you use the Zecca?”
My mother again. “Not the Zecca. All operations must be outside the city. This enterprise is to be kept secret, on his orders. And since you cannot come to the Zecca, I have brought the Zecca to you.”
“Here?”
“Here. In my train are the finest craftsmen our city can provide, the heads of their divisions at the Zecca. I thought to leave them here, so that they may instruct your own men in your own seam. Or our own seam.”
“It will belong to the Seven, as he has agreed. So neither of ours.”
“Or both of ours.” They were sparring again, and my mother had won the bout. “We leave tomorrow, for we must meet my lord the doge in Milan presently.”
“He brings the map?”
“He does. It is safe under his own roof.”
Now this, as you can imagine, made my ears prick and my bowels loosen. My father was to bring the map. If they meant the wooden roll I now held in my sleeve, when he went to seek it in the Zephyrus horse, he would find it gone. But I still could not see how the wooden roll could be a map—perhaps there was another map that my father would bring from “under his own roof”—in another location, signposted in the painting, hid somewhere in the palazzo maybe. And yet, the basil-ica was his “own roof” too; my mother had ofttimes told me that the great church was my father’s private chapel and part of his palace. I stilled my pattering thoughts lest I miss some tidbit from below.
“Then tonight it must be. After the feast my sappers will lead your men down.”
“My men and myself.”
A pause from the archduke. “Dogaressa, it is a perilous place.”
“No matter. I am accustomed to peril.”
“Then if I may address you on a matter of some delicacy, may I recommend that you . . . ah . . . wear some . . . breeches.” A snuffly laugh, like a pig truffling, issued from the archduke and I got the idea that he rarely gave way to mirth. I knew from the jest that Archduke Sigismund had heard the same rumors about my mother and father’s relationship that had reached the ears of Don Ferrente, namely that she wore the breeches in the marriage.
“Very well.” My mother was cold as the climate. “But let it be understood that I will need to take a blank with me, so that it may be properly and independently assayed.”
“Independently assayed by your own inspectors.” The arch-duke scoffing now.
“No.” My mother was all steel. “By his.”
A pause from the archduke. “Then of course. In fact, let me have one stamped. Then he may admire the design. I assume you have brought the cast?”
A silence. I guessed there had been a nod from my mother.
“Well. I will be interested to see it for myself. Perhaps I will join you tonight, if you will permit me.”
“So be it.”
At least one party left the room at this point, and as I heard the doors I raised myself up on stiff knees, rubbed my sore ear, and scampered back to my room as quick as I could, lest my mother be coming up the stair to me. Back in my freezing eyrie I tried to make sense of what I’d heard.
The repeated reference to an angel explained Zephyrus’s wings, but a golden angel? Zephyrus was more silver if anything. At least I knew for sure that my mother and the archduke were involved with the Seven, that it wasn’t some invention. Madonna, my mother could lie like the devil! All her cant about the Primavera being an innocent wedding gift, a celebration of beauty. My arse.
I did not know what the Zecca was, for if it was someplace in Venice, my mother had, deliberately or no, left it off our itinerary. Talk of treaties and trading had largely gone over my head, and I wished I’d paid more attention to my mother’s tuition back when she was willing to give it to me. I was a little nearer to knowing why she had brought a carriage of strange men with us—they were experts of some sort. I sighed. Eavesdropping had made me no wiser, but I knew one thing. I had to follow my mother and the archduke tonight, wherever their “perilous” destination might be.
I knew this would be difficult, for no sooner had I returned to my room than Marta entered with the goodwife that had brought the