Chapter 138: Priceless Relics, Penniless Husband

Vito stepped over and shut the door with his heel. He had come to his own office to find his soon-to-be wife at work, an unfortunate discovery for him, who wanted her time and had no intention of waiting patiently.

January stayed outside in the corridor. The brazier warmed the room, its pierced copper hood scattering light across the rush matting, while ink and rosewater mingled with the faint scent of eel rising from the kitchen.

Caterina’s new oak table stood beneath the window. Beyond the leaded panes, the canal lay black as pitch, light moving slowly across it.

Behind her chair, just to the right of the window, the second door was closed.

Vito hung his mantle on the peg-stand beside Caterina’s cloak, then set [Artiglio del Leone] beside them.

Caterina finished writing, laid the quill pen across the page, and finally looked up.

"The carpet is paid for, Vitale, so wipe your boots."

Her voice was mischievous, for once. "Dio mi liberi, a quarter of an hour in the kitchen, doing what? Checking the spoons? The cook works for me, the eels, they belong to the Doge, and the debt, ah, the debt belongs to the Rialto, every last grosso. And you, marito? What do you own in this house?"

She tilted her head.

"Ecco. That, I have not yet found."

Vito crossed to the brazier and spread his arms toward the heat. "I own the well, moglie! And every stone between it and those cursed eels, I have walked them, Dio bon, every room in this house stinks of money we haven’t yet earned back."

He played into the speech further. "So tell me, may I sit in my own office? Or must I go down and beg the cook for permission? On my knees, maybe, with my cap in my hand?"

Caterina laughed lightly. "Silver of the Rialto, marito, and the good name of Fantin’s grandfather. On these this house stands, not on your well, and both, mark me, will be paid."

Then she lifted her chin toward the right-hand wall.

"Sit afterward. First, look."

Dark walnut shelves climbed the wall in four tiers, their contents lit by a bracket lamp that spilled warm light over the things he had brought home from different corners of the sea.

These things looked magnificent under it, and he had never been shy about claiming credit for his possessions. The display was doing half the work for him.

Constantinople occupied the top shelf with a gilded scale from the armor of Alexios Doukas, Emperor of the Romans, beside the head of a Varangian axe.

Zaccaria had pulled the scale from the corpse and pressed it into his fist while he lay senseless in Santa Sofia, a stranger’ entire life pouring into his head. As for the axe-head, it belonged to the braided Norseman who lifted Zaccaria by the throat.

The captain had handed it over with a look that dared anyone to call him sentimental.

Crete occupied the shelf below with a banded agate, no longer than a finger joint, carved with a bull and a little figure somersaulting over its horns. Back in Knossos, some farmer’s wife sold it for two goats.

The stone stayed cold whatever the weather, and it was older than Rome itself.

Alexandria had the third shelf with a chip of red granite from Pompey’s Pillar and a fist-sized piece of white lime from the foot of the Pharos.

Athanasia had sent both down to the piers beneath a basket of dates.

Vito brushed his hand over the granite. "The guide at that pillar, moglie, a man with a beard like a wet goat, he swears to me that giants raised it in one night! After a wager with a djinn! So I say to him, calm, polite, like this, ’Amico, a Roman prefect put it up for Diocletian.’ And he, Madonna santa, he screams at me! In three languages!"

Caterina sighed, and the pen dragged on. "I would have charged him, marito. A fee for the correction, and a fee for the privilege of hearing it."

The fourth shelf stood empty, an unbroken stretch of walnut waiting for its next occupant.

Vito set his thumb against the wood and left it there.

Then he noticed the chart on the left-hand wall. Its joined sheets of vellum showed an old sea serpent coiled around a doomed little ship in one corner, a monster copied without leaving out a single detail. Four pins marked the harbors they had visited last season.

Vito walked to the chart and put a finger on the serpent. The brazier’s light fell across the vellum, and the eastern sea spread before him like a will no one had bothered to finish.

"And now, moglie, the sea, what does she want from us this spring?"

"The sea wants nothing, marito. It is the market that decides, and I have not yet asked it."

"Ma va’, the market, I have met the market, moglie, we have been introduced."

He slid one pin an inch across the vellum, then put it back where it had been.

"It wants everything cheap and delivered yesterday. In return, it pays you compliments."

Vito left the chart, walked behind Caterina’s chair, lifted the latch, and went inside their bedroom, the master chamber.

There was cold, creeping through a gap in the shutter.

The bed occupied most of the room, piled high with feathers, while two bolsters lay side by side like a couple of bankers who had fallen out. Above, a small Panagia kept a flame burning, while some boxwood comb lay across the ewer, and Caterina’s second-best cloak hung beside his old sea-cloak.

Vito watched the room for a few seconds, nodded satisfied, and then returned to the office and stopped behind her chair. Her braid lay over one shoulder, baring the back of her neck, while the draft lay beside her elbow with its wide blank space still waiting for words.

He bent and kissed her just below the braid, enough to feel her pulse jump against his lips, while her pen slipped and she wrote the same word twice.

"Marito... your breath is interfering with my numbers."

"Then enter it, mia cara, enter it with all the rest. Let the books suffer a little."

He kissed the place where her neck met her shoulder.

"Under miscellaneous provisions, marito. Right beside the wine you think I do not know you hide."

The blush rose from her neck to her ears and lingered there. Her quill kept moving, as though the neck beneath his lips belonged to a woman in another house.

His mouth moved below her ear. "Listen, moglie, listen. A man, here in this city, he has cloves. And nutmeg! And no one knows how they came here, while the whole sea sleeps, per Dio, like a thief in winter."

He kissed her again, taking his time.

"And I, mia cara, I would like to find him first."

The pen stopped mid-letter. "By morning, the whole bridge will be hunting for him, every merchant, every cousin of a merchant. And the one who arrives first, ah, that one names the price for the rest of the lagoon."

She closed the ledger with a small snap.

"Then we go tonight, Vitale."

Caterina took down her cloak while Vito took his mantle. Her eyes gazed on his belt for half a breath, then turned toward the stairs.

The purse knocked against his hip as he swung the mantle over his shoulders. The ring was inside it, small and exactly where he had put it.