“Milord. We can’t give you endless time . . .” said the unfamiliar voice.
“Damn your eyes, man!” snapped Lodovico. “We’ve always paid at least the interest. We should have a tranche of cash in the next three days.”
“I really hope so, milord. We’d hate to even think of foreclosure.”
Katerina turned away. If she went in now she’d tear that moneylender’s head off. He was being polite—which, she’d gathered, wasn’t normally the case. The trade they were in did make some powerful people beholden to them, people she was sure had protected them in the past. Things must be dire now.
* * *
She came back some time later, intent on at least trying to cool her grandfather down. He was sitting at his desk, staring at a piece of paper. Not looking angry, just morose. His craggy face seemed more lined than Kat could ever remember it; his hair, thinner and whiter. Even his dark eyes—almost coal black, normally—seemed muddy-colored.
“What sort of mess are we in, Katerina?” he said grimly. “First that damned moneylender. Now this. They want their ‘supplies’—but they’re too scared to even sign their names.” He waved the letter. “Your great-grandfather always told me ‘stay out of politics and stay out of religion. Make money.’ But he got involved in politics, because he had no choice. And we are involved, against our will, in religion. Still, I think my father’s backing of Rome was the start of the rot. He granted the first mortgages.”
Kat groped for his meaning. She understood the general point. The principalities of Italy were a maze of shifting alliances. But there were always two poles. Rome—and Milan. The Milanese under the Visconti were, officially at least, Montagnards—believers in one united Christian realm, under the aegis of the Holy Roman Emperor. Not without reason, their neighbors viewed this lofty and always-distant goal as little more than an excuse for the Visconti dynasty’s insatiable lust for immediate conquests of territory in northern Italy.
Rome’s priorities—which was to say, the priorities of the Grand Metropolitan of Rome—were more nebulous, beyond opposition to having northern Italy absorbed into the Empire. But those priorities had more than once involved taking occasional territory; always for the good of the people, of course. Grandpapa had said before that his father’s politics—the Montescues were traditionally allied with the “Metropolitans,” as the anti-Montagnard faction was called—had gotten Casa Montescue into trouble. But she hadn’t realized the trouble had extended to their relations with the family’s financial supporters.
“It can’t be that bad, surely, Grandpapa?”
He sighed. “I’m afraid it can, dearest Kat. Floriano’s—and we’ve borrowed money from Floriano’s since I was a boy—have actually started talking about foreclosure.”
Kat put an arm around him. The feel of her grandfather’s still-broad but bony shoulders brought sadness. She could remember, as a girl, thinking that her grandfather must be the strongest man in the world. “Can’t we sell off the farm? Or this place, for that matter? We can’t keep it up, anyway.”
He shook his head, sadly. “No. The truth to tell, we dare not sell anything. We haven’t just borrowed from Floriano’s. Much of what we have is double mortgaged. If we show any signs of failing . . . the gull-gropers will be onto the flesh of Montescue and rip it to shreds. There will literally be nothing left. We’ve been in difficulties for twenty years. . . .”
He leaned back from the desk, pushing himself away with arms that had once been heavy with muscle. Only the size of his hands reflected any longer the strength which had once been a legend in Venice. One of those hands reached around Kat’s waist, drawing her close.
“The worst of it, of course, has only been in the last three years, since your father left. Vanished at sea. He borrowed heavily for that venture.”
She felt the hand squeezing her. The slight tremble in the fingers was heartbreaking. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Kat,” the old man said softly. “You have been the mainstay of this family since your father . . .” Sadly, and for the first time, he whispered the word: “Died.”