Read Online Kit by Marina Fiorato - Free Book Online

their pay in the dockside taverns, Kit went her own way into the black and white town. As the citizens gabbled around her pointing at her clothes, she memorised her route back to the large square where the soldiers were billeted. She felt entirely alone in this odd place where churches looked like houses and houses looked like churches. Perhaps everything was in disguise. The cathedral, guarded at its steps by roaring stone lions, was rendered in black and white marble in crazy stripes. Kit did not enter, but walked into the tiny alleys behind the duomo; here, cheek by jowl with Genova’s greatest church, she was sure she would find what she was looking for.
    And she did indeed. She paused outside the door and looked up at the universal sign for a silversmith; three splayed silver arrows, just the same as the smiths on Dame Street in Dublin. Here, as there, there was a burly guard to watch the door – this one a hairless giant bristling with weapons. But he nodded benignly enough at Kit as she laid her hand on the door and went inside.
    She was almost blinded by the glaring constellation that awaited her within. Everything was rendered in silver: goblets, coin chests, spoons, daggers, bracelets, even an arquebus with silver shot. Here too she looked into the countenance of the counterfeit Virgin; the Madonna della Fortuna was rendered over and over again, in miniature no bigger than a silver egg, on a huge canvas in an ornate silver frame that sprouted leaves and curlicues, in silver statuary; her face reflected a thousand times in the silver-backed looking glasses that hung about.
    In all the glory Kit did not at once see that there was a living figure among the glory. A woman stepped forth.
    ‘ Mi dica ?’ she said.
    Kit, remembering just in time, doffed her tricorn. She wondered, as she bowed, how she would possibly explain what she wanted to buy. ‘Can you understand me?’ she asked tentatively.
    The woman shrugged. ‘Certainly.’ She spoke English with a strange accent, making a ‘Sh’ sound on the C.
    ‘Are you English?’
    ‘I am a Hollander. But I speak a little of most languages and more of a few. In trade one must be able to speak to all nations.’ The woman had a pale face, tidy ash-blond hair and a fringe cut across her brows, not unlike Kit’s own style. She held her hands before her, clasped not above a full skirt but over a leather apron. Her hands were her strangest feature, for they were as green as holly, stained by some nameless compound; fingers, palms and all.
    ‘Is the silversmith within?’ asked Kit.
    ‘I am the silversmith,’ said the lady, ‘my name is Maria van Lommen.’ She held out a green hand.
    Kit took it. ‘Christian Walsh. You made … all this?’ Kit’s gesture embraced the glory about her.
    ‘Of course. This is my business. My father makes silver in Amsterdam. I make silver here.’
    Kit was impressed that a woman owned all these riches, let alone crafted them. A woman, moreover, who seemed not much older than herself. But for now, Maria’s sex made Kit’s task more difficult. It would be harder to explain what she wanted to a female.
    ‘It is of a … personal and delicate nature. I need … an appendage resembling …’ Kit mentally rejected all the shipboard vocabulary she had learned for the male member. ‘A man’s parts.’
    Maria van Lommen nodded, her face impassive, as if Kit had asked for a silver spoon. ‘Come into the back. Gennaro!’ she called, and the giant stooped to enter the shop. ‘ Guarda qui. ’
    The treasure guarded, Maria swiped back a heavy blood-velvet curtain with one green hand, and led Kit into a little atrium. ‘Is this what you are looking for?’
    Ranged around the wall were raked shelves, lined with the same crimson velvet, displaying the strangest objects and contraptions Kit had ever seen.
    ‘You see anything you like? I got more in the drawers, different sizes, different attachments. You just say, I make bespoke.’
    ‘May