Chapter 1 The Fourth Office #2
The room relaxed just enough for Lucetta to realize how tightly she had been holding herself.
There had been a time when a new line in an old account would have meant a day's work at a desk: compare hands, seek a witness, write a memorandum.
Now it meant saddles, ferries, money changers, road gossip, and the unpleasant arithmetic of how many men might already know what she knew.
She gathered the pages and read the first one again, forcing herself past the circled office to the smaller notes beneath it.
There were dates. Three payments. A vessel named Santa Marta, or perhaps Santa Marita; the scribe had cramped the second word into a blot.
A sum reckoned partly in Venetian grossi and partly in local account money.
Then, farther down, the name Tomaso Roncaglia appeared beside a phrase that made her sit straighter.
"Listen to this. 'Received from the widow of Master Enrico, formerly shipmaster of Saint Aurelia, one sealed packet and one iron casket, to be held until lawful demand.'" She read it twice. "The date is sixteen years ago."
Adelasia's hand came down on the table. "Sixteen?"
"Yes."
"Then this is not the first passage through Roncaglia hands.
Enrico was already dead. His widow transferred a packet and a casket to Tomaso.
That is custody, not inheritance." Adelasia began pacing, each turn bringing her close to the brazier and back.
"If Tomaso's sons later called those things household property, they may have done so because nobody came to demand them, not because they were given them.
A merchant can hold another man's silver for twenty years and still know it is not his.
Whether his sons know the same is another matter. "
Lucetta felt the argument taking shape with the gratifying clarity of a geometric figure. "So the two branches may both be wrong."
"Or both partly right," Odelin said. "The casket might contain goods left in deposit, while the key itself—if there was one—might have passed by separate instruction. Do not fall in love with a contradiction merely because it is elegant."
Bertran had moved to the shutter. He opened it the width of two fingers and looked into the wet street. Lucetta knew that posture now. He was listening not to them but to wheels, hooves, steps under the eaves. "We have company," he said quietly.
No one moved at first. Naldo stopped chewing.
Bertran closed the shutter without haste, then crossed to the door and lifted the wooden bar into place.
"One man in a brown hood has passed this house three times since I came in.
He is not selling anything, he is not waiting for a cart, and his boots are too clean for a man who has walked the road.
There is another under the arcade opposite.
He watches the stable gate. That does not mean they know what is in this room. It means they care where we go."
"Could they be Corrado's?" Lucetta asked.
"Of course they could. They could also belong to a creditor, a local officer, a jealous husband, or an innkeeper who thinks Naldo stole his spoon. I do not accuse a man because he owns boots." Bertran looked at Adelasia. "How soon can the Ravenna factor be warned not to release anything?"
Ysoria answered from the doorway before Adelasia could.
None of them had heard her on the stair.
She had removed her wet cloak and held it folded over one arm, dark hair plastered against her temples from the rain.
"He cannot be warned before tomorrow evening unless I ride now," she said.
"And if I ride now on that south road, anyone watching the stable learns our direction before I am beyond the second gate.
I can send a boy north as if for Modena, have him change horse and circle east at dawn, but that costs half a day and two lies.
Or I can leave on foot through the market quarter, take a hired mount outside the wall, and perhaps lose the watchers. That costs more money and less time."
Bertran did not object to her certainty; that was one of the changes Lucetta had watched develop between them. In the mountains they had disputed every route as if the road itself belonged to whichever of them argued longest. Now he asked, "Which would you trust with a sealed warning?"
"Neither, if you write the warning plainly.
" Ysoria came to the table and glanced at the papers without touching them.
"Write that Mistress Roncaglia's expected order is changed.
Tell the factor to hold the blue cloth until she arrives in person.
If intercepted, it sounds like trade. If he has sense, he will remember there is no blue cloth. "
Adelasia smiled without amusement. "He has just enough sense to be offended that I think him a cloth merchant. Good. That will make him remember it."
They composed the message immediately. Lucetta wrote the outer words in the vernacular rather than Latin, partly because a commercial note in Latin would invite curiosity and partly because Adelasia insisted that any false message should resemble the ordinary business of the person supposedly sending it.
Ysoria watched the ink dry, folded the sheet, and sealed it with a plain borrowed seal rather than any mark associated with Lucetta or Adelasia.
Before she left, Bertran caught her at the door.
"Do not outrun suspicion merely to prove you can," he said. "If the man at the stable follows, let him. Better to know one face than trade him for another we have not seen."
Ysoria's brows rose. "You have given me that advice twice. The first time I ignored it and arrived before you."
"The first time there were mountains between us and the men who wanted the same road.
Here there are bridges, ferries, gates, and twenty places where a rider can be delayed by law.
Speed is useful until it becomes a straight line drawn for your enemy.
" Bertran's voice remained even. "Take the north gate.
Change direction only when you can do so without being seen.
If you think you are followed after dark, do not go to the factor at all.
Go to the convent hospice outside Ravenna and send from there. "
Ysoria considered him for a long moment. "That is better advice," she said. "You improve slowly." Then she was gone.
Rain deepened through the afternoon. Bertran refused to let anyone leave in pairs that made obvious sense, which meant Lucetta spent an hour at a wool merchant's warehouse pretending to inquire after ledger copying while Orsino visited a church whose iron grille he had praised the previous day, Naldo went to the fish market, and Adelasia called upon an elderly widow who had once invested in a river barge with her husband.
By dusk they returned by separate streets.
The man in the brown hood had vanished. The watcher opposite the stable had not.
Bertran sent Naldo out again after dark with a porter from the inn, both carrying empty baskets.
They came back laughing, wet to the knees, and with the information that the watcher had followed them to a wine shop and then handed a small folded paper to a mounted servant.
"Which road?" Bertran asked.
"East for three streets, then south," Naldo said.
"He could turn anywhere after that. But the mounted one wore a black cloak with green lining, good wool.
Not a common messenger. And he had a Ferrara badge pinned under the fold, which means either he works for someone here or he wants fools to think he does. "
"Did he see you watching?"
Naldo looked wounded. "Master Bertran, I have spent half my life being invisible to men who believe the person carrying their barrel has no eyes."
"That is not an answer."
"No."
They ate badly and late. The inn served beans cooked with too much onion and a piece of river fish whose bones seemed determined to survive every mouth.
Yet the meal became one of those councils that had gradually ceased to be called councils because no one among them had clear authority to summon one.
Lucetta spread a rough map and the copied account sheets across a cleared section of table.
Adelasia set out the names she knew: Tomaso Roncaglia of Ravenna, dead six years; his elder son Matteo, also dead; Matteo's widow and sons holding one set of warehouse interests; Tomaso's younger son Giacomo, dead without sons but leaving two daughters married into houses with claims upon his movable property.
A cousin at Comacchio had purchased salt shares from both branches and was said by each to be a thief.
An older sister had entered a convent decades ago.
No one agreed whether she had renounced her property before or after Tomaso took custody of the sealed packet and iron casket.
"This," Bertran said after listening, "is why soldiers burn account books."
Lucetta looked up sharply. "And this is why soldiers remain poor when wars end."
Orsino gave a bark of laughter. Bertran accepted the blow with a small incline of his head. "Then make me less poor in understanding. If both branches claim the casket, which one has the better right to prevent us seeing it?"
"Neither, if the record is accurate," Lucetta said.
"A custodian's heirs inherit his obligations as well as his goods, though the method of enforcing that depends upon the place, the contract, the surviving witnesses, and whether anyone can prove the obligation still exists.
But we do not possess the original instrument.
We possess a copy of an entry which says Tomaso received the thing until lawful demand.
We are not ourselves the lawful demander unless we can establish that the confraternity's surviving right passed somehow to us—which it did not.
We may have evidence that the casket contained something belonging to Saint Aurelia; that does not make us Saint Aurelia. "