About Me
My story starts like most, I suppose. My father was a wool trader, as was his father before him. I took after my father in many ways, most especially his business acumen. However, being a Scottish lass in the late 16th century is difficult if one wishes to do more than cook and sew. My father saw how restless I was becoming, and knew the only way to satiate my need for something more was to help facilitate my departure from Scotland for new opportunities.
In dealings with the mills and fabric purveyors of the great cities of Florence and the like, I found myself set to work in the accountants' offices, where my mind for numbers and balances met their purpose. It was in Florence that I found the three loves of my life: Sir Thomas de Kilbride, business, and hospitality. All are welcome in our home, as long as one doesn't mind rooms overflowing with books, written ledgers, jetons, and counting boards. My husband is quite patient with me, and finds no fault in my passions.
For some years, Florence was world enough. The ledgers of the wool guilds, the murmur of merchants in the loggia, the warm evenings of bread and wine with friends made of every nation; it suited us. But the trade itself was shifting. The great Italian houses had begun looking northward, where the Rhine still carried more wool, linen, and silk than any sea route could match, and where the fairs of Frankfurt and the counting houses of the Free Imperial Cities had become the true crossroads of Christendom. When an opportunity came to follow that current, to act as factor for a Florentine concern with interests in the north, Sir Thomas and I gave one another that look long-married people give, and began to pack the household.
We settled in Cologne. I confess I chose it deliberately. I had heard, even in Florence, that a woman in Cologne might keep her own books, hold her own contracts, and stand as a Kauffrau in her own name; that the city had guilds run by women, and widows who commanded respect at the Rhine wharves equal to any man's. I found it to be true. The silk women of Cologne, the Seidmacherinnen, taught me as much about the putting-out trade as any Italian master had taught me of double-entry, and the customs of the Rhine, its tolls, its measures, its stubborn old privileges, became a new study for my notebooks.
Our house there is, as ever, full. The ledgers have multiplied, of course, and the counting boards now share their shelves with German pattern books and a small but treasured collection of Rhenish stoneware. On feast days the table holds whatever the season brings: spiced wine in winter, river fish in spring, marzipans and gingerbreads from the Frankfurt fair. Italian merchants pass through and stay a night. Hanseatic factors come to settle accounts and stay three. Pilgrims bound for the shrine of the Three Kings stop at our door and are not turned away. Sir Thomas, patient as ever, has learned enough German to scold the cook in two languages.
Where the road leads next, I do not yet know. The Rhine runs both ways, and there are fairs I have not yet seen, courts I have not yet kept books for, and tables I have not yet set. For now, Cologne suits us, and the next chapter, like the next ledger, waits with its pages still clean.
