Chapter 14 The Closing Harbor #3
"Yes. Supply contracts change. Ports close. Buyers fail. Grain spoils. A shipmaster may be ordered to sell part of a cargo to fund the rest. That is why this page alone proves very little."
Lucetta traced the endorsements. "But the same intermediaries recur."
"Yes."
One name appeared only as initials. Another as a house mark. A third referred to a factor "for the southern lord." None was enough to identify Rainier de Cazilhac, and Lucetta was almost relieved. The truth should not become neat merely because they had suffered for it.
Then she opened the waxed pouch.
Inside were four letters and two receipts.
One letter had lost its seal but retained the tail of the fastening strip.
It was written in Latin by a practiced commercial hand and concerned reimbursement for stores redirected from an Adriatic vessel toward Proven?al accounts.
The named recipient was not Rainier. It was an intermediary house at Marseille. The guarantor was abbreviated.
The second letter complained that the reimbursement had been entered twice.
The third demanded silence until claims arising from losses in the East had been settled.
The fourth was not addressed to Saint Aurelia at all. It was a copy of instructions sent from a Proven?al agent to a factor whose surname made Adelasia sit upright.
"I know that house," she said.
Lucetta waited.
"Not personally. My husband dealt with a partner of theirs years ago. They handled supplies, horses, timber, sometimes grain. They served landholders who wanted commercial transactions without appearing at every counting table themselves."
Beatrice leaned closer. "Whose landholders?"
Adelasia looked at the notation again. "Several. That is the problem. A factor is not a confession tied to one lord."
Lucetta read the final line.
Payment guaranteed against revenues identified by a shortened territorial phrase: Cazilhac.
The name was not Rainier's.
The date placed the transaction in his father's generation.
No sentence said stolen. No sentence said conspiracy. No sentence said that men had deprived Acre of supplies for profit. Yet the shape of the thing had changed. A chain that had seemed merely commercial now touched a family interest in Provence.
Odelin said, "Do we know whether this guarantee was honored?"
"Not yet," Lucetta answered.
"Do we know whether the redirected stores ever returned to the eastern account?"
"Not yet."
"Do we know whether the claimant understood that charitable or crusading funds were involved?"
"Not yet."
Beatrice gave Lucetta a sidelong look. "You say those words with unusual satisfaction."
"Because they are better than certainty we have not earned."
Adelasia turned another page. Her face had gone still.
Lucetta knew why before she saw the name.
Roncaglia.
Adelasia's late husband's family appeared beside a freight acknowledgment, not as recipient but as correspondent. A note in the margin referred to an objection lodged against duplicate charging.
For several breaths no one spoke.
Adelasia reached toward the page and stopped before touching it.
"He objected," she said.
Lucetta answered carefully. "Someone under the Roncaglia house did."
"Do not spare me by making the name smaller than it is."
"I am not sparing you. I am keeping the evidence where it belongs. It may have been your husband. It may have been his partner. It may have been a clerk writing under the house name."
Adelasia's eyes remained on the line. "But it is an objection."
"Yes."
Her mouth tightened. She did not cry. Lucetta had never expected she would.
"For years," Adelasia said, "I feared that when we finally reached the truth I would discover he had been clever enough to hide theft from me and foolish enough to leave a trail for strangers.
Then I began to fear the opposite—that I had made him nobler in death because grief requires some work to do.
This is worse in a different way. One line is enough to give hope and not enough to deserve it. "
Lucetta placed her hand beside Adelasia's, not over it. "Then we do not make it deserve more than it does. We follow the objection."
Adelasia looked at her. "You have become very tiresome about truth."
"I learned from merchants."
"No. Merchants round figures when it pleases them. You learned from being disappointed by parchment."
Lucetta thought of her father, of documents he had taught her to trust and men he had warned her not to. "Perhaps."
Orsino set Key IV on a folded cloth.
"The key is genuine enough for me to risk my reputation on it," he said.
"Not because of the punch alone. Look here.
The salt has eaten deepest on one side of the bow and along the lower stem.
It lay for a long period with one face exposed to damp and the other protected.
The old sailcloth in the coffer carries rust staining in the corresponding shape.
That does not tell us who owned it. It tells us the key has belonged to that hiding place for years, perhaps decades. No one planted it last week."
Niccolò, who had entered without interrupting, said, "Messer Corrado will ask whether it opens one of the seven locks."
"So will I," Orsino answered. "And I shall tell him that only the lock can prove the final fit. A key is not a saint's bone. We do not declare miracles because rust looks persuasive."
Beatrice said, "Yet you accept it."
"I accept that if it is not the Shipmaster's Key, then Providence has produced an unusually elaborate practical joke involving dead merchants, old accounts, and a locksmith's temper."
That was as close to certainty as Orsino intended to come.
They worked until the lamp oil ran low.
The documents gave them no location for the Seven-Lock Chest. They did something almost as valuable: they moved the search west. Proven?al intermediaries appeared repeatedly in the freight chains.
A charitable payment had passed through a house connected to the Rh?ne.
One letter referred to "the southern protections" in a context Odelin believed might concern the office later called Protector.
Another mentioned stores held pending instructions from men across the western mountains.
A road was forming.
Not yet a destination.
Near midnight, Ziani knocked once on the cabin frame. "A fishing boat came out before the harbor closed completely. News says the fighting has not taken the city. The western disturbance was put down or scattered. Gates remain shut until morning. The hospital quarter is quiet."
Lucetta stood so quickly the stool scraped.
"Ysoria? Naldo?"
"The fishermen do not know your friends. But they say no fighting reached the hospital church."
It was not proof of safety.
It was enough to let her breathe.
The next morning a small boat approached under a white cloth tied to an oar.
Ysoria sat in the bow.
Naldo sat behind her with his injured foot elevated on a net bundle and an expression of unbearable satisfaction.
Lucetta was at the rail before the boat touched them.
"You were told to remain at the hospital house."
Naldo looked up. "And yet here we are. History is full of disappointments."
Ysoria climbed aboard first. "The gates opened at dawn under restriction.
The harbor remains controlled, but small boats may pass.
Brother Paolo sent word that Giuliano is alive, his household lost one man to a broken arm and another to a cut, and the coffer remains locked in the stone room under watch.
The men who entered escaped before the town watch arrived.
One was caught later near the market but claims he was hired by a stranger and knows no name. "
Bertran said, "Description of the stranger?"
"Former soldier, perhaps. Southern speech according to the man. Scar at the jaw. Paid in good silver. That description will fit half the professional trouble between here and Provence."
Bertran accepted the answer without pretending it was more.
Naldo held up one finger. "And I have been examined by Brother Paolo, a barber, and an old woman who says she has set more sailors' feet than either of them. All agree I am alive. Two agree I am foolish. One says the swelling will fall if I stop walking. I have chosen to respect the majority."
Ziani came forward and looked at the bandage. "You are not touching a line for three days."
Naldo's face collapsed. "Captain."
"Four if you argue."
"This is tyranny."
"Five."
Naldo shut his mouth.
The company was whole again.
Beatrice left them two days later when the harbor roads reopened enough for her servants to reach the coast. Before she went, she asked Lucetta to walk with her along a strip of stony shore beyond the anchorage.
"I will go west separately," she said. "Do not mistake my consent over the key for surrender. If your papers lead into Provence, my family's claim may strengthen rather than weaken."
"I assumed as much."
"Good. I dislike repeating threats. They lose quality."
Lucetta smiled. "Was that a threat?"
"A promise of continued inconvenience. I think we know one another well enough to call it friendship if we are not sentimental about the word."
Lucetta considered her. "That is the least friendly definition of friendship I have heard."
"Then it may survive."
That evening, after Beatrice's boat had gone and the others had settled into the practical labor of deciding their next route, Lucetta found Bertran alone near the bow.
The coast lay dark to the west. The air smelled of salt and wet rope. Behind them the fortified harbor was only a cluster of lights beneath the wall.
"You sent Naldo away because he slowed us," she said.
Bertran glanced at her. "This is an unusual beginning to gratitude."
"I am not thanking you. I am trying to understand something."
"That usually costs more."
"You made the correct decision. I knew it was correct while I hated you for making it. Then I hated myself because I was relieved when Ysoria took him. If he had stayed and fallen, I would have stopped. You knew that."
"Yes."
"You would have stopped too."
"Yes."