Back on the street, Nerio raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Too much,’ I said. ‘Too dear.’
Nerio walked several steps beside me. ‘Give me your purse, brother,’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t come out with any money.’
He held out his hand and I unhooked my purse and handed it to him.
He used most of my worldly fortune to purchase a saffron-laced street pie with beef, and we walked along the Grand Canal. He was kind enough to give me a bite. Then he used the rest of my money to buy us a cup of wine from a very pretty girl whose wine was scarcely her only commodity. He let his fingers linger on hers when he passed her back the cup and she seemed to tolerate the familiarity with good humour.
He said something and she laughed and looked away, and Nerio came and grabbed my shoulder and we walked on.
He still had my purse, and as we crossed the narrow bridge over a side canal, he folded back the cover and emptied it into the canal – or rather, he up-ended it and nothing happened.
‘Broke?’ he asked. ‘Destitute?’ He tossed me the purse and went back to walking.
I shrugged.
‘Why the doll?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Who is it for? You should have seen your face, my friend.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Bah! The disappointment of love.’ He pointed at me. ‘You have no money and you are in love. Every banker knows the symptoms!’
I don’t know whether I glared or cringed or denied.
He walked off again, lengthening his stride as we crossed a tiny square with enough room for a man to walk fast. I followed him back to the leatherworker’s shop. He walked in, exchanged a few sentences in rapid-fire Veneziano, and bought my doll for a third what I’d be told. He tossed it to me on the step. ‘Don’t play with it where the other mercenaries can see,’ he said with a grin. ‘You need money? Let me put some in your hands.’
Rich men borrow money. They are rich, so they get into debt. This is the rule of the street – no one loans money to the poor. And the poor know better than to borrow. I was used to pawning armour, pawning horses, but I was unwilling to pawn armour in Venice and besides, the army of the Passagium Generale had caused a glut of used armour in the shops. The value was practically nil.
My point is that I was, mostly, unwilling to borrow, even from Nerio and his father. He spent the rest of our walk trying to convince me that I was a good business risk. I took him to the armourer’s quarter, and introduced him to my Bohemian.
He looked at the helmet and heard out the Bohemian’s pitch on a full harness of new Milanese altered to fit, and Nerio shrugged. ‘If you are going to keep me alive going to Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘come, what does this amount to, five hundred ducats?’
He wrote the Bohemian a note of hand.
I tried to thank him, and he declined. ‘Listen, my friend, my father is the banker, not I. But I will not see a friend starve in Venice of all places. Here, he did it all for four hundred and seventy ducats. Take these thirty, and call it five hundred.’
I embraced him, and bought him wine. But I still hadn’t found a tailor who would make a surcoat by Christmas eve.
I had, however, found an excuse to visit Emile.
‘Where are you off to?’ Nerio demanded.
‘I have an errand,’ I said.
‘To the mother of a child who wants a doll?’ Nerio asked. ‘How very Italian of you, William. My mother used to tell me, when I was young and amorous, only lie with matrons and never virgins, and no damage is done. Eh?’