“And if you are considering writing any notes directly to the Barbarigo”—jealousy put a sharpness in my voice—”you may erase it from your mind. You might as well know that I will be sailing on the same ship as you. The great galley Santa Lucia —I am her first mate.”
“The first mate!” she exclaimed with scorn. “Now I know you are full of lies. You are much too young to be the first mate of a fishing boat, let alone a galley.”
Although this time I had spoken the truth, her scorn cut as deeply as if I had been caught in an abominably proud boast.
“My uncle is her captain,” I insisted. “I have been at sea with him since I was eight and he does indeed charge me with such responsibility. As a matter of fact,” and now I sought to get back at her, “I have been personally charged with the safe conduct of both yourself and your holy chaperon.” I nodded in the direction of the aunt’s convent. “Good day, Madonna Baffo. I will see you on the dock at the rising of the tide on Saint Sebastian’s Day.”
The girl sucked her breath at this and then let it out in a little squeal of anger. She stooped down and grabbed a handful of pebbles from the path which she flung at me. I scrambled up the wall in a moment—it was easy for one used to the rigging of ships—and sat perched on the top, out of her range.
I tipped my hat once more and bade Governor Baffo’s fair daughter a fond “Until Saint Sebastian’s Day.”
Then I dropped over the wall, pursued by her curses to the end of the lane and the canal.
II
“A willful and headstrong girl,” my uncle Jacopo said with a disbelieving shake of his head as I finished telling him my afternoon’s adventure.
His voice gave me a moment’s chill, coming as it did from behind the mask he was trying on before a small mirror in our room. The black mask’s beetling brows that made the eyes empty pits and the grotesque nose that gave a sepulchral hiss to his words had me convinced for a moment that my uncle spoke to me from beyond the grave.
Uncle Jacopo swept the mask off his face. It was of a piece with the tall, conical white hat, so that he now stood revealed as the man I’d always known and loved, who’d taken me in when my own parents and his wife had died in the same epidemic. Life fairly burst from his dark eyes, the flash around them heavily crinkled from much gazing across a sunburned sea. The gray on his wavy hair was no more than the white -caps formed before a warm, gentle south wind that made for good sailing and a quick homeward journey.
“Why don’t you wear this mask tonight?” he asked, handing me the now-limp disguise.
“Me, Uncle?”
“Oh, I masked my share in my day, I can tell you. Used it to cover youth and folly and more indiscretion than I can remember.”
“You, Uncle?” I teased. “My pious, God-fearing uncle? I won’t believe it!”
“You don’t believe it because I was always careful to wear a mask when I did it,” he replied with a conspiratorial wink. He rested a hand on my shoulder, which was now almost level with his. “The time comes to pass everything on to younger blood, those with the stamina to take it. Accept the mask as the first of everything I shall leave you.”
“Uncle, I expect to be best man at your remarriage any day now, and then what follows—”
“No, Giorgio. I won’t remarry. I couldn’t get a son if I did. Too many whores in too many ports. The pox they carry— I won’t put another decent woman through what I put my Isabella in her honest attempts to get an heir. It’s up to you. The continuation of our line, the charge from God in the Garden to multiply and replenish, it’s all on your shoulders now. See that you don’t fail that responsibility as I have done.”
“I shall not,” I answered my uncle’s sudden and unaccustomed sobriety with what I hoped would match it. “But let’s not think of that now, not tonight, not at Carnival.”
The mood would not leave my uncle yet, though he pushed at it with sarcasm and a flourish. “I bequeath to you the grand old mask of the Veniero revelers.”
“Thank you, most gracious uncle. I accept.” When he phrased it like that, I could hardly refuse. “But you will wear my visor. For Carnival.”
Uncle Jacopo took my simple black satin band and fingered it as he turned to look more out the window than at what he held in his hand. We were on the third story; the more prosperous branches of the family claimed the lower floors but allowed us these small rooms whenever the sea brought us home. Our long months abroad, after all, paid for their tapestries, their Persian rugs, their silverplate, their long winter evenings by the fireside. Our labor paid for their glass windows, a luxury we rarely saw elsewhere, but which were common here, even on third floors, like the one my uncle gazed through now.
The window was made of twenty or more separate little panes, their round bull’s-eyes leaded together in a pattern of alternating red, green, and clear. All I could see from where I stood was the occasional dart of a sea gull through the clear circles. I supposed my uncle could see more.
“Ah, Venice.” He sighed, laboring under his mood of dark premonition. “ ‘If the Earthly Paradise where Adam dwelt with Eye were like Venice, Eye would have had a difficult time tempting him away from it with a mere fig.’
He was quoting Pietro Aretino, the famous satirist who was then but six years in his grave. I knew my
