Or so I thought.
From Padua we turned back south, so that we had wasted two days travel.
Father Pierre merely shrugged and said it was God’s will, and that he had reason to visit Chioggia. Now, today, every soldier in Europe knows of Chioggia, but then, it was merely a prosperous town, the southern land-link between the Serenissima and the mainland. The town was well walled, with a drawbridge and a long causeway road across a series of dykes all the way back to the mainland. It had a beautiful central tower of red brick and two fine churches, as well as a monastery on a nearby island and a forest of ships in her port. It was a fine place, with two central canals, and it gave me a taste of Venice without overawing me all at once.
We arrived late in the day, and Father Pierre went to the island monastery by boat with Fra Peter and Fra John and Sister Marie. The rest of us had to make shift. We stood on the central square – a square that would have graced London or York, let me add, with fifty palaces and great houses fronting on it. They formed an unbroken façade, and every house had a covered, arched portico on the ground floor, so that a man could walk all the way around the square and only be exposed to the elements at the places where the roads came between the houses. Most were three storeys tall, and fronted in stone. All had magnificent chimneys like Turk’s heads atop poles, and in every case, curious to the English eye, the chimneys rose off the front of the house and came down almost to the front door. I later learned that this was a Greek style. The whole town smelled of fish.
I am prosing on. At any rate, there we stood in the main square, having just seen the legate into his boat at the piers, and Ser Niccolò grinned his evil grin at me. ‘And where do you imagine you’ll stay this night, Messire Englishman?’ he asked.
‘An inn?’ I asked.
Ser Niccolò shook his head. ‘There are two inns in Chioggia. They are fine establishments, but we will fill them both to overflowing. Come, let me introduce you to my friends, the Corners of Chioggia.’
The Corners, a cadet branch of the mighty Venetian family, lived in mercantile splendour in a three-storey palazzo fronting on the square. It had room after room and the whole house seemed to me to be an endless profusion of blue and gold, bronze and aqua, over and over. The donna Signora wore jewels of lapis and aquamarine, and her husband was one of the richest men in the town. They were very deferential to Ser Niccolò and Ser Nerio, and I was delighted to be drawn in with them. I slept in a magnificent covered bed with Ser Nerio and Juan, and we drank Candian wine and played dice and went to Mass, which was said in a Latin so touched with the tongue of the Veneto that I understood little but the Kyrie.
Really, the only reason I remember Chioggia – except for what came later, of course – is that night, Madonna Corner was complaining to her husband that the house was overstaffed with male servants. This led to a long, rambling account of the process by which one man had been disciplined for some crime so arcane I couldn’t get the gist, but was too old a family retainer to be dismissed. Again, they all spoke the Venetian dialect, Veneziano, of which I understood so little that I had to constantly ask my hosts to explain.
Ser Niccolò was his usual debonair self in green wool and gold silk and fur, and he was wearing tall boots – up to the top of his hose, in fact, which matched his clothes. I remember this, because when he rose he was oddly discordant with the blue and gold house.
He rose to his feet because the erring manservant had come in. The man was short and portly, but not fat; he had a cherubic face and a shock of bright red hair.
‘Come,’ Ser Niccolò said. ‘William Gold, I have found you the perfect page.’
The man had the good grace to appear abashed.
‘What’s your name, sir?’ I asked.
‘Marc-Antonio,’ he said softly. ‘You are English?’