It took me most of my last day in Bologna to copy that letter. Three hundred lines, and two small errors, and we covered them both. I had not entirely wasted my time with the monks in London, and no donat at Avignon escapes without some copy jobs, unless he is absolutely illiterate, which is increasingly frowned upon in the Order.
Sister Marie wore heavy Venetian spectacles to copy and they made her look like some avian monster, owl-eyed and beaked. But when she pulled them off she looked human, almost homey. ‘Sir William, I would never have marked you down as a writing man. My thanks, I would not have finished in time without your clerking.’
‘Sister Marie …’ I paused. My petty troubles with Fiore and Juan had suddenly made me more careful than was my wont with other men and friendship, but I am in general a blunt man, and I ploughed on, ‘I would not have taken you for a sword hand, but as you are, can we not be friends?’
She met my eye – I’ve said it before, but she never flinched from eye-meeting like a normal woman. I suppose girls are trained to it and nuns, perhaps, are trained out of it. At any rate, she raised an eyebrow. ‘I suppose we could be friends,’ she admitted.
Well, she was not the warmest of women. But she wasn’t my mother or my bed warmer; she was the legate’s Latinist. And witting or not, she had been my ally in writing to Emile.
All told, I suppose we were a week in Bologna, although it seemed a year, and when we rode east for Venice, crowds cheered us in the streets. Leaving Bologna, we were a small army; two dozen knights and donats of the Order, brilliant in scarlet, Lord Grey at our head with the papal banner; Ser Niccolò and his score of men-at-arms as brilliant as angels from heaven; another dozen volunteers from Bologna with their harnesses and their warhorses and carts full of belongings they were taking east. And with another twenty priests and nuns and clerks, as well as squires and pages and servants we had at least three hundred horses in our cavalcade.
Fra Peter had command of the whole, and I found myself commanding the donats. The older Knights of the Order were quite content that I do so: they stayed close to Father Pierre. There were almost a hundred Knights of the Order heading for Venice that autumn, but only half a dozen chose to ride with the legate. Or perhaps that was Father Pierre’s choice. A big column of knights ate up the countryside and devoured more bread and more grass.
I have not, up until now, described the intense faction that split Italy from the Italian point of view; I have to at least mention it to explain how I almost lost my life in the streets of Verona. The della Scalas were the lords there, and like every family of aristocrats in Italy, they belonged to one of the two competing factions – the Guelfs and the Ghibbelines. In brief, these two parties stand for allegiance to the Pope and allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. The quarrel is an old one and now has elements of the absurd, but the division remains lively.
Verona was a Ghibbeline city, and the della Scala, the local tyrants, were ancient supporters of the Pope. Since we served the Pope, you might have thought that we would make popular guests, but a rumour met us in Verona, to wit that the Emperor was coming to Italy with a large army to join the crusade. By some stretch of the popular imagination, that made us Guelfs – supporters of the Emperor. With papal banners at our head.
In truth, the London mob is every bit as fickle as the mob of Paris or Rome or Verona.
At any rate, we did not receive a hero’s welcome to Verona, and while we rode in through the white Roman Gate and trotted by the marvels of the amphitheatre, and the magnificence of Saint Anastasia, we were watched by a sullen crowd. Father Pierre dismounted in the courtyard of the Carmelite convent, and the Knights of the Order closed around him, wary of the people. The nuns watched from the upper cloisters like curious birds.
Fra Peter watched the crowd for as long as it took the clock to strike three, and then handed me an ivory tube with many of our travel documents. He shrugged. ‘This may be ugly. I need to be with the legate. Get to the castle and get our documents signed. Tell della Scala …’ He paused and looked at the ground. ‘Never mind. But if you can find out what this is about, I’d like to know.’