S Perry - The Serpent’s Mark

As he reaches her, Bruno bends a knee so extravagantly that she could be Caterina di Medici herself. One arm sweeps across his little body as if he intends to make her a gift of all London. He seizes her right hand to kiss, and she gets a glimpse of black doeskin gloves studded with gemstones – probably glass, knowing Bruno. He launches himself upon a tide of voluble reunion.

Bianca stops him with a laugh. ‘Cousin, peace! English, please! Speak English.’

He looks hurt. ‘English? Why English? Have you forgotten your mother tongue since you came here?’

‘No, of course I haven’t. But it’s better that way,’ she tells him, not wanting to hurt his pride. ‘When the English overhear someone speak in a foreign language, they think he’s trying to outsmart them at commerce or plotting their downfall.’

‘Then it shall be so,’ says Barrani with a sigh, adopting the expression of a holy martyr bracing himself for the pagan’s arrow. ‘If you wish me to be uncouth, then for you I shall forbear all onore. I do my best to make myself understood.’

‘I’m sure you’ll manage,’ she says, knowing that he had his lessons for free at the knee of her own father, who was English to his roots. ‘What are you doing here, Bruno – in London, of all places?’

A ribbon of that impossibly dark hair has fallen across his brow. He raises one gloved index finger to it. But instead of brushing it aside, he moves it to a more pleasingly rakish angle. Bianca cannot help but laugh. How can such a small vessel hold such a quantity of vanity? she wonders. But she knows it also holds a generous heart of equal measure. ‘Rice, Cousin!’ he announces proudly. ‘I have come to sell the heretic English some fine Lombardy rice.’

‘ Rice? You used to cry at the very sight of it, I seem to remember.’

‘I sell it – I don’t eat it.’ He scans the low ceiling of grey cloud and the choppy river. ‘Where it is always winter, it will not grow. So I bring!’ He brushes his hands together with a slap of expensive doeskin, as though he’s just successfully concluded a difficult transaction. ‘Very good profit!’

‘You – a merchant, Bruno? Since when?’

‘A year or two. These are early days.’

‘Well, you seem to be prospering,’ she says, taking in the inky braid woven into the ebony silk of his doublet. ‘But I’m surprised. When we were children you wanted to be a captain of pike for the King of Spain.’

‘I have unquestionably the heart,’ he tells her proudly, before raising one hand to the level of his temple and explaining with a self-deprecating smile, ‘but sadly not the altezza – the height.’

She smiles at his pronunciation of height: ayt ; and at the image of the diminutive Bruno Barrani attempting to wield a ten-foot pike-shaft. ‘Besides, I thought you were bound for the seminary. Last time I saw you, you were determined to become a chaplain to Cardinal Fiorzi.’

‘The cassocks are too big,’ he says. ‘I would look like a peregrine hidden under a sack. Besides, I dislike celibacy even more than I dislike rice.’

‘Well, it gladdens my heart to see you. You’re the first proper contact with home I’ve had since I came here.’

‘And now you are an English milady, yes? Like your queen – very rich!’

Bianca laughs. ‘Not rich, Bruno. I own a tavern, and I dispense cures. Over there.’ She points in the general direction of Bankside, hidden by the buildings that sit on the bridge like a grand boulevard floating above the water. ‘I came across because I heard the Sirena di Venezia had docked.’

‘She is a fine vessel, Cousin, is she not? His Eminence helped me to purchase her. We are joint owners.’

‘So you are Cardinal Fiorzi’s man after all.’

He looks at her shrewdly. ‘You ’ave a man now? English man, yes?’

‘No, Cousin. I do not have “English man”. Nor do I desire one, if he were to be offered; thank you for asking.’

‘Almost thirty and unmarried!’ he says in horror. ‘How do you expect your dear departed mother to find peace in heaven?’

He has a point, Bianca thinks. At eight years old, like all the girls in her street, she had wanted to marry Christ. By now – she assumes – a goodly proportion of them already have. But her father had protested that it would be a barren bridal bed for a nature as inquisitive as hers. So she’d lowered her sights a little – to Cardinal Santo Fiorzi. Barely coming up to his waist, she’d somehow found the astonishing nerve to march up to that magnificent, scarlet-attired confidant of God, one day after Mass.

‘Yes, child? What is it that you want?’ he had asked. ‘Are you not a little young for confession?’

She had taken a deep breath and asked the question she’d been rehearsing for a month: ‘Would you mind awfully being my husband, Your Eminence? Mother says I cook clams very well, and I wouldn’t need a throne – not yet.’

She’d sulked for a full week when, to her mortification, Fiorzi had laughed with delight and told her that, sadly, his heart was already taken.

But Cardinal Fiorzi had not forgotten the precocious child who could cook clams. He had found a way to reward her devotion. Although she’d had no comprehension of it at the time, the Sacred College of Cardinals was more a snake-pit clad in crimson cloth than a nexus of piety. Fiorzi had powerful enemies. So he had entrusted her and Bruno with messages that he didn’t want carried by servants who could be bribed or threatened. Their reward was a prominent position in the procession when the effigies of the saints were paraded through Padua on feast days. It placed them amongst the most popular youngsters in the city.

Her first great secular infatuazione – at sixteen – had been the ne’er-do-well son of the man who painted the shrines in Father Rossi’s church. He was as lean as a greyhound, Bianca remembers, with cascades of lustrous curls and a face that looked like she imagined Christ’s might look, if it was his cherished desire to be crucified three times a week and twice on Sundays.

As soon as her mother had got to hear of it, Bianca found herself accompanied everywhere by a phalanx of protectors, led by Bruno himself. Most galling of all, the object of her desire had resolutely refused to hurl himself against their ranks in order to reach her. And then she’d discovered that the crucified look was something he put on for any maid foolish enough to buy it.

And now I have feelings for a man married to a ghost .

Where, in all of God’s bright dominions, was that thought spawned? she wonders. Startled by the sudden image of Nicholas Shelby, she blushes.

‘Cousin?’

Bruno’s voice cuts into her embarrassment. ‘You must come see my fine crew! All best men of Veneto. Very handsome. Fine teeth. No squints. Maybe not all as perfumed as gentlemen, but a bull is not a bull without his musk. I find you one for a husband.’

Laughing, Bianca takes Bruno by the arm. ‘It’s a long time, Cousin, since I had an offer like that,’ she says. And being a good half-head taller than him, she allows herself to feel positively regal as he leads her towards the Sirena while promising her that his fine Venetian bulls will eat, drink and entertain themselves in no tavern in all of London save hers.

On the deck of the Sirena , and safe from suspicious ears, Bruno falls back into Italian. A dozen sun-bronzed men are labouring to bring the sacks of rice out of the ship’s hold, sweating even in the cool of the English air. Their faces – mostly young – are familiar to her, even though they’re the faces of strangers. In their gestures and voices is the edgy vibrancy of the Veneto. Bruno calls them to order. When he explains proudly who she is, the men instantly assume a reverent humility, coming forward in turn to greet her formally, starting with the tall, saturnine sailing master, Luzzi. Then she meets a Piero, and a Luca, and a Francesco, and a Cesare – not one of them less than a palm’s width taller than their master – and so on, until the last man is standing before her.