But my squire rose and bowed. ‘Thanks you, my lord, for your work. I am sensible of my debt,’ he said, with more gentility than I had expected.
If I needed a reward for my labours – and I don’t pretend I worked so very hard on Marc-Antonio – if I needed a reward, Emile’s appraising look and smile were beyond price.
At any rate, a fine evening. And when the countess had retired, I took Corner aside in his hall and asked him if the shops of the town could produce a doll. In a story, he’d have produced one in the morning, but instead, he sent my squire out and he returned empty-handed and defeated.
Italians are the most hospitable men and women in the world – they will never allow you to buy wine, and Corner obviously felt that the failure to provide a doll was a slight on his good name. He offered to have the attic ransacked for one of his daughter’s.
‘They’re all grown,’ he said. ‘All they think of now is shoes. And husbands.’
But somehow, in this empris, I suspected that little Magdalene needed a new doll.
That day, before we were ferried to the Lido, I sent a letter to Pisa, to John Hawkwood and Janet. And then we rode took the ferry to Pellestrina, and rode along the islands to Venice.
I think that, if the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and sixty-five deserves to be remembered, it is as the year in which nothing – nothing I imagined, anyway – ever seemed to occur as I had expected it.
I left Chioggia the happiest of men, and we rode the sandbanks and orchards of the outer islands like a company of pilgrims, telling stories and singing, and each time we dismounted for a cup of wine, I caught Emile around her waist, and her smile would take her like a flush of surprise. The gulls cried, the sardines were delicious, and I would have had that ride go on forever.
But all too soon we came to Venice. And in an hour, a boat ride, I lost Emile and her children and her men-at-arms to an island convent, where lodging had been prepared for them, and I was separated from her by a stretch of water that was as effective a barrier as the Alps. There was no goodbye, no touching farewell, no kiss. She was a great lady, and she and her party were greeted by officials of the Doge and I was treated … well, as what I was, a gentleman-servant.
The Doge’s secretary was kind enough to take me aside and tell me that the lapal legate wanted to see me as soon as I was at liberty. I sent Marc-Antonio to find us lodging with all our horses, and I walked across the square to the Doge’s palace where the legate had been given space to work.
As homecomings go, it was quite good. Fra Peter embraced me in the guardroom, and there were Juan and Miles and a dozen other men I knew, as well as most of the Knights of the Order that I had met and trained with at Avignon, here for the mounting of the Passagium Generale.
Fra Peter waited with what proved to be staggering patience while men embraced me, admired the Emperor’s sword, or praised my fighting at Krakow or warned me of the dire penances that the order demanded for breaking the rule against private warfare. I might have been more terrified if these threats hadn’t almost always been accompanied by a gruff laugh or a significant stare, and I had no idea I was in a hurry, but when I’d told my story three or four times, and I was just starting to describe the banquet to one of the Venetian captains, Fra Peter’s iron-hard right arm locked on my left and I was frog-marched to the stairs. As soon as we were safe on the first landing, I handed over the leather bag of scrolls and letters from Avignon.
‘Avignon!’ Fra Peter bit his lip. ‘We sent you to Vienna!’
I nodded. ‘I went to Nuremberg, heard the king was in the east, and I chased him all the way to Krakow,’ I said. ‘He sent me back to Avignon with letters patent and missals for the Pope.’
Fra Peter’s patience ran out. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.