Dark Tides Page 29

  She gave him a little push. “Go on, I have done all this for you.”

  He took one step towards the overwhelming building. “And the price?” he remembered to ask.

  She laughed. “A nothing. It is that you be a friend to me, Johnnie. There is no need to go through the books and worry your mother about my debts, there is no need to ask your mother if I should not pay Excise duty. I am sharing in the fortunes of your family—taking; but also giving—see what I am doing for you?”

  He blushed red as he remembered that his grandmother thought her an imposter, and that Sarah was hoping to unmask her. “I don’t speak against you…”

  “There is nothing to say against me,” she told him. “My reputation, as an honorable widow, has to be unblemished, perfect,” she told him.

  “I’m sure it is,” he stumbled.

  “And I have a plan which will be of great benefit to the whole family.” She paused for a moment. “I am going to buy a warehouse, a very big warehouse in a good part of town. Your mother and grandmother will live above it, that will be their new home. And your mother and perhaps Sarah will sell the goods, beautiful antiquities which I will order from my store in Venice.”

  He was stunned. “We know nothing about that business,” he said. “We’re wharfingers, we ship small loads and—”

  “I know what you do. This is completely different. You would work for me.”

  “I thought you were buying Grandma a house in the country?”

  “A better house in clean air,” she corrected him. “This will be better. Your mother can work downstairs and be close to her mother all day.”

  His head was whirling. “Are there enough customers for such things?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I could have sold my Caesar heads over and over. I am giving your family a great opportunity, Johnnie. I rely on you to advise them to take it.”

  “What d’you want me to do?” he asked her simply. “Would I still work here?” He glanced longingly at the building.

  “Of course, and Sarah could stay at the millinery shop if she wants. This is to give your mother an easier, more profitable business, and your grandmother a more comfortable home. All I want from you is to advise when your mother speaks of it to you. Tell her that it is a good idea.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t you think it’s a good idea? That your mother has a more profitable business and your grandmother a better home? That they trade in rare and valuable goods rather than cheap dirty stuff?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  She extended her hand in the black lace mitten. “Then we have an agreement.”

  He had to take her hand and at once she drew him near, so close that he could smell the scent of roses from her bonnet, from her dark ringlets of hair. “We are partners,” she said. “I will get you the one post that you want in all of London and you will help me to sell the wharf and buy the new house. You will give me your promise.”

  He blushed furiously, conscious of being an ungrateful fool, a young man, perhaps a stupid young man. “Of course, I can promise my support,” he said, horribly embarrassed. “You’re my aunt—though you don’t look like one. And anything I can do to assist you… of course.”

  “Then we are agreed,” she said, and finally released him. “Go and get your appointment. You should start at Easter. I have been very good to you, Johnnie.”

  “You have,” he said fervently.

  “And one thing more?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell them any of this in the warehouse. Not any of it. Not our agreement, not your appointment, not till the day that you start work at Easter.”

  “But why?” He was bemused. “They will be so pleased!”

  “I have my reasons,” she said. “I have to make arrangements with Venice, I have to get my second shipment sold. I don’t want your mother to feel that I am moving too fast. She has to sell the warehouse and borrow money. You know what she’s like, so slow to see opportunity. Do you agree?”

  He could not think why he should not agree, it was such a great benefit to him and there was no reason that he should tell his mother until he was about to start. But he was uncomfortably aware that there were secrets in the warehouse where there had never been any before. The unbalanced account books, Sarah’s absence, the unpaid Excise duty, Livia’s friendship with Sir James, this plan to sell and borrow, and—worst of all—his grandmother’s suspicions of her.

  “It will not hurt my mother or grandmother if we keep it secret?” he temporized, and she widened her dark eyes at him, the picture of innocence.

  “How could it? No! And I would be the last person in the world to harm them,” she said. “It is a little secret, just a delay. To spare me embarrassment.” She paused. “You know that they do not like Sir James. They do not like my friendship with him. But it brings us wealth, and it brings you this opportunity. I don’t want them to quarrel with me when I am trying to do good for them, and especially for you.”

  “Oh, I see!” he said.

  “So we are agreed? I do you this great favor, you tell no one of it, and you remember you are obliged to me.”

  “I am!” he promised.

  “So you can go,” she told him. He did not see her raise her face for his kiss as he dashed across the road, dodging between carts, and entered the tall door of East India House at a run.

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  At dawn, a cold dark December dawn, after more than a month at sea, Sarah heard the order to drop the sails and the ship slowed. Throwing a shawl around her shoulders she ran barefoot up the companionway to the upper deck in time to see a shallow boat rowed like a gondola by a standing oarsman come alongside, and the passenger climb nimbly up a lowered ladder. He greeted Captain Shore with a brief handshake and went to the wheel. The sails were raised again and the ship was underway with the stranger commanding.

  “Who’s that?” Sarah asked the ship’s cook as he went past with two mugs of grog for the Captain and the steersman.

  “Pilot,” he said. “In his sandolo. Nobody knows the channels and the sandbanks like the pedotti. They have to live in Rovigno and guide the ships into the Custom quay.”

  “This is Venice?” Sarah asked, disappointed by the low-lying sandbars and scrubby islands. “I thought it was a grand city? I thought there were big houses, not just these farms? And some of these are not even islands, they’re just sandbars.”

  The man laughed and went on to the wheel. “You keep watching,” he advised her. “We’re hours out.”

  Sarah went to the side and looked out through the gradually lightening mist. A succession of islands emerged, one after another, slowly changing into a landmass dim and purple. The marshy islands and little promontories became bigger, higher in the water, walled, with quays and piers, and then she started to see houses, at first built singly on little islands with a boat moored at the quay at the front, and then the islands were linked one to another, with little bridges and quays. The houses became bigger, more ornate, she could see the tossing heads of trees in beautiful gardens over the high walls, then there were fewer gardens and the houses ran side by side like a terrace with great water doors opening onto the lagoon, which was now narrowing ahead of them to become a broad beautiful canal, and she was no longer at sea but in a city, which looked, not as if it were built on water, but as if it had risen from it and was still dripping.

  Sarah was astounded. A London child, she was not overawed by the crowds of people on the narrow quays running inland, nor the mass of water traffic in the broad waterway, but she could not believe the complete absence of horses and carriages and wagons: there were truly no roads, there was no grind of wheels or clatter of hooves, no smell of animals being driven to market. She found she was peering down the canal junctions assuming there must be lanes and fields and stables tucked behind the buildings; but where in London there might have been an alley, here there was the glassy shine of a canal with narrow dark quaysides running alon
gside it and dozens of low-slung bridges, some no more than a plank levered up on a rope that could be dropped for a pedestrian, and then raised for a passing boat.

  On and on they went, the little craft before and behind them, traghetti crossing and recrossing from one side to another, gondolas spearing into the waters of the main channel and then swerving off into mysterious canals, barges loaded with enormous beams of wood, some of them with sharpened ends to be driven into the lagoon bed to form the piles for more new buildings and new quays; galleys, rowed by men bowed over the oars, skiffs, sandoli, wherries, boats of every sort and size.

  Sarah’s bare feet grew icy cold; but she could not tear herself from the side of the ship watching this extraordinary city unfold. They went past a palace, white as marble standing on a marble quay, blanched and priceless, its huge gates open wide. There were men in dark cloaks walking in the inner marble courtyard, the snowy walls around them pierced with a thousand windows looking down, looking out, missing nothing. Beside the palace was a high bell tower made of brick, set in a vast public square, lined on every side with more white buildings with more dark windows.

  Captain Shore yelled an order to dip the standard as a sign of respect to the palace, as the ship went on, down the wide channel between beautiful buildings on each side, falling sheer into the glassy water.

  Looking forward, Sarah could see a massive stone quay dividing the canal into two. At the sharply pointed prow of the quay was a high brick watchtower crowned with a four-sided roof and a swinging weathercock. The warehouse walls, crenellated like a castle, stretched back along the white marble quays; the warehouse doors stood in great ranks, on both sides, facing the water. Moored up on both sides of the quays were three or four oceangoing ships like their own, cargo hatches open, loading and unloading at the treble-height doors.

  Captain Shore shouted the order to drop the sails, the pedotti let the ship nose slowly into her mooring place, and the crew threw lines to the waiting lumpers, who caught them and made them fast. The pedotti lashed the steering wheel and put his seal on it, to signify that the ship could not sail again without a pilot on board, threw a casual salute to Captain Shore, pocketed his fee, and was first down the gangplank to take a ship up the Grand Canal on the return journey. He disappeared among the crowd of dockers with sleds and carts for unloading, the officials, and the duty officers.

  “Better stop gawping and get your boots on,” Captain Shore advised, going past her. “They’ll want to see you, an’ all.”

  Sarah ducked down into her cabin, crammed her feet in her boots, packed her few things in her hatbox, slipped her money into her placket, tied her grandmother’s red leather purse of tokens around her neck, and went up on deck. Captain Shore, busy with the mooring of his ship, waved her to wait.

  “You can’t go yet, they have to check you for disease.” He nodded at the Venetian officials, dressed in the livery of the Doge, mounting the gangplank. “You have to have your papers before you can disembark.”

  Sarah stepped back as the two men came on board and took the ship’s manifest and the crew list from Captain Shore.

  “This passenger?” the first man demanded in perfect English.

  “Mrs. Bathsheba Jolly,” Sarah said, repeating the name of one of her workmates that she had told Captain Shore. “Of Kensington village, near London.”

  “In good health?” The official’s hard gaze scanned her, looking for a feverish flush in her cheeks, or any trembling. “No swellings or sores?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you kept company with the sick?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “There’s no plague in London, thank God.”

  “You’d have been sent to the lazaretto if there was any chance of plague,” he said grimly. “With the whole ship’s crew. Left there for forty days’ quarantine, however pretty.”

  “I don’t have it,” she assured him. “I don’t know anyone who has had it. Really.”

  “Purpose of visit?”

  “To collect some furniture belonging to my mistress from her store.”

  “Address?”

  “Palazzo Russo,” Sarah replied. “Ca’ Garzoni.”

  “Occupation?”

  “I am a milliner, serving Nobildonna da Ricci.”

  “The safety of the Republic of Venice is the responsibility of every citizen and visitor,” the official told her sternly. “If you learn anything that would damage the Republic then you must report it at once. If you do not report it, you are regarded as party to the crime. Equally, if anyone believes that you are working against the Republic then you will be reported and taken up for questioning. Do you understand?”

  Sarah swallowed down her unease, nodding obediently.

  “The questioning is done inside the Palace of the Doge,” the man said. “Everyone always answers. Punishment for wrongdoing is swift and very onerous.”

  “I understand,” Sarah whispered. “But I assure you, I promise that I want no trouble with anyone. I’m a milliner!” She offered her occupation as if to claim that she was as unimportant as a wisp of silk on a bonnet. “Just a milliner! Running an errand.”

  “Even so, you are required to maintain the safety of the Republic,” he repeated. “You are the eyes and ears of the Doge while you are his guest.”

  Sarah nodded again.

  “You tell her how to make a report,” the official ordered Captain Shore. “Then she can go ashore.”

  He produced a paper with a red seal in the corner, scribbled his signature, gave it to Sarah, and turned to start his inspection of the crew and goods.

  Sarah showed the paper to Captain Shore. “I have to make a report?” she asked.

  “That’s your landing papers,” he said. “It’s called a permesso. They’ll ask for your permesso. You show it to any official that asks for it. You have to carry it with you all the time. They know exactly who’s here, in the city. This is your passport, you hand it back to them when you come on board to go home, you have to show it for them to let you leave. Keep it safe, you can’t leave without it.”

  “What does he mean that I have to report?”

  “If you see or hear anything that you think is a danger to the Republic, you write the name of the person on a slip of paper, and what they said or did, and you feed it to the lion.”

  “What?”

  He smiled grimly at her increasing alarm. “See that lion’s head on the dockside? Set into the wall?”

  Sarah turned and saw, like a wall fountain, a lion’s head carved in marble, its mouth gaping wide. “Yes?”

  “It’s a postbox. Shaped like a lion, or a wild man, or any kind of thing. You’ll see them all over. You put your denunciation into the mouth of the lion—the Bocca di Leone—and one of the officials collects it, they collect every day, and they read everything, everything anyone says, and they arrest those they think might be guilty and take them away.”

  “But anyone could say anything!” Sarah protested.

  “Oh, yes, they do.”

  “But they must arrest hundreds of people!”

  Captain Shore smiled grimly. “That’s the idea.”

  “Where do they take the prisoners?” Sarah asked nervously.

  He pointed back down the Grand Canal.

  “To the Doge’s Palace. You saw that great palace that we came by?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “He lives there like a king; but he’s not a king. He’s one of the great men of Venice, but he prides himself on being a servant of the people. He works with the Council of Ten. Together, they rule the Republic, the greatest power in Europe. Hundreds of men, thousands of men work for him, like a court; but not a court. They don’t dance or sing or play or hunt like our court. They’re not a court of fools. They work, all day, all night, in absolute secret. They make trade treaties and agreements with every country under the sun, they spy on every country in the world, they sell to every country in the world, and they watch their own people, night and day, and pick
them up at the least sign of trouble. The people of Venice have the wealthiest, safest city in the world because they’re watched, night and day, by themselves.”

  “A city of spies?”

  “Exactly. You didn’t mention meeting your husband to the officer?”

  “He asked me what was the purpose of my visit—so I told him about my work.”

  “As you wish. But if he asks me, I’m not going to lie for you.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not a secret. I just didn’t mention it.”

  He laughed shortly. “No such thing in this city.” He took up a rope and lashed the gangplank tighter to the stanchion on deck. “There, you’ve got your papers, you’re certified clean, I’ve told you how to report, you can go. Into a city of spies.” He looked at the young woman. “That steward—he’ll bring your choice of goods to the quay here? And do the paperwork like last time? He has to declare it at the Custom House. If he says it’s private furniture, it’s his own word on it, not mine.”

  Sarah nodded. “Can you tell me how to find him?” she asked humbly. “I have his address, I thought it would be easy to find—but I didn’t expect it to be all water…”

  He laughed shortly. “You have the address of his house?”

  “I thought I’d walk down a road!”

  He pointed to one of the idling children. “Get one of them to lead you,” he said.

  “Are they safe?” Sarah asked doubtfully, looking at the crowd of begging children.

  “This is Venice,” he said again. “Nobody commits a crime unless they are unseen in complete darkness and probably working for the state. Nobody dares. Pay the lad a farthing. And pay the boatman what he asks. They don’t cheat either.”

  “They don’t cheat?” she asked incredulously.

  “They don’t dare. They’d be reported at once. And come back inside two weeks. We sail as soon as we are loaded, we’re not allowed to stay beyond our time. Already they’ve issued our papers. If you’re not here, I’ll go without you. And get the goods here sooner rather than later; they’ll want to inspect them.”