Chapter 9 The Island House
Lucetta woke to bells, gulls, and a pain beneath her left breast that had sharpened during the night into something too precise to ignore and too modest to deserve the dignity of complaint.
For several moments she remained beneath the coarse blanket, listening.
The storm had gone. That absence had a sound of its own.
No rain battered the shutters; no wind pressed at the roof; no ropes groaned outside like wounded animals.
Instead there came the ordinary noises of a religious house beginning its day: sandals along stone, a door bar lifted, a bucket set down too hard, a man coughing behind a wall, the low collective murmur of prayer from the chapel.
Beyond those, farther away, the inlet breathed against the landing steps.
Naldo snored from the pallet nearest the brazier with one swollen foot elevated on a folded sack.
Orsino lay on his back, mouth open, one arm thrown over his face.
Niccolò had somehow managed to sleep sitting half upright against the wall, protecting Corrado Salviati's packet inside his robe even after nearly drowning with it. Adelasia's pallet was empty.
Lucetta sat carefully and discovered the bruise along her ribs had grown from a narrow purple bar into a broad dark stain. She touched it, regretted the experiment, and reached for her gown.
"If you press it often enough," Ysoria said from the doorway, "you may persuade it to hurt more accurately."
Lucetta looked up. Ysoria had already braided her hair and found a dry cloak from somewhere. She held two cups.
"You have become compassionate since joining us."
"I have become observant. Compassion takes longer." She offered one cup. "Warm water with something bitter in it. The canon who examined Naldo says it is useful. I suspect it is merely what they serve guests they do not wish to keep."
Lucetta drank. The something bitter might have been sage. "Where is Adelasia?"
"In the yard speaking to a servant about the old landing. Brother Odelin has been awake since before dawn. Bertran went down to the boat. Ziani sent word that the mast will stand if no one asks it to perform miracles, and that he needs half a day before he will trust the patched rigging."
"And Naldo?"
Ysoria glanced toward the sleeper. "The ankle is not broken. He may walk badly if he is stupid and walk less badly if he is not. He has taken this as permission to be stupid."
From beneath the blanket Naldo said, "I am awake."
"Then hear the diagnosis twice."
"I heard it the first time. I objected silently."
"That must have cost you dearly."
Lucetta smiled despite the ache in her ribs. The ordinary quarrel was reassuring. She finished the drink, dressed, and stepped into the covered walk.
Morning had washed the house clean. The stone paving shone.
A fig tree in the inner court had lost several leaves, which lay plastered against the wall like wet green hands.
Two servants carried baskets from the storehouse.
A canon in a faded black mantle swept water toward a drain with the solemnity of a man performing an office no less necessary for lacking Latin.
Odelin stood at the far end of the cloister beside the elderly canon from the night before.
Neither man looked as though he had slept.
Between them lay a narrow wooden board supporting three bound gatherings of parchment and one smaller packet of loose leaves tied with string.
Lucetta stopped beneath the arch.
Odelin saw her. "You are limping."
"I am bruised. Naldo is limping. I have not stolen his privilege."
The elderly canon smiled. In daylight his face looked less narrow than worn, the skin fine and pale beneath his eyes. "Mistress Verani, Brother Odelin tells me that once you decide a dead man has something to say, you are difficult to distract."
"Brother Odelin has made me sound disrespectful to the dead."
"On the contrary. Most living men would be grateful for such attention. I am Canon Leone. I kept these books before my sight became worse, and before that Brother Anselmo kept them, and before him men whose handwriting proves humility was not among their vows."
Lucetta came closer. "What are they?"
"Guest records, offerings, burials, and a miscellany that ought never to have been bound together.
The house was larger then. Or perhaps only busier.
Sailors, salt men, pilgrims, merchants caught by weather, men too poor for passage, men too rich to admit they were lost. They came because the landing was sheltered and because there was once a warehouse beyond the south wall.
The sea took part of the quay. The merchants took the rest of their business elsewhere. "
Odelin rested one finger beside the smaller packet.
"I remembered a formula. Last night when he mentioned San Giorgio men, I remembered seeing the same form used in a death memorandum at another house years ago.
Not the name. The manner of recording property delivered onward after a traveler died.
If this house served the same traffic, it may have done the same. "
Lucetta looked from him to the packet. "And you have found such a memorandum?"
"I have found that there are twenty-seven years in which the burial book is complete, four in which it is damaged by damp, and six months in which some diligent brother decided every foreigner could be identified by first name and profession alone. I have not yet found our man."
"Then what did you remember?"
Odelin's mouth moved in the beginning of a smile. "That you would be impossible if I waited until after breakfast."
Canon Leone laughed aloud.
Lucetta drew the bench toward the board. "What years?"
Adelasia entered the cloister before Odelin could answer. She had mud at the hem of her gown and a small twig caught in one sleeve.
"The old landing is still there," she said.
"Or enough of it to insult a boat. The servant says northern merchants used it until perhaps twenty years ago.
Salt, timber, oil, sometimes wool. San Giorgio is not one company.
It is a name men here use loosely for several houses that kept stores under the same saint's protection in the northern port.
If we chase the name alone, we will collect half the Adriatic. "
Lucetta nodded toward the books. "We may have something narrower."
Adelasia's eyes sharpened at once. "Show me."
Canon Leone raised both hands. "I begin to understand why Brother Odelin warned me about ordinary nouns."
"You have not yet met Orsino with a hinge," Odelin said. "Then you will know fear."
They worked first not by names but by dates.
The torn Santa Marta deposition fragments recovered from the punt had preserved enough to indicate that a man connected with the Badoer-Zorzi freight route had carried correspondence north after the elder custodian became afraid.
A surviving margin mark, read against an older Saint Aurelia account, suggested the movement occurred sometime between 1278 and 1281.
The range was broad enough to be troublesome and narrow enough to make trouble seem solvable.
Canon Leone brought another register.
"We did not record every guest," he explained. "Only those who paid, those who required care, those who left property, those who died, and those whose behavior irritated the cellarer sufficiently to make him immortal."
"An excellent archival principle," Lucetta said.
"You mock, but irritation preserves history."
Adelasia turned a page carefully. "So does debt."
For an hour they found nothing except proof that storms had always arrived at inconvenient times.
A Paduan merchant with fever. Two sailors from Zara after a broken mast. A widow traveling to Ravenna with three servants and a locked chest whose contents Canon Leone's predecessor had tactfully not described.
A cooper who died after eating shellfish and whose tools were sent to his brother.
Three pilgrims who claimed to have been robbed and were later discovered to have hidden their own money beneath a mattress.
Naldo appeared at the cloister entrance leaning on a staff and wearing one boot.
Ysoria walked behind him with the expression of a gaoler disappointed by the quality of her prisoner.
"I was told not to walk," Naldo announced, "which I have interpreted as permission to stand in several places consecutively."
"Sit," Bertran said from behind him.
Naldo turned. "You are becoming tiresome."
"Sit before I make the instruction simpler."
Bertran had returned from the shore with damp boots and a new bandage around his right hand. Lucetta noticed the bandage before she intended to and then disliked herself for noticing.
Naldo lowered himself onto the bench. "A company of tyrants."
Orsino arrived last, carrying bread. "You are alive because we outnumber you."
"That is not how tyranny is usually defended."
"Eat."
The bread disappeared between them while Lucetta continued turning pages.
It was Adelasia who found the first useful name.
"Here."
She placed her finger beside a line halfway down a leaf.
The entry was brief. A certain Tommaso, servant to Ser Marino Badoer, had stayed two nights while awaiting passage. His master had paid for fodder, wine, and storage of two bales. The year was 1279.
Lucetta leaned closer. "Badoer."
"One branch of the freight partnership," Adelasia said. "Not enough."
Odelin read the next line. "He left no property. No illness. No death."
Canon Leone said, "But he proves the route."
"A road can exist without carrying the man we need," Bertran said.
Lucetta looked at him. "You have learned to be a notary."
"No. I have learned what happens when you decide one coincidence is an argument."
"That is nearly the same thing."
They continued.