And the closer we got to Venice, the denser the traffic on the roads. By the time we reached Padua, we were passing trains of merchant wagons and laden pack animals carrying cloth from the northern fairs, cloth that had come over the passes from Savoy and the Swiss cantons, from Germany and Flanders and England. And we passed a pair of wagons carrying Bohemian glass and armour, sword blades from Germany, and then load after load of grain from all the country about.
Fra Peter winked at me. ‘Have you been to Venice?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘You know I have not,’ I answered.
He laughed. ‘You are full of surprises, William. But Venice is … remarkable. And all of this is but a tithe of the products that flow through her port. Most of it comes by sea, or up the canals.’
Well, who has not heard of Venice?
We had planned to take a more northerly route from Padua and the legate had tasks in every city, but he received letters at Padua, one from the Pope urging him to haste, and letters from the bishops of England, Normandy and Burgundy.
That night in Padua, Sister Marie came to my room. She found me reworking the scabbard of my arming sword. It was a fine sword, and I prized it, but the leather was coming off the wood core of the scabbard where Juan had stepped on it. All the donats were gathered around my straw pallet, watching me, and Miles Stapleton had a stinking pot of fish-hide glue he’d got from the leatherworker across the convent yard.
‘But the wood’s broken!’ Juan said in his Catalan French.
Sister Marie appeared at the door. I remember this as if it was yesterday. She wrinkled her nose at the smell and then pushed in with her intense curiosity about everything that characterised her.
I pulled a small, flat piece of bronze out of my shoulder scrip. It was a clipping off a larger piece, and I’d bought it for almost nothing the day before. I held it up so Juan could see it.
He grinned.
I used my eating knife, which was sharper than a razor, to shave the broken wood away. My eyes met Sister Marie’s, and she smiled, so I went on.
I took the brush from the warm glue and spread the stinking stuff on the wood, and pushed the broken edges together. ‘It looks repaired, like this,’ I said. ‘But it’s like a man with a broken bone. If you don’t splint it, it won’t knit. So I take the metal plate …’
Suiting action to word, I laid one small bronze strip on the back of the scabbard, and the second on the front, as if I was splinting a bone, indeed. Then I pulled the leather of the scabbard cover back into place. ‘The leather makes a tight seal. You have to sew it up while the glue is still warm and wet.’ I used a curved needle – a rare commodity, purchased back in Bologna for half a florin – and in twenty stitches, I had the whole scabbard fixed.
I used a little more glue on the mouth of the scabbard’s chape, and slid it back on to the point of the scabbard; then I put two holding stitches through the leather. I turned the scabbard around. The plates showed a little under the thin-stretched red leather, but altogether, it was a decent job.
Sister Marie shook her head. ‘The glue inside will dry and fill the scabbard,’ she said.
I grinned; it’s so nice to actually know something, when you are a young man. ‘Miles?’ I said, and Stapleton produced a second smelly tin, this one full of tallow. I took my arming sword and coated the blade a fingernail thick in tallow, and then slid it home.
‘Good for the scabbard’s wood; good for the sword. And now the glue has nothing to hold.’ I smiled at Sister Marie, and she grinned.
‘You are a useful young man,’ she allowed. ‘Can you fix a book cover?’