Chapter 136: Barozzi del Leone

The Republic had other business, busy rearranging itself around the two of them.

Ranieri Dandolo sailed before the sea had time to close, taking his own fleet and his own private army with him. He was the first Duke the island would ever have the pleasure of bleating at, and no word would come back before March.

Vito spent that same week giving things away, which was a more dangerous sport in Venezia than taking them. The first gift was the compass that had brought his fleet from Crete to the lagoon nearly a week faster than the sea permitted.

The Doge’s oath barred the old man from accepting any gift worth mention, so the Ducal Councillors took the compass in the Republic’s name, and the Avogadori entered it in the record as the Republic’s own property.

A city that had steered by its campanili for eight centuries now owned a way to steer without them, and the Councillors barred the compass from every foreign hull, shutting Genoa and Pisa out with one stroke of a quill. Marco’s name never appeared on any list either.

The wheel followed the compass. Vito sent the pile driver to the Republic’s works at the Molo, where rotted pilings had spent three summers waiting for a hammer, and the treadwheel crane and timber cableway to the Arsenal’s stacks.

A crane apiece went to the houses for their Rialto warehouses, to Donata Morosini, and to the belfry of San Pietro di Castello. Father Ambrogio blessed the crane by the lift after billing the yard by the splash and declaring the work Christian.

The Doge had told Vito to keep his cards deep in his sleeve, and the Republic, having been handed a gift horse, saw no reason to inspect its teeth.

What Vito kept, he kept locked. The sawmill stayed with him, the stamp mill, and the ship sheets lay in a sealed chest under Nestor’s key.

The Republic’s voyages grew shorter, and so did his.

La Serenissima repaid gifts with attention, and the hall paid with voices. The Great Council, which had known him as a youngster on a bench with a bear in his legend, learned to stop talking when he stood.

He held no office, yet the hall behaved as though he had misplaced three.

The old man at the head paid for the winter in hours. His cough took more out of every sitting, and by December he held the chair only to the second red band of the candle.

The cloth at his mouth came away dark more often, and he folded it faster each time.

Caterina invested the private yard a little over thirteen thousand grossi from the thirty-eight in the strongbox, a third and a thumb besides. Four hulls cost ten thousand grossi at twenty-five hundred apiece, leaving enough for two more berths, timber, and a band of sixty workers.

A fifth keel went down on silver the colleganza had brought in.

Nestor laid lateen galleys and naves on the same bones, frames first, the rudder on iron hinges, the galleys’ benches slanted, and the oars on balconies. Sixty carpenters in winter nights by torchlight on tallowed ways rimed with frost, sawdust freezing in their beards and pitch smoking in the dark.

Tarpaulins hid every stern, Father Ambrogio swore the gang for a fee, Nestor’s temper kept visitors outside the fence, and one red cap who climbed it left covered in tar.

The first ship took the water at dawn on San Nicolò’s Day, stern to the wall, her rudder hung only inside the yard’s water-gate. Nestor had cursed every plank of her in three tongues and refused to name her, so the lagoon named her La Greca.

By Christmas one hull floated, one was planked, two stood in ribs, and one was still only a promise. In spring they would make five new hulls beside the three naves, eight trading ships with three war galleys to escort them.

The yard was only half of what the winter built. The other half began on San Martino’s day at a notary’s table on the Rialto, where Fantin’s copyist cousin witnessed a fraterna, the holding of kin who run what they own as one, with a clean quill.

Vitale Barozzi and the six little households entered it together, a branch of the Barozzi leaving the old table for a new one. Fantin brought six small shares, and Vito brought his share of the venture and the yard.

The notary wrote the junior branch name, Barozzini, and the Avogadori noted it beside the old one. The banner was wine-dark cloth with the black lion of the company, which brought them the nickname of Barozzi del Leone.

Marco had held those six households by their debts, forty-one hundred grossi of paper, including the boat loan on which Fantin’s sister had been given at sixteen to a widower from Chioggia. Caterina bought the debt through three loans from the benches, at a discount, for twenty-nine hundred, so no man on the Rialto could say who held it.

The deed folded the paper into the fraterna’s common chest, where a household that owes the name owes itself. Not a soul called that noble, and Caterina would have struck the word from any leaf that tried.

Fantin, who could turn a funeral into a feast, made no joke when the leaf was read to him.

Marco’s reply came by notary. His man struck eight names from the Barozzi registry, Vito’s, Fantin’s, and the six household heads’, then scraped the leaf so thin that the Doge’s seal showed through over a name that still refused to leave the ink.

No word passed between uncle and nephew. Notaries talked, paid by the word, while Andrea and Pietro stayed under the hat.

The Rialto watched the quarrel by betting on it, the new house becoming the Lion and the old one the Hat.

The Contarini came last and sweetest. With the vote counted, Orsola and Almorò discovered the dowry silver that had never come and offered it with a chapel, a house, and a share in any venture the pair cared to name.

Caterina refused every offer in writing, sat through one dinner, left before the sweets, and swapped feast-day sweetmeats at Christmas. Her letters to her branch in Constantinople waited in the strongbox for March.

The deed stood ready to receive her at marriage, her share written where a dowry belonged, while the hole in the notary’s draft stayed open for a word to be said.

Three names had waited in her notebook through all of it. The old steward received a purse that reached him by a random acquaintance, and the nurse received a pension paid through Father Ambrogio’s alms box.

The cousin who had slipped a boy figs was offered a stool in the new house’s archive room and declined. On Santo Stefano’s Day he arrived at L’Angelo with the kitchen books under his arm.

The sea lay shut and Ranieri was out of reach on his island. Four keels stood in the mud, one ship floated at the water-gate, and the ring lay in the trunk at L’Angelo under the scraps, where it had been since Alexandria.

On the last evening of the year, a fist struck the door, and the Doge’s bowl-boy stood in the passage with a basket of eels that had left Almorò Contarini’s kitchen for the Doge’s and been sent on, still wriggling.

The chair wanted to know whether the lagoon knew what the chair did not.