With a kick, she sent the little stood off the scaffold and fell—into the great black arms of my uncle’s man Piero. I had charged him with her safe arrival on board our ship and I knew he would not fail me, but even I let out a sigh of relief at his near miss. Then I laughed heartily with all the rest, both on board and on shore, as old Piero sat down on the stool beneath one of the dead men, turned Baffo’s daughter over his knee, and gave her the spanking she deserved right there upon the gibbet with all Venice to cheer him on.
I shall never forget the picture they made, the great black man and the flailing pink arms and legs. The contrast of colors pleased me so well that I resolved to buy my uncle’s man a bit of coral for his ear when we should reach Constantinople. With this thought, I returned to my work with a single mind. Madonna Baffo would not waste any more time in coming on board.
The public taming of the signorina gave me confidence that I could be master of myself as well. I had watched her antics all that morning with the detachment of an audience, of a harem woman behind her grille. I felt the power of that. From the distance of the middle of the Basin, her physical beauty had no effect on me. All her machinations had come to naught. They seemed foolish and juvenile. I need have no fear of her. With the slap and surge of the sea under her, Sofia Baffo would be humble.
A brisk wind was behind us, filling the wedge of our lateen sail and sending our ship singing over the billows like the strings of a zither. The sailors were fresh and exuberant, and by evening the peninsula of Istria was already a low, gray mass along the port side. The lowering sun hit the coast with such brilliance that any detail was impossible to make out. But the winds carried the smell of oak forests upon our ship, the source of the ribs, keel, and planking that rocked beneath us. The vivid colors of the sunset, like a noblewoman’s silks, gave promise of good sailing on the morrow. The evening star was a diamond in milady’s ear, the whip of Saint Mark’s banner over our heads the whispering of her words of love. Dolphins leapt for joy before the bow.
I had my work to do, ordering the sails to the proper tack with the evening rise of winds, fine-tuning with the oars when needed to pass a particularly difficult channel. When I was obliged to use them, the rowers flashed water rainbows from the sweep of their oars as if showing pleasure in the activity.
Truth to tell, I had quite forgotten about our willful passenger until then. She had been very quiet.
But, “when the children are quiet,” my old nurse used to say, “I know they’re up to mischief.”
VII
My uncle brought the old nun to me. “This is my nephew Giorgio, the ship’s first mate,” he said. “He will see to your difficulty.” A roll of his eyes as he left told me privately that he did not have time for the foolishness of the problem.
The nun’s face was tear-stained and already a little green from the movement of the ship. She faced me with courage, however, clutching her beads for support, and defied me to resist the divinity contained in them.
“Holy Sister?”
“Young Signor Veniero.” She heaved an ample bosom in my direction with anything but eroticism. “Signor Veniero, I demand that you discipline your man.”
“My man?”
“That monster of a blackamoor, Signore.”
“Piero? Why? What’s he done?”
Once or twice she opened her mouth like a fish gasping in air, but she could not bring herself to speak the name of the atrocity. She had to take me across the deck, through all the benches of heaving rowers, and show me. Our progress halted on a stretch of forecastle where we could see the spray mowed before us in golden sheaves and the twilight sky above caught in a web of rigging.
There was my uncle’s man, in the place I expected him. Legs crossed in his long, exotic white cotton trousers, he was dutifully mending ropes in the day’s last light. But beside him, perched on a great coil, was Governor Baffo’s daughter.
She had changed her costume. It was plum velvet now, flashy with gold chains and rings. But the pink silk was still with her. She had spent the afternoon, it seemed, ripping and cutting up the skirt and now, armed with needle and thread, she was in the process of making it up into a shirt for old Piero. After a morning spent playing mad on the quayside and swinging on the gibbet, there was little use in her trying to salvage it for another display of fashion. Nevertheless, how well the color suited my uncle’s man had not been lost on Baffo’s daughter, either.
She hadn’t progressed far with the project—firstly, because she was not a very good seamstress. Her second difficulty was that she was maintaining an extremely active interest in Piero’s work to the neglect of her own. She watched his fingers, commented on their agility, asked any question that came to her head as if she would be required to mend ropes herself the very next day.
While I stood and watched with the aunt, I saw Baffo’s daughter bend over the slave twice, once dropping her thimble in among the coils, which
