The Salt Road (The Seven Keys of Saint Aurelia #3)

Chapter 1 The Fourth Office

The packet from Ferrara had reached them with a stain of rain across the outer fold and a wedge of river mud hardened beneath the string, as if even before it was opened the road wished to make its claim upon whatever lay inside.

Lucetta Verani turned it beneath the light from the inn window and studied the seal twice before she cut the cord.

The wax was common red, the impression no noble device but the blunt mark of a warehouse factor who had once served Adelasia's husband.

It had been pressed in haste, one edge flattened by a thumb.

Outside, the spring rain rattled against the shutters of the lodging house at the edge of Ferrara, where the road eastward sank into a plain veined by ditches and slow brown water.

Bertran had already complained that the stable roof leaked, Orsino that the smith in the next street had charged him twice a fair price for a strip of iron, and Naldo that any city which made a sailor sleep so far from salt water deserved to be abandoned to its own mud.

Lucetta heard them dimly. She had the packet open now, and the first line had already taken the room away from her.

"It is not a list of ships," she said. Adelasia, who had been standing with one hand at the brazier and the other tucked beneath her opposite sleeve, turned at once.

Brother Odelin lifted his head from the stool where he was repairing the clasp of his travelling psalter with a patience Lucetta could never imitate.

"It is an account of offices. Not names.

Offices." She drew the sheet closer. The hand was cramped and hurried, but the words were Latin of the sort a working notary wrote when he expected another working notary to understand him.

"Warden. Treasurer. Notary. Shipmaster. Almoner.

Storekeeper. Protector. Seven. The first three are marked with crosses beside them, as though the writer had received something from those officers or had verified their possessions.

The fourth is not crossed. It is circled.

" She looked at Adelasia. "And beside it is written: ad mare, per domum Roncaliae.

To the sea, through the house of Roncaglia. "

Adelasia did not move for several breaths.

She had become very skilled, over the years Lucetta had known her, at allowing silence to do the work that less disciplined people attempted with exclamations.

At last she crossed the room, took the page without asking, and held it near the window.

"That is not my husband's hand," she said.

"Nor his father's. The Roncaglia house named here may not even be our line.

Men who trade for three generations discover cousins in every port when profit is good and none at all when debt arrives.

You must not take a family name in a merchant paper as a rope tied to a single door.

" Her eyes travelled lower. "Yet the notation is old enough.

And this abbreviation here—do you see? S.M.

after the word navium. My husband used it when he meant San Marco's scales, but another clerk might mean something else.

If you build your conclusion upon two letters, Lucetta, I shall knock it down before Messer Corrado has the pleasure. "

"I would rather you did." Lucetta drew a second page from the packet.

"The man who sent this copied what he was allowed to copy from a bundle belonging to the heirs of Tomaso Roncaglia of Ravenna.

He says the originals are disputed. Two branches of the family claim them, and neither will permit the other to remove so much as a worm-eaten receipt.

That is why we have a copy instead of the bundle.

" She laid the page flat and traced a line with her finger.

"But here the same office is named again: magister navis, custos clavium maritimarum.

Shipmaster, keeper of the maritime keys.

The phrase may be ceremonial. It may mean warehouse keys, strongboxes, chapel chests, a hundred ordinary things.

Yet the office list places him fourth among the seven, and the paper from the mine said the confraternity's maritime accounts were kept apart from the rest."

Odelin rose, his knees protesting audibly.

"Then the question is not whether the Roncaglia name appears," he said, "but why the fourth office was sent toward a merchant house at all.

A confraternity that trusted its officers with separate authority might entrust a key to a shipmaster during a voyage, but if the key remained in his bloodline after his death, that suggests the institution had already begun to fail.

Men are careless with what belongs to a dying body.

They are more careful with what can be claimed by heirs.

" He rested a thick finger beside the circled word.

"And before you ask, no, I do not think the word 'key' proves the iron we seek.

I have spent thirty years among inventories in which one chest is described as if it were Solomon's treasure and another, holding a month's rents, is called merely 'the old box.

' We must earn certainty one line at a time. "

The door opened behind them, and Bertran came in carrying rain on his shoulders.

He shut it with his heel, stripped off his gloves, and looked first at Lucetta, then at the pages spread on the table.

"You have found something," he said. It was not a question.

He had a way of reading the arrangement of a room before anyone spoke: whether a chair had been pulled closer to the fire, whether a purse had been moved, whether Lucetta's ink knife lay uncapped.

"If it sends us east, I should like to know before I bargain for another week of fodder.

The stableman thinks every mule in Ferrara was sired by the emperor's own horse and must be fed accordingly. "

Lucetta told him. Bertran listened without interrupting, though when she reached the phrase about the two rival branches, his mouth tightened.

"Families are worse country than mountains," he said when she finished.

"A mountain does not care which grandfather insulted which uncle.

If there are two houses, there will be servants who carry tales between them, creditors who prefer one, priests related to the other, and men with swords who believe inheritance is simpler when the rival heir cannot speak.

You may be thinking of parchment. I am thinking that somebody sent a copy to us because the originals are already watched.

" He leaned over the table but did not touch the pages.

"Who knew enough to ask the factor for them? "

"Adelasia." Lucetta looked toward her.

"I asked three men," Adelasia said. "One in Ferrara, one in Ravenna, one who moves salt and timber between the coast and the inland river markets.

I told none of them that we were looking for a key.

I asked for old Roncaglia business concerning hospices, eastern freight, or deposits held after Acre.

That was enough to make the Ravenna matter rise like a corpse in floodwater.

" She folded her arms. "Do not give me that look, Bertran.

If I had sent one message, the wrong man might have sold it.

Three messages mean three risks, yes, but also three chances of learning who repeats questions. "

"And have you learned?"

"Perhaps." Her expression changed, the smallest contraction around the eyes.

"The man in Ravenna wrote separately that strangers asked about Tomaso Roncaglia's papers six days before our inquiry reached him.

Two men. Neither gave a family name. One claimed to represent creditors in Venice.

The other claimed to act for a widow in Rimini. The factor believed neither."

Bertran exhaled through his nose. "Then our questions are not making the trail. We are walking on one somebody else has already found."

Orsino came in at that moment, accompanied by Naldo and an argument that appeared to have begun at least three streets away.

"A hinge is not a horse shoe," Orsino was saying.

"If a man cannot tell the difference between iron that bears weight and iron that merely turns upon a pin, I will not trust him to mend my cook pot.

" He stopped at the sight of the papers. "What have you broken now?"

"Only your hope of a quiet week," Lucetta said. She showed him the office list.

Orsino read more slowly than the others, moving his lips over the Latin abbreviations, and when he reached the fourth office he grunted.

"Shipmaster. Good. Ships have chests. Chests have locks.

Salt ruins everything. If this key has spent fifty years near a harbor, do not expect the pretty black iron you brought me in Rovigo.

Expect rust, filing, a new bow brazed to an old stem, perhaps a bit cut again by some village fool who thought every lock should obey the same tooth.

And if you think I can name a key merely because a dead clerk wrote 'shipmaster' beside it, I shall leave you here and become a baker.

" He handed the page back. "But if there is an old strongbox, I want to see it before anyone breaks it with an axe. "

Naldo had gone directly to the bread. "If we are going to the sea," he said through a mouthful, "I forgive all of you for Ferrara.

" He tore another piece and pointed it at the map Bertran had left folded beside the lamp.

"Ravenna first? Or Comacchio? If the Roncaglia people ever moved salt, there will be kin at Comacchio whether the kin admit it or not.

Salt makes relatives faster than marriage. "

Adelasia gave him a level look. "It also makes smugglers faster than honesty."

"That is why I said there will be kin."