This Rough Magic

The head of the Casa Dorma smiled back. He looked younger. Nicer. Less like the Doge.

'But not on me. Now go and try to stay out of trouble. And pretend to be learning to be a good young Case Vecchie for my mother's sake. She has enough to bear with Angelina being taken away. You can speak like a gentleman when you wish to. Do so.'

 

PART III February, 1539 a.d.

Chapter 11

The forests of Istria were dripping and bleak. The mists seemed to hang heavy and cold around the trees. That matched Maria's mood fairly well. She was big bellied and uncomfortable. What she really wanted was someone to have a good fight with. A good fling-plates-and-break-things fight. In that respect her husband Umberto was hopeless. For starters he was always off marking trees or accompanying the foresters. The life out here didn't suit him, but he was a fiercely conscientious man. He'd far rather have been in the dockyards in the Arsenal back in Venice. This however, was where he had been sent. And after the affair with the previous chief forester he did his best to keep going out with the tree patrols.

At least he had listened to her—or if he hadn't done so consciously, some of her insistence that he look into the peccadilloes of those under him had unearthed the culprits still running the timber-scam.

She tried not to be too irritated with him, even so. He insisted on thinking of it purely in terms of 'timber being sent away from Venice' rather than 'timber being sold to the enemies of Venice.' Sometimes, his focus was so narrow, so parochial, it made her want to scream. And never mind that not all that long ago, her focus had been entirely on running her cargoes and not enquiring too closely about where they were from, or where they were going, on being dazzled by a pair of blue eyes and not asking what was going on in the head that housed them.

Well, that had changed. If only Umberto had learned the same lesson.

At least he was on to the cheaters now, and he was off every day, trying to match his city strides with the long paces that the foresters took, and sneezing a lot.

She envied him, envied his long hikes through the forest, envied that he got out of the house every day, into the open, beyond the four confining walls. To her surprise she'd found that the openness, space and silences felt welcoming. Umberto complained of missing the people and the sounds of the city. She enjoyed their absence.

In the first day here, she had learned all that, despite the fact that things had been quite chaotic. To get out, under those old, quiet trees, had been a pleasure she would never have anticipated. So far as she was concerned, all that had happened was that she'd had a lovely walk and solved half the timber problems—and, yes, gotten a little lost and gotten home a little late, but that was hardly anything to worry about.

Umberto'd almost had the baby for her, to judge by the performance he had given when she came back at last. And unfortunately, she was no longer the sole arbiter of what she did; she was a wife now, and half of a couple, and it behooved her not to send her husband into a state of panic. The result—with her 'delicate condition' in mind, was being confined to the house and yard with an elderly forester's widow as a combination between house-servant and guard.

Not that she was in any real sense a prisoner. No, she was just confined by chains of care and Umberto's ideas of how it all should be, and the proper arrangement of the universe. Women had their place. It was a pampered and protected one—well, as pampered as a caulker's wife ever got, anyway. It didn't include being out on the canals at midnight, running gray-cargo, nor traipsing about the woods like a forester.

It all chafed at Maria's soul. She was used to her independence. She was used to defining for herself what she would and wouldn't do. And if her mother had plied her own boat until the very day of Maria's own birth, why should she now be stuck within four walls, tending to the housework as if she hadn't a care except that the floor be clean enough?

For that matter, her world was so much wider now! The last year—no one who had lived through what she had could be unchanged. She'd come up against challenges she would never have dreamed of, and beaten them, and if she'd chosen to marry rather than try to raise a baby on her own, well, it was for the baby's sake.

She certainly wouldn't have done it for her own. So she'd taken the husband that she thought would best love her baby, no matter who the father was. And now, she found herself powerless to fight the trammels of Umberto's gentle care. She didn't even know how to start dealing with his hurt expressions when she didn't fit in with his expectations.

How did you fight this? She really could use a good screaming fight.

Issie, the black-clad forester's widow who was supposed to help her, tugged at her arm. 'Why don't you sit down, dearie, and rest your feet. You'll get little enough rest when the baby is born.'

Maria looked out into the black, bare trees, ignoring Issie. Umberto was out there now, trying to select good timbers for masts and keels, when what he knew about was cladding. The caulkers back in Venice were undoubtedly going to be grateful for the improvement in the quality of deck planking. Maria was, however, sure that he'd be getting more letters of complaint from the masters of the carpenters' guild. At least he got regular letters from Venice. It was more than she ever did.

She sighed. It wasn't as if reading came that easily. True, she'd spent more time working on it since they arrived here. But there weren't many people back home who could write in the first place. She only ever seemed to get letters from Kat. Letters full of Marco. Letters from a life she'd chosen to leave behind, to try to forget. Benito was always carefully not mentioned.

The second reason Maria found it difficult to pick a good fight with Umberto was straight guilt. He'd married her, loved her enough to take what fellow Venetians would have called 'spoiled goods.' She had taken his offer, not because she felt any deep affection for the balding, slightly worried looking gray-haired man, but because she