1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [40]
Ruy sniffed. "Town guards, militia. You can spot the ones who know their trade by the fact that they look as little like soldiers as they can. The ones who break up a tavern fight, rather than making it worse, tend to look little smarter than the participants—ah, did I, Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, not predict this?"
The militia horsemen were lining up for a charge in the street out of sight of the rioters, just around the corner Ruy and Sharon were standing on. The officer on the lead horse—Ruy had picked him out correctly, for all he was attired similarly to his men—leaned down. "Signora, signor, move aside, if it please you. We shall clear this riffraff from the street directly."
"Come, Doña Sharon," Ruy said, adopting the form of address she had never been comfortable with. "Let us move to a less insecure vantage point."
"I thank you, signor. It would grieve me most greatly if the dottoressa was hurt in the unpleasantness to follow." The officer touched the hilt of his sword to the brim of his hat as he spoke, while behind him his men chivvied out into a column of fours. At least he's up on current gossip in this town, Sharon thought. As the wealthiest and most prominent black woman in Rome, she was distinctive enough that pretty much everyone recognized her on sight.
Before she'd arrived in Rome, Sharon had assumed that she'd be the only black woman in the city. But, to her surprise, she'd discovered there were a considerable number of black people living in several cities in the peninsula. Having black servants was considered fashionable by wealthy Italians. The same was true in southern France. There were a lot of African women in Marseilles, for instance. In fact, there was a subspecies of charity in France that consisted of orphanages for the out-of-wedlock children of African domestic servants whose masters would not allow the kids to be reared in the household, along with an order of nuns who ran them. In due time, she imagined, these children—or their children—would just merge into the general population.
But few if any of them looked the way she did—wearing very well-made and expensive down-time garments and accompanied by an armed caballero. She also knew that her bearing and comportment would be quite different. She still found the idea peculiar—downright bizarre, in fact. But she'd eventually accepted what Ruy and every down-timer told her, that she acted as if she were nobility, and high-ranked at that. A veritable Queen of Sheba, as Ruy had once put it.
Ruy took Sharon's elbow and urged her back down the street. "This should be amusing to listen to," he said, irritation coming through the veneer of good humor he usually projected. "And if we retire a little I shall be able to fight down the urge to call out that—" Ruy trailed off in a low, monotone stream of obscenities. Sharon's own grasp of Spanish—still less Catalan dialect—didn't let her follow more than a few words past the pithy description of what the officer's mother had done for a living. While drunk. With toads.
"Calm, Ruy dear. Getting annoyed with stupid people for being stupid really does no one any good."
"Ha! Did not your up-time Charles Darwin say it? Survival of the fittest? Did I not have clear duty here and now I should improve the next generation of Italians out of all recognition. I pray only that he did not breed before today."
"You think he's going to die?"
"May god grant in his infinite mercy that he should, Sharon." Ruy's tone was suddenly quite grim. "Forty years of military experience, ha!"
Sharon leaned in to Ruy, holding his arm tight. "Bad memories, love?"
"Yes. Of serving under officers like that fatuous, incompetent, deluded dullard." He sighed. "Oh, for a certainty more of his men will survive this day than not, but that will be in spite of him. He has orders to clear a disturbance from the home of some notable, and thinks to make a bold gesture. Ah, here it comes—"
A hunting