The sun set, and up rose the yellow moon:
The devil’s in the moon for mischief; they
Who call’d her CHASTE, methinks, began
too soon
Their nomenclature; there is not a day,
The longest, not the twenty-first of June,
Sees half the business in a wicked way
On which three single hours of
moonshine smile—
And then she looks so modest all the while.
Lord Byron
Don Juan, Canto the First
The dirty truth was, James wasn’t thinking clearly.
At one point he was listening to Giulietta, trying to learn what he could about her friend. But behind her, at the corner of his vision, sat the friend and Lurenze. James caught scarcely one word in ten of their conversation. He didn’t need more to grasp the meaning. He was aware of Bonnard leaning toward the prince to give him an unobstructed view of her breasts. James heard clearly enough the change in her tone, how it became softer and more seductive.
Then he was murmuring polite excuses to Giulietta, and rising from his seat and walking toward the pair: the dark head, glimmering with pearls, bent so close to the fair one, as though they were sharing secrets.
He saw Bonnard applying her siren’s arts to the young prince and her victim practically wriggling with delight, like a puppy having his belly scratched.
James found himself one furious heartbeat away from lifting her out of her chair and carrying her bodily from the opera box.
Luckily, lying was second nature to him, costing him nothing. A conscience was something he’d owned at one time, but it was a very long time ago, and he couldn’t remember much about it.
The lie had worked, and that was what mattered. Though he could feel her anger pulsing in the air between them, she did not threaten him or argue as they left the opera box. When she encountered acquaintances on the way downstairs, she appeared completely at ease, chatted briefly, and left them smoothly.
Like so many of her ilk, she was an excellent actress. She might be longing to plunge a dagger into his black heart but she made a good show of going with him peaceably out of the theater.
When they stepped out into the night, James was relieved though not altogether surprised to find her boat in readiness. Her gondoliers were reliable men, Zeggio had confirmed. Their ancestors had served Venice’s great families for generations, protecting them from treachery both political and personal. Thus, when James said quietly, “Don’t take the usual way,” Uliva didn’t seek confirmation from his employer but simply nodded.
Soon they were making their way along the Rio delle Veste past the crowd of vessels converging at the Fenice’s rear door.
Mrs. Bonnard settled into her seat in the posture he remembered from the time he’d played Don Carlo. She leant her elbow on the edge of the open window, rested her cheek on her knuckles, and looked out at the passing scene.
She was shutting him out, as she’d done then.
He wished he could shut her out. He’d closed the door unthinkingly. The space inside the cabin had shrunk and, even with the windows open, felt too small, too close.
Though the gondola glided smoothly through the water, now and again a movement brought her hip against his, her shoulder against his upper arm. The skirt of her silken gown slid against his trousers. The breeze gently entering through the casements traveled toward rather than away from him, carrying her light scent to his nostrils.
He needed a distraction. An argument would do admirably. But he refused to be the one to break the silence. He stared hard at the pearl and diamond bracelets hanging upon her gloved wrists and tried to occupy his mind by calculating their worth.
Finally, when they were clear of the theatergoers’ boats, she said in a bored voice, “So, you were helping Giulietta. How gallant of you.”
“I thought you needed only a hint,” he said. “It was hard to believe you meant to keep the boy prince to yourself, since you don’t really want him.”
“It’s unwise to let men believe one wants them,” she said. “They only presume.”
The scornful glance she threw him was as easy to read as a tavern sign.
He told himself to ignore it. He couldn’t. “You mean me. I’m presumptuous, you’ve decided.”
“You seem to be under the misapprehension that I’ve been languishing for your company,” she said. “Let me quiet your anxieties. Last night my mind was disordered by shock and my reason overcome by gratitude. Such is not the case tonight. You lost your one and only opportunity with me.”
“That is not why I removed you from the theater,” he said.
“It wasn’t because of Giulietta,” she said. “That was a thin excuse if ever I heard one—as thin as the one you gave Lurenze.”
He’d no reason to feel embarrassed, James told himself. He lived on thin excuses.
But as easily as he might find it to lie to everyone else, he was unable to lie to himself. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t recognize the real reason he’d dragged her away. That she recognized it, too, made the heat race up his neck. He felt like a fool. No, it was worse than that: He, a professional, had let himself turn into the impetuous boy he’d been a lifetime ago.
Meanwhile she remained unmoved, her silken cheek still upon her hand, her green gaze shifting lazily from the scene outside to him.
“And you were toying with Lurenze in hopes of making me do exactly what I did,” he said.
To his surprise, she smiled. “It worked, did it not? Men are so easy. They’re so competitive.”
James made himself smile, too. “So true. We’ll fight over anything, even if we don’t really want it.”
“If you’re trying to crush my vanity, you must do better than that,” she said. “Pray recollect that I am a divorcée, Cordier. I’ve been insulted and slandered by experts.”
He felt a sharp inner twinge. It couldn’t be his conscience, since he’d left his in France ten years ago. It was…irritation. “Pray recollect that I’m not a coddled royal of one and twenty, Mrs. Bonnard, but a man of one and thirty who’s seen something of the world. You are not the first woman who’s tried to drive me to distraction.”
“I haven’t begun to try,” she said. “When I do—if I do—you’ll know it.”
“You tried your damnedest last night.”
Her sleek eyebrows went up. “You think that was an effort?”
“I know a lure when I see one.”
“All I offered was a mild yes,” she said. “Very mild. Only the first notch above a no. Were I to make an effort—and no great one, either—you’d never withstand it.”
James recalled the siren laughter. He felt a prickle of uneasiness but he shook it off. “You have a high opinion of yourself. But the king’s ransom in pearls you’re wearing is not proof that you are irresistible, only that some men are weaker than others.”
Some man had been weak, indeed. He shifted his gaze from her haughty countenance to the top and drop pearl earrings, then down to the two pearl necklaces circling her throat. From the upper, shorter one dangled pear-shaped drops of graduated size, the largest at the center. It pointed to the space between her breasts, whose rapid rise and fall told him she was not so indifferent as she pretended. The low-cut gown, of silk the color of sea foam, reminded one of the pearls’ watery origins. The pearl and diamond bracelets at her slim wrists glimmered against the butter-soft gloves.
The jewels alone constituted a cruelly arousing sight for a man who was a thief at heart. It was maddening that he couldn’t simply steal them and have done with her.
“You don’t think I could bring you to your knees,” came her voice, cool and taunting. “Would you care to make a wager?”
His attention snapped back to her face.
The tension in the felze increased by a factor of ten.
“I don’t wager with women,” he said. “It’s unsporting.”
“Men so often say that when the truth is, they can’t bear the mortification of losing to a woman.”
“I don’t lose,” he said.
“You will,” she said. “Let me see. What shall it be?” She closed her eyes briefly, thinking. When she opened them, they glinted. “I know. There’s a peridot parure at Faranzi’s shop that took my fancy.”
“Merely peridots? You don’t rate your powers very high.”
“I’m rating your income,” she said. “You’ll find these peridots painfully expensive. You’ll have to borrow to pay for them. But they aren’t beyond the borrowing abilities of one of Lord Westwood’s younger sons.”
“I see. You wish it to be not merely a costly wager, but a painful and humiliating one.”
She nodded. “Well?”
“And if you lose?”
“I won’t,” she said. “But if it soothes your masculine pride to imagine you’ll win, then by all means choose a forfeit.”
The letters, James thought. The reason I’m obliged to tangle with you. All I want is the damn letters, curse you. But even if that had been completely true, if the letters were all he wanted, it was the one forfeit he couldn’t ask for.
“The peridots,” he said.
That did surprise her. She took her hand away from her cheek and tipped her head to one side, studying him.
“They’ll be a gift to my betrothed,” he said.
She blinked. “You’re betrothed?”
It was an easy lie, too easy. He was far too angry to utter it. “Not yet,” he said. “But before too long. It will be a fine symbol for my bride-to-be. It will signify my ability to defend my principles and honor in the face of all-but-irresistible temptation.”
Her exotic eyes narrowed. “There’ll be no all-but about it.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “Name your time and place.”
She glanced out of the window. “Now,” she said. “We’ve plenty of time before we reach my house. This shouldn’t take so long, at any rate.”
Her confidence—hell, her insolence—was beyond anything. It was infuriating. Knowing he was in a temper, he should have held his tongue. He should have given himself time to cool down and think. But he was too angry—with her, with himself.
“Do your worst,” he said.
Francesca couldn’t remember when last she’d been so furious.
She’d made a fool of herself last night, and now he presumed she was his for the taking—if and when he felt like it.
To him, she was merely a whore.
You are, a rational voice within reminded her. You chose to be.
True enough. Nonetheless, the pearls he called a sign of men’s weakness were in fact a sign of respect, a sign of her power.
Since she’d left England—that frigid island of provincials, Puritans, and hypocrites—no man had shown her disrespect…except this one.
An Englishman, naturally. Half an Englishman, to be precise, but half was more than enough.
He needed desperately to be taught a lesson.
Unhurriedly she slid shut the casement beside her and closed the blinds. She reached across him, letting her bosom brush against his chest, and closed the window and blinds on his side.
As she moved back to her place, she felt his chest rise and fall a little faster than it had done a moment earlier.
She folded her hands in her lap. “There,” she said. “No one can see.”
“There won’t be anything to see,” he said.
“We’ll see,” she said.
She looked down at her hands. She looked at them for a while, making him wait.
Since he sat to her right, she started with her left glove. She slid it down toward her wrist until it bunched against her bracelets. She tugged on the thumb, the index finger, and so on, each finger by turn. She did it in a leisurely way, as though her mind were elsewhere. Then she drew off the glove, pulling it gently through the bracelets.
She dropped the glove into her lap.
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t have to. She knew he was riveted on her hands. She knew he was breathing faster and harder and trying not to.
She went to work on the other glove, again, slowly, casually, in the way she might if she were alone in her boudoir. Undressing.
She let the second glove drop onto her lap.
She adjusted the bracelets, letting her fingers trail lightly over the pearls and diamonds circling her now-naked wrists.
She lifted her hand.
He tensed.
She didn’t touch him.
She touched herself, bringing her index finger to her right ear. She made a light path along the curve of her ear and behind it, lingering at the place below her ear where she liked to be kissed.
She felt him shift in his seat.
She ignored it. She pretended she was alone, enjoying her treasures, herself.
She drew her finger down over the earrings, caressing the round top and the pear-shaped drop, savoring the feel of these, the most sensuous of gemstones.
She let her hand glide down over the upper necklace, and enjoyed the feel of the large pearls under her fingers. Back and forth, back and forth she went, then down, to fondle the immense pear-shaped pearl at the center.
And down further still she went, to play with the other necklace. And down again. This time she slid her hand over the silk of her bodice, making the fabric whisper. Then lightly she cupped her breast.
He made a sound, deep in his throat.
She didn’t look at him. She watched her hand as she might have done had she been alone…touching herself.
She drew her thumb along the edge of her bodice, slowly, back and forth, tracing the swell of her bosom.
Then she lightly pushed the edge of the bodice down, baring another inch of skin.
His breath came out in an abrupt whoosh.
“Diavolo!” he growled.
His arm wrapped about her waist. He pulled her onto his lap. He grasped the back of her head and brought her face close to his.
It happened so fast, faster than she’d expected. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t done yet.
“I’m not done y—”
His mouth silenced her. It was warm and stubborn and very, very angry.
She brought her hands up to his chest and pushed.
I’m not done yet.
“I’m n—”
But she forgot the rest, because his mouth was so warm and sure and…
And then her hands went limp, her mind clouded, and everything turned hot and confused, and she was swimming in awareness.
She could smell him. Man smell. The tang of shaving soap and starch and freshly laundered linen. The damp Venetian air clinging to the wool of his coat. All of it mixed with the scent of his skin.
She could feel him: the big, warm, powerful body under the civilized trappings. She could feel the tension in his powerful thighs. She was aware of the heat beneath her, of his arousal.
Something kicked, low in her belly, and heat uncoiled there, serpentlike.
Her hands slid up, to grasp his shoulders, then up again to find the thick black curls, where they tangled. She held him thus, as he held her, and kissed him back, as stubborn and angry as he.
Stubborn and angry and hot and wanting.
His tongue pushed for entry and she gave way, and the taste of him was dark and wicked and exactly what she wanted. He tasted like every sin she’d ever been warned against and committed, every rule she’d learned and broken.
She was distantly aware of sound, a drumming, but there was drumming within, and she didn’t know, didn’t care, which was which.
She cared about his hands, the long fingers moving down her neck, sliding over the pearls, and over her skin and down to the place where she’d silently invited him a moment ago. He pushed the bodice down and cupped her breast. He broke the kiss and bent his head. She arched back, to give him room. He kissed her once, long and hard, upon the breast he’d bared, then again, long and hard upon the other.
Then he lifted his head and looked at her, his blue-black eyes glittering in the lamplight.
“You’re a very bad girl,” he said hoarsely.
He lifted her up and dropped her back into her seat. Not gently.
Hot need bubbled into rage. She almost bounced up from the seat and wrapped her hands around his throat…
A modicum of sense remained, though, pointing out that he was too big for her, and the attempt would only make her look more ridiculous than she felt already.
She became aware once more of the drumming. Her heart was pounding with balked lust, with fury, but that wasn’t what she heard.
It was rain, beating on the cabin roof.
He opened the blinds and peered out.
“Home,” he said, his voice thick. “You lose, cara.”
Home? Already?
She yanked open the blinds.
Her house.
She blinked in disbelief.
She looked at him, but he was still gazing out of the window.
“Maledizione,” he said.
She leaned forward to see.
A large, ostentatious gondola waited at the open water gate, lamps ablaze, as were all the lamps in the andron.
She could see, within, Prince Lurenze standing near the gates. With him stood Count Goetz.
Cordier turned to her and started to pull up her bodice. She slapped his hands away and quickly covered herself.
She smoothed her skirts and her expression. When the gondola stopped, she was ready. She let Cordier hand her out of the vessel but she pretended she had eyes only for Lurenze. She gave the prince her warmest, most intimate smile and addressed him as though only he mattered, as though the others didn’t exist.
“What an agreeable surprise,” she said. “Or ought I not to be surprised? Had I scheduled a conversazione and forgotten it in all the recent excitement?”
“No, madame, not at all,” said Goetz. “We are here because we did not wish to lose a minute in informing you.”
His highness only nodded. No doubt he was gathering his wits, which her smile must have scattered.
“A moment after you left with Mr. Cordier, I received a message,” the governor went on. “A man was captured on his way to the mainland in a stolen gondola. We have reason to believe this may be one of the men who attacked you. Mr. Cordier, we have him in custody. I must ask you to come to identify him, to spare the lady this distressing task.”
“All is well,” Lurenze told her. “You must have no fear, madame. I remain to protect you—like the guard dog.” He shot a defiant look at Cordier.
The defiance couldn’t quite mask the prince’s uncertainty. He had reason to be unsure, she knew. She’d rejected all of his previous efforts to protect her.
She moved to him. “You are exceedingly kind, your highness. Thank you. I shall be very glad of your company.”
His grey eyes lit. The corners of his beautiful mouth turned up, transforming his expression to pure, unmasked, unashamed happiness.
How could she help smiling up into that face, at so much sweetness?
She glanced at the governor, making it seem that she could scarcely tear her gaze away from Lurenze. “Until next we meet, Count Goetz,” she said. He bowed.
She turned away and took Lurenze’s arm. “Addio, Mr. Cordier.” She tossed the dismissal over her shoulder and went on to the stairs with Lurenze. She didn’t look back.
Later, at the Doge’s Palace
James fervently hoped the Austrians had the right man in custody because he needed, very badly, to hurt somebody.
He’d come within a gnat’s testicles of losing his wits entirely and taking Bonnard then and there, in the gondola.
You’d think he was a schoolboy with his first tart.
It was the great pearl, tapping against his head as he was losing himself in the silken smoothness and warm fragrance of her breasts. If that light tap hadn’t recalled him to the moment, made him remember where he was, who she was, what he was about…
His face burned, recalling.
Imbecille! he berated himself. Idiota!
A fine way to play hard to get.
She would have had him, proved her point, and tossed him aside. She had much larger fish in her nets.
Peridots, indeed. Mere baubles to her, though the set she had in mind would no doubt send the typical younger son deep into the nets of the moneylenders, from which he might never disentangle himself.
Still, he had managed to save himself. He had won, and she was furious. Had Goetz not turned up, with the goggle-eyed boy, James might have provoked her to extend the wager.
I’ll give you another chance, he could have said. Then she might have invited him into the house, and—if he were clever and careful—into her confidence.
But no. Instead, he must spend hours in officialdom, trying to extract information from a ruffian while concealing from the Austrian governor his true purpose.
Such were James’s thoughts as he and Count Goetz made their way through the Ducal Palace. En route here, they’d discussed how they would deal with the suspect, and James had succeeded in making Goetz believe the resulting plan was Goetz’s. Now, having traversed a dark, narrow passage from the great council chamber, they stood in the State Inquisitor’s room.
It was not a happy room. Even one whose nature was not fanciful would sense its dark history, as though the souls of all who’d suffered here haunted it.
Fear was an old but reliable tactic, as the Austrians clearly understood. To strike terror into their prisoner’s heart, they’d lodged him in the pozzi, the “wells.” The narrow, dark, dank cells had once held great crowds of those who’d run afoul of the Venetian Republic. Nowadays, it was a lonely place.
While James and Goetz waited for the man to be unearthed from the prison depths, the governor showed James about this part of the Ducal Palace.
At last the prisoner entered, with guards fore and aft—an unnecessary precaution, given the heavy chains about his ankles.
James stood in the shadows, as he and Goetz had agreed. The prisoner took note mainly of the governor, disregarding James as merely a minion. The interview proceeded in Italian.
It did not proceed very far. For one, the southern dialect the suspect spoke was nigh impenetrable to the governor and difficult even for James. For another, the fellow—who gave his name as Piero Salerno—claimed to know nothing about any lady. He had fallen off a fishing boat, he said. He wasn’t trying to steal the gondola. He’d only climbed into it because he was tired of swimming.
That was his story. It made no sense whatsoever and he couldn’t be made to budge from it.
Goetz sighed and turned to James. “Sir, do you know this man?”
The prisoner started, apparently having forgotten anybody else was there. Now he craned his neck forward and squinted into the shadows where James stood.
Though parts of the chamber were dark, as James had advised, the place to which they’d led the prisoner was well lit. Even in poorer light, James would have known the man. He’d seen this face only briefly, but it was his business to notice and remember details.
“This is the one,” he said.
He stepped out of the shadows.
Piero shrank and took a hasty step backward. One of the guards prodded him back into place with his bayonet.
“What a pity,” James said. “I was hoping for the other one. All this one did was row the boat.”
“He is an accessory,” said Goetz. “The penalty is the same.”
“But if he cooperates?” James said. “Perhaps if I spoke to him alone, he would be more confiding.”
Piero’s eyes widened. “No!” he cried.
He had not gone far last night, then. Judging by his reaction, he’d seen what James had done to his large friend.
James smiled at him.
Goetz signaled to the guards. The three of them exited the room, leaving James alone with the prisoner.
Speaking in the plainest and simplest Italian he knew, James said, “This has not been a happy night for me, Piero. I had to leave the opera before it was over—I must abandon Rossini, of all things! One woman complains to me about her man problems until my ears ache and the other woman is breaking my balls. I didn’t want to come here in the first place. I have better things to do. Lying little mounds of filth like you are sucking from me time I shall never get back. I am not in a good mood and I want to hurt someone. You’re not my first choice, but you’ll do, you ugly little pile of shit.”
He advanced. Piero tried to back away, but he stumbled on the manacles and fell.
James grabbed one arm and hoisted him up, pulling hard enough to make the prisoner shriek. “I can pull harder than that,” James said. “I can pull it right out of the socket. Shall I demonstrate?”
Piero began to scream. “Help! Help! He will kill me!”
He tried to run to the door, but stumbled again. When James reached down to pull him up, the man tried to scramble away on his backside.
“None of them care if you scream, you reeking pustulence,” James said. “No one cares if I kill you. It will save the government the cost of a trial and execution. But I’ll give you a kind warning: After the troublesome women, this noise you make is not improving my humor.”
Once again he jerked the man to his feet. This time James held onto his arm, squeezing hard. Piero whimpered.
“The way to improve my humor,” James said, “is to tell me who you are, who your friend is—or was—and why you attacked the lady. I shall give you to the count of three to begin putting me in a better frame of mind. One. Two.”
“We do it,” the man said. “We attack the whore.”
James squeezed harder.
Tears started from Piero’s eyes. “The one you throw in the water is Bruno. I hide and wait for him but he never comes. Then I think you have killed him. And so I steal the gondola and try to go back.”
“Never mind that,” James said. “Why did you come here in the first place?”
“To steal. This is what we do, Bruno and me. We have some trouble in Verona, and so we go to Mira. The whore was there, for the summer holiday. Everyone talks of the jewels she has. But then, she moves from the villa there back to Venice. And so we come to Venice, because it is easier to follow her here than in the little village, where everyone watches everything. We come to Venice, and then we wait for the right time.”
Once he’d begun talking, he babbled on and on. But most of the rest he had to say was irrelevant
All the way to Venice, simply to steal? That made no sense to James. Crime was far easier elsewhere in Italy—in the Papal States, for instance, where corruption was rife. Or farther south, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But to come here, where the Austrians ruled? It made no sense.
Still, Piero would not budge from his story. It was theft, mere theft, he insisted. Bruno had only decided to make some fun with a little rape. He’d choked the English woman to keep her from screaming, Piero claimed. “She’s a whore. This is what they like, as everyone—”
James flung Piero away from him so violently that the man tripped and fell.
This time James left him where he was.
If he touched the swine again, he’d kill him.