Life As Carola by Joan Grant

Author:Joan Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

2. WINTER IN FIUME

Before he left, the Captain had found two little rooms over a ship-chandler’s for us. It was on the water front, and at night I used to lie listening to the water sucking at the wooden piers of the wharf. When a ship was loading, carts used to grind over the cobblestones and I could hear the rumble of the casks as they thudded down into the holds. It was easy to tell when a ship had made port after a long voyage by the vomit on the streets outside the taverns.

We knew that in Fiume it would be difficult for Petruchio to earn money as a jester, for the frequenters of the harbor taverns were mostly foreigners who could not understand Italian. But we had saved enough money to keep us through the time the Captain expected to be away, and he had promised that on his return he would give us passage to his home port of Naples.

I hid our bag of money under a loose floor-board in my room, because Petruchio thought it unsafe to carry it about with us. His leg refused to heal, and at last even he could not bear the pain of walking and he had to keep to his room. The chandler’s wife let me cook at her fire, and I used to go down to the market to buy our food. Fish was plentiful and it was easy to get meat; but at this season of the year the price of fruit or butter was too high for me to afford any. I missed being able to gather my own wild pot-herbs. I had never lived out of the sight of growing things before; in all the little villages and towns where I had been it had taken only a few minutes to get out of the shadows of buildings.

Petruchio often asked me if I still had the ring which that other Bastard of the Griffin had given me, and he made me repeat my promise that if he died I should go the House of the White Sisters for sanctuary. I had a picture of it in my mind: high, white walls, which shut away the turmoil of the world; quiet cloisters with white doves strutting among the ordered plots; and muted bells to mark the gentle hours. But I put the thought of it away from me, for I knew that there I should have no Petruchio—I was so afraid of having to live without him.

I never found out who stole our money. I think it was the squinting son of the chandler, but I knew it would be useless to accuse him; he would only have denied it and his parents would have turned us out. I did not tell Petruchio it was gone, for it would have made him unhappy to know that our livelihood depended on what I could earn.

The shop next door was owned by a meat-pickler. I earned a little money there, helping to fill the casks and nail down the lids.

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