Chapter 171: Letters in Many Waxes

The letters lay spread across the oak table in every color of wax the Rialto had to sell, with Caterina’s half-written reply drying beside them.

They came from five houses, one for each bench in the hall, as every winter gift had been entered in the books as a debt.

Now the debts had come due, and the bills were being paid in dinners.

Each letter smelled of its trade. Chioggia’s seal had crusted white, the Michiel letter stank of tar, Ser Orio’s left flour on everything, Donata Morosini’s bore the brown wet mark of a Commandaria bottle, and the warden’s had a cat hair pressed flat beneath the wax.

Caterina answered the whole lot in one evening, keeping a finger beneath each line so she wouldn’t lose her place. As the heat lay over the lagoon and she had no intention of walking the city from one house to another in it, Vito would make the rounds while she drew up each partnership at the same table by night.

Five fronts, five houses, five dinners. A campaign could hardly ask for a better supply line.

She dragged the quill down the sheet in hard black ticks. "Allora, Chioggia first, Vitale, because the salt won’t wait for August, and neither will Ser Nadal’s temper. Then Michiel. Then Memmo. Then Morosini, and may God and the fish have mercy on you. Tiepolo last, on his island. Let him wait and wonder."

She set the quill down, caught his chin between two ink-stained fingers, and turned his face to the window. "Now listen to me, marito. Eat everything they set before you, everything, hm? A man who leaves food on his plate is hiding schemes... but promise nothing, not one syllable, until a notary has his hand on the page. A seal never talks, Vitale, and a mouth never stops."

"But tell me, mia cara, the true question, which of these sets the best fish on its table?"

"The best fish, caro mio, is always at the table that wants the most from you."

"Then I shall eat the fish, moglie! The whole fish, eyes, tail and conscience, and I shall leave my promises lying on the plate with the bones, where the cats can have them!"

Vito left by barge at dawn, heading south, and the flats of Chioggia emerged from the haze, their edges white where the winter’s salt basins lay.

Ser Nadal Zane was the eldest of his branch of Ca’ Zane and the master of its salt pans.

The new basins produced white salt faster than the old pans ever had, just as the new technology promised. The Barozzini had given the method to Ca’ Zane first, then to every pan on the flats, and in return, they received first call on the salt for their cargo and promised to keep Levant salt off the Republic’s scales.

Marco held paper on the leases of four flats, Ser Nadal’s among them, but now that the Zane pans were turning out white salt, those claims were beginning to look cheap. The lord of Chioggia who had once owed Marco was now in debt to the Barozzini instead.

Ser Nadal plunged a fist into the nearest heap and let the salt hiss through his fingers.

"White as a bishop’s linen, Messer Barozzi!"

His voice scraped out eloquently. "All my life I’ve raked gray mud and sworn to God it was salt, and now look! Look at it! I thank God first, you hear me, God first, and your house second. Go and tell either of them I said so. But tell God first, or I’ll know!"

Vito inclined his head. "Your neighbor sends his thanks as well, Ser Nadal. To the sluice, you understand, not to you. He swears the sluice has been his since the flood, although he didn’t say which flood, so I took it to be Noah’s."

"Ostrega! That sluice has been his since breakfast, Messer Barozzi, and only because I was kind enough to let him! God forgive my weakness!"

The barge brought Vito back at dusk and put him ashore outside a hall that stank of tar.

A Michiel nave lay at the pier, fresh lead glinting below her waterline, and Ser Zuan Michiel sat at the head of his table with a tankard in hand. He was the eldest living captain of his branch, a gray-haired veteran bearing the oldest scars from Zara.

The lead saved the Zara veterans the cost of refitting their ships and took that work away from the red caps, who had voted with the Old. The Doge’s oath forbade him to accept a gift, so the lead for the state’s galleys went to the Ducal Council in the Republic’s name, just as the compass before it.

The red caps lost their refits but received the lead-work in exchange, a loss with a contract nailed to it.

The man still believed Zaccaria was a stray Michiel born on the right side of the blanket, and no one at Ca’ del Leon had ever bothered to correct him.

Ser Zuan thumped his tankard down so hard the dice leapt on their board. Then he cocked his gray head at Vito, one pale sea-washed eye and then the other. "Eh, fio! And my stray? That scowling cousin of mine, that sour Michiel who wouldn’t smile if you paid him in good silver? Tell me he hasn’t drowned! I’d never forgive him!"

"At sea, Ser Zuan, where else? Scowling at the horizon and being a Michiel with all his might."

"Good! GOOD! A Michiel belongs at sea, and the sea belongs to the Michiel, and the rest of you may have the dry land and welcome! Wine! Wine for the boy! And a full cup poured out on the floor for the stray, so the sea knows whose he is!"

From the tar, Vito took a gondola up the Grand Canal to a house with flour on the steps and bread served at every course.

Ser Orio was the second son of Ca’ Memmo, responsible for its granary contracts and its mills upriver. He was a round man dusted with flour, much like a loaf himself, and sat with the Old and ate often at the Young’s table.

The Old trusted vellum, and on Marco’s bare table, any scrap of paper could be held against the man who touched it. The roll therefore stayed on vellum, because an act sealed by a notary ought to outlast the notary.

Paper stamps went up beside the grain wheel at the Memmo mills, with the Barozzini supplying the stamps and the rag-men’s stock while Ca’ Memmo supplied the water, the wheel, and the clerks.

Marco had bought the Old with paper. Vito sold them the other kind.

A short gondola ride at supper brought him to the grandest table of the round.

On Donata Morosini’s wall hung a hand’s breadth of lead-backed mirror, and beneath the table waited her grandson’s spaniel, whose pedigree was finer than Fantin’s crest-spoon. The boy’s mother had brought two vineyards and a lawsuit into the house, and the lawsuit had turned out to be the better vineyard.

Donata was matriarch of Ca’ Morosini and hostess to the Young, while her cousin Thomas served as Latin Patriarch of Constantinople.

In the millpond in her yard, a silk frame waited for the fleet’s raw silk, and the Morosini looms stood ready to turn it into thread. The Barozzini would keep the frame and the first silk, while the Morosini would keep the looms and the court.

Mirrors would go into the grand wives’ salons, with Donata’s sala serving as the shop window, and spectacles had been promised to the Patriarch’s scribes.

Murano had the last table, and Vito crossed over on a Sunday, the barge riding low under the weight of everyone else’s dinners.

The warden’s roll lay on a trestle at the end of the new pier, and behind it, the brick chimney smoked, and the net racks had been pushed back toward the reeds.

Vito’s declaration before the Avogadori lay where anyone could read it. Every master who crossed signed for a plot on the shore in front of the warden, and the rent passed from the master’s hand to his while the warden entered each payment in his roll.

The city’s glass guild grumbled, and the island’s blowers raised their prices before they raised a fire. Tiepolo drove every rule into the island like a nail, and the cat sent compliments to every plot.

The round ended where it had begun, with five leaves beneath five seals and Caterina’s finger under the last line.

The salt method had reached every pan on the flats, lead had reached the state’s galleys, paper had reached the granary keepers and the chancery, and spectacles had reached every lapidary in the lagoon. Clear glass, mirrors, and the silk frame remained under partnerships on Vito’s shore, just as the sawmill and the ship sheets always had.

Every gift had been entered as a debt, and every channel led back to Ca’ del Leon.

In a few years, a cadet who had left the sack with three galleys and a name had spread a net over every bench in a hall that would one day have to fill that chair. The Young’s count had gained a house, one that had crossed the floor without telling anyone why.

By the last days of July, the sala’s weekly table shut its doors as Caterina’s pregnancy drew near.

Her belly had grown beyond the table. By San Giacomo, her feet had swollen again, and Cristina fed her liver and greens at every meal.

The midwife, washed to the elbows, judged the child ready and said it would come before the month turned. The master chamber stood prepared, with fresh straw and boiled linen.

Marouda hung a small bronze bell beside the ring of the master chamber door, making it clear that the bell belonged to her and that anyone who rang it without good reason would meet the slipper.

That night, Caterina brought the books upstairs and drew a single line on its last page for the child’s name, but left the space blank.

The household had argued over the name at every meal, Cristina wanting a saint’s name and Marouda a Greek one, and no one dared settle the matter.

Beside the master chamber door, the bell hung ready.