Historical fiction · The Genoese Triptych, III
The Master of the Ledger
Every figure in it was true. That was how the thing was done.
Pera, across the water from Constantinople, 1452. Giacomo Lomellini is twenty and the best hand in the Genoese colony, a clerk with a rare gift: a line ruled true without a straightedge, a column carried to the denaro without paper. He keeps the one creed that governs the books, that you write it as it happened and date it the day it happened.
Then the guns open across the water. Pera declares its neutrality and keeps its counter open, and both sides come to it with money. Every sale is entered at the posted price and dated the day it was made.
One ordinary sale of tallow, timber and cartage. One ordinary tidiness, a delivery moved forward three days. Nine days later Giacomo watches seventy galleys come over the ridge behind his own town wall, hauled overland on a road greased with his own consignment.
He will keep two books for the rest of his life: one that saves his people, and one that convicts him. He will never show either.
The books agree with each other. The cellar does not.
A novel of the fall of Constantinople seen from the Genoese colony across the water, about a clerk whose honest books convict him.
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The Master of the Ledger draws on the record of the Genoese colony of Pera and the siege of Constantinople in 1453. A note at the end of the book separates the record from the invention. It is the third panel of The Genoese Triptych. The paperback and the ebook are out now from the author’s store.