WITHIN A WEEK of our wedding I signed a contract with the army—an officer’s contract—and immediately after that I received my new posting, which would send me to Stato da Màr, the seaward face of the Venetian empire. Emilia and I spent the next two years on Corfu.
An army posting on Corfu, even for an officer, hardly differs from an army posting out in the far western reaches of Terraferma. My lodgings were better, and of course I shared my bed and my meals and my free hours with a woman I continued to consider the greatest prize any man could ever win.
My days were duties (more interesting than they’d been before, and fewer hours on guard duty), continuing my fencing studies, and teaching others how to shoot. I still read a lot, and played chess, with officers and with Emilia, who had no knack for it but was always happy to try. She befriended the wives of the higher-ranking officers, no matter their background—most officers were not Venetians but mercenaries from all different backgrounds. She would patiently practice the Venetian dialect with them, teach them dance steps and table manners, and in all ways prepare them to blend into “society” should their husbands ever find themselves in Venice. The aging patrician commissioners who were here fulfilling their civic obligations were happy to have dance partners less than half their age. I commented, more than once, on the irony that Emilia herself had never been all that concerned with blending into “society,” and here she was, herself creating it.
I was a jealous husband, I admit that. Some of the higher-ranking officers, seeing their wives mincing merrily about the mess hall in the evenings, asked Emilia to show them how they themselves should dance. At least once every week I had to watch her in the arms of some other man—usually of a higher rank than I was—moving about in harmony to a tune that she would hum aloud from memory. They did nothing improper, but I still felt a thrill of nervousness course through me every time she had a dance partner. She teased me for my jealousy and said she liked how, later at night, in bed, I possessed her so intensely.
“Perhaps I should flirt with some of them,” she’d whisper as I lay spent and breathing hard on top of her, in the cold dark bedroom on a hard bed with weathered sheets, still inside her, feeling I’d reclaimed her from the world. “Then you would really have a go at me. I’d be walking awkwardly for days, and everyone would know it was because Iago was such a master over his mistress, and they would so envy both of us.” The darkness would sparkle with that soft, sweet laugh of hers, and I’d be hard again.
We spoke of children. We knew we wanted, someday, to have a family, but also knew it was not the time. We were too immersed in each other’s presence; there was no room yet for a third. “We will get used to each other soon enough,” she’d say. “That happens in every marriage I have ever seen. We will bore each other someday, and then it will be time for offspring. That’s just how the world works.”
TWO YEARS INTO IT, we were not used to each other, and we were not bored, and we were no more inclined to share each other with a child than we’d been on our wedding night. Emilia learned ways to prevent conception; there were concoctions from the older wives of officers, who had in their turn learned it from older wives before them. Once her flux was late and very heavy, and she seemed melancholy for a day or two. “That might have been a babe, but it’s good it was not, it’s not time yet,” was all she said, and smiled and caressed my face. That was the only moment of our time on Corfu that was not perfect domestic bliss.
Professionally, however, it was a time of political upheavals. I will attempt to summarize in a manner that does not seem as if I am inventing or exaggerating. Two officers, let us call them Sforza and Orsini, each wanted to be the highest of the high in the armed forces. Sforza had the higher rank, but Orsini (for reasons too Byzantine to explain here) was in a position to be promoted to a rank above Sforza’s, and Sforza didn’t like that. As a result, each of them had a secret pact with a different branch of the government that they would never have to be subordinate to the other one. It all got quite out of hand and resulted in Orsini finding some other form of employment, and Sforza leading the cavalry on Terraferma. This created an absence of leadership for the infantry.
Neither man was Venetian, but they were both Italian. The commissioners leaked a rumor that the Senate was looking farther afield for military leaders. If a Greek or Pole or Russian could be hired to lead our troops, then there was no risk they would get caught up in complicated family ties or local political pressures. There was a rumor that the Senate’s first choice was a mainlander who believed Venice should seize Rhodes from the Turks. This was a thrilling proposal, but it was in complete opposition to the doge’s edict that the last thing the army should attempt was further conquest of any sort.
I was glad these were not my headaches to sort out. As a young ensign, I would not be working directly with the new general anyhow, but I had ambition and intended someday to rank high enough that I might serve near him. I had fought beside Greeks and Poles and Russians, and I would be content with any of them as my commander in chief. I would be equally well- disposed to obey the orders of a Croat, a Spaniard, or even a Christian Turk!
Not that the Senate would ever consider an apostate heathen to govern our armed forces.