Chapter 2 Two Heirs To One Key
They did not reach Ravenna before their pursuers.
They reached it before their pursuers could make themselves welcome, which Adelasia said was a different victory and, in a merchant quarrel, often the better one.
The road had dried enough after Ferrara to throw dust from the horses' hooves, then drowned again near the low ground where canals, reed beds, embankments and fields made a traveller doubt whether earth or water possessed the country.
Their company separated and joined twice according to Bertran's plan.
Lucetta rode with Odelin for the first stretch, dressed plainly and carrying no visible writing case; Adelasia travelled with Orsino in a grain factor's cart whose driver complained without pause about axle ruts; Naldo and Bertran went ahead as hired men inspecting the road for animals; Ysoria disappeared altogether and reappeared at midday with a different cloak, a borrowed mare and the information that two mounted strangers had passed south before sunrise.
Ravenna did not offer itself to Lucetta as a single city so much as a collection of old walls, churches, towers, wet roads, gardens and business courtyards gathered around memories too large for the present streets.
Adelasia had warned her not to arrive thinking only of emperors and bishops.
"A man may conduct business beneath a mosaic made for an emperor and still cheat you over the weight of wax," she had said.
"The dead magnificence is useful because visitors stare upward while the living count below.
" Their contact, Marco Bellandi, received them in a warehouse court smelling of hemp, salt fish and damp boards.
He was a square man with a square beard, ink on two fingers and a manner so carefully unimpressed that Lucetta immediately trusted him more than she trusted men who rushed to proclaim loyalty.
"Your blue cloth has become expensive," he said to Adelasia without greeting.
"The widow's people came yesterday morning with a clerk and two cousins.
Giacomo's daughters sent their husbands' procurator after noon.
By evening both sides had convinced themselves I had copied more for the other than for them.
Then, after sunset, a man from Venice offered me eight grossi to say whether a Paduan woman had asked about old hospice accounts.
" He looked at Lucetta. "You are not difficult to describe. "
"Did you take the eight?" Adelasia asked.
"I took two for the wine he drank while waiting, then told him I had seen no Paduan woman. If I had taken eight, he would know I knew something worth sixteen." Bellandi scratched his beard. "You owe me two grossi."
"One. Your wine is bad."
"Then you have returned exactly as I remember you." His mouth twitched. "Come inside before the street learns there is anything here to watch."
The bundle he showed them was not the original Roncaglia archive.
That remained divided between two houses, each guarding its own portion like relics.
Bellandi had copies, abstracts and three receipts obtained years earlier when he had acted in a dispute over warehouse rent.
Lucetta settled at a long board on trestles while the others arranged themselves according to habit.
Odelin took the place where light fell best on faded ink.
Orsino looked at the iron latch of a cupboard and muttered that somebody had fitted it upside down.
Naldo drifted toward the loading doors until Bertran caught his sleeve and placed him where he could watch the court without appearing to do so. Adelasia stood rather than sat.
"Begin with Tomaso's death inventory," she told Bellandi. "Not the casket."
Lucetta glanced up. "Why?"
"Because if we ask first about the thing everyone is fighting over, Bellandi will give us only the paper he expects us to want.
I want to know what the household believed it owned before anyone learned outsiders cared.
" Adelasia looked at the factor. "And because Tomaso was vain.
He would have listed six cracked cups if he thought his grandchildren might call them silver. "
Bellandi grinned and produced a copy.
The inventory was exactly as Adelasia predicted.
Tomaso Roncaglia had died with more moveable property than Lucetta expected and less ready coin than his heirs later claimed.
There were bolts of cloth, barrels of oil, shares in two boats, salt contracts, warehouse rights, money owed by cousins, money owed to cousins, three beds, a painted chest, brass vessels, six silver spoons, two cups described as silver-gilt and a reliquary that the clerk carefully noted belonged to the household chapel rather than to Tomaso personally.
There were keys to warehouses, a key to a country storehouse, keys to chests, keys to an office strongroom.
There was no mysterious iron casket and no object identified with Saint Aurelia.
"That helps us," Lucetta said after the second reading. "If the casket had become household property, it ought to appear."
"Ought," Odelin repeated. "A useful word because it leaves room for sin, stupidity, and bad clerks."
Bellandi tapped another sheet. "There is a memorandum three months after the inventory.
Matteo Roncaglia, the elder son, complained that his brother Giacomo had removed 'certain effects formerly held by our father for foreign parties' before the estate was divided.
The clerk did not list those effects. Giacomo replied that he removed only goods connected with his own contracts. The quarrel was settled privately."
Adelasia's eyes narrowed. "And each branch now says the other inherited the casket."
"Each says the other stole it first and therefore must account for it now." Bellandi shrugged. "You see why I began charging by the page."
Lucetta read the memorandum aloud, then the reply.
The language was ordinary enough, but one phrase disturbed her: formerly held by our father for foreign parties.
Not eastern parties. Not Venetian parties.
Foreign. A family clerk writing in Ravenna could use the word loosely, yet it suggested that Tomaso's sons knew at least some goods in his keeping were not his property.
She marked it on a scrap and asked for the next paper.
By midday she had three competing sequences of possession, none satisfactory.
In the first, favored by Matteo's widow, Tomaso had received the casket from Enrico's widow, kept it for years, and Giacomo removed it unlawfully after Tomaso's death.
In the second, favored by Giacomo's daughters, Tomaso had entrusted it to Giacomo because Giacomo handled maritime business, and the elder branch later seized it when warehouse rights were divided.
In the third, which appeared in no formal claim but emerged from Bellandi's oldest notes, the casket had been moved out of Ravenna before Tomaso died and neither son had possessed it at all.
The third sequence depended on a line Bellandi had copied from a salt contract: 'carriage of the old iron, without opening, to the house at the pans. '
"The pans," Naldo said immediately from the doorway. "Salt pans?"
"Perhaps," Bellandi said. "There are pans enough between here and Comacchio for every family in Ravenna to lose a chest in one and swear innocence."
Adelasia held out her hand for the note. "Who paid for the carriage?"
"Tomaso."
"Who received it?"
"The line is torn in the original. I copied what survived: ...aldo Ronc..."
"Rinaldo Roncaglia," Adelasia said. "Tomaso's cousin at Comacchio."
Bellandi nodded. "The same man both branches now call a thief."
Lucetta felt the day rearrange itself. "Then why do they both claim the casket passed through their fathers?"
"Because Rinaldo died without legitimate sons and his interests were divided back among cousins," Adelasia said.
"If the casket went to him in custody and later disappeared from his inventory, each branch can build a road from his estate to itself.
The road need not be true. It need only contain enough stones to stand before a magistrate. "
Lucetta made one final note before closing the bundle: not merely Roncaglia, but every place where the name changed its meaning.
In one account it identified a blood relation, in another a trading house, in a third only the party responsible for carriage.
That distinction seemed small enough to bore any man waiting for a sword fight, yet she had learned that small distinctions were often the hinges upon which journeys turned.
A wrong surname could send them thirty miles from the truth.
A right surname read carelessly could send them farther.
She sanded the ink, shook the grains back into their horn, and wrote beneath the list: Do not follow the family; follow the custody.
Bertran came away from the loading door. "Before we build roads on paper, someone has been outside twice asking whether Bellandi received travellers from Ferrara. First a boy. Then a man who says he is looking for rope."
Bellandi's face did not change, but he slid the copied notes back into a leather folder. "I sell hemp. Men often ask for rope."
"He asked without looking at the rope."
"Then he is a nobleman," Bellandi said. "They buy everything that way."
Adelasia ignored the joke. "We need the originals."
"You need a miracle," Bellandi said. "The elder branch keeps theirs in the widow Agnese's house.
The younger branch's papers are with Ser Baldo Malatesta, procurator for Giacomo's daughters.
Neither will allow a joint inspection because each fears the other will claim possession by merely seeing the bundle. "
"Then we inspect separately," Adelasia said.
"They will ask whose interest you serve."
"Mine."
Bellandi looked at her more carefully. "That may be worse."