The Binder of Saint Aveline

When the first gondola scraped under the Rialto arch, Livia Levrini had already opened the shutters and bent over the press. Dawn made the canal a strip of pewter; pigeons folded like small silver coins along the eaves. Her hands knew the press the way a weaver's hands know pattern: the cold iron, the slow descent, the smell of hot glue and boiled hide. A ragged bell by the workshop door chimed seven times and the sound settled into the leather like a promise.

The bindery sat on the narrow calle that led from the market to the fish stalls, one step from salt and sardine smoke and two from the spice merchants who still sold saffron in tiny, trembling pinches. Livia liked the way the light came across the table at that hour — it lay in a thin band that made dust look like gold. Matteo, her father, slept in the small room above the shop with the shutters half-closed against the morning glare. He coughed sometimes in the night now, a dry, rattling thing that frightened her more than the thought of a winter without wages.

'You're coming to see the council today, aren't you?' Paolo called from the street when he swept at the shop threshold. He was the apprentice the guild had assigned last month: seventeen, skinny, eager to learn the name of each bone folder and every glue recipe. Livia wiped her hands on an oilcloth and smiled at him without turning.

'Also, keep the press warm,' she answered. 'A cold press is a stubborn press.'

People in Venice said every trade was a small religion. The bookbinders had their rites: the stretching of vellum, the clean tabs at the head, the singing of numbers as they counted signatures. Livia had been apprenticed at ten, fingers first learning the rhythm of folding and then, as she grew, the stubborn caprices of calf and goatskin. She worked with patience that made her fingers blunt in the best way; patience, in the trade, was not waiting but attention pressed edgewise to the grain of the world.

Contessa Valeria arrived three hours later. She wore black velvet and a small, certain frown that did not make her less beautiful. She unrolled a silk parcel with a hand that had never known hard work and laid a slim ledger upon the table — a private account book, its edges darkened by the thumbprints of some unsettled life. 'I need it bound by evening,' she said. 'Not in the coarse casing of the notaries. Something discreet. There are names here that must not leak into conversation.' Her voice trembled once, not from fear of the ledger's content but from the fear of being found vulnerable.

Livia took the ledger. The pages were thin and smelled faintly of camphor; the ink had bled in one place as if a hand had trembled mid-writing. She felt, in a clockwork way, that the order of her day had altered. A binding was an intimacy. She traced the spine with the pad of her thumb and saw that the linen cords beneath the leather were faintly cut, as if someone had tried to remove them rudely and given up.

'You shall have it by dusk,' she said.

The Contessa left with a curtsey and a scrap of silk trailing like a small shadow. Matteo sat up when Livia carried the ledger upstairs and peered down at the pages.

'Be careful, mia figlia,' he said. 'Some books carry more than words.'

She laughed then, soft and sharp at once, and began to lay the first signatures out across the table. Outside, the market grew louder. Voices rose and fell like tides; a boy cried an odd coin, a woman hawked dried lemons. Livia worked, counting stitches, dipping the awl into beeswax. An hour later, at a time when the sun had warmed the canal to a blue-green glass, Paolo opened the front door a little too quickly.

'There was a man asking directions for the Contessa's Palazzo,' he said. 'He had a coat like a merchant and eyes like a hawk. He noticed the ledger on the table.'

Livia's fingers froze. She had left it away from the edge, tied in linen, the stitches pinned. But the room smelled suddenly of something sharp and wrong, like rubbed lime. She walked to the door, heart in her throat, and looked down the calle. A pair of travelers crossed the small bridge and a gondola slid by with a man in a brown cloak, his head wrapped low. Nothing else seemed changed.

At midday, when the sun had pushed itself fully into the sky, two men without guild badges appeared with a note stamped by a hand Livia had seen in the Contessa's envoy: a request that the ledger be delivered to the palace at mid-afternoon. They were civil, and their civility had the littleness of men who do what they are told. They took the ledger; Livia watched them carry it away with a carefulness she envied. She cleaned her hands again and resumed sewing. The day did not feel troubled yet; the bindings took color under her fingers. The city folded its ordinary life around the shop like a cloak.

Only when the light diminished and the Contessa knocked with small, urgent fingers did the shape of that afternoon reveal itself. Her face had an edge Livia had not seen before.

'They said they had it,' the Contessa said. 'They said the ledger is in the palace. But when my servant came to fetch it, the men were gone. And a notice—' She pressed a folded card into Livia's palm. 'A summons. The name on it: Matteo Levrini.'

For a moment the world narrowed to the square of paper in Livia's hand and to the coughing that had been muffled by the stair above. The summons was a small, effective thing: a claim that Matteo had defrauded a noble household, a demand of presence before the council. Where the ledger had been intended to protect, its absence made accusation possible. Livia felt the press of her own breath. The leather on the table might as well have been a wound.

'I did not touch more than I had to,' she said. The words were small. 'I will find it.'

Outside, somewhere in the tangled lanes of the city, a gondolier sang as the light went away and the canals began to take the blue of evening. Livia closed the shutters, who had a workshop and a debt to settle; she spoke aloud to the empty room, and Matteo's answer was the hoarse, faithful cough from above.