"What about?" There were some predictable answers to that, but it paid to ask.
"Requisitions and foraging, mostly," Ezquerra said. "The usual. There will be more. We have a lot of kids who've just joined. Many of them away from home for the first time. There will be trouble. We seem to have gotten away with it so far, though I hear someone killed an Italian in a tavern brawl a couple of nights ago. There wasn't much of an outcry over it, but it's the kind of thing we can expect."
"I know, I know," Don Vincente said. "Well, I suppose we can hope and pray that Borja's arrival does not portend more trouble. I understand he was not popular when he was viceroy."
Ezquerra shrugged. "The Captain will know more of such things than I."
Don Vincente thought back over what he had, in fact, heard. "Now I think about it," he said, "it does seem strange. The holy father ordered Borja out of Rome last year, as I recall, and ordered him to live in his diocese. I wonder why he's back in Italy? It might be thought disobedient to the holy father."
Ezquerra made the little hiss-spit noise he had for the occasions when he was annoyed by something. Don Vincente had only heard it before when something the men had done when practicing their drill displeased him. "I don't think the rules apply to such as him," he said, after a quiet moment. "You or I, Don Vincente, we face the Inquisition if we disobey a priest. The cardinal? He can disobey the pope and no one can tell him different."
"True," Don Vincente said, and it was. Not least because Borja was one of the Inquisition's senior cardinals. "Still, I want the men mustered for musket drill tomorrow, and every day until Gonzalez calms down. I don't know what the other companies will do, but I think training the men might well stop them finding idler pursuits until we have real trouble to deal with."
"The men won't like it, Don Vincente." Ezquerra's tone betrayed how little he cared about that. The man was a veteran, and had himself walked the Spanish Road to the wars in Flanders. Don Vincente could tell how much he approved of training the men by the simple fact that there was none of the usual obfuscation and delay whenever the suggestion arose.
"They aren't meant to like it, Sergeant. They're meant to have a reason to be up early in the mornings so they start to think twice about spending their wages all night on whores and drink."
"I shall give them the terrible news, Don Vincente," Ezquerra said, relish in his eyes and voice. "Will there be training with powder and ball?"
"Not every day." Don Vincente was now thankful that he'd been going over exactly that paperwork when the sergeant arrived. "I only have so much money to spend on powder. Two or three volleys, I think, tomorrow morning, so the idiots who get themselves hangovers really suffer. After that we'll run them until they puke if they turn up looking hungover."
"As the Don wishes," Ezquerra said, grinning.
Don Vincente decided, as the sergeant left, to let the paperwork go hang for the afternoon, and bellowed for a bottle of wine to sit in the afternoon sun with. He would beg off messing with the other captains tonight, to ensure he had a clear head for the firing in the morning, but for now a short break to recruit his strength before an arduous couple of weeks was just the thing. He wondered, for a moment, if the sergeant's attitudes were contagious?
Chapter 2
Venice
Frank Stone slammed the door behind him. Giovanna looked up at him from the table where she was going over some of the Committee's paperwork—the interminable minutes of one of Massimo's interminable theory workshops, from the looks—and her face suddenly grew pensive.
Uh, oh, Frank thought. Shouldn't bring it home with me. He forced himself to take a deep breath and stand up straight, relax. "Sorry," he said. "Been talking with your dad again."
"I hope it wasn't too bad, this time?"
Frank chuckled, feeling his bad mood evaporate. "I guess we're sort of feeding off each other a bit. Massimo's no help, either. He gets all prickly and defensive about everything, these days."
"What was it about?"
Frank waved it away and went over to pour himself a glass of wine. "Wasn't anything, really."
"Then why could I hear you from three floors above?" The tone of her voice was . . . ambivalent.
Not that Frank could blame her. She'd been Daddy's Little Girl when they'd met, on the very day that Frank first arrived in Venice, and then she and Frank had fallen head-over-heels in love. After that there'd been all that stuff that had happened when they went to try to rescue Galileo, although describing it as just "stuff" was on a par with describing the Civil War as a bit of a disagreement—which had somehow managed to culminate in their wedding.