‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Fra Peter said.
We all prayed together, and Fra Peter walked me out to the guardroom.
‘Do we have beds?’ I asked.
‘I doubt that there’s a bed in this city,’ Fra Peter said.
Marc-Antonio found us both rooms in a decaying Byzantine structure near the new fish market. On the ground floor was a scriptorium where illuminated manuscripts were produced, and just walking through it was a dazzling experience for every sense with its gold leaf and size and resin and ink and lapis and turpentine and parchment. It was one of the smells of my youth: the monastery in London had a scriptorium, although neither this lavish nor this commercial, and I felt at home. The second storey rooms were in the hands of a prosperous grocer and his family: five daughters, a wife, and the wife’s mother – a sort of commercial nunnery. They owned the building and the one next to it, where the grocery was on the ground floor.
Donna Bemba demanded twenty gold ducats for a month’s rent, paid in advance. I’d like you to note that this represented about five years’ wages for a peasant in England with his own farm; the cost of a good helmet made by a good armourer and half the cost of a decent warhorse over on the mainland. This, for two small rooms which were damp and whose windows sagged on their sashes.
‘Just pay,’ Marc-Antonio advised me. ‘My father knows them a little. It is a fair price.’
‘A fair price!’ I all but shouted. I was down to the last of my money. Remember, I was not paid. The word ‘donat’ implies donation – a man donating his time and his body to the order. I had made a fortune in Lombardy and Tuscany, and now I was spending it on a failed crusade.
Had spent it. When I paid for the fodder for my horses and gave another month in advance and covered my debt to the tailor who had made up my clothes for the trip to Poland, my purse was empty.
Venice is a dreadful city in which to be poor. Food is expensive, trinkets are magnificent – and expensive – and everyone knows the value of everything to the last farthing. I needed a new helmet if I was to fight Saracens or really anyone except small children, and when I had a rower take me to the streets where the armourers plied their trade – that is, where both armourers and merchants dealing in Milanese or Pavian armour resided – I saw a dozen helmets I liked and two I adored, but the prices were now beyond me.
My favourite armourer was a Bohemian, a tall, handsome man with a fashionable forked beard who had earned his citizenship fighting for Venice in Dalmatia. I liked his work and I liked him, and we drank a cup of wine together while he tried to sell me a full harness in the new style, breast and back together, matching arms and legs. He had a helmet after which I lusted like a young man following a young woman, a cervelliere, or skull cap, in the new hard steel with a fine, light aventail lined in silk, and a separate helm, beautifully rounded and sloped so that it was all glancing surfaces, with a moveable visor. The best feature of the helm was that it slid on to the skull cap on little rails and locked into place.
My Bohemian, Jiri, nodded when I had it on. ‘Not my work,’ he admitted. ‘But a good fit and it would keep anyone alive in a mêlée, eh?
He also had gauntlets that were lighter and stronger than anything I’d ever worn. Of course, they cost three months’ rent on my third-storey hovel.
‘Pawn the sword,’ Marc-Antonio suggested.
I didn’t.
I had been two days in Venice, and I had landed Juan to share my palace above the grocers, when Father Pierre sent me to Terra Firma to review the men-at-arms at Mestra and north around the lagoon. He sent Fra Peter north the same day despite the cold weather to see if the king was coming over the passes.
I visited Sir Walter Leslie and his brother, who were festering in Mestre and growing impatient. They had two thousand men, many of whom I knew, and I received a good deal of heckling while riding through the cold and muddy camp.