Chapter 1 The Fourth Office #3
"Then if we walk into Ravenna saying, 'Good day, we have come for the iron your grandfather held for a dead confraternity,' they can shut the door."
"Yes."
"And if Corrado walks in with creditor instruments?"
"He may have a stronger claim than we do." Lucetta disliked the taste of the words but would not soften them. "That does not mean he owns the key. It means he can make a better argument for an inventory."
Adelasia turned her cup between both hands.
"Which is why we should not begin by asking for possession.
We ask to see the papers. We ask to reconcile the two branches' claims. We offer something they need: a neutral reading of instruments each believes the other is misrepresenting.
Once we are inside the quarrel, we learn what became of the casket. "
"Neutral?" Odelin asked mildly.
"Neutral enough to enter the room," Adelasia replied. "Do not make that face, Brother. A bridge need not belong to neither bank in order to carry you across."
Lucetta watched her and felt again the difference between reading business and understanding merchants.
She could expose an altered date, reconstruct a sequence of transfers, explain what a clause required.
Adelasia understood the transaction that occurred before anyone reached for ink: pride traded for access, deference for information, insult measured against profit.
"What do we offer the second branch?" Lucetta asked.
"The same thing, but first." Adelasia's smile was thin.
"Each believes the other has corrupted the record.
If both are told that a notary's daughter from Padua, with no Ravenna kin and no share in their salt, will compare their instruments, each will want to be the one who places the first papers in your hand.
Men who distrust a judge still compete to reach the judge's ear. "
"And if they ask who pays us?"
"I do."
Lucetta frowned. "Adelasia—"
"Do not begin. My husband is named in these accounts.
That gives me an interest whether I pay a denaro or not.
Better an admitted interest than a concealed one.
" Her voice hardened. "I have spent too many years watching men call a widow disinterested when they mean powerless.
I am neither. If the Roncaglia papers can tell me what my husband knew, I will spend for the answer.
If they can also tell us where the fourth key went, so much the better. "
Silence settled, not from disagreement but because there was no respectful answer that would not diminish what she had said.
Lucetta reached across and touched the edge of the account sheet nearest Adelasia, not her hand.
"Then we keep the two questions separate," she said.
"What became of Saint Aurelia's maritime property, and what part your husband played in it.
If one answer tempts us to force the other, you stop me. "
"Gladly."
Bertran leaned back. "Now the road. If we are watched, I do not want six people riding east in a pretty line."
What followed occupied another hour. Ysoria's absence forced them to think without their best judge of courier routes.
Bertran proposed leaving Ferrara by different gates and regrouping near a river crossing.
Naldo objected that splitting six travellers over flat country made each easier to delay.
Orsino objected to any plan requiring his mule to cross flooded ground.
Odelin objected to none of it until Bertran suggested lodging one night in an abandoned grange rather than a religious house, at which point the monk said that sleeping in a wet field merely to outwit a watcher was vanity disguised as prudence.
Adelasia settled the matter by producing a letter from a grain factor whose cousin managed a riverside storehouse east of the city.
They would leave as if travelling separately on ordinary business, but converge at the storehouse before noon, where pack animals could be shifted and questions asked without advertising their destination.
Before they broke from the table, Orsino insisted on seeing the three keys again.
The demand sounded at first like craft vanity, but when he laid them separately upon a folded cloth the practical reason became plain.
The Warden's Key was dark and repaired at the bow; the Treasurer's heavier, broad in the hand; the Notary's longer and narrower, its filed notch unmistakable.
Three pieces of iron, made in different workshops for locks none of them had yet seen together, and already enough to draw men across jurisdictions.
Orsino touched none until Lucetta had named each one.
"Remember them by more than office," he said.
"If one is stolen and another fool brings you a black key claiming to have recovered it, you must be able to say why he lies before I arrive.
Iron records use. This one has been held by a right hand often enough to polish the inner bow.
This one struck against something hard for years—see the flattening there?
And the mountain key was filed after it left its first lock.
Objects acquire witnesses when men do not. "
Adelasia looked at the three with distaste rather than wonder. "And yet every man who hears of them imagines gold."
"Gold is easy to imagine," Orsino said. "A lock is harder.
Men think a key means treasure because they do not understand that most locked things are accounts, tools, grain, other men's pledges, or a master's private shame.
If I built seven locks on one chest, I would assume the owners distrusted one another before I assumed they were hiding a king's ransom. "
Lucetta wrapped the Warden's Key again. "That may be the truest thing anyone has said about Saint Aurelia."
"Of course it is. I work for a living."
Near midnight, when the others had gone to their rooms, Lucetta remained by the dying brazier with the copied office list. Bertran stayed too, pretending to repair the leather wrap on his sword grip although it did not need repair.
For several minutes they worked in companionable quiet.
She had learned that his silences were not all alike.
Some were walls. Some were watch posts. Some, increasingly, were places he allowed her to stand without explanation.