out and came back with an older woman.
‘For the Order of St John?’ she asked. Her voice was flat, and a little shrill.
‘Yes, my lady,’ I said in my best Italian.
She unbent a little. ‘This is an impossible task, but all my little reprobates love a knight. Very well. Thirty ducats in a single donation on completion, and ten for me to dispense as I see fit.’
A month’s rent. But I had no choice; it was cheaper than some of the tailors.
‘We’ll have to keep this,’ the older lady said, holding up my surcoat. She sniffed. ‘Perhaps we’ll return it clean.’
Emile came back with Magdalene at her apron strings, clutching the doll. The little girl wouldn’t meet my eyes and kept turning away, but she managed to mumble her thanks for ‘Lady Guinevere’ very prettily. I bowed my very best bow to a lady.
Then I made bold enough to meet her mother’s eye. ‘May I expect you on Christmas Eve, Countess?’ I asked.
She half-smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. She looked at me with a little of her old self. ‘We are so very busy.’
Strong in the knowledge that I had saved Juan’s knighting, I helped my gondolier to pull over the choppy water of the lagoon. There was rain, a cold rain, with a little sleep mixed in.
I came back to my cramped rooms by the fish market to find Juan on the wooden steps with a young Moslem girl in a red shawl — a slave-prostitute of the kind favoured by the gangs that ran the waterfront brothels and wine-houses for foreign sailors. Behind them on the steps was Marc Antonio, wearing a heavy cloak.
He read my expression and bridled. ‘I’m a grown man and can sin as I like,’ he said. His voice was thick with angry wine.
‘Where did you get her?’ I asked.
He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I …’
Marc-Antonio’s eyes gave him away.
I turned on him. ‘You? You went and bought-’
Juan shoved the girl down the steps and put a hand on his sword. ‘I will take no moralising from you, Sir William. You have a doxy in every town.’
‘You’ve paid her?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Juan’s cheeks flushed. ‘Of course I’ve paid!’
I turned to the girl. ‘Run along, now,’ I said, and she bolted.
‘You fucking hypocrite,’ Juan said. He said more, in Spanish, about my affair with a notorious married woman.
Nerio, called forth from his den — he paid the most, and in return he’d arranged for our room to be divided by panels so that he could have his own snug chamber — stood in his shirt and hose on the landing. ‘Can you children be a little less noisy?’ he asked. ‘Juan, come back to your party!’
‘I was taking my ease with my friend-’ Juan said.
‘He arranged to have my squire buy him a strumpet on the docks,’ I said. ‘Juan …’ I thought of a thousand things to say: about the life of a Moslem slave in Venice, about women, about prostitutes.
Nerio laughed. ‘For a fornicating adventurer, William has a fine sense of moral outrage.’ He raised an elegant eyebrow at me. Juan brightened, and Nerio turned on him, ‘But gentlemen — at least, gentlemen in Italy — do not hand over coin for access to a whore. At least, not in such a way as their friends can mock them for it.’
Juan, caught between us on the steps — it was almost like one of Dante’s poems — looked up and down, and his rage returned. ‘You have some bitch in your room this minute!’ he spat at Nerio. His use of language, the way he spoke — he was very drunk. I’d never seen the younger Spaniard as a man dedicated to any of his appetites and I’m not sure I’d ever heard him use foul language. He lived like a monk and his piety was proverbial, even if he was less a priest in armour than Miles.