The Alchemist's Apprentice

8

G iorgio was still at the quay, standing within a group of gondoliers and listening more than talking, as always. He strolled over to meet me.

“No boys?” I asked.

He gave me a blood-chilling look. “You didn’t give them money, did you?”

“You think I am an idiot? A half-witted softhearted troublemaker?”

“How much?”

I dodged the question. “Not enough to buy them any serious trouble. I expect they’ll be here shortly, I just have to visit the Ca’ della Naves and I can walk there from here. I won’t be long.” I fled the field.

Like almost any father, when his sons are old enough to earn money at odd jobs, Giorgio insists they turn it in as part of the family income. Corrado and Christoforo, for instance, had been working on and off at the building project on the other side of Rio San Remo. I felt he should let them keep at least some of their wages, else why should they bother? But it was none of my business and I must not meddle in his affairs.

The mysterious foreigners who had gate-crashed the book showing lived a few minutes’ walk away, so I might as well go and see them. Had I been offered my choice at that point, I would have spoken with the procurator’s granddaughter, the mysterious Bianca, who had probably had more opportunity than anyone to tamper with his wine, but the Orseolo family was in mourning and I had no authority to intrude.

As I hurried through the darkening calli of San Marcuola parish, I worried how much things had changed the moment Isaia confirmed that the procurator’s death was murder. I had a clear duty now to report that fact to the authorities. Of course an apprentice is bound to obey his master, so I might argue that I must report to the Maestro first, but I did not think that excuse would weigh very much with the Ten.

And what if the Maestro refused? If he still insisted on trying to find the killer by himself, he would be courting disaster. His efforts to unmask the murderer might well be seen as an attempt to bury evidence, not uncover it. Or we might scare the criminal into fleeing beyond the reach of justice. Then both of us would find ourselves where I had been that morning, in the Leads. If that shock didn’t kill the old man outright, the disgrace would ruin him. Sier Alvise Barbolano would evict him, his clients desert him.

But I hate to start something and not finish it. So does he. Half-done is do, he tells me often enough. He had occult tools that the Ten did not, or at least would never admit to using. Even I could invoke a fiend, and that might be less dangerous than what I was doing now, meddling in the Ten’s business.

And then there were the doge’s parting words: I will see his head roll across the Piazzetta. The doge did not trust the Council of Ten to see justice done. The Ten are politicians, all seventeen of them, and the other sixteen are eagerly planning promotion to higher office. They lust after votes in the Great Council, and if the murderer turned out to be a patrician, then the nobles of the Ten would be wary of antagonizing his relatives and friends.

I peered into the parish tavern, partly to see if the twins were there, which they were not, and also to inquire which apartment in the Ca’ della Naves was infested with heretics. The drinkers gave me the information I wanted plus some seriously disapproving looks.

As I started up the stairs in the big house, I began to have misgivings. The Republic’s attitude to foreigners is complicated. For centuries, pilgrims have passed through Venice on their way to the Holy Land, and there are state officials, tholomarii, stationed at San Marco to take care of them, to see that they find proper housing and transportation. The inns they use are carefully regulated and, although they do have to pay more for goods and services than residents do, they must not be cheated any more than the law allows. On the other hand, the senate is very wary of foreign politics. Contact between Venetian nobles and foreigners is strongly discouraged, and is actually illegal in the case of foreign ambassadors. A nobleman can be put to death just for meeting with a foreign ambassador in private. Feather was not an ambassador, but a procurator had been murdered. What I was about to do began to seem foolhardy.

I was very close to talking myself out of my mission when I heard voices just above me, one more flight up. Not just voices, but a woman shouting a barbaric guttural rant that I could barely recognize as French. I swallowed the bait and took the rest of the stairs at a trot.

Thus do the stars dictate our lives.

She was just inside the door. He was just outside it. She was one of the largest women I had ever seen, so much taller than I that at first glance I thought she must be wearing the stilt shoes of a courtesan. She was blonde, not just Violetta’s bleached reddish gold, but a Germanic ash-blonde displaying a complicated sculpture of silvery curls on which balanced a tiny bonnet. A high fan-shaped collar formed a backdrop, her neckline was surprisingly demure, yet her gown was a voluminous mass of purple brocade and gold lace that would have been denounced by the Venetian Senate as absurd extravagance. It was not, obviously, a local costume. Her eyes were the watery blue of sapphires and her cheeks were flushed with anger.

He was clutching a parcel with both arms and prepared to defend it to the death. She was speaking loudly and clearly, so his failure to understand her was pure perversity.

“Madame!” I proclaimed in French, offering a gymnastically low bow suitable for reverence to a goddess. “May I be of assistance?” I added in Veneziano, “Shut up and let me deal with her.”

She uttered a satisfied, “Ha! At last! You speak French, monsieur!”

Better French than she did. “A little,” I said. “Is this oaf causing you trouble?”

“He has brought our costumes for Carnival and refuses to give them up without payment, although we had made an agreement with the seamstress.”

I understood the problem already, but decided to spin it out. “Talk back and threaten me,” I shouted in Veneziano so broad that even a Paduan would not have understood. “Slum-dwelling, dung-eating spawn of a canal rat, you insult the madonna?”

His response flaked plaster off the walls. He was either a lot more skilled at invective than I was, or just well worked up already. Fortunately he had his hands full and I had two to wave, which evened the odds a little. I responded and we screamed at each other for a few minutes. Then I turned to the lady.

“Madame,” I explained calmly. “The wretch expects to be paid for delivering the goods, as if one glimpse of your divine beauty should not be sufficient recompense in itself. Permit me to settle the matter.”

I palmed him half a lira, which was five times what he was demanding and ten times what he had expected. “For the lesson in abuse,” I bellowed, waving a fist. “You have the foulest mouth it has ever been my privilege to meet.”

He thrust the package at me and slunk off as if I had whipped him, calling back curses over his shoulder. What he actually said was, “Blessings on you, lustrissimo, and give the foreign mare the ride of her life.”

Hyacinth said, “Oh! What a disagreeable man! That was most kind of you, m’sieur. If you will wait a moment I will find my purse.”

“I should not dream of accepting one soldo, madame. The honor of being of assistance is recompense enough. You are the Contessa Hyacinth of Feather, are you not, the celebrated English beauty I came to meet? Permit me.” I offered another bow. “Alfeo Zeno, assistant to the celebrated Maestro Nostradamus, clairvoyant, physician, astrologer, philosopher, and sage, honored to be at your service, madame.”

Even in distant England, they knew that name. A tiny frown ruffled her eyebrows. “Nostradamus died years ago.”

“Not Michel Nostradamus, but his even greater nephew, Filippo. You met him two nights ago. And he has talked of little else since.”

“He has?” She peered down at me suspiciously.

My hopes of being invited inside were fading. “He was at the book viewing. You spoke with him.”

“Oh, that shriveled little gnome behind the table? I asked him if he was the clerk. He didn’t speak like a Frenchman.”

She was not the first person I had heard say so. Loyalty has always forbidden me to ask. “He is an expert on old manuscripts.”

“You are selling manuscripts? Why didn’t you say so sooner? Come in, monsieur, er…”

“Zeno.”

She let me enter and locked the door, then marched me through to a roomy, but rather cluttered salotto, whose furniture looked as if it had been rented in the Ghetto, although I could make out little by the light of a single oil lamp. She bade me sit and brought me a glass of malmsey with her own soft, white, shovel-sized hands. She strode around like a musketeer and declaimed louder than a sergeant drilling a platoon. Statuesque, she was. She would have been right at home embracing Mars on the giants’ staircase.

“Sir Bellamy went out to call on some dealers, monsieur. We had promised the servants a night off to enjoy Carnival and Sir Bellamy always keeps his word, although without Domenico it is difficult for us to manage by ourselves.”

Her clothes and hair styling were wrong and I could not read her signals. It was unheard of for a lady of the Republic to entertain a man in her husband’s absence and the absence of servants made the unspeakable unthinkable. Romantic near-darkness would normally turn hint into blatant invitation. Perhaps this was normal social behavior in cold, foggy England, or perhaps she was confident she could knock me senseless with a single blow if I tried anything. Who was Domenico? She was still proclaiming.

“That disgusting exhibition the other night was quite typical. If any Englishman spoke to us the way that vulgar Imer man did, Sir Bellamy would have given him a thorough thrashing. And if he didn’t I would. But it is a joy to meet a man who understands French.”

I suspected that many others did but were unwilling to swim against her accent. “Is it that you have traveled widely, madame?”

“Just France and Rome and Savoy and Tuscany. We brought letters of introduction from many respectable people, including several members of the English and French nobility, you understand, but the recipients have not responded warmly.” She pouted. Her lips looked like ripe plums in the dusk.

“You find our city appealing?”

“Most beautiful!” she said. “But the canals do smell and the people are not friendly. Not like Padua or Verona, even. We have not been invited to a single ball or banquet since we arrived.”

“I am sure this is only a language difficulty, madame. Veneziano is not Roman or Tuscan.”

“Absolutely unintelligible! Nothing like proper Latin. But even when we had Domenico, the nobles never invited us into their palaces. It is most unfriendly. And I know that some of them are very pressed for cash just now. A lot of fine art has been coming on the market, and Sir Bellamy represents several important collectors. He is willing to pay in gold if the price is reasonable.”

She paused to draw breath and I whispered, “Domenico?”

“Domenico Chiari. Sir Bellamy hired him to be our guide and interpreter. He ran out on us three days ago. It makes things very difficult.”

Rich foreigners are always suspect. Either Domenico had been spying for the Ten, or he had been taken in for questioning. “Did he take his belongings with him?”

“Well, yes, he did. Why do you ask?” Sudden suspicion pulled rolls of flesh in around her eyes.

“People can meet with accidents and I could have advised you on how to report the matter.”

I could see no way to bring the conversation around to wineglasses and poison. I wondered how I could lure this bell tower of a woman and her so-trusting husband to Ca’ Barbolano so that the Maestro could interrogate them for himself. She was still galloping ahead of me-

“He walked out on us without asking for his pay. It makes our task here almost impossible. Like two nights ago, when we met your master. The book dealer had told us about the sale at Master Imer’s residence. He assured us that it was open to the public, and of course Sir Bellamy was not going to disgorge the sort of money he wanted without seeing how much other people were willing to pay. The host told us to leave and was very rude about it. Sir Bellamy apologized for the misunderstanding-extremely politely for him-and offered to show the color of his money, but then he became even more offensive and ordered us out of the house at once. He asked your master to translate for him. Sir Bellamy was much offended. He is talking seriously of breaking our lease on these premises and leaving the Republic as soon as possible. The weather is appalling. Worse than England. We can make better purchases in Florence.”

“Karagounis himself had invited you to the supper party?”

“Certainly. And there was no mistake, because we still had Domenico with us when we called on him.”

“Lord Bellamy is a collector of books?” That seemed fairly obvious.

“He isn’t Lord Bellamy. Why do you Venetians have this extraordinary custom of making all your nobility equal? The rest of the world has dukes and counts and so on, including England. Here everybody is sier. Sir Bellamy is a baronet, a chevalier.”

“But he does collect books?”

“Books are one of our objectives. We have also been buying pictures and small sculptures. You said your master had manuscripts to offer?”

I had not said that, but I could think offhand of half a dozen items in his collection that he would willingly unload on wealthy foreigners.

“He will be happy to show them if you and the baronet wish to come and inspect them. I could send his gondola-”

“Let me show you the treasures we have collected so far.”

Taking up the lantern, she marched into the bedroom. I followed, wondering giddily if I was supposed to ask how long we had before her husband came home, but no, she took a taper and began lighting more lamps so she could show me paintings. There were six of them, all framed but not hung, leaning against the walls.

“I realize the light is not very good,” she boomed. “And they aren’t very much to show for two months’ work, are they? But some real gems! This Tintoretto, for example…”

Maybe school of Tintoretto, I thought. And if the next one was a school of Titian, the old master had been sparing the rod too much. In the end I was quite certain that two were crude fakes and three made me very uneasy. But there was one I honestly admired. It was the smallest, so I could lift it and carry it to where the light was best.

“I still think we paid too much for that one,” Hyacinth declared, bringing another lamp close enough to singe my ear. “It was the first we bought. But Sir Bellamy knows a nobleman who will pay generously for it.”

Even an art lover would. A few feather shafts protruded from the subject’s torso so the Church would accept that he was a martyred San Sebastiano, not just a beautiful young man tied to a tree while wearing only a dishrag. But his musculature was well portrayed and his expression saintly, not agonized or lecherous; also the canvas was unsigned, which was another reason for a cynic like me to think it might be a genuine master. It was old enough for the varnish to have developed craquelure.

I set it back in its place. “A very fine piece, worthy of Giovanni Bellini! But I am no expert in art, madame. My master has shared with me a little of his wisdom on books. When would it suit you and Chevalier Feather to come and view what he has to offer, and perhaps discuss others that he knows of?” I started to move to the door and suddenly she was in front of me.

“First tell me why you really came.” She raised her lamp so she could study my face. “Two nights ago your master, if that is who he is, denied that he sold books, because I asked him. So who are you and what do you want? And don’t try anything with me, boy, or I’ll break every bone in your body.”

The look in her ice-pale eyes was that of a Persian cat that has just caught a juicy mouse. I had misjudged her. She had been testing me. Inside all that beef there was a smarter woman than I had realized.

“I do serve Maestro Nostradamus, madame. It is true that he is not a book dealer as such, but he owns a large collection and I catalogue it for him, so I know he has some duplicates he would part with if the price was right. I have told you no lies, except to praise the pictures a little more than I should.”

“But what are you really after? Were you in league with that ruffian delivery man?”

“No, madame. I never saw him before. I came to ask you which wine you drank at the Imer residence that night.”

“What?” Not surprisingly, she looked surprised.

“At the viewing…One of the guests was taken ill later. My master is a physician and suspects that one of the wine bottles may have been spoiled. You were offered three wines when you arrived, yes?”

“I took the malmsey,” she said. “Both of us did. It’s what we drink at home in England. I don’t care for most of the foreign stuff.”

Where did she think malmsey came from? “If my master is correct, you made a wiser choice than you know. You didn’t happen to notice anyone tampering with the bottles or the glasses, did you?”

“Of course not.” She seemed to grow even bigger. “I was interested in the books and nothing else. Tampering? What business is this of your master’s anyway? Why doesn’t he report his suspicions to the magistrates?”

That was a very good question, for which I had no good answer. “He has his reasons, madame, which I am not permitted to-”

An explosion of consonants from the doorway spun me around. Sir Bellamy had returned. He was older than Hyacinth and surprisingly short for a man married to a woman so large; he wore clothes that looked more Tuscan than local, but he was sporting a ruff the size of a millwheel and an absurd pointed mustache, neither of which even a Florentine would have willingly been buried in. He was pale with rage, which was understandable-and he wore a sword, which was disturbing.

I bowed and for the moment was ignored.

His wife answered him in the same guttural language, which I assumed was English, but she did not seem in the least discomfitted at being caught alone with a young man in the connubial bedchamber. She gestured at the paintings and pulled a face in my direction. I caught the Maestro’s name.

Feather was very loud and very furious. Hyacinth shrugged and continued to answer calmly.

“What is it that you want?” he demanded of me. His accent was not quite as bad as his wife’s.

“Two nights ago, at the residence of citizen Imer, observed you a man in purple robes?”

“And two in red. It was more a coronation than a book sale. Answer me! Why do you come here pestering my wife?” He had his hand on his sword. He was fizzing with rage and he was between me and the doorway. This was no time for finesse.

I waved my hands to show that they were empty and I was unarmed. “To warn you, monseigneur, and your noble wife. The older man, the one with the purple robes and the fancy-” I had to gesture to my shoulder, for my French did not extend to the word for tippet. “Procurator Orseolo. He was poisoned at that meeting. Everyone who was present is suspect. You have heard of the Council of Ten?”

“You work for the government?”

“No, messer.”

Feather drew his sword. “You dare come here and threaten me, you young-” Fortunately, he reverted to English, although the gist was obvious. He came towards me.

I started backing. “I am unarmed, messer. What you are doing is a very serious offense in this city.”

“So is forcing yourself into a lady’s bedroom!”

Her word against mine, although if the judges ever saw the size of the potential victim, they would laugh the case out of court. Meanwhile, the crazy Inglese was out for blood. I backed rapidly to the pictures and grabbed San Sebastiano to be my shield and defender, while sending a quick prayer of apology to the saint.

“Put that down!” Feather screamed. “Drop it!”

“Put up your sword, clarissimo. I wish only to leave in peace. You will not improve the holy man by adding sword wounds to his troubles.” I kept half an eye on the doughty Hyacinth. If she got behind me, she could garotte me with her bare hands.

“Depart!” he bellowed, pointing at the door. For a small man he was both loud and ferocious.

“I will follow you, clarissimo. Madame, if you would be so kind as to go and open the outer door? Then you lead, messer. San Sebastiano and I will follow.”

“Come, Sir Bellamy,” his wife said. “The boy will not turn his back on your sword.” She led the way, moving with majesty.

It took some more calming talk from me before he followed her, reluctantly walking backwards, not taking his eyes off me. I kept my eyes on him as I edged out through the outer door, dropped the saint at the top of the stairs where he would obstruct pursuit, and took off downward like a rat diving into its hole.