They blush, and we believe them; at least I
Have always done so; ’tis of no great use,
In any case, attempting a reply,
For then their eloquence grows
quite profuse;
And when at length they’re out of breath,
they sigh,
And cast their languid eyes down,
and let loose
A tear or two, and then we make it up;
And then—and then—and then—sit down
and sup.
Lord Byron
Don Juan, Canto the First
He was kissing her so sweetly: scores of tender kisses on her nose, her cheeks, her forehead, her ears, her neck, her shoulders. Francesca kissed him back in the same way, like a girl in love for the first time. And when he stopped and drew away a bit and looked at her, she knew she was looking back at him with stars in her eyes, but she couldn’t help it.
She’d been numb for so long, dead to feeling without realizing it. Until now. It was as though the long, sensual bathing ritual had washed away—not her sins, for she was deeply attached to those—but a coating or shell of some kind that had stopped her from feeling too deeply, too fully.
She felt now, deeply and fully.
Joy was coursing through her. It was not the simple physical pleasure of coupling but a bright happiness that lightened her heart.
He drew her upright, and she rose out of the water like one mesmerized. She couldn’t make her eyes turn anywhere but up to him, to look up into his handsome face.
Later she’d ask herself why but for now she could only gaze at him in a kind of stupid wonder.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?” She said, as though she didn’t know she wore the expression of a girl hopelessly in love.
He turned away to reach for a dry towel. “You’ll put ideas in my head,” he said. He wrapped the towel around her and helped her out of the tub. “I shouldn’t have kept you here for so long. If you take cold, Thérèse will kill me.”
“But it was great fun,” she said.
“Fun,” he said. Frowning, he picked up another towel and as smoothly and efficiently as Thérèse could have done it, wrapped her hair into it and twisted the towel about her head like a turban.
“Oh, you’ve done this before,” she said.
“Never,” he said. “You’re the first.”
She almost wished that were true. She almost wished he’d been the first for her and she could persuade herself he felt as she did.
She knew better.
Still, she told herself, if it had been the first time, she couldn’t have properly appreciated what had happened. She wouldn’t know enough to savor it, to store it in her memory.
“Go sit by the fire,” he said.
She walked to the couch and sat.
She watched him take up a towel and vigorously rub his hair. When he was done, the shiny black curls bounced about his head. She ached to tangle her fingers in his hair again. She longed to touch everything. She let her gaze travel wistfully over his long body. Then she made herself turn away. She lay down on the couch and stared into the fire.
She wasn’t aware of falling asleep.
She never heard him leave.
James had wrapped a towel about his waist and gone out to look for a servant to fetch them something to eat and to send for his clothes.
He found one too soon.
Sedgewick was sitting on the stairs nearby, waiting for him.
Arnaldo had already sent across the canal for a change of clothes. Sedgewick had brought the clothes. He’d also brought a message.
“It’s from San Lazzaro,” Sedgewick said. “You’re wanted there. Without further loss of time, I was to tell you, sir.”
“Monsieur left a note, madame,” Thérèse said, handing it to her.
Amor mio,
Those accursed monks! I had appointed to meet with them at San Lazzaro this morning. Something made me forget. A troublesome girl, I believe. Forgive me. Dine with me tonight in my bachelor lodgings and I will make it up to you.
Caramente,
C
Francesca knew she was deeply, unforgivably foolish. Before melancholy and disappointment could settle upon her, one hastily scrawled note drove them away. She tried but she couldn’t stifle the surge of relief and happiness. She laughed softly.
And when Thérèse scolded and said madame needed something to eat and a proper sleep, Francesca smilingly agreed.
She’d need her strength for tonight.
Meanwhile, in less elegant quarters in Venice
A ceramic Madonna flew across the sitting room of Marta Fazi’s lodgings and shattered against a door frame.
The two young men waiting to collect their pay only watched Marta’s hand, to see if she would throw anything else. But she was too puzzled to be truly enraged, and her temper cooled quickly, as it often did. She returned to her chair at the small table.
“These are not the letters,” she said.
The two young men looked at each other then at her.
“I showed them to you,” said the smaller one. “You said, ‘Yes, let’s go.’ You made us hurry away. You gave us no time even to pick up some of the jewelry.”
“I told you it wasn’t real!” she lied. “You want to make the English whore laugh at how stupid you are? You think she keeps her fine jewelry in her house, in a drawer where anyone can get it?”
Even Marta, who’d been told of the jewelry, hadn’t believed her eyes at first. But the Englishwoman was a rich whore with many servants. Those arrogant ladies never dreamed anyone would steal from them. They were always so shocked and outraged when it happened.
Though the messenger had hinted that she could help herself, Marta knew better. When one stole from the rich, the laziest authorities became brutally efficient—and the Austrians were not lazy. They’d caught Piero in no time. Of course, he was an idiot. Even so, it was clear that the great English whore was no mere puttana in the eyes of the Venetian governor. Had Marta and this pair made off with all the jewelry they’d found, they’d be swiftly hunted down…and if they were captured, the precious letters would fall into the wrong hands.
She’d taken a risk, she knew, to steal the emeralds. But that was only one set, among so many riches…and it was fine, as the messenger had promised. Fit for a queen.
All this was far too complicated to explain to this pair of fools. They didn’t know she’d taken any jewelry. At the moment, however, she was not worried about being hunted down for one measly set of emeralds.
She was far more disturbed about the letters.
“These are in his hand,” she said, half to herself. “But the dates are only this year and last year. The ones they want are old. And where are the names they told me to look for? Nowhere do I see them. But why does he write to her, still, the woman he hates?”
She might as well have asked the two to explain the Pythagorean theorem. They were little more than boys, because a person sporting half a day’s growth of black beard does not make a believable nun. They only lifted their shoulders in the universal gesture of “I dunno.”
Marta folded the letters, tied them with a piece of string, and set them down on the table. “He will explain this,” she said. “And it will be a good explanation or he will be very sorry.” She looked at the boys. “These are not the letters we want. I am finished playing games with the fine lady, the English whore. Enough.”
“It’s done then?” said the smaller one.
“Done? Did the Sicilian sun cook your brain? How can it be done when I have the wrong letters?”
“But you said ‘enough.’”
“Enough with creeping about,” she said. “Enough with looking here, there, everywhere. The next time we do it properly.” The way Bruno and Piero were supposed to do it, the imbeciles. “The next time we make her tell us.”
She took out her knife and held it up to the light. She smiled.
The monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni stood amid groves of cypress and fine gardens on a small island off the Lido. Early in the previous century, the former hospital island for lepers was given to an Armenian monk from Morea who’d been forced to flee invading Turks. Here, a few years ago, Byron had struggled to learn Armenian. He’d never succeeded, most likely because of all the women distracting him.
James had only one distraction in female form. The trouble was, she was more disruptive to his reason than the scores in Byron’s harem.
Putting her out of his thoughts was out of the question, since she was the subject of the present conversation.
James was strolling—or giving the appearance of strolling while inwardly roiling with impatience—through the cloisters with Lord Quentin. This was the man who, half a lifetime ago, had saved him from a life of unsanctioned crime and lured him into a life of sanctioned crime.
Ten years older than James, his lordship had embarked on the life of secrets and conspiracies at an early age as well. In fact, in many ways he was better suited to the trade, being of average height and unexceptional looks and having a way, as Sedgewick did, of calling no attention to himself. Men like Sedgewick and Quentin rarely needed a disguise. People took little notice of them.
“If Mrs. Bonnard hears that you’re here and I’ve been talking to you, I might as well go home,” James said.
“I know the risk,” Quentin said. “But I needed to speak to you directly. I heard about the attack the other night.”
“That came as a surprise,” James said. “No one told me she was in danger.”
“We’d no idea Elphick would act so quickly.”
“He was bound to hear of your visiting her,” James said. “He has agents here. Not that he needs any. She probably wrote to him about it.” If Elphick was writing to her, she must be writing to him.
“They correspond, yes, but unless they’ve a secret code, it’s utterly trivial: who was at which party and what they said. There’s far juicier stuff in the scandal sheets.” Quentin shook his head. “It’s more likely he got the wind up as soon as he learned I’d come to Italy. But I’d expected to be here and back by the time he got word. Who could have guessed she’d be so irrational about the letters we wanted, given what he did to her? I was certain she’d jump at the chance to ruin him. If I hadn’t been certain, I should never have approached her directly.”
That completely settled one question, then: The not-love letters from Elphick that Thérèse had reported missing weren’t important—to the mission, at any rate. Bonnard hadn’t been feigning indifference about their whereabouts. She truly hadn’t cared.
“In any event,” Quentin went on, “you don’t seem to be making great progress. What the devil have you been doing for this last week—besides nearly killing a potential informant?”
“Piero is still alive, so far as I know,” James began.
“I referred to the other one,” Quentin said. “We found him yesterday, and we had the devil’s own time getting him away without attracting attention.”
“Bruno? He’s alive?”
“Small thanks to you. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking to stop him from killing Mrs. Bonnard,” James said.
“And you nearly stopped him permanently from answering questions,” Quentin said. “Has that troublesome woman got her hooks into you, too?”
Yes, James thought. Yes, indeed, she has.
He said, “I was on the brink of getting the information we’re looking for when you summoned me here. Was it only to complain about how long it’s taking me?”
Quentin glanced casually about him. The cloisters surrounded a large garden. Two monks walked slowly through the shaded passage on the other side of the garden, well out of earshot. “Our friend Bruno’s too sick to be of much use,” he said. “Pneumonia, damaged windpipe, dislocated shoulder, among other things. The only bit of luck we had was his fever. He had a bout of delirium. Along with the other ravings, he babbled something about letters and mentioned Marta Fazi several times.”
James’s last, very feeble hope—that he’d got it completely wrong—died a quick death. He’d got it right, and the situation, as he’d deduced, was very bad, very tangled, and about to become a great deal worse.
What else was new?
“Oh, there’s a bit of luck, indeed,” he said. “Dear Marta. I remember her well. The darling lass who promised to cut off my balls in little bits, slowly, first chance she got. The one who, last I heard, was locked away in the deepest, darkest dungeon in Rome. The one who apparently wasn’t locked up anywhere, since she was in Venice last night, ransacking the Palazzo Neroni.”
He didn’t want to imagine what Marta would have done had Francesca Bonnard been home at the time. His mind imagined anyway, and he felt sick.
“That’s not good.” Quentin paused and shook his head. He moved to a stone bench and sat down, looking weary.
James sat down beside him, weary, too. He was angry, yes, but then he was often angry. Plans fell apart. Villains slipped through their nets. Documents ended up in the wrong hands. And comrades were killed, too often in appalling ways. Such was the nature of the work. He’d learned that early on. One dealt with human beings. All were fallible. Not all were trustworthy.
“You’re sure it was Fazi?” Quentin said.
“They were dressed as bloody nuns! They got into the house and drugged the food. It was exactly the same method she used in the other thefts. They took a lot of letters—the wrong ones—and emeralds. No other jewels. Only emeralds. Who else could it be?”
“So Elphick’s set her on his former missus,” Quentin said. “Bastard.”
“How the devil did he come to hire Fazi?”
“Who’s to say?” Quentin looked about him. “We’ve only started watching him closely in the last eighteen months—since you worked out that code. He might have met her years ago, back in the time when no one paid any attention to him. Or one of his agents in Italy might have hand-picked her to do the job. They must have paid a fortune to get her out of prison.”
“That tells me Elphick knows her well, either personally or by reputation,” James said. “In his place, she’s what I’d choose for a job like this. She’s no giant intellect, but she’s cunning, daring, and very, very dogged.”
Her cunning and daring had resulted in several remarkable jewelry thefts in the last year or so. Still, James and his associates had deemed her the local government’s problem, until the affair of the emeralds. In that case, British agents had become involved as a favor to an important ally. The ally had repaid the favor by signing his name to a crucial treaty.
“Every instinct told me the first attack on Mrs. Bonnard was not simple robbery.” James went on. “But it certainly didn’t look like Fazi’s work.”
“You incapacitated her best men in Rome,” Quentin said. “She’s making do with what’s available. I’ll wager anything that pair the other night weren’t following orders. There was a cock-up of some kind.”
James considered. “Mrs. Bonnard was wearing a magnificent set of sapphires. They made my hands itch. Apparently Bruno lacked my superhuman powers of self-restraint. He got distracted by the sparkly gems and the beautiful woman. What are the chances, do you reckon, of a brute like that ever getting his hands on a beautiful, highborn woman? Too much temptation for his tiny brain. Then I interrupted before his partner could remind him what he was supposed to be about.”
“I should like to know what exactly they were supposed to be about,” Quentin said. “Our friend Bruno hasn’t been terribly enlightening.”
“They were supposed to terrify her,” James said. Now that he had no remaining doubt about Marta Fazi’s involvement, he had no difficulty working out the plan. “They were bully boys, sent to scare Mrs. Bonnard into telling where the letters were. If that didn’t work, they’d take her away and torture her until she cooperated.”
His stomach knotted and his head pounded. He stood up. “The moment I stepped into the gondola last week, I knew I was stepping into un mare di merda. I’d better get back to Venice.”
Quentin rose, too. “I’d better make sure Goetz learns there’s a dangerous fugitive on the loose in Venice. At this point, it doesn’t matter who finds Fazi, so long as she’s found and locked up. The last thing we want is for Mrs. Bonnard to come to harm. Her death would be—”
“Deuced inconvenient,” James said. “Yes, I know.”
It seemed to take forever to get back to Venice. The whole while James fretted, even though common sense told him Marta Fazi was unlikely to risk an attack in broad day, and even though he’d taken precautions. Before leaving for San Lazzaro, he’d sent a message to Lurenze, suggesting he play guard dog again. And to make sure Lurenze did nothing else but guard, James had sent a message to Giulietta as well.
Both would have heard about the burglar nuns soon enough. They probably would have hastened to the Palazzo Neroni in any event. But James wanted to make sure they stayed with Bonnard until he could take over. Fazi would never attack while the lady had important guests, especially royalty. Even the most lax and corrupt government would marshal all its forces and hunt down anyone who troubled important visitors.
Even so, he was angry and impatient all the way back, and short with Zeggio and Sedgewick, who only irritated him further by exchanging that look, again and again.
Not until they came up the canal, and he saw the two gondolas moored outside the Palazzo Neroni, did James begin to relax a very little.
Yet he remained uneasy while he dressed, and gave too many unintelligible orders regarding dinner. When the servants told him that Mrs. Bonnard’s gondola was coming across the canal, he raced down the stairs to the andron. Her feet had scarcely touched the terrazzo floor when he pulled her into his arms and kissed her, fiercely and long, until they were both breathless.
He broke the kiss reluctantly, to let her draw breath. “Gad, I thought those accursed monks would never let me leave,” he said.
She looked up at him in that way she’d done before, with the ghost full in her exotic green eyes, so that all he saw was a girl, a beautiful girl, gazing at him adoringly.
It was what he’d always wanted—for one girl to look at him so, with all her heart in her eyes—but he’d imagined it so differently. He’d pictured an innocent girl with an honest, caring heart, who knew nothing of life’s darker side, who’d saved herself for him and who’d be true, who’d never deceive him.
“Wicked monks,” she said. “Did they make you study Armenian against your will? Byron finally admitted it was beyond him.”
“The curst fellow was there at last—the monk who had the key to the library,” he lied. He saw the irony at once: He, who did little but deceive, insisting upon purity and truth in a woman. “But there were other visitors today, and what must he do but take the lot of us on a tour, and show us every last volume in the place. Then the visitors must ask idiotish questions, which he answered soberly, too patiently, and at interminable length.”
She reached up and brought her soft palm to his cheek. “Poor man. Such an ordeal you’ve endured.”
He turned his head to kiss the palm of her hand. He inhaled the scent of her skin, mingled with the teasing hint of jasmine.
“And all for naught,” he said. “I heard not one word in fifty. My mind was in Venice, at the Palazzo Neroni, where a troublesome girl was probably sleeping—and I spent far too much time wondering if I was in her dreams.”
Her hand slid away, and she looked away. “Have a care, sir. You are beginning to sound romantic.”
“Lack of sleep, probably,” he said. “I’ll be better in the morning.”
“Won’t that depend on how you spend the night?” she said. The ghost vanished from her green eyes, and mischief twinkled in its place.
“I have a plan for that,” he said.
It was meant to be a Roman orgy, he’d explained.
The trouble was, he hadn’t any proper Roman furnishings. And so he’d had the servants take out most of the furniture, pile carpets and cushions on the floor of one of the canal-side rooms off the portego, and strew flower petals everywhere. It must be a Turkish seraglio instead, he told her. He would be the sultan and she would be all the women of the harem.
The way he looked at her when he said it made Francesca feel as though she were all the women in the world—or at least all the women he could ever want.
She supposed other men looked at her in that way.
But she remembered the way he’d pulled her into his arms as she disembarked from her gondola, and his kiss, so wild and hot that for a moment she’d believed there was desperation in it.
She’d felt desperate, too. Lurenze and Giulietta had heard about the burglarious nuns, and they’d been waiting for her when she finally woke in the afternoon. She’d had the devil’s own time, first trying to quiet their anxieties and later, trying to carry on a rational conversation. All the while, all she’d wanted was to be on the other side of the canal. In this man’s arms.
Only pride had kept her from flying from the house in her dressing gown. Pride demanded she wear a gown to make his mouth water. It was crimson, a perfect color for a harlot, and cut low, front and back. A corner of her tattoo, her mark of sin, was just visible above the back of the gown.
She knew that he, being a man, couldn’t feel as desperate as she, being a fool, did. The wild heat she felt was merely lust, which she’d done her utmost to arouse. What he expressed was the intense passion usual at the start of an affair.
While they dined, she tried not to let herself build castles in the air. It was hard not to, when he treated her so tenderly and kindly.
Reclining as his Roman ancestors must have done, he fed her tidbits of this and that, olives and bread and delicately prepared shellfish, fruits, and cheeses.
After they’d eaten, she lay with her head upon some cushions while he lay on his side, leaning on his elbow, the two of them facing each other, in a strange sort of intimacy, like…friends, while they…talked.
He described the monastery and told her how the monks had made a shrine of the room in which Byron had studied.
“Shall you study there, too?” she said.
He blinked. “I?”
“Did you not come to study Armenian with the monks?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “But Armenian is impossible. No wonder Byron gave it up. I’d rather study you.”
“Not too closely,” she said. “And never in bright sunlight. No woman can withstand that kind of scrutiny.”
“What, do you think the noonday sun will shatter my illusions? Do you think I have any, foolish girl?”
She was so foolish. When he smiled at her in that way, as though he were truly fond of her, and she looked into his deeply blue eyes, she forgot everything she’d learned in the last five years. All her illusions and delusions came back.
“The sun in England is kinder to women,” she said. “There we needn’t try to stand up bravely to its glare, since it so rarely glares.”
“‘That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers/Where reeking London’s smoky caldron simmers,’” he quoted Byron.
“I miss it sometimes, though, the farthing candlelight,” she said.
“Enough to wish to go back?”
She felt a stab, sudden and surprising, of loss. She had not felt it in a long time.
Perhaps that was what loosened her tongue. Or maybe it was the way he watched her, the way he listened so intently, truly paying attention, as men so rarely did. Even with her, their attention was not, really, on what she said but how she said it and how she looked saying it.
She knew this about men. She used the knowledge to manipulate them. She was finding it impossible to manipulate him.
She said, “I do wish, sometimes, to go…home. I know it’s silly. Upon the Continent, I’m merely a divorcée. In many places that’s respectable enough. I’m invited nearly everywhere, except where English society gathers. I ought to be happy, not needing to abide by their tedious and endless rules or to bear their special brand of hypocrisy.”
“All the same, you’re a foreigner here,” he said. “It’s natural, from time to time, to miss the world in which you grew up.”
Of course he understood, and it had nothing to do with their being soulmates, she told herself. There was no such thing between men and women. She’d learned that the hard way. He understood her feelings because he was a wanderer, too. Early on he’d told her he’d spent little time in England.
“I miss the voices,” she said. “I miss the sound of my own language in all its accents, high and low. And I do miss London Society, the Season. I was good at that, you know. I was a good hostess. I did everything I ought to do. I was a good wife, truly. I loved my husband. I wanted to be the best wife in the world. I thought it was part of the bargain, that we would be as good to each other as we could. I thought, if one loved somebody, and married that somebody, it was forever, exactly as the vows say.”
Her chest heaved and the tears started. She brushed them away and said, “Curse you, Cordier. What is it about you that makes me weepy? How could you let me drone on about my misbegotten marriage? What wine was that, to make me so maudlin?”
He reached out and lightly stroked her cheek with his long fingers. “Maudlin or angry?” he said. “Women weep oftentimes because they’re angry. Unlike men, they’re discouraged from expressing strong feeling physically. Throwing someone in a canal, for instance, is a good way of dealing with a lot of annoying emotion churning inside.”
She laughed, and the shocking pain subsided, as though it had never been. He drew his hand away, though, and she wished he hadn’t.
“It’s true,” she said. “Women are trained to smile and be brave—or to relieve our feelings with words.”
“You could write a novel, a thinly disguised roman à clef, like Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon,” he said. “Only think how wonderfully she savaged her beloved Byron.”
Francesca shook her head. She raised herself up, took up her wine glass, and sipped. She looked into it as though it would tell her what to do, what to say, how far to trust.
“I have my own way,” she said after a moment. “More direct. I write to Elphick, at least once a week.”
Cordier’s dark eyebrows rose. “So often?”
“Oh, yes. I’m quite faithful—in my correspondence.”
“You write to rail at him, after all this time?”
She laughed at his baffled expression. “Certainly not. Then he’d believe I was unhappy and suffering. Instead, I let him know how delightful my life is. I tell him who calls on me, and what we talk about, and who invites me where, and who has commissioned a portrait of me from which famous artist, and who has bought me this and that and what it’s worth. My letters are filled with great names—painters and poets and playwrights and such. But most important, they’re filled with the names of Continental royalty and nobility—precisely the kinds of people he likes to hobnob with. I know he grinds his teeth when he reads such things, and it is a pleasant revenge.”
Silence.
She drank more, bolstering her courage. “I think it serves him well. He’d turned every friend I had against me. My father had bolted. I had no one to take care of me. Naturally Elphick expected me to sink quickly into the gutter.”
“Instead you’re a queen.”
“A queen of whores, but upon the Continent that is almost as good as being a real queen,” she said. “Did you know that in some courts, there was an official position, the King’s Mistress? It was so in France, and is still so in Gilenia, I’m told.”
His expression changed, turning stony in an instant. He sat up, his face hard. “Were you aiming for that position with Lurenze? Have I thrown your careful plans into disarray?”
“I do not aim to belong to any man,” she said, “king or not.” She made herself laugh. “Compose yourself, sir, or I shall imagine you’re jealous.”
“I am,” he said. “Will you write to your former husband about that, as well?”
“Heavens, no,” she said. “You’re merely a younger son. He won’t give a damn about you.”
“It’s stupid, you know,” he said tightly. “A stupid, dangerous game. Your marriage was over five years ago.”
“He won’t leave it alone,” she said. “Why should I? He taunts me with the social events he attends. He tells me who was there and what was said. He knows I miss it. He knows I miss my so-called friends. And so he makes sure to rub salt in the wound. I know he wants me to be scorned by everybody and left miserable and penniless—and so I torment him with my successes. What would you do in such a case?”
He took the wine glass from her hand and set it down. “I should never have let you get away in the first place.” He moved quickly, then, gathering her into his arms. He kissed her, angrily, fiercely, and in a moment so deeply that she lost her moorings. Her head fell back and she let him take her where he would, do what he would. In no time at all she was flat on her back, laughing, while he pulled up her skirts.