Chapter 188: Same Water, More Passengers

The bells were still ringing out the old year, and two little voices from the east wing had begun answering every stroke. They had been at it for some time, and no one yet persuaded them that the bells could manage without their help.

Caterina left the key on its hook, where it was kept for one night each year, and took two fleeces from the peg-stand beside it. Two great houses had sent boys up the water-stairs that week with invitations for the twins to hear the bells at their tables, but both boys had gone back downstairs with the same answer.

The twins reached the office door hand in hand, Lucia leading at the speed of a galley under full oars, while Leo followed with his fleece dragging across the boards. Both had their father’s looks, which had never obeyed anyone, and both came into a room the way their mother did, expecting an account of what was going on.

Cristina and Marouda had already put a motion before the household in the androne to let the twins out into the frost. It had passed two votes to none, the only motion those two women had ever carried together, and the Great Council might have learned from the efficiency of the business.

Everyone washed to the elbows at the ewer, since the rule didn’t take holidays for feasts, with Marouda doing the pouring, while Cristina packed provisions as if she were sending a ship to sea. A cloth of roasted chestnuts too hot to hold, a flask of boiled water for the children, and a flask of warm wine for their parents.

At the water-gate the grille went up on its windlass, and the black gondola waited below, its cushions covered in frost, a lantern swinging from the prow and a private from the company watch seated at the oar.

On the night he had asked for her hand, Vito had stood in this same boat and rowed it himself, yelling at a sleeping barge about a clove merchant who didn’t exist. Tonight he climbed aboard with a child under one arm and a fleece under the other, then handed the oar to someone else.

Marriage had evidently brought some changes in his duties.

They slipped out into the thin fog. Behind them, every hull the house owned had been hauled out and covered in frost, the new works stood behind closed doors, and an iron frame waited in the courtyard workshop for the tower that would carry it.

Genoa had declared no war, though it had forgotten nothing, and beyond the lagoon, an Emperor wore a fresh crown from Rome.

Ahead, the lit windows of San Marco floated through the haze beneath the bronze horses. It was the vigil of San Silvestro, and the whole city was awake to see the year out.

Off the Molo, the oarsman let the gondola carry its own way.

Lucia had escaped her fleece before the boat had finished gliding, and Leo followed a moment later. He folded his fleece into four neat parts and placed it on the seat, where no one would lose it.

This was one of the differences between them.

The twins were two years and five months old, and they ran the east wing like a crew of two, each with a part to play. Lucia did the talking and Leo supplied the hands, Lucia made decisions and Leo reported them, while Lucia fought and Leo talked.

They went to sleep in separate rooms but were found together in one before dawn, and every dawn Marouda checked them like cargo unloaded from a late ship. They knew every door, stairs, and guard in the house, and spoke to one another in a mixture of Venetian, Greek, and words of their own invention.

No grown person had ever managed to follow a complete conversation.

They had also inherited the old kitchen treaty, since Cristina controlled the pot and Marouda controlled the door. Leo was responsible for the pot and Lucia for the door, and Christmas was an excellent time to put the arrangement to use.

Lucia stood at the larder entrance and kept Marouda occupied with orders in Greek, loud, lengthy, and wrong in every matter of grammar but perfectly delivered, while Leo walked out with a fig in each fist.

Afterward he reported everything to Cristina, slowly and in full, right down to the last stem, and she rewarded his honesty with a third helping. Lucia had a slipper raised at her and considered the price reasonable.

The treaty held on the boat, too. Leo peeled a chestnut with patience, placed the shell on the cushion, and put the meat into his sister’s hand. Lucia swallowed it, gripped the gunwale with the strength of an oarsman, and held out her hand for another.

"Akóma, Leo! Ancora, ancora! Par Mamma, par Mamma, Mamma!"

Mamma, seated an arm’s length away and conspicuously unfed, was not consulted.

Leo placed the next shell beside the first, then more beside that, keeping the row straight, just as his mother ruled an accounts of sums. Lucia ate every chestnut and swept the whole row off the cushion with one swing of her arm, then claimed the lamps on the water, all of them, pointing at each one and informing it of the fact in Greek.

Leo examined the bell towers with and inspected the bronze horses thrice. He got the same number both times, which seemed to satisfy him, then peeled another chestnut and started a fresh row, putting the first shell exactly where the old one had been.

Caterina leaned against Vito and pulled a fleece over both their knees while the twins continued their work between them.

He would turn thirty in the coming year, and she was twenty-eight.

A cadet who had once come out of the sack with three galleys and a name now sat in his own black boat, with a wife beside him and a crew of two at his feet. He had done rather well for a man who had started with so little.

In the hall, patricians had learned to stop talking when he stood. The sons of the dead electors called him Ser Vitale, while the Rialto still called him ’the cadet,’ and meant it as a joke. Along the corridors, people had begun asking which office he meant to accept, though he hadn’t yet asked for one.

Caterina kept the key and the books, and oversaw every trade the house conducted. The brokers called her Madonna Caterina, the money-changers rose from their benches when she passed, and once a week her table in the sala still taught the midwives of Castello to wash.

There was no shortage of people who knew whose house it was.

She reached across, plucked a hair strand from his temple, and held it up to the lantern between two inky fingers.

Caterina chuckled warmly. "Ecco. Guarda, marito, guarda. Entered in the book, one husband, thirty this year, and one wife, twenty-eight. And here, here, on the left temple, what do I find? A grey hair. I write it down as the loss of one dark hair, and I leave a margin, a big, wide margin, for all the others who are coming."

He laughed out loud. "Ostrega, moglie! A grey hair! Hang it from the masthead, fire the salute, send for the Doge, the first sail of my old age is sighted! Thirty in the knees, and I accept the charge, I accept it, write it down."

Then he hugged her, her warm body against his. "But the appetite, ah, the appetite is still a boy of sixteen. Every night it loses, and the whole house hears the trouble in bed."

The company private at the oar suddenly found the fog very interesting. He had heard every word and would swear to none of it.

Leo handed his sister another chestnut.

"Madonna santa, what a bad investment I was. Twenty-three, a list of investors, every one with a sour face, no dowry, and my cousins looking at me like a loan without guarantee. And now look, this same bad loan, she holds the key, and the whole Rialto, it bows."

"Eh, the Rialto bows to the key, cara mia, naturally. And I, poor me, I am only the hat that falls off every time."

She laughed against his shoulder, and the grey hair slipped from her fingers into the dark water, disappearing without leaving so much as a witness.

The oarsman laid his oar flat on the water and let the gondola drift as it had once before on this same water, when a woman had said yes. Caterina turned the gilded ring once around her finger with her thumb.

"Now say it to me plain, Vitale. Are you glad of it?"

"Sì, Caterina. Sì."

San Marco struck the last bell of the year, its stroke rolling across the Bacino as the campanili took it up one after another down the lagoon. Then they all stopped, and the whole water seemed to hold its breath.

In March the sea would open, and the hulls would return to the water.

In a tall house behind San Bartolomeo, the press would pull its first page, while above the Rialto the clock at San Giacomo would strike the hour without waiting for the sun. Along the Arsenal’s wall, the new canal would carry its first hull off the line.

Then, in the autumn, the old truce on the crusader coast would expire, and no one in Venezia could say what would follow. Twenty years, Vito had once told her in a bed beside two cradles, give or take a Doge. They could leave that number to the bells.

Leo had been watching the water slip away from the gunwale. After a while, he spoke in the slow voice he used whenever he was unsure.

"Papà... L’acqua, the water. Where she goes? Where she goes, Papà?"

"Out by the Lido, Leo, fio mio, through the gates of the sea, down the whole Adriatic, and into every harbor where your Mamma keeps a book. And some of it comes home again, as pepper."

The oarsman turned the gondola toward home.

Lucia had fallen asleep with a hand wrapped in the fleece and the other still closed around a chestnut, while Leo placed one more shell in a row of its own. Behind them, the wake spread across the dark water, and the lamps of the Molo rose and fell upon it.