The Merchant of Dreams (Night's Masque, #2)(56)

Just as the Grand Canal turned back on itself their gondolier heaved on his oar and continued on westwards down a tributary. The houses here were less grand, though still three or four stories tall with bronze doors and painted plaster walls. A bridge crossed the canal, barely high enough for the gondolier to go under without ducking; it had no parapet, as if the citizens of Venice were so accustomed to the water that they gave it no thought.

A little further on they passed under a second bridge and then turned aside into a yet smaller canal, perhaps twenty feet across. The houses bordering it were more modest in proportion, mostly no more than two or three stories, with simple arched windows edged in white stucco. The gondola snaked around a dogleg bend and stopped at the foot of a weed-encrusted stair leading up to the fondamenta, the canal-side walk.

"Here you are, signori," the gondolier said, gesturing to the building on their right. "This is the residence of the English ambassador."

The house sat on the bend in the canal, a fine specimen of Venetian architecture with walls painted a deep terracotta red and arched windows decorated with white plaster mouldings. Two sides faced the canal, the third gave onto a street that merged into the fondamenta, and the fourth was joined to its neighbours. Mal's thoughts were already occupied with assessing its entrances and exits.

He scrambled ashore, relieved to be back on solid ground again, and waited with studied indifference whilst Ned heaved their belongings onto the fondamenta. Raleigh paid the gondolier, strode up to the house's street entrance and rapped on the handsome panelled door. Mal joined him, signalling to Ned to wait with the baggage. Several minutes passed, and Mal began to think they had the wrong address. He was just about to ask a passing Venetian for directions when the door opened and a manservant peered out.

"Sir Walter Raleigh, to see the ambassador," Raleigh barked.

The servant blinked at them, then opened the door with a bow.

"Please, come in, sirs."

They followed him into a small but elegant atrium with a floor of grey marble tiles. The servant left them there and made his way slowly up a narrow staircase of the same stone, clutching the balustrade with an age-knobbed hand. No wonder it had taken forever to open the door. Mal wandered over to a gilded side table and leafed through the pile of handwritten notices: announcements of executions, the election of citizens to public office, and all the other doings of a well-run state that might be of interest to diplomats and men of business.

Above the table hung a portrait of a gentleman in recent English fashions; the ambassador himself? Mal's guess was proved correct when the man from the painting descended the stair. A little older and stouter, perhaps, but undoubtedly Sir Geoffrey Berowne in the flesh.

"Sir Walter!" The ambassador bowed. "How wondrous unexpected! How is Her Majesty?"

Raleigh bowed in turn. "In good health, God be praised. And yourself?"

"The damp plays hell with my joints in the winter, but the summers make up for it." He looked from Raleigh to Mal and back. "Have I been recalled?"

"Not at all," Mal said, bowing and holding out Walsingham's letter. "Maliverny Catlyn, at your service."

Berowne took the letter and peered at the seal, then turned away as if he had quite forgotten their presence and headed back towards the stairs. Raleigh gestured for Mal to follow.

The stairs opened out into an antechamber hung with English tapestries. The one bare section of wall bore a portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth in a scarlet gown trimmed with gold, and below it stood a high-backed chair of dark wood. There was no other furniture.

"This is what they call the piano nobile, the noble floor," Berowne said, seeming to remember his guests at last. "No Venetian lives on the ground floor of his house. No cellars, you see, because of the canals, so the street level chambers serve as storerooms and shops."

He ushered them through a door into a smaller, more intimate chamber, more like an English parlour. A chair and footstool, both upholstered in tapestry-work, waited by a small fireplace, though most of the space was occupied by a dining table of polished marquetry with an enormous gilt-and-glass candelabrum in the centre. Berowne went over to the window and cracked the seal of the letter.

They waited in silence until the ambassador had finished reading.

"Well," Berowne said, and put it down on the table top. "Well, well."

"Sir Geoffrey?" Mal took a step towards the ambassador. "Can I be of assistance?"

"I take it you are here to spy on the skraylings."

Mal inclined his head in acknowledgement.

"Well," the ambassador said, "I fear you have come all this way for naught."

"What? Have they left already? But we saw one of their ships–"

"Oh no, they are still here. But how you are to spy on them, I cannot fathom. No one may speak to them without the permission of the Ten, not even the Doge. I doubt they will extend that privilege to a visiting Englishman."

"Even one who is a personal friend of the skrayling ambassador?"

"Especially one who is a personal friend of the skrayling ambassador."

"I see. That does present a difficulty. However Sir Francis has put his trust in me, and I must do what I can."

Berowne squinted at him. "What did you say your name was?"

"Catlyn, sir. Maliverny Catlyn."