Chapter 180: The Things We Leave Behind

The palace stayed closed until Epiphany, the sea stayed closed until March, and for a few frozen days Vito had nowhere to go and no one to see.

He washed his hands and arms to the elbows, then lifted Lucia from her cradle. Caterina sat among the cushions with Leonardo at her bosom and a brazier warming her feet.

Frost covered the shutters, and beyond them the new wing stood open to the weather, its piles of stone and low walls waiting for better days.

The twins were nearly half a year old. They couldn’t talk or walk yet, but they could sit if someone propped them up, roll if left alone, grab anything within reach, and put whatever they grabbed straight into their mouths. They were getting very good at that last business.

Lucia did everything with determination. She had the grip of a galley oarsman, kicked the quilts out of place, and reached for anything forbidden with such purpose that Vito suspected she intended to walk by spring, whether her legs were ready or not.

Leo took his time with everything, his calm so complete that his father suspected the boy had read ahead and found no reason to hurry.

They placed the twins side by side on a quilt before the mirror, a hand’s breadth of glass propped against a bolster, with a cushion behind each child to keep the proceedings from ending too soon.

Lucia saw the girl in the glass, who looked every bit as disagreeable as she was, and struck her.

The mirror rocked.

Leo examined his own face with great seriousness, raised one finger toward the boy opposite him, and received the same gesture in return. He laughed in slow, round gasps, taking his time to appreciate the joke.

Vito knelt behind them and recited the Doges in the sing-song voice men use for children and mules.

"A-na-fe-e-esto! Te-gal-lia-a-no, ciò, bravo! Or-so I-pa-to... and Te-o-da-a-to..."

Lucia grabbed her father’s hair, used it to pull herself upright, and rolled over her brother. Leo landed on his back, looked mildly surprised, and turned his attention to the beams while his sister took possession of the mirror.

Vito lifted her off the glass and held her overhead. She kicked at the beams and began crying for more as soon as her feet touched the quilt.

By noon Lucia was hungry and proclaimed the fact with her entire immature voice. Caterina took her into the nest of cushions, while Vito lay Leo on his knee.

A minute later Caterina yelped. A white edge, no longer than a grain of rice, had broken through the girl’s lower gum, and Lucia had already put it to work, looking up at her mother with satisfaction.

"Ostrega! Madonna santa, Vitale, she bit me! The little brigand has a tooth, and she’s put it to work already!"

"That’s her mother’s bite, anima mia. I’ve got the marks to prove where she learned it, and I’ll show them in any court in the city."

"Don’t you grin at me, Vitale!"

Caterina jabbed a finger at him across the cushions while her arm shifted the girl to the far side with a hiss. "Look at me. Look! Two wineskins, hot and swollen and sore as if I’d hauled them over the Rialto bridge, and now one of the customers has teeth!"

"Poor moglie, I’ll make it up to you tonight. I’ll drink you dry, anima mia, and come back begging for the dregs."

She struck his arm hard enough to make Leo blink.

"You’ll queue, marito. There are two ahead of you, and one of them bites."

Vito laughed until the cushions shook, while Lucia rolled one furious eye toward him and continued drinking, with no intention of letting a joke interfere with her meal.

At last they put the twins in their cradles. With the children settled, the married couple could almost pretend the room belonged to them again, until he crossed to fetch his cup and struck his shin against a rocker. He swore under his breath.

"A room, Vitale. They need a room, two rooms, before she’s finished shoving him off the quilt and into the canal."

"Five months, she’s five months old, moglie."

Caterina held up two fingers. She had counted two shoves since breakfast, and Leo, who had rolled over both times, seemed more interested in the experience than troubled by it.

"And there’ll be more tomorrow. The sala’s suites belong to the households, and the wing is no place for a child. We build onto the family rooms, a floor over the bays, and a door apiece, one for him and one for her."

"Over the bays? Eh! Then they’ll sleep above the pepper like proper merchants’ children."

"Above damp, tar, and the stink of a hold? Ostrega, no, they’ll wake up smelling like cargo. Put the rooms over the accounting hall, Vitale, where it’s dry."

"And they’ll learn their letters up there! A for amphorae."

Caterina snorted into the bolster.

"A for alum, you goose. Then A for audit, always audit."

He smiled at that, but the joke had given them both more to think about. A room for each child meant walls, doors, and another piece of the house committed to a future neither of them could yet see.

Night came early. The twins were fed, washed, and put down again, their cradles so close together that Vito, propped against the bolsters, could rock both with one foot. Caterina lay beside him with her feet tucked under his thigh and no books within reach, which for her was practically a vow.

"The wing wants a watch, Vitale. An empty guard post is only a door with a sign painted on it."

"Then we’ll put a man in it. Some fellow with big feet and a short temper, who kicks first and asks after."

The cradles creaked and a twin sighed, then decided against making more of the matter.

"It’s not only the wing. The whole calle counts our windows, Vitale. They count the stones going up and the days between them, and it’s the speed they can’t stand. A house that rises in four winters insults every house that took forty..."

"...and they’d all give a month’s rents to watch it fall. Sì, sì. The man who sold us his wall bows a little lower every week. I’ll apologize in spectacles."

Her cold feet found his leg.

"Wear all the spectacles you like, a man can still hold paper in them. And the Hat? Not a candle, not a ribbon when the fioi were born."

"Cazzo, Zio Marco never gave a gift in his life he couldn’t enter as a loan."

Caterina propped herself up on one elbow. "Which is why I don’t trust his silence. He needn’t send a gift to make a statement. A man can strike a name without winning a single vote, Vitale. He’s done it before, eight at a time, with one stroke of the pen."

"The roll is remade at San Michele, and I know how ink scrapes off. So every bench gets something of ours to lose. Let him scrape that, ciò. Let him try."

Vito’s foot stopped on the rocker, then started again.

"Leo’s name is in the deed with every son of the house. A seat that comes by name can be taken by name. Doors don’t stay open, moglie. They’re built to shut. I just like to be inside when it happens."

Caterina didn’t ask where he’d learned that. She never did.

"Lucia’s account is entered, Vitale, and Almorò’s eels haven’t come. Watch, he’ll price her at the font and call it affection."

"Then he can keep his eels. If he thinks a few fish buy a say in our children’s lives, he’s mistaken. They’ll marry whoever they like, moglie. Leo too. I’ll pay for the whole feast and dance on the table in my stockings."

Caterina raised one eyebrow.

"With that temper, she’ll pick a Genoese just to spite us. And no one asked me who I liked."

"I’m asking them. And I’d have asked you too, anima mia, if it had ever been mine to ask."

She laughed into the bolster.

For a moment, the years ahead seemed less like a ledger of debts and alliances and more they might still get to choose for themselves. Then Caterina returned to the business of keeping their children safe, which was never far from the business of keeping the house alive.

"Eels or no eels, there’s the leaf to think of. Nane sails with the first ships of spring, to turn a pier of paper into a pier of stone."

"And Phasis, ciò, sits on its hands, waiting for a court that hasn’t hurried since the Argonauts, while the steppe road gets thinner every year."

The brazier ticked as it cooled.

"The last galleys brought news, Vitale, and it’s good. The Bulgarian is dead beneath the walls of Thessalonica, and the Marquess in the ground before him. Two fewer wolves in the yard."

"Then Henry can breathe, at last. He holds the lock on our back door, moglie, and a lock only works while someone feeds it. Ten good years in him. Maybe. And don’t you dare enter that."

She turned her head toward him.

"I’ll enter it as a rumor."

"And while we count Henry’s years, we have to decide which doors to open ourselves. Alexandria’s the other door, moglie. The Sultan will sign with someone this year or next. The only question is whether he signs with us."

A cradle creaked.

"The fleet grows, the stills grow, and every house that sat out the season comes scratching at our door. Mark me, Vitale, a house that needs no one is hated by everyone."

"Then we leave a little corner on every leaf, moglie. A crumb apiece, so they can love us a little."

Her toes found his calf.

"Enough that they’d weep to lose it, Vitale. And the bays will fill, God willing, and you, madman, want the fioi sleeping on top of them."

"Above the pepper that pays their dowries."

She laughed, then lay still.

"How long, Vitale? All of it, the whole venture. Give me a number, a real one, and don’t you dare say God willing."

"Longer than you’d like and shorter than I need. Twenty years, moglie. Give or take a Doge."

The rocker stopped creaking beneath his foot.

Caterina was quiet for a while, looking toward the cradles. Twenty years was long enough for the children to grow, for the house to change beyond recognition, and for all the plans they made tonight to become either history or a warning.

She swung her feet onto the cold floor, took the lamp, and went through the second door into the office. She returned with a thick, plain book from the shelf, bound in good leather and never used. It was for the children, and no one else.

She sat on the edge of the bed and wrote the twins’ names and the year at the head of the first leaf. Beneath them, in her small, square handwriting, she made the first entry, about a tooth, and the girl who had used it.

"Santa Maria, that’s going to eat a great many pages."

"That is the idea, marito. Teeth, steps, first words, every quarrel she wins. Every one of them entered, and not one forgotten."

A word, so no one gets caught out. This was the last winter the house could be counted in cradles. The months that followed would pass faster than any season the venture had known, and the years behind those months would pass faster still.

Caterina dipped the pen and began the second line.