Blachernae, July 1438
The lamp on the worktable was burning low when Katarina opened the door.
Constantine was bent over the table with Elias, the two of them angled toward a small piece of dark metal between them. The piece caught the light when Elias turned it. They were speaking quietly.
Constantine looked up at once.
"Katarina."
Elias straightened and set the piece carefully on the table beside the wooden model of the university. He bowed.
"Empress."
"Master Elias."
"With your leave, Majesty, I will come back tomorrow. There is one more thing to try before it is ready."
"Tomorrow then. Thank you, Elias."
Elias gathered two folded papers from the edge of the table, bowed again, and went out. The door closed behind him with a small dry sound.
Katarina crossed the room. The tray was still at Constantine's elbow on the worktable — a plate, a piece of bread, a cup. The plate had been half-eaten and then forgotten. The grease had set white at one edge.
"You missed supper again."
"I was going to come up."
"You were going to come up an hour ago." she said half-smiling. She put her hand on his shoulder as she passed behind him, and he reached up and held it there for a moment, and then she went around to the other side of the table and stood looking at the wooden model.
"The new plans for the university?"
"Yes. Filelfo wants the library bigger. A second hall on the south side. A façade with sculpture."
She put a finger lightly on one of the small painted columns.
"Careful. The plaster is still soft."
She lifted her hand.
"It might still change once Antonio is here."
"The Italian? He has not sailed yet?"
"Filelfo says by the end of the month. He has been saying that since June."
She smiled. The model was beautiful in the lamplight, the small painted columns warm at the bases where the light caught them and dark above. She did not sit. She moved along the table to the working side and stopped near the piece of metal Elias had left.
"What is this one?"
"A part for something that is not finished."
"That is what you said the last time I asked."
"It is still true."
She let it go. She had asked before, and he had answered the same way before, and she had stopped expecting him to answer differently. She turned away from the table and looked at him. The room was plain — a long table, a desk, shelves, the maquette in the corner. Upstairs the audience rooms went on for a long way, painted and tiled, and most of the doors stood open onto each other so the corridors felt like one large room. She had walked through them three times since they arrived, trying to learn where she was in the building.
"Zoe was saying papa at supper. She kept looking at your chair."
Constantine looked at her.
"Little Helena wanted to know where you were. Catherine told her you were working. Then she wanted to know if you were always working."
"What did Catherine say?"
"Sometimes. She was kind about it."
"And what did you say?"
"I did not say anything. Catherine had it in hand."
He smiled at that, briefly, and looked back down at his papers. Katarina watched him for a moment.
"They were looking at the herbal book again before supper. Helena was reading the Latin to Zoe out of it. Zoe was pointing at the pictures and saying flower at everything green."
"She is going to be a herbalist."
"Helena is very serious about it. She knows three of the flowers now by their Greek names. She told me yesterday that the one with the strange head is good for the stomach. I asked her how she knew. She said because the book says so."
"It does say so."
"I told her she should ask Master Chortasmenos before she tells anyone else."
"That was wise."
"She has started keeping a little book of her own. Catherine gave her a quire of paper and she draws the flowers in it after she has seen them in the herbal. They are not very good drawings. She copies the Greek names underneath in her own writing. Yesterday she drew the one with the strange head and put it on Thomas's plate at supper. He carried it around for the rest of the evening."
Constantine smiled.
"She is going to make a scholar of him."
"He will not mind. Zoe drew something too, on a separate paper, which she said was also a flower but was mostly a circle. Helena was very serious about putting it in the book with the others. She wrote Zoe underneath it. She had to ask Catherine how to spell it."
She had drifted back to the worktable. She did not sit. She picked up the cup from the tray, looked into it, set it down. The wine in it had gone dark.
"The Dioscurides is going to the press, by the way."
She looked at him.
"With all the pictures. A physician should not have to guess which plant the writer meant. The hospitals will have them by next year."
"The children will like that."
She went on as if a small thing had just been settled between them.
"The palace is settling. I have asked the steward for four more women for the upper rooms and two more men for the gate of the women's quarters. He said he would find them."
She moved a paper aside on the table.
"There is a corridor on the north side where the lamps have not been lit since we came. There is a fresco in it of half a saint, the other half is gone. I do not know who the saint was. Catherine thinks it is John of Damascus. I think it is Basil. We will ask someone. I do not know what is in three of the rooms off the corridor either. Tomorrow I will go and look."
"You should take someone with you."
"I will take Catherine. She is curious about the frescoes."
"I have not been up there in a long time."
"Then come with us tomorrow."
"Not tomorrow. Some other day." A pause. "Ask Chortasmenos. He knows the rooms."
"I will."
She was at the worktable again, on the far side from the tray. She put one hand flat on the wood and looked at him across it.
"Thomas was at supper."
"Yes."
"He was at supper the night before too."
"He has time."
"He has been hunting in the morning and home for supper. He sat next to Helena and cut her meat for her because she had hurt her hand on something in the garden. She showed it to him for ten minutes."
Constantine said nothing.
"He said something to me afterwards. He said you do not trust anyone with anything."
"That is not true."
"He said you trust George with the works and Theophilus with the treasury and Andreas with the army and you do everything else yourself. He said it as if it were a complaint about you. I told him I agreed with him."
"You told him —"
"I told him I agreed with him. I do."
He set his pen down.
"There is a great deal to do."
"There will always be a great deal to do."
"The empire has to be put back together. Every part of it. The chanceries, the treasury, the army, the law. None of it is yet what it needs to be. It is my duty as —"
"Constantine."
He stopped.
She did not say anything for a while. She had heard the speech before, in pieces and in whole, and she had stopped trying to argue with the parts of it that were true. She came around the table. He looked older in the lamplight than he had in the spring, and there was a tightness under his eye that had not been there when she had last seen him at Glarentza. She did not put her hand on his shoulder, although she had thought she might. She put it on the back of his chair instead and left it there.
"You act as if no one else can do any of it. As if the moment you turn your head it will all fall down. It will not fall down. George will not let the foundries go cold. Theophilus will not lose the treasury. Andreas will not lose the army."
"I know."
"Do you."
"Yes."
"Then come to supper tomorrow."
There was a silence. The lamp ticked. Somewhere in the corridor outside, a servant walked past with a tray of cups and the cups touched each other faintly and went on.
She did not press it. She moved one step along the table, looked at the maquette again, touched the small painted base of one of the columns with her fingertip, and turned to him.
"The children should see your mother."
He looked up at her.
"Zoe should see her grandmother. Helena should too — she has met her once and does not remember it. I have not met her at all."
"Katarina —"
"I am not asking you to bring her down from the monastery. I am not asking her to come to Blachernae. I am asking that the children be allowed to go up to her. Half a day. With me. I will go with them. She does not need to receive me. She can sit with Zoe and Helena and that will be enough."
He did not speak.
"If you write to her and say it, she will not refuse. She will not refuse her grandchildren at her door. She might refuse Thomas. She might refuse me alone. She will not refuse Zoe."
"You do not know her."
"No. I do not know her. That is the point."
The lamp guttered once and recovered. Constantine looked down at the paper in front of him, which had nothing on it that mattered, and then back at her.
"I will think about it."
"Not too long, Constantine."
She said it lightly. She was already moving back toward the worktable, toward the tray, the way a person moves when she does not want a conversation to end on its heaviest line. She picked up the cup again and this time she carried it to the side table and set it down there, away from him.
"You should eat something else. That was cold by the time it came up."
"I will."
"You will not. I will send Stamatia with bread and something warm."
"Katarina —"
There was a knock at the door.
A quiet one. Two taps and a pause.
Constantine did not look at the door. He looked at her.
She inclined her head a small fraction — go on. She did not move toward the door.
"Come in."
The clerk was a young man Constantine did not know by name yet, one of the new ones Theophilus had brought up from Glarentza. He stopped just inside the door and bowed to both of them.
"Majesty. Empress. A packet from Rome. By the courier who came in this afternoon. Master George said to bring it directly when you were free."
He held it out in both hands. The seal was heavy and red and Katarina, looking at it from across the room, could see the keys.
Constantine took it and thanked him, and the clerk bowed again and went out, and the door closed behind him with the same small dry sound it had made when Elias had left an hour before. Katarina stood by the side table with the cold cup of wine in her hand. She watched her husband turn the packet over once and look at the seal, and then set it down on the table next to the half-eaten plate without breaking it. He looked up at her.
"I am going to bed," she said. "Come up when you can."
He nodded. She went to the door and stopped with her hand on it, and stood there for a moment thinking about whether to say the other thing or to leave it for the morning. In the end she said it.
"Write to her tomorrow. Not the day after."
She went out.