In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant
Just as she has her job, now I have mine. I have become again the majordomo, the capo, the accountant, and the keeper of the purse. I sit with paper and pen in front of me watching the cloth fly. The buying pile grows higher, and as fast as they do their sums, I do mine, so when the time comes to pay, it is I who do the talking, while my lady sits pretending fits of the vapors over the ferocity of the haggling and the price. And in this way we all acquit ourselves with enough deceit for the transaction to be honorable and for them to leave as content with what they have not sold as we are with what we have had to spend.
That night we eat spiced rabbit stew in new old clothes, she in green brocade that sets off perfectly the color of her eyes and I in an outfit of new hose and velvet doublet, with specially altered sleeves so that at least it fits me—for no dwarf can serve a woman of substance in a suit whose slits are more of wear than of style. Meragosa is pleased with her gown too, for though it has more of the kitchen than of the salon about it, it is in addition to the one I promised and have already delivered to her, and that evening she goes out of her way to feed us well, so all three of us share a sense of high spirits at the thought of what is to come.
Next morning La Draga arrives early, carrying shining falls of golden hair, accompanied by a young woman whose eyes are as alive as our healer’s fingers. The day before, my lady had bought a second shawl from the Jews (her idea, not mine), and as she puts it into La Draga’s hands now, the healer’s pale face lights up like a candle. Yet almost immediately she becomes unsure of herself, caught between pleasure and embarrassment by the compliment my lady pays her. As for me, I am polite but get out as soon as I can, for I will not risk another encounter. Today I am more interested in business than in beauty anyway. I have already retrieved our purse from between the slats of the bed and am off to meet my dark-eyed Jew to exchange the last of our jewels.
As do the proprietors of every other business, the pawnbrokers open their shutters with the Marangona bell. It is raining, and I am not the first to arrive. A man in a cloak and hat is already waiting with a bag held inside the folds of his garment, trying to look as if he is not really here. I have come across his like before. In a city where trade is glory, the difference between a ship that docks with a fortune in its hold and one that falls prey to piracy or bad management is bankruptcy for the merchant who financed the trip with money he didn’t have. Those who belong to the ruling Crow families have the advantage of their birth and breeding, for even the poorest of them can sell their votes to richer, more ambitious nobles looking for a step up into one of the smaller governing councils or senates that make up the pyramid of this celebrated state. (It is a mark of the sophistication of Venice that, while every ballot at every level of government is secret, every appointment can nevertheless in some way be rigged. It makes Rome’s more obvious corruption feel almost honest in comparison.) But for the citizen traders, there is no such safety net, and the move from grace to disgrace can be dizzyingly fast. When we come to pick our rugs and chests and dinner service, we would do better not to speculate on whose failed lives we will be buying secondhand.
The pawnbroker lets us both in, and I wait in the shop front while the two of them conduct their business in the back. The man leaves about a half hour later with his head down and his bag empty.
Inside the sanctum, I clamber onto the stool, take out my purse, and empty the jewels onto the table between us. He goes straight for the great ruby, and I am pleased to see his eyes flicker at its size. As he turns it over in his hand, I try to imagine the price. It must indeed have choked her to swallow, but it will be worth it now. Depending on its quality, it might be as much as three hundred ducats. Which, along with the others, might give us almost four hundred. The memory of my lady captivating the Turk and the sight of her in finer clothes again had brought back some of the lost confidence of Rome, so that now even I can imagine us renting a house near the Grand Canal for a few weeks. Rich bait to catch richer fish.
Across the table, the pawnbroker is studying the gem through his special lens, the muscles in the right side of his face creased up to keep the glass in place. What age is he? Twenty-five? More? Would he be married? Is his wife lovely? Is he ever tempted by others? Maybe the Jews have their own prostitutes inside the Ghetto, because I cannot remember seeing any Jewesses on the streets. He takes the glass from his eye and puts the stone down.
“I will be back in a moment,” he murmurs, and the creases in his forehead are deeper.
“Is there something wrong?”
He gives a shrug and stands up. “Please, wait. I leave the stone here, yes?”
He goes out of the room, and I pick up the gem. It is perfect. Not a flaw in it. It came from a necklace given to my lady by a banker’s son who developed such a passion for her that he became a little deranged, and in the end his father offered her money to let him go. He was later sent away on business and died in Brussels of the fever. I daresay his ruby came closer to her heart on its journey through her insides than he himself had ever done in real life, though she was never cruel to those who pined for her. It was—and, I hope, will be again—one of the hazards of the profession. She will—
The thought is stopped by the opening of the door. My doe-eyed Jew ushers in an old man, with a shock of silver hair and cap, who moves slowly to the table, his eyes on the floor. When he is seated, he pulls the stone toward him and fixes the eyeglass.
“He is my father,” the pawnbroker says, acknowledging his lack of grace with a small smile. “He knows a great deal about jewels.”
The old man takes his time. The air is beginning to feel stiff—though I can’t tell whether it is from the smallness of the room or my growing anxiety—when the old man says: “Yes…it is very good, this one.”
I let out a sigh, but it sticks in my throat when I see the younger man’s face. He mutters something in his own language, and the father looks up and replies sharply. There are more curt, angry exchanges between them, and the old man pushes the ruby back across the table to me.
“What?”
The young man shakes his head. “I am sorry. The jewel is a fake.”
“What?”
“Your ruby. She is made of glass.”
“But…but that’s impossible. They all came from the same place. You saw the others. You bought them. You told me yourself they were high quality.”
“And they were. I still have two of them here. I can show you the difference.”
I stare into its heart. “But—it’s flawless.”
“Yes. Which is why I was not sure. That along with the cut. You heard my father. It is good, this fake. In Venice there are many who are very clever with glass. But once you see it…”
But I am no longer listening. I am in the room, feeling my hands under the mattress for the purse, thinking, sifting through a thousand images and memories. It doesn’t make sense. The gems left the room only when we did. And when my lady slept, I slept too. Or was that true? Of course there had been times when she was there alone. But she would never have left them, surely. And for whom? Meragosa? La Draga?
“I don’t believe you. I saw your face. You weren’t sure. And he”—I poke my hand toward the old man, furious that he still will not look at me—“he can’t even see his hand in front of his face. How can he tell anything?”
“My father has been dealing in gems his whole life,” the pawnbroker says gently. “I ask him only when there is a doubt. He has never been wrong. I am sorry.”
I shake my head. “Then I’ll take it elsewhere,” I say, squirming my way off the chair and gathering the stones back into the purse. “You’re not the—”
Now the old man’s voice rises to join mine, his tone as angry as my own. And this time he looks at me. His eyes are filmy and half blind, like those of the mad La Draga, and it turns my stomach to see it. “What does he say?” I yell furiously.
His son hesitates.
“Tell me what he said.”
“He says tha
“What—Jews, you mean?”
He nods slightly.
“And he thinks what? That I came here for the last six months trading good gems with you to pass you off a fake now? Is that it?”
He makes a gesture with his hand as if to show that this is only an old man’s opinion.
“You tell him that when I lived in Rome, our house was so rich we played dice with better stones than he’ll ever see in this hovel.”
“Please…please, we can still do business.” And I realize as he says it that I am shaking. “Please, sit down again.”
I sit.
He says something in a firm voice to the old man, who scowls and gets up, shuffling his way toward the door. It slams behind him.
“I am sorry. My father is anxious about many things. You are a foreigner, so I think you don’t know, but the Great Council has voted to close the Ghetto and send us out of Venice again, even though we have a contract with them to stay. It is about money, of course, and if we pay again, then no doubt we can change it, but my father is an elder of the community, and it makes him angry. For this reason he is sometimes suspicious of the wrong people.”
“I would say so, yes. I didn’t come to cheat you.”
“I do not think you did.”
“But someone has cheated me.”
“Yes. And it has been done with some cunning. But then Venice, she is a cunning place.”
“But how? I mean, how does…one make such a fake?” And I can hear the tremble in my voice as I say it. Five minutes before I was planning our rich future, now I am spinning through black space. Oh, my God. Oh, my God…How could we have been so stupid?
“You would be surprised how easy it is. There are men who work in the glass foundries on Murano who can make stones so fine that even the doge’s wife would not know she was wearing them. If they have the original, they make a not so good copy fast for a quick substitute, then a better one in a little more time. You hear stories—”
“But I check the purse every day.”
“And did you study each and every stone?”
“I, er…No—just enough to see that they were there.”
He shrugs.
“So, what are you telling me? That it’s worth nothing?”
“In terms of money, no. It would have cost maybe ten, twenty ducats to make…which is not so cheap for a fake. But it is a good one. Good enough to wear as a jewel. Your mistress, because—I think you are selling for somebody else, yes?”
I nod.
“Well, she might wear it around her neck, and most people will not know. But if you want to pawn it now, here, to me, then it is worth nothing. I have no need for such things, and for me it is better if they are not on the market.”
“And the others?”
“Oh, the others are real enough. And I will buy them.”
“How much will you give me?”
He stares down at them on the table, moving them around with his finger. “For the little ruby—twenty ducats.” He looks up at me. “This is a good price.”
I nod. “I know. And the pearls?”
“Another twenty.”
Forty ducats. It might rent some tapestries for one room, and maybe buy a set of glasses to drink from. Though the wine in them would be vinegar. No noble worth his salt would come near us, or those who came once would certainly not return. Nevertheless. “I will take it.”
He pulls down the papers to make out the bond. I look around me. I have grown to like this room. With its books and ledgers and pens, it speaks of ordered management and perseverance. But all I can feel now is panic like bat wings smashing around my head. He dusts the ink and pushes the paper over to me. He watches me as I sign my name.
“You are from Rome, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So, what? You came here with the troubles?”
“Yes.”
“It was a bad business, I think. Many Jews died there too. I never saw that city, though I hear it was very rich. But I know Urbino. And Modena. And this is better than both of them. Even with our great argument with the state, Venice is a safe city for us Jews. I think perhaps it is because here there are already so many people who are different from one another, yes?”
“Perhaps,” I say. “I…er…I am sorry for your misfortune.”
He nods. “And I for yours. If you have anything else to sell, please, I will look at it for you.”
We have, it seems, after all, talked about life.
Outside, the sky is as gray as the buildings, and the cobbles are streaming under the rain so that the whole city is like a great mirror, its surface speckled and cracked in a million places. I run like a dog, head down, close to the walls, my legs splashed to my knees and my new velvet doublet sodden within minutes. The sudden exertion hurts my legs, but I go on regardless. At least it stops the thoughts for a moment. There is nowhere to go but home, but perhaps because I dread it so, somewhere on the way I take a wrong bridge or alley and find myself at the edge of the Rialto, where the streets are thick with market crowds and there are dozens of taverns and wineshops in which you could crush memory and drink yourself toward oblivion. I might even have gone in if I had found the right one, but the next turn I take brings me to an alley I don’t recognize, and from there I emerge at the water’s edge at right angles to the Rialto Bridge. The Grand Canal here is so crammed with barges and boats serving the great fish market that even the rain smells of the fish flesh and the sea.
On the other side, the morning crowd is pouring out from the covered walkway of the bridge when a woman starts screaming “Thief! Thief!” at the top of her lungs. At the same instant a figure breaks free and smashes and skids his way along the canal edge. He tries to push inland, where the alleyways will swallow him, but the throng is too thick, and instead he jumps onto one of the barges and starts clambering across the great canal by way of the fishing boats lashed together for unloading. The crowd is going mad now, flapping and squealing as he slips and slides across wet planks. He is more than halfway across, close enough for me to be able to see the fear in his face, when he hits a mess of fish guts and comes crashing down between the hulls of two boats, so hard I can almost hear his ribs crack as he hits the wood.
A roar of triumph goes up from the other side, and within minutes two great fishermen are hauling him up, he howling with pain, and dragging him back over the boats toward the bank. Tomorrow, if he isn’t dead by then, he’ll be strung up in front of the magistrate’s office next to the bridge with the skin off his back and his thieving hand hanging from his neck. And for what? A purse with a couple of ducats or a grabbed ring or bracelet, of which, for all he knew, the stones would only be worth the glass they were made of.
I stand in the deluge listening to his screams with the water cascading down my face and my nose running with a mixture of snot and rain and the terror of poverty like great stones grinding together in my gut. And when I can no longer see or hear him, I turn and make my way back to the main streets and home.
CHAPTER TEN
The worst of the downpour has slackened by the time I get to the house, and my wits, if not my spirit, are somewhat restored. Only my lady and I had known where I had gone that morning. So the thief, whoever she is, would not necessarily be aware that her deception had been found out.
The kitchen is empty and Meragosa’s cloak is gone, but this is the time when she is always at the market, and while she is lazy in many ways, she enjoys the power and the gossip that come with a purse enough to brave the rain.
I move silently up the stairs until I am on the landing and can see into the room ahead. Fiammetta is sitting next to the window, her eyes covered by what looks like a mask of wet leaves and her head a storm of golden hair, the new tresses falling from under a silk band woven halfway up her head. Were it any other moment, I would be transfixed by the change. But there is someone else in the room who takes my attention first. The young woman is gone, b
But though she is blind as a newborn ewe, she knows I am there long before I appear in the doorway. As I walk in, I see, clear as daylight, a shadow cross her features, and she shifts her hands back quickly from the bed into her lap. And I have it then and there, in that look. What was it Meragosa said about her? That she would sell her grandmother for the right amount of gold. Amid all that laughter and gossip, I daresay there had also been the story of our escape from Rome. La Draga would have no need of sight to find a purse under a mattress or to feel the size of a jewel, for as she is only too eager to tell me she sees the world through other senses, and she is smart enough to know what sells to whom and at what price. I know who has stolen from us. And she knows that I know it, because I see the fear mounting in her body even before I have accused her. God’s wounds, no wonder I have been so suspicious of her.
“Are you comfortable there?” I say as I walk toward her. “You don’t feel the need to slide your fingers down the slats to help you balance at all?”
“Bucino?” My lady slips the leaves from her eyes and turns, careful of both the glory and the weight of her new hair. “What is it? My God, what has happened to you? You look awful.”
On the bed La Draga has brought both her arms up to protect herself. But she needn’t have bothered. Nothing in the world would persuade me to touch her. The very thought makes me sick.