Chapter 108: The Fairs of Europe

’Not just yet’ turned out to mean the rest of the afternoon, which was a considerable amount of just yet for who had been expecting to leave.

Zaccaria took the fleet’s business off both their hands, and by the time the sun dropped behind the campanili, the worst of it was done, and neither Vito nor Caterina had lifted a finger.

Three hulls’ worth of cargo went ashore under Zaccaria’s eye and into a rented warehouse near the Rialto. Sacks, casks, and crates passed through doors that belonged to neither the Barozzi name nor the Contarini one while the customs man took his cut from the grossi that had been sitting untouched in the strongbox, and nobody made a fuss about it.

The buonavoglia collected their wages as soon as the last rope came off the last bollard, just as the Republic required, then scattered into a city that many of them considered home.

Zaccaria divided what remained of Domenego’s platoon in much the same fashion.

Most of the soldiers went loose into the city two or three at a time, swords left with the baggage and purses heavier than they had been in months, while a few stayed behind by turns to watch both ship and warehouse through the night.

Domenego argued for one breath about which duty he preferred, lost, and went off cursing toward whichever watch given to him.

Bepi stayed with the ships, complaining about salt-crusted rigging and sailors who imagined one good season meant they could stop checking their knots.

To Vito and Caterina, that left the one question neither had bothered to ask aloud, sleeping beneath either family’s roof would have meant spending the night in a nest of snakes.

The Barozzi had spent its venom, loudly and in public and to no end, while the Contarini had shown its danger more patiently, polished by years of practice with no decency left underneath.

So they took rooms at L’Angelo instead, a respectable house near the Rialto that kept beds for patricians and prosperous merchants with no house of their own in the city.

Caterina’s servants came in with them, with Marouda complaining about the linens before the trunks had even reached the stairs. There are few things more dependable than a servant finding fault with a bed before anyone had the chance to sleep in it.

By the time evening had fallen over the canals, both of them had scrubbed the voyage off themselves.

Servants carried up basin after basin of hot water and them away again, each one heavier with salt and rope-grime than it had arrived. Neither Vito nor Caterina had noticed how much of the voyage they were still wearing until it was gone.

The mantle and [Artiglio del Leone] hung together over one chair, put aside as soon as the water arrived. The Lion of St. Mark folded in on itself and looked, for once, like nothing more important than laundry.

Vito had dressed for precisely nobody, down to his smallclothes and no more. He had never thought that easy lack of concern worth an apology. Caterina sat across the little table in her chemise, an unlaced overgown loose around her, her hair falling over her shoulders.

A jug of wine stood between them, brought up earlier and untouched, while a single lamp kept the room warm with its low light.

Caterina looked at the one bed beneath the window, then at him, and one eyebrow began its slow climb.

She snickered to him. "One room, Vitale? Ma, are you mad? By sunrise the whole lagoon will have decided exactly what the two of us have been doing in here all night."

"Whatever they decide, mia cara, you’ve earned every wicked word of it."

He spread his hands and showed no shame whatsoever. "What sense is a poor man supposed to keep when his wife looks like this? I came into this room with some, I swear, and now you’ve frightened every scrap of it clean out of me. So blame yourself, mia cara. I certainly shall."

She laughed outright and got up to fetch the wine herself.

"Your name, you know, it arrived here months before you did."

She poured two cups without spilling a drop. "By now, I imagine a good many of them have built quite a picture in their heads. I expect you’ll disappoint at least a few."

"Please. I never disappoint. I merely exceed expectations faster than some can prepare themselves."

Caterina handed him his cup and took the chair across the table instead of the space beside his knee. She sat there, plainly satisfied with herself.

Vito looked at the empty place where she usually ended up and took its absence as an injury.

"No lap tonight, moglie?"

"You’ve done nothing to deserve one, marito. You’ll have to earn it."

She looked far too pleased with herself. "A reward given once does not become yours forever just because you ask sweetly."

"Cruel woman."

He laughed and let her have that one.

Then he reached for the reason they were still sitting up instead of asleep. Caterina picked up the little notebook that never strayed far from her hand and opened it between their wine cups.

"The warehouse will not empty itself, Vitale. As much as I would enjoy letting it."

"Go on, then, moglie. Tell me, which part of our little fortune are we spending first?"

"The Commandaria, of course."

She didn’t need to think about it. "Every patrician house on this lagoon wants to be the first at its table with a wine their neighbors have never tasted. I already know four brokers who would claw each other’s eyes out for the right to sell it."

"And don’t forget the little story that comes with it. Richard of England, no less."

"Then it will sell twice as fast once we spread the tale."

She raised her cup toward him.

"You may take the credit for that part. I’ll take the money."

She laughed at his expression, and Vito could only shake his head, smiling into his wine. He let her have the victory, then tapped a finger against the ledger.

"Pepper next, and cinnamon after it."

He leaned back, the look on his face sharpening as thoughts came to him. "And now, mia cara, here’s knowledge worth knowing, since apparently I am the only man in this whole city who reads for pleasure. There is a great cycle of fairs held every year far to the north, in a county they call Champagne. Half of Flanders goes there, and half of France besides."

He lifted his cup, warming to the telling.

"Troyes and Provins are the names of the towns."

Caterina’s eyebrow went higher, wow she was curious rather than teasing. "And how, exactly, does our pepper leave a galley and find its way all the way to an inland fair in this Champagne of yours?"

"Ah. That, mia cara, is precisely the part I don’t know." Vito admitted

"Then, marito, it is fortunate indeed that one of us does."

She tapped the notebook once, pleased. "There are German and Lombard merchants who come to San Bartolomeo every morning looking for cargo. They buy from the Rialto and send it north by road, over the mountains and into the fairs."

Vito stared at her for a moment, then gave a slow shake of his head, half laughing. "Then find me one of those merchants before the week’s out, and we’ll have pepper riding north on a cart before the first frost.

Caterina only grinned over the rim of her cup.

"The alum next."

She moved her finger down the list that seemed to exist entirely inside her own head. "Every dyer in Florence would sooner lose a hand than go without alum, and we’ve enough in that warehouse to put a very handsome smile on many of their faces."

"I’ve been thinking on it ever since Alexandria."

He raised his cup as though attending a funeral. "No verses, ballads, nor one weeping lover has ever thrown himself from a tower over a sack of alum. And that, moglie, is precisely why it sells. People spend good coin on the things they desire, not the things they already have for free."

"That may be the nearest you’ve ever come to wisdom."

"Don’t look so astonished, moglie. Wisdom visits me often enough, you are simply too stubborn to recognize it."

She let that pass and moved on to the cotton, still unsold and heavy in the warehouse. "The Lombards will take the cotton too, especially the raw stuff. They’re turning it into a coarse cloth cheap enough that the peninsula can afford it."

Vito picked up from there. "The glass and silk will scarcely need us to lift a finger since the houses fighting over the Commandaria will take both without so much as blinking. We are in no such hurry that we must sell cheap just to watch the warehouse empty."

"And the balsam, that goes to Rome."

Caterina said it plainly and wrote the word down. "No censer in Christendom fills itself, and Rome has never yet discovered a year when it wanted less balsam. War, peace, excommunication, none of it makes the Papacy lose its appetite.

By the time the wine had gone from the jug into their cups and mostly out again, the whole season’s cargo had found a home on paper, if nowhere else yet.

Vito leaned back and looked at her across the table, pleased that it had been done properly, with two pairs of hands doing the work instead of one.

Caterina rose first.

She stopped a step short of the bed, her hands finding her overgown before leaving them alone again. She stood there a moment longer than she needed to.

This room belonged to them because they had chosen it.

Vito put down his cup, crossed the room in three easy strides, and swept her off her feet before she had decided what to do about any of it.

He declared, as grandly as any herald with a scroll. "Make way, make way! Ser Barozzi proudly announces the safe delivery of one impossible woman to her rightful bed! Delivered whole, dry enough for respectable company, and a finer cargo by far than any this poor sailor has hauled all season."

She went rigid in his arms for one breath.

Then both hands found their way around his neck and held on tight.

"Put me down, Vitale! Ma che matto you are!"

"Ma va’! Would you have me stop work halfway through? Never, moglie."

He set her on the bed with considerably more care than promised, and stayed close enough that she had no particular reason to let go of his neck yet.

Vito brushed a strand of hair back from her face, taking his time with it. "Nothing waits for you tonight but sleep, moglie. No tricks, nor wicked intentions, I swear it. I’ll keep you warm until dawn and be content with that."

Caterina let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

Her shoulders loosened beneath his hands, and her whole body relaxed into the mattress and into him at once.

"Ah, marito, listen to you. All these sweet words, you might as well be a poet."

Her voice was much more intimate than she noticed. "Insufferable man. Into bed with you, marito, and quickly, before I change my mind and condemn you to the floor like the troublesome husband you are."

He laughed, low and warm, and did exactly as he was told.

They lay together in a room that belonged to neither family but to themselves. It was the first night either of them had spent in the city they had both, in their different ways, spent years wanting to reach.