The Long Sword(142)

            One evening, while I was still living at St Katherine’s, I remember preparing to leave my friends to go back to the island. There was wine on the table, and Nerio’s latest conquest was serving it. I rose, gave them all a half-smile, and bowed. ‘Friends, I must leave you,’ I said, or something equally witty.

            ‘To go back to your private nunnery,’ Nerio said. In Italian, as among us nunnery can be used to mean brothel.

            I bridled. Nerio’s casual blasphemy and arch misogyny could pall.

            He laughed in my face. ‘I suppose it frees you from sin that it isn’t a novice you’re tupping,’ he said with a superior smile.

            I may even have reached for my sword.

            Nerio put his hands on his hips and laughed derisively. ‘You know why it is so valuable to all of us to keep young Miles about us?’ he asked the room.

            Miles blushed, as usual.

            ‘Because without him, Sir William would seem a prude,’ he went on.

            So … Miles was holy. He was also more than a little superior about his holiness, which could at times be grating.

            Nerio’s abiding sin was arrogance. His endless venery was more comic than tragic, and his success, while legendary, was itself so fraught with complications as to render him more human. The evening he met his former mistress, the grocer’s daughter, on the street while strolling with a courtesan he’d hired remains indelibly printed on my thoughts. The courtesan, terrified for her looks, proved a coward, and the grocer’s daughter proved to have a full Venetian command of the language as well as a fast right hand. She was the victor of the encounter, leaving her rival stretched full length in the street, and Nerio was so inconstant and so obliging that he instantly restored the grocer’s daughter to her former position – and so charming that she accepted his blandishments.

            He did these things because he believed that he could escape the consequences. And he usually could; good birth, brilliant good looks, skill at arms, classical education and vast riches gave him every advantage. His riches made him insensitive, and he could be the worst friend imaginable.

            Gloves were a constant issue among us. In Venice, no gentleman could be seen without gloves. And good gloves were expensive; they take hours to make, the makers are expert, and the materials themselves are costly. To make matters worse, gentlemen’s gloves were expected to be clean.

            And yet, as swordsmen who trained each day, we wore good gloves, chamois, or stag skin, for fencing. And wearing gloves for such work stretches and discolours them.

            Now, we were poor. Or rather, Fiore was very poor, but cared little about dress; Miles had an allowance; I had no money at all but good credit, and Juan seemed to have money all the time, but seldom spent any. Only Nerio had all the money he required. And his money was always at our service – he would buy us whatever we asked, and never request repayment. And yet, this paragon of generosity never seemed to own a pair of his own gloves. He wouldn’t get fitted for them, or purchase them.

            And it happened that he and Fiore had hands exactly of a size. Now Fiore was not a pillar of courtly dress – in fact, he cared very little for his appearance. But two things he fancied, because he felt they contributed to his Art; shoes, and gloves. He would spend half a day being fitted for the plainest shoes, fine slippers with minimal toes at a time when all of us sported poulaines with toes outrageously endowed; and he would linger like a lover in a glove-makers.

            He was poor as a dock rat, though, and he hated to borrow money – any money. He never borrowed from Nerio. Instead, he would scrape together a few ducats and resort to a brothel that had cards and dice, from which, sometimes, he would emerge as poor as a shaved dock rat, but at other times, he would be as rich as Croesus. One evening he went with Juan, of all people, and returned laughing. He had lost all his throws but the last, and his fool of an opponent had accused him of cheating. The two of them had retreated to the alley, where Fiore had relieved the man of his life, and then his purse – such things were thought perfectly honourable.