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mother took a fancy to one of her apprentices and married him. And now the apprentice occupied his own three-storey well-furnished Bank on the Grand Canal by the Rialto. Here.
    Gregorio said, ‘I really can’t tell you more: he only came back yesterday morning, and we’ve talked nothing but business. But Tilde and Catherine, after all, are his step-daughters. I’m sure he won’t let them down.’
    ‘Tell that to Tilde,’ Julius said.
    They went to tell it to Tilde. On the way, in between pricing the furniture, Julius learned that Nicholas had left before dawn for a series of meetings which (he gathered) might well last until nightfall. Nicholas would be compelled to see to his cargo, to report to the Signory, and to spend some time at the yard where his damaged roundship was being placed in dry dock. He had also (Gregorio said) sent to arrange several personal visits.
    ‘I can guess where,’ Julius said, though he couldn’t. When Nicholas was a boy, the whole of Bruges always knew where to look for him, give or take a hayloft or two. Of course, he was out of the kitchen league now. Ruminating, not without some nostalgia, Julius climbed the staircase and found himself confronting Loppe, planted foursquare at the top like a tombstone. Julius seized and shook his hand, while Loppe’s teeth and eyes shone. Until joining the Charetty company, Julius had never expected to find himself on any sort of terms with a Negro; but Loppe, of course, was unique. He hoped to God, again, that Tilde would behave herself. Gregorio opened the doors of the salon.
    Both the women were there. Margot got up and came forward. No one had ever worked out how a man like Gregorio, with his pedantic style and scrag-end face and abysmal swordsmanship, could attract and keep a handsome woman like Margot. Julius, like everyone else, had tried to fathom why the two didn’t marry, and had even asked two or three times, but without receiving much satisfaction. He could imagine several possible reasons. Julius himself, as it happened, was the result of an embarrassing slip by a celibate. He didn’t know where Margot came from.
    Mind you, youth counted for something and, even beside Margot, Tilde de Charetty didn’t come off too badly. She had missed her mother’s strong chestnut hair and high colour, but she was rounded all right where she should be, and her solemn expressionsuited the shape of her face, although her brow, like her temper, wrinkled too easily.
    After Marian’s death, Tilde had gone about in old-fashioned thick-folded robes, with her brown hair in tightly coiled plaits. As her manager, Julius had found it depressing. Recently, however, she had seemed to take stock, and sent her mother’s costlier clothes to be remade. Today her hair rippled loose from a caul, and she had on an exceptional pendant and an overdress grand enough to be bridal. She had behaved remarkably well, too, on the journey: six weeks from beginning to end, with all the roads crowded, and snow and mud over the Alps.
    Of course, she had travelled here from Flanders before, escorted that time by Gregorio. Now, she jumped up flushing as soon as the lawyer entered the room, and her expression changed to a smile. She had expected Nicholas, Julius saw. She had always blamed Nicholas for inducing her mother to marry him, and had a good deal more to blame him for now. That was why she was here. Concern for her trade was the least of it.
    Gregorio looked pleased to see her as well. He took her hand in his old-fashioned way and said, ‘Demoiselle, welcome to Venice. You look charming. We are all so happy to see you.’ He didn’t release her. He said, ‘You remember Loppe? Now factor for all the Bank’s sugar estates.’
    The flush and the smile had been for the man who was kind to her when her mother died. Loppe was the slave elevated by her mother’s apprentice. ‘I remember him, of course,’ Tilde de Charetty said. ‘That old broker at Sluys had him before we