Chapter 10 What the Dead Man Sent #2
Lucetta wrote a reply at once. She disclosed enough to prevent Beatrice's evidence from being useless: they had found an island burial record linking Martino de Marelli's coffer to Pietro Varesi, and Varesi to the fortified harbor.
She did not disclose the exact wording of every entry.
She requested that Beatrice preserve the estate inventory and identify its custodian.
Before sealing the reply she added one sentence.
No party presently possesses sufficient evidence to claim the coffer or whatever it contained.
Adelasia read it over her shoulder. "You know she will take that as a challenge."
"It is a statement."
"Those are often the most effective challenges."
The servant left with the letter.
Ziani's carpenter found the repaired stay sound enough to continue. Water casks came aboard. The wind strengthened slightly from the west.
Stella Maris sailed again.
By afternoon the coast changed. Low marshy stretches gave way to firmer shore and more frequent towers. Traffic increased: fishing craft, grain boats, a galley seen far offshore moving under both sail and oars. Ziani kept the Stella Maris closer to the coast than Naldo expected.
"Why not take the straighter line?" Naldo asked.
"Because straight lines are drawn by men at tables," Ziani said. "Depth, current, wind, and ports were not invited."
Lucetta looked up from her papers. "I feel attacked on behalf of tables."
"Good. Tables have too much influence."
The humor faded when a lookout called from forward.
A vessel was following them.
Not closely. Not obviously. A broad-bellied coastal trader had appeared astern after the roadstead and maintained roughly the same course for more than an hour.
It could have been coincidence. It could also have been the sea doing what roads had done since their first journey: giving pursuit enough distance to pretend innocence.
Bertran watched it without theatrical suspicion.
"Has it changed course with us?"
Ziani shrugged. "It has changed course with the coast. That proves it owns eyes."
"Can it overtake us?"
"If it wishes and the wind favors it."
"Does it?"
"Not yet."
Bertran remained near the stern anyway.
Lucetta came to stand beside him after a while.
"You think it is Hugues."
"I think it is a ship."
"You have been spending too much time with Orsino."
"I think someone may be aboard who has reason to follow us. That is different from deciding who before I can see his face."
"Fair."
The trader did not approach.
Near sunset it turned toward another inlet and vanished behind a point of land.
Bertran watched until the sail disappeared.
"Satisfied?" Lucetta asked.
"No."
"Because it could still be innocent?"
"Because if it was innocent, we learned nothing. If it was not, it learned our course."
"You are difficult to reassure."
"That is one of my professional virtues."
They ate bread, cheese, dried fish, and onions on deck while the light faded.
The fortified harbor lay perhaps a day ahead depending on wind. They would not attempt entry after dark even if they reached its approaches. Ziani intended to anchor at a smaller roadstead before midnight and make the final run after dawn.
That gave them an evening with nowhere to go.
Lucetta disliked evenings with nowhere to go. Movement excused uncertainty. Stillness gave it a chair.
She found Bertran after compline hour sitting near the bow where the sound of water against the hull covered quieter speech. His bandaged hand rested on his knee. The skin around his knuckles was swollen but not red. He had obeyed the canon's instruction better than Naldo had obeyed anyone's.
"May I sit?" she asked.
He shifted to make room. "You are asking now?"
"I am experimenting with courtesy."
"Do not strain yourself."
She sat.
For a while neither spoke. The sea had gone dark blue, almost black. A few shore lights marked villages or religious houses. Above them the repaired rigging creaked with each change in wind.
Lucetta said, "Beatrice's inventory bothers me."
"Because it may prove the coffer moved into her family's custody?"
"Because it may prove the opposite."
He waited.
"If the steward wrote that it was not opened for want of proper warrant, then the people holding it did not treat it as ordinary inherited property. They believed someone else had authority over it, or feared someone else did. That means the chain of custody may have remained disputed for decades."
"Which is good for us?"
"It is good for finding the trail. It is terrible for deciding what happens if we find the key."
"We already knew that."
"Knowing in principle is easier."
He nodded. "Most dangers are."
She drew one knee up carefully, avoiding pressure on her ribs. "What happens if we reach the harbor and find the strongbox in Beatrice's lawful possession?"
"We do not steal it."
"Corrado may claim creditor rights. Odelin may say the contents are charitable property. Beatrice may say her family held it for generations. We may have documentary reasons to believe the Shipmaster's Key is inside. If we do not obtain it, the expedition stops."
"Then we persuade, bargain, seek witnesses, or go to whoever has authority there."
"You make it sound simple."
"No. I make it sound preferable to burglary."
"You stole the first key from me."
He glanced at her. "And nearly got us both killed before I returned it. I do not recommend every lesson be repeated for emphasis."
The old fact landed between them without bitterness now. Once it had defined him for her: the armed stranger who entered her work, took what she had found, and expected danger to be ordinary. Now the memory seemed almost to belong to younger versions of them.
Lucetta said, "When you came back, did you expect to remain?"
"No."
"How long did you expect?"
"Long enough to discover who wanted us dead. Then long enough to get you somewhere safe. Then long enough to see whether Orsino was right about the second lock. Then long enough to reach the warehouse."
"You kept extending the contract."
"There was no contract after the first one."
"That is my point."
He looked out over the bow. "I know."
She heard more in the answer than he had said.
"And now?"
His silence lengthened.
A year earlier she might have filled it with questions. She had learned something about leaving room for another person's words to arrive in their own order.
Bertran said, "Now I no longer know what leaving would mean."
Lucetta's breath caught, though the statement was not romantic in any simple sense.
He continued. "At the beginning I could have ridden away and the matter would still have belonged to you, Orsino, whatever merchant hired the next swords, and whichever official decided to care.
Now I know where the keys are carried. I know which roads Hugues prefers when he has more men than time.
I know Naldo will climb with an injured ankle if no one watches him.
I know Odelin will argue law with a man holding a spear because he thinks the distinction matters.
I know Adelasia can purchase help from someone who hates us if she is given ten minutes and a price.
I know Ysoria will ride until the horse fails before admitting a schedule was impossible.
And I know you will continue toward a contradiction even after everyone sensible has called it a wall.
If I leave, I do not become uninvolved. I become absent. Those are not the same thing."
Lucetta looked down at her hands.
"You make us sound exhausting."
"You are exhausting."
"All of us?"
"Some more consistently than others."
She smiled, then lost the smile because the next question had been waiting beneath the first.
"Is that why you stay? Responsibility?"
Bertran turned his head toward her.
The wind lifted a loose strand of her hair. She tucked it back and immediately wished she had not moved, because movement gave her something to do when she wanted none.
"Partly," he said.
"And the rest?"
He did not answer quickly.
When he did, his voice was lower. "The rest is more difficult to promise without lying."
"I did not ask for a promise."
"No. That is what makes the answer harder."
She held his gaze.
He said, "I stay because the work matters more to me than I expected.
Because I have spent too long selling my judgment by the month to men whose only question was whether violence could make an account easier.
Because this company has become something I do not have a useful name for.
And because when I imagine riding away, there are people I miss before I have left. "
Lucetta's heartbeat became embarrassingly audible to her.
"People," she said.
A small, almost helpless smile moved at one corner of his mouth. "You are a cruel notary."
"I am not a notary."
"Then you have fewer excuses."
She could have asked him to say her name.
She did not.
Instead she said, "I do not know what comes after the keys."
"Neither do I."
"I have no household waiting that can absorb this life.
My aunt would gladly receive me if I returned to Padua and became sensible, which is another way of saying she would receive a version of me who had not spent three years becoming impossible to place.
I earn money irregularly. I possess no office.
Even if the chest contains enough silver to buy half a street, none of it is ours merely because we found the locks. "
"Good. I would distrust a plan built on treasure we do not own."
"You always improve romance by mentioning property law."
He looked at her sharply, and she realized what word she had used.
Neither of them laughed.
The silence changed.
Lucetta felt heat rise into her face despite the night wind.
Bertran said, very carefully, "Was that what we were discussing?"
She could have retreated. The path was open. She had spent years learning how to phrase uncertainty until it resembled caution.
"Partly," she said.
His expression softened, not with victory but with something more dangerous: recognition.
"Then we are both doing it badly."
"We are doing it without evidence."