The Long Sword(108)

            I produced the doll. She pounced.

            ‘You didn’t forget!’

            I confessed. ‘I did forget, madonna. My lord sent me on a mission, and it is only this morning that I found this. But I came as soon as I could.’

            She wasn’t listening. She swept out, and there were peals of laughter, giggles, a shriek!

            And then nothing for so long that I feared that I had lost her again. I filled the time explaining to the sister that yes, I was very much of a size with Juan.

            She went out and came back with an older woman.

            ‘For the Order of St John?’ she asked. Her voice was flat, and a little shrill.

            ‘Yes, my lady,’ I said in my best Italian.

            She unbent a little. ‘This is an impossible task, but all my little reprobates love a knight. Very well. Thirty ducats in a single donation on completion, and ten for me to dispense as I see fit.’

            A month’s rent. But I had no choice; it was cheaper than some of the tailors.

            ‘We’ll have to keep this,’ the older lady said, holding up my surcoat. She sniffed. ‘Perhaps we’ll return it clean.’

            Emile came back with Magdalene at her apron strings, clutching the doll. The little girl wouldn’t meet my eyes and kept turning away, but she managed to mumble her thanks for ‘Lady Guinevere’ very prettily. I bowed my very best bow to a lady.

            Then I made bold enough to meet her mother’s eye. ‘May I expect you on Christmas Eve, Countess?’ I asked.

            She half-smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. She looked at me with a little of her old self. ‘We are so very busy.’



            Strong in the knowledge that I had saved Juan’s knighting, I helped my gondolier to pull over the choppy water of the lagoon. There was rain, a cold rain, with a little sleep mixed in.

            I came back to my cramped rooms by the fish market to find Juan on the wooden steps with a young Moslem girl in a red shawl – a slave-prostitute of the kind favoured by the gangs that ran the waterfront brothels and wine-houses for foreign sailors. Behind them on the steps was Marc Antonio, wearing a heavy cloak.

            He read my expression and bridled. ‘I’m a grown man and can sin as I like,’ he said. His voice was thick with angry wine.

            ‘Where did you get her?’ I asked.

            He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I …’

            Marc-Antonio’s eyes gave him away.

            I turned on him. ‘You? You went and bought—’

            Juan shoved the girl down the steps and put a hand on his sword. ‘I will take no moralising from you, Sir William. You have a doxy in every town.’

            ‘You’ve paid her?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.

            Juan’s cheeks flushed. ‘Of course I’ve paid!’

            I turned to the girl. ‘Run along, now,’ I said, and she bolted.

            ‘You fucking hypocrite,’ Juan said. He said more, in Spanish, about my affair with a notorious married woman.

            Nerio, called forth from his den – he paid the most, and in return he’d arranged for our room to be divided by panels so that he could have his own snug chamber – stood in his shirt and hose on the landing. ‘Can you children be a little less noisy?’ he asked. ‘Juan, come back to your party!’

            ‘I was taking my ease with my friend—’ Juan said.