‘Where did you get those pearls?’
‘From a noble,’ she gasped. ‘Who couldn’t pay. God curse you! What’s the matter? Will your sword not fight?’
I sprang back to the attack. The smell of her, the gleam of the pearls, woman and pearls, woman and pearls, the delight of Ippolita and my greed for her treasure merged in a single exquisite emotion. As my mouth drew close to her ear I whispered, ‘I’ll give you a hundred ducats for them.’
She arched her back, bit my neck and hissed, ‘Two hundred.’
I twisted and swooped. ‘A hundred and twenty.’
‘Oh! Oh! Oh! And fifty.’
I rolled her on top of me to drink the last drop of delight and whispered in her ear, ‘Done.’
7
I went home euphoric. The smell of Ippolita was still about me: and I had made my first purchase. But lying in bed back in our lodging I began to doubt what I had done. What if it had only been the spell of the wine, the exotic foods and the delicious taste of my Amazon that had seduced me? By the light of a single candle I opened the casket again and got out my scales. They were true jewellers’ scales, which I had bought before leaving home. They had no stand; instead they hung from the finger and thumb, with two pans, on to one of which the tiny weights were lifted with tweezers. My pearls were of a good, even weight, some three and a quarter carats each, and of a good roundness. They were pierced, of course; but it surprised me to see that they had not been drilled right through their centres in the usual fashion, but in a shorter line across the base. Drilling pearls is always dangerous work; this must have been infinitely harder. It was this oddity that had caused the pearls to hang in so bewitching a fashion in Ippolita’s hair.
I crossed to the window, still holding the pearls. Dawn was beginning to break. I heard the water-carriers making their usual way up from the canal, and then the whoosh of their buckets emptying into the well. As the sun rose, for the first time I saw the pearls’ true glory. They had a deep and subtle sheen, like cream tinged with rosewater. The light played on them, hinting at transparent depths. And yet there were none, for the entire mystery of a pearl, unlike a gem, lies in its surface. I had been right: they were worth many times what I had paid.
‘Martin!’ I called, as my servant came padding through from the outside room, bringing hot water. I held out the casket and let him see them, seven silver orbs against the blue silk I had folded inside to keep the stones I bought safe and separate.
‘What do you think of that?’
Martin leant over and sniffed. ‘You bought from the whores?’
I snapped the lid shut in annoyance. ‘I’ll buy from the Devil if I have to. Do you doubt me?’
‘No, master,’ said Martin with reluctance. ‘If you say they’re real, I believe you. That’s all very well. But what next?’
‘Today we walk,’ I retorted briefly. ‘And tonight, back to the Bridge of Nipples.’ That truly was the name of that narrow little bridge: the Ponte de le Tet’; and a better-named bridge I have yet to see.
‘Is that your plan?’ Martin asked me in disgust. ‘To lie with a different trollop every night? For how long? Until all your money is gone?’
It was my mother speaking, loaded with disdain. For a moment I wavered. What if they were right? What if all I was capable of was squandering her money and creeping home, the chastened prodigal, never to attempt to rise again? But then anger welled up in me: anger at the slander and injustice of it, and at this hulking spy who dogged my every move. I walked up close to Martin, took hold of a fold of his shirt and flung him back against the wall. ‘I hope my mother is paying you well,’ I hissed at him. ‘Because you are taking a risk. What were her orders? To force me to make a mistake? To drive me home again as soon as you could? Well?’
Martin looked back at me stolidly. ‘I am here to guard you, master. And to be of service.’
I let him go. Of course he would admit to nothing. I should have kept my temper. I said, ‘I will lie with as many courtesans as it takes, and do whatever more I have to, until I find what I am looking for.’
On my daily prowls through the city, I mixed with the merchants in the Piazzetta before the ancient church of San Giacomo; I walked the Merceria, that wound up from Saint Mark’s towards the Rialto. And as I walked, I heard rumours that unsettled me. That summer, war had returned to northern Italy. Pope Clement had raised a force of eight thousand men, and sent them north to join with the armies of Venice and France. This confederated army had captured Lodi and Cremona from the Emperor’s Germans and Spanish, and was set to march on Milan, the Imperial stronghold in the North. For some days there was great excitement, and everyone talked of a quick victory for the League. But I heard other news too, whispered by merchants who had returned from the western fringes of Venice’s territory. There were great disagreements, it was said, between the Duke of Urbino, Venice’s general, and the Papal commanders. The Duke wanted to advance at once and crush Milan; but the Pope’s generals feared that would open the way for the Imperials to move south. In fury, the Duke had written to His Holiness to have his own orders approved; and meanwhile the army could do nothing. All this news I relayed to Uncle Bennet in ciphered letters. I hoped I might be raising my uncle’s importance in Wolsey’s eyes: and any increase in Bennet’s standing at Court was good for my chances too.
Then came word that the Pope’s army had suddenly detached itself and marched back south. Left alone, the Venetians and French had been obliged to retreat. At the same time, the Emperor’s great general, the Duke of Bourbon, had landed with an extra ten thousand men from Spain. There was fear and dismay everywhere. The League was finished, some said. Pope Clement was notoriously indecisive and treacherous. He might make peace with the Emperor at any time, and leave his allies in the lurch. France was weak, Florence would surrender if the Pope did, and that left Venice to stand alone. The older folk remembered twenty years ago, when Venice faced an alliance of the Pope, Emperor and sundry other states.
‘But the city can never be captured, surely? The lagoon and the war galleys protect us?’ I put this to Matteo Pasini, the old barber-surgeon who was the host where I lodged.
‘Venice cannot be captured!’ he echoed. ‘True, but she can be ruined. In 1510, when the Emperor smashed our armies, there was not a merchant left on the Rialto. The state banks closed. There were three million ducats on their books, owed to the people of Venice. But the money was gone: spent on armies that lay dead from the fight to defend our territories. You could see the burning towns over on Terraferma from the bell-towers. Bills and bonds were worthless. It could happen again, believe me. Whatever it is you have come here to buy, my friend, I advise you to work fast.’
I wrote letters; I fretted and fumed. I was half inclined to go straight back to the Fugger agent and cash the rest of my bills, while there was still gold to be had. But I would be a fool to load myself with two thousand ducats more, when I was still unable to spend what I had. It was more urgent than ever that I keep up my search. Even now, on my hard, profitless journeys through the city, I thanked God I was not in London, and that I was free, for the moment at least, of the House of Dansey. But I wished more than once Mr William had been here, or that I had his experience.
The courtesans’ world teased and inflamed me. I was fascinated by the thought of noblemen who could part with pearls for so far below their true value. I went back again and again and saw them in their gondolas, gliding up below the ladies’ windows by the Ponte de le Tet’: true courtiers, I thought, with their jewelled sword hilts and crimson doublets slashed with gold. They stood in the prows and gazed up with one finger keeping the place in a book of Petrarch’s sonnets. ‘What feeling is this,’ they crooned, ‘if it be not love?’ and ‘I swear to God you are cruel!’ and ‘My lady, will you murder me, when I am so loyal a slave?’
When I met them later, drinking with the ladies before retiring inside one of the canopies, they looked me haughtily up and down. I saw the rubies on their
fingers, the diamonds in their hat badges, the pearl buttons. Ippolita watched my eyes with a smile. When I was alone with the ladies she said, ‘You want to buy, and buy cheap? The place you want to be is a casin.’
‘And what,’ I growled, ‘is a casin?’
‘A casin, in the Venetian tongue, or casino, as they call it on Terraferma, is a place where nobles go to gamble. But looking as you do, they would not even let you through the door.’
‘You need to lose that hat,’ said Armida, standing up and casting it aside with distaste.
‘And this cloak is more like a pedlar’s,’ said Dardania.
‘And what a poor little dagger you have,’ said Angelica. ‘Gentlemen carry swords.’
‘This shirt disgraces you,’ said Ippolita, pulling it off. I tried to fight her away, but Armida came up behind me and took a firm grip on my breeches.
‘So do these.’
‘And these,’ added Dardania, peeling off my hose.
‘And most certainly these.’
I tried to dodge aside. ‘What in the Devil’s name is wrong with my drawers?’
Ippolita gave the final pull. ‘They should be of silk. Embroidered.’
They had stripped me. Ippolita dropped my undergarments on the pile along with the rest, with a grimace of distaste. I was angry, but I was laughing too: I felt strangely cleansed, as if my old life had been peeled away from me along with those clothes, the brown jerkin, the kersey breeches, the wool stockings and unadorned linen shirt. Before me lay the unknown. The courtesans evidently thought the same.
‘Look at him,’ Armida smiled. ‘Naked he stands, before the entry to a new world.’
I stooped down to my purse and tossed them a scatter of ducats. ‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘I would take it as an honour if you would be my guides.’
And so they began. Two days later it was the Feast of Saint Michael, Michaelmas, as we call it, at the end of September. On a church holiday no courtesan may practise her trade, and so the ladies conducted me to Saint Mark’s. The great square was packed with fine folk pressing for a view of the Doge as he passed in procession, dressed in crimson with an ermine mantle on his shoulders and the pointed cap on his head that is known as the Horn. Over him, keeping off the sun, was held a vast ceremonial umbrella all of gold brocade. This was the legendary Andrea Gritti, with his short white beard and fierce scowl, who had been the captain-general who fought Pope Julius and reconquered Padua for the Republic. Now he was leading Venice in her war against the Emperor. The bells rang, and along the piazza tapestries hung from every window. Monks dressed in white followed the Doge up to the five lead-sheathed doors of the church, before which flew three vast banners all of gold thread, depicting Saint Mark and the lion.
Together with my ladies I pressed through the crowd inside the church. I stood and stared at the mosaic-work and gold on every wall, the columns of coloured marble and pulpits roofed in gold, the statues of the saints too many to count. As Mass began, I looked about at the greatest wonder of all: the ladies of Venice. They sat high above us, in the galleries for the nobles. It would cheer a dying man’s heart to behold the quantity of diamonds they wore, the emeralds and sapphires of such size as I had hardly seen, the pearls about their necks and in their hair, and most of all the flash of the gems in their rings when all in a single movement they put their palms together to pray. A single one of these ladies might wear five hundred ducats on her fingers, and another thousand about her throat. My own four guides wore not a single jewel, as the law commanded of courtesans when they go abroad: so jealous are the Venetian ladies of the adornments that mark them out as noble.
Dardania plucked my arm and hissed in my ear to leave the women alone. It was the men I was here to watch: how they stood, how they sat, the hang of their cloaks, the way they doffed their hats, the cut of their doublets, the way their sword scabbards swung as they walked. They were dressed mainly in black: black stockings, black doublets and gowns slit at the elbows to allow their arms to come free of the long, trailing sleeves. Everything about them was elegant, with just a few flashes of true opulence: the gold buttons here, the silver lining showing through the slashed doublet there, the gold medal in the hat, the jewelled ring on the finger. That, said Ippolita, was the true polish I must cultivate: not the raffish carelessness of the men who visited my ladies at night.
Early next day, before the courtesans resumed their trade, we met again. They ushered me into a gondola. As we skimmed along the Rio di San Cassiano, I amused myself trying to steal kisses from the ladies. But their minds were entirely elsewhere.
‘Do the three Milanese women at the sign of the Angel Raffaele still make the best lace?’ asked Dardania.
‘Of course they do,’ said Armida. ‘And close by is the place for the best cambric.’
‘You mean the Calle dei Preti?’
‘Naturally. And we shall need a silk-draper, and a hat-maker, and a cutler.’
I gave up. When we put in at the Rialto Bridge I let the ladies guide me from one shop to the next. I ordered a black velvet doublet, slashed with cream-coloured silk, maroon silk hose, a cap with short ostrich feathers frothing all round its brim, new shirts with lace at the collar, and a rapier of Spanish steel, for which I chose a silver guard and a black leather scabbard. All this, you may imagine, required a shower of ducats from my purse. Martin looked on with apprehension.
‘They are using you,’ he told me, late that night as we walked home from yet another session above the bridge. ‘Their only chance of real comfort is to find a patron, someone to set them up on their own. Someone like you. I warn you, master, they will bleed your purse dry.’
I shrugged him off in annoyance. Soon I would be a nobleman, to all appearances. And to those who dress richly, it seemed to me, riches must necessarily come. I worked hard at the accomplishments that completed the part: including Italian as it is spoken in Venice.
‘Not “angelo”,’ said Armida. ‘Anzolo.’
‘And not “Venetsia”,’ Dardania corrected me. ‘Venezzsia – zzs.’ When I tried to copy it, that sound which Venetians spell with an ‘x’, they all fell back, laughing. They made me stand on a napkin, too, and practise my bows. I swept off my hat, overbalanced and broke a glass, at which they laughed more than ever. Late at night when the clocks struck three, and all courtesans were bound to shut their doors, I made my way home, tired and bad-tempered.
One morning, when I had not been asleep more than a couple of hours, I was woken by Martin shaking my arm. At his side I recognised the water-carrier’s boy.
‘Come at once,’ he whispered to me, ‘and you will see something to interest you.’
I grabbed my purse of gold. In a few moments we were out in the early dawn twilight. The shadows were thick in the narrow lanes, and we followed the boy with his lantern like a will o’ the wisp. We ducked through an archway and down to the canal, where the old water-carrier was waiting in his boat.
‘So there is a ship,’ I prompted, as the boy began rowing us out past the fish market in the direction of the Grand Canal.
‘There is a ship,’ the old man confirmed. ‘The master of it is in debt, and he wishes to sell some of his goods at once, before his creditors hear of his arrival, and before the officers of the Customs come out to search. He has already parted with certain rolls of silk: dark work, without lights.’
‘And from where has this ship come?’ I asked.
The old man turned back to me, and I saw in his eyes for a moment the excitement that all Venetians feel at the mention of the East. ‘From Egypt.’
We were drawing away from the city, out into the Lagoon. The early morning mist lay in swirls over the water. Rising from it was a ship: a great ship of good tonnage, with a high, gilded stern and the figure of a triton at her bow. It had rained in the night, and her sails were spread in the slack air to dry. We had perhaps an hour’s grace before her arrival was known. To come aboard before the officers of the Dogana was a crime of seriousness. I must
finish whatever business waited for me on board, and get away with dispatch.
I climbed the ladder, and clasped the hand of the ship’s master, a bearded Neapolitan with a scar running down one cheek. He nodded and led me astern into the great cabin. I saw Martin come in after me and look round with a scowl, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. Only now did I realise how imprudent I had been. We were at their mercy out here, in the morning mist, unknown to anyone. And they knew that we carried gold. Robbery and murder would be easy. I jumped as the master shut the door behind me. But then he walked over to a table spread with a white cloth beneath a hanging lantern, and nudged towards me a leather pouch. I sat down and tipped out a scatter of stones.
I thrilled to see them tumble out in front of me. There were fifteen or so of them, all uncut, some larger, some smaller. The light in here was poor, and in the morning’s hurry I had forgotten my scales. This would be a stern test: I was about to find out whether I had profited from my hours in the shops on Cheapside; whether my eyes and ears had been open, or whether, as the goldsmiths say of a stone that is dull and admits no light, I had been deaf and blind. I held the first stone up to the lanternlight. It had a pallid yellow gleam like a young oakleaf, and yet it was oddly darkened; whichever way I held it, it refused to shine. In its depths were flecks of gold. I was almost sure this was a chrysoprase, of India. This kind of stone must be cut with care, most commonly into a six-sided figure; too often even this fails, and it appears dull, blunt, quenched of all its fire. Only time would tell. If I was right, this stone could be nursed into a surprising and uncommon glory.
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