Clermont castle, Glarentza
Constantine came in from the outer court with sand still in his boots and the hem of his trousers damp to the knee. He stopped at the threshold to pull the boots off and set them against the wall beside the door.
A maid crossed with a copper pitcher against her hip, steam still curling at the lip, and bowed without slowing. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, which was stiff with salt at the temples, and went on to the dining chamber.
The table had been laid out the way it was laid out every morning now. Bread and white cheese, olives in a shallow bowl, figs cut in halves, honey in the wax, thin smoked fish on the blue-rimmed plate that had come from Ragusa with Katarina's chests. Two covered jugs stood on the side board. Four servants were placed around the walls, a boy was at the sideboard, and the woman who had set the cloth was still crossing the room with a folded napkin over her arm.
He sat down and reached for the water.
Katarina was across from him already, her shawl folded on the bench beside her, her hair braided flat for the morning and pinned once at the nape, and Zoe sat on her lap drinking from a small covered cup with a clay spout, both hands wrapped around it the way she had been taught. A wet half-moon had spread across Katarina's skirt where the child had leaned against her. The fig on Zoe's plate had been opened for her, and the seeds were turning slowly in the bead of juice.
"How was your run?" Katarina said.
"As far as the boatyard and back. There was a heron working in the shallows under the new slip — it didn't move when I went past."
"You smell of salt again."
"I washed."
"You washed, but you still smell of it. It's in the hair now." She said it evenly, and shifted Zoe a little higher on her knee.
He tore a piece of bread and put a smear of honey on it, and Zoe watched the movement of his hand and after a moment banged her cup on the board, once, the way she did when she wanted attention. The boy at the sideboard stepped forward with a clean napkin over his arm, but Katarina shook her head at him without looking and he stepped back to the wall.
"Leave her," she said. "She'll sort it out."
Constantine let his eyes travel the room while he chewed. There was a servant at each corner — the four of them placed so evenly that the floor might have been measured for them — and behind Katarina's chair there was the older woman who had been there before the lamps were trimmed that morning and who would be there when they were trimmed again at night. He had not quite gotten used to that again.
"Do we need all of them," he said quietly, "for breakfast?"
Katarina looked at him over her cup and seemed to weigh, for a moment, whether he meant it as a complaint or only as a question. "They're household," she said. "They've always been here. It's their morning work."
"At the sea house there would be three. The cook, the girl, and the boy who runs the errands. That's all."
Her hand stopped above Zoe's plate and came to rest on the wood instead, and the maid at the door understood something before either of them did and slipped out into the passage without being sent.
"So it's the sea house again."
"We could go down today. The cart could be at the lower gate within the hour."
Zoe pushed her cup along the board, caught it before it went over, laughed once at herself, and pushed it again. Neither of them moved for it. Somewhere down the passage a door opened and closed, and a bucket scraped on the stone.
"The sea house," Katarina said, "is a fisherman's cottage with four chairs and a table and a bed without curtains, and the whole of your steward's office would fit in a saddlebag. I counted the rooms once, the last time we were there. Four, if you call the place where the coats hang a room, which I do not."
"I know I said no before, but perhaps I could put two more on it. My builders would have them up before the autumn, and we could be in them by the feast of the Cross."
"Two rooms."
"For Zoe. For you."
She let the offer sit between them for a moment, and she lifted the child a little higher on her shoulder and pressed her cheek briefly against her hair, and the fig sat forgotten in Zoe's small fist where she had crushed it earlier.
"You sleep there," she said.
"I sleep everywhere. I sleep on the ship's deck when I have to."
"You sleep there. You come up from the beach with the salt still on you before the cook has his shoes on. You run before the sun is up. When you're here, you are awake and moving an hour before anyone can bring you a cup of anything, and I hear you going down the corridor. That is how I know."
"That's the point of the house. That's what it's for."
"I know that's what it's for. That is why it is a problem."
She set her own cup down and watched Zoe for a few seconds — Zoe, who was chewing the corner of the fig with her eyes closed, the way she did when she was trying to keep a taste — and then she spoke to the boy at the sideboard without turning her head. "Clear the side plates. Leave the bread and the honey, and the figs."
The boy moved, and two of the women in the corners moved with him, carrying plates back through the curtain. When they had gone the room was quieter, though the older woman behind Katarina's chair stayed where she was, and Constantine knew she would not be dismissed for anything less than an order, and that Katarina would not give one.
"The sea house is for a man on his own," Katarina said, more gently this time. "Or a man and his dog. It isn't a house for a woman with a child. Not for a woman like me, at any rate."
"It would be large enough for us, with the rooms put on. We could add space for your women when you bring them, and a dry room for Zoe out of the wind."
"It isn't just the size, Constantine." She said it patiently, the way she said things when she had been thinking about how to explain them. "It's that there is nothing in it to do. I sit down on the bench and my hands have nothing in them. There's no chest to go through in the morning, no linen to see to, no list of stores to go over with the housekeeper. The maids stand against the wall because there's no corner of the room to put them in. I wasn't trained for a house like that. I was never trained for a house like that."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," he said.
"No. You wouldn't have."
A pigeon had got into the loggia again and was walking the length of the sill outside the window, nodding its head with each step. Zoe saw it, slid off the bench on her uncertain feet, caught hold of the table leg for a moment to steady herself, and then set off toward the window with both hands held out in front of her.
Constantine watched her go, and turned back to Katarina, and spoke more quietly. "Come down for the morning, just for the day. Leave the household here, take the nurse, and we can have the cart at the lower gate within the hour, and we'd be back before the evening meal if the weather holds."
"She's too young for the beach."
"She's the right age for the beach. Water's good for her. My father had us in the sea before we could walk, all of us, even the ones who cried about it. She only needs to put her feet in. I'll hold her in my arms, and the water will come no higher than her ankles."
"In front of whom."
"No one. I know three coves within a quarter of an hour of here, and the nearest I can empty with a note to the guard post. No fishermen. No one looking down from the road. No one at all."
"A quarter of an hour is a quarter of an hour in each direction, Constantine, in which any number of people can see the Empress with her skirts wet to the knee and a child bare-legged on the Emperor's arm. You know it as well as I do."
"She'll be in a shift, with a wool cloak over it until we're at the water. Two guards at the top of the path, with their faces turned."
"Two guards at the top of the path are two guards who will tell their wives about it by supper, and the wives will tell their sisters, and by Sunday the Patriarch will be hearing it from his barber and wondering why the Emperor's wife was wet to the knee on a Saturday morning on a beach where she had no business being."
"Then one guard. Then none. Pick the number. I'll go with the nurse and no one else, and we'll be back by noon."
She let out a short breath through her nose, the sound she made when she had decided to stop arguing about something, which was a different thing from granting it, and over by the window Zoe had her palm flat against the stone of the sill and was saying bird, bird, bird, and the pigeon, undisturbed, was walking on toward the corner of the loggia.
"Tomorrow," Katarina said.
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow, if the weather holds. The beach, in the morning only. The nurse comes in the cart with us. Zoe wears a shift, with wool over it until we reach the water, and she comes out of the water the moment her lips go blue or she stops laughing, whichever happens first. One guard at the top of the path, and he is to be a man of yours, Constantine. Not one of the household."
"Agreed."
"And we come back here afterwards."
He looked at her across the bread and the honey and the overturned cup, and she had reached for a piece of bread at last and was tearing it over her plate without watching him, and the smear of fig juice had dried into a pale ring on the wood beside her napkin.
"For now," he said.
She did not answer, only reached for another piece of bread.
They ate for a while. Zoe came back from the sill, leaned against Constantine's knee, then went over to the dog. Somewhere in the kitchen a pan was set down hard. Katarina poured more water.
"And Grgur," Constantine said. "When does he come?"
She looked up at him.
"I told him on the road out of Velbazhd that he should come south once it was over, that he should see you and Zoe, and he took it the way he takes most things, which is to say he said yes and meant later. I had hoped later would not be so far off."
"It will be." She tore the bread into smaller pieces while she spoke and laid the pieces in a row beside her plate without eating any of them. "Father will keep him in Smederevo this year. Spring, perhaps, or the year after. I had a letter last week."
"From Grgur?"
"From Father. Grgur writes seldom, and when he does it is two lines about a horse or a hawk. This was Father's hand, and four pages of it."
"How is he?"
"His foot has been bad this winter. He does not say so in the letter, but I can tell. He has begun to write in the evenings as well, which he never used to do."
She set the torn bread down.
"He has been writing about Smederevo, mostly. He means to build a new church, and a library beside it, and Mother says he has been at the plans every evening since the spring. The letter is full of it." She turned the cup once on the wood. "He wants the library to have Serbian books. He has been thinking about a press, in Cyrillic."
"In Cyrillic."
"In Cyrillic, yes."
Constantine took the honey down onto his bread and laid the spoon back across the lip of the wax jar.
"We will send him one. As a present, from us — a press to start, with instructions on how to cut the type in Cyrillic. He will have men who can do it once they know how."
She kept her hand flat on the wood while she thought it through.
"He will be very pleased," she said. "He will write you a letter that thanks you for it as if it were a castle."
"As long as you are pleased."
She turned the cup once more on the board, then let it rest.
"Only Hungary sits on him, in the rest of the letter. He does not say much about it, but he says it more than once, which is how I know it is on him."
The older woman behind Katarina's chair shifted her weight from one foot to the other and was still again, and Zoe had got her hand into the dog's ear and the dog was bearing it with the patience of an animal that had been through this before.
Constantine reached for a piece of bread. "And your cousin's ankle?"
"Mended. She will limp for a little while, but she will limp at her own wedding in October, which is the part she cares about, and she has written to me twice about the dress and once about the cake and not at all about the bridegroom, which tells you most of what you need to know about the match." A small smile, gone almost as it had come. "She asked me to send her something for her hair. I sent two combs, the ones with the pearl set into the spine, because she once said in a letter when she was sixteen that they were the only things of mine she had ever envied."
"Good."
A servant appeared at the doorway then with a folded paper on a small silver tray, and stood waiting, as he had been trained to wait, to be seen.