“About time!” he caroled in Marco’s face, pulling the door open while Marco stood there stupidly, key still held out. “You fall in the canal?”
“They kept us late,” Marco said, trying not to feel irritated that his daydream had been cut short. “There any supper? It was your turn.”
“There will be. Got eggs, and a bit of pancetta. Frittata do?” He returned to the fireside, and the long-handled blackened, battered pan. He began frying garlic, a chopped onion, a handful of parsley—stolen, no doubt, from someone’s rooftop garden—and the cubes of pancetta. Marco sniffed appreciatively. Benito was a fairly appalling cook, but always got the best of ingredients. And, as long as he didn’t burn it, there wasn’t much he could do wrong with frittata.
Benito tossed the fried mixture into the beaten egg in the cracked copper bowl. Then, after giving it a swirl, and putting in a lump of lard, he tossed the whole mixture back in the pan and back on the heat. “They gave me tomorrow off too, like you—something about a merchant ship all the way from the Black Sea. You got anything you want to do? After chores, I mean.”
“Not really,” Marco replied absently, going straight over to the wall and trying to get a good look at himself in the little bit of cracked mirror that hung there. Benito noticed, cocking a quizzical eye at him as he brought over an elderly wooden platter holding Marco’s half of the omelet and a slice of bread.
“Something doing?”
“I just don’t see any reason to show up at Giaccomo’s looking like a drowned rat,” Marco replied waspishly, accepting the plate and beginning to eat.
“Huh.” Benito took the hint and combed his hair with his fingers, then inhaled his own dinner.
“Hey, big brother—y’know somethin’ funny?” Benito actually sounded thoughtful, and Marco swiveled to look at him with surprise. “Since you started eating regular, you’re getting to look a lot like Mama. And that ain’t bad—she may’a been crazy, but she was a looker.”
Marco was touched by the implied compliment. “Not so funny,” he returned, “I gotta look like somebody. You know, the older you get, the more you look like Carlo Sforza. In the right light, nobody’d ever have to guess who your daddy was.”
Benito started preening at that—he was just old enough to remember that the great condottiere had been a fair match for Caesare Aldanto at attracting the ladies.
Then Marco grinned wickedly and deflated him. “It’s just too bad you inherited Mama’s lunatic tendencies also.”
“Hey!”
“Now don’t start something you can’t finish—” Marco warned, as his brother dropped his empty plate, seized a pillow and advanced on him.
Benito gave a disgusted snort, remembering how things had turned out only that morning, and threw the pillow, back into its corner. “No fair.”
“Life’s like that,” Marco replied. “So let’s get going, huh?”
* * *
Giaccomo’s was full, but subdued. No clogging, not tonight; no music, even. Nobody seemed much in the mood for it. The main room was hot and smoky; not just from Giaccomo’s lanterns, either. There was smoke and fog drifting in every time somebody opened a door, which wasn’t often, as it was getting cold outside.
Lamps tonight were few, and wicks in them were fewer. Customers bent over their tables, their talk hardly more than muttering. Dark heads under darker caps, or bare of covering; no one here tonight but boatmen and bargees. Marco looked around for the only blond head in the room, but had a fair notion of where to find him. When he had a choice, Aldanto preferred to sit where he could keep an eye on everything going on.
Pretty paranoid—but normal, if you were an ex-Montagnard. Especially an ex-Montagnard from Milan. Even by the standards of Italy, intrigue in Milan was complex and deadly. Milan was the stronghold of the Montagnard cause, to which the Duke of Milan paid faithful homage. But Filippo Visconti had his own axes to grind and his own double-dealings with respect to the Montagnards. The “imperial cause” was a marvelous thing for the ruler of Milan—so long as it did not actually triumph. If it did . . . the essentially independent realm of Milan would become just another province within the Holy Roman Empire. And Duke Visconti was not the man to take kindly to the thought of being a mere satrap—any more than his condottiere Carlo Sforza’s bastard son Benito took kindly to his older brother Marco’s attempts to rein in his less-than-legal activities.