After I had risen, dressed, and broken my fast the next morning, I sent for Giuseppe. “I am going to him tonight,” I said.
Startled, he asked, “So soon? You were next to meet tomorrow night, si?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I cannot wait that long. I must see him tonight.” I tried to hide the wide grin that threatened as I remembered him playing the concerto, playing it for me, before the whole theater, as though declaring to them all that I was his.
“And what if he is not home?”
“Then he is not home, and we will return.”
Giuseppe hesitated, as though to say something else, but he merely bowed and said, “As you wish, madonna.”
* * *
As we drew near Vivaldi’s house just after midnight, I could see the flickering light of candles and perhaps a fire behind the curtains. “He is home,” I said to Giuseppe, my voice low. “Return for me at four o’clock.” My blood heated at the thought of so much time with him.
“As you wish, madonna,” Giuseppe said. He turned and made his way back up the street, leaving me with the feeling that that phrase signified he had something he wished to say but was not planning to say it. I found I did not much care for it.
I pushed these thoughts aside, knocking once to alert Vivaldi to my presence, then let myself in. “Tonio, I—”
I stopped dead, the door slamming behind me, when I saw—disaster of disasters—he was not alone. The man sitting in the second chair before the fire looked startled and confused, studying me quickly before turning a questioning gaze to Vivaldi.
“I am so sorry,” I said, taking a step backward and bumping into the door. “I did not realize that … you had a guest.” I could feel my face burning, and my stomach roiled so that I was certain I would vomit.
We were found out. We had been discovered, and it was my fault.
“Adriana,” Vivaldi said, quickly rising from his chair. The panicked, stricken look on his face no doubt mirrored mine. “I was not expecting you this evening.”
“Antonio,” the stranger said, rising from his chair. He was a bit taller than Vivaldi, and a great deal older as well. His hair was gray, and his face had the worn look of a man who had toiled many years for very little. “What goes on here?”
Like the consummate performer that he was, Vivaldi immediately collected himself. “Signorina Adriana,” he said formally, “may I introduce my father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi.”
Shock and shame seemed about to drown me, but I composed myself, wondering how in the name of God and all the saints we were going to explain ourselves—and if we should even go to the trouble. “A pleasure to meet you, signore,” I said, stepping into the light from the fire.
“And this, Father, is Adriana,” Vivaldi continued. “She studies the violin with me.”
My breath caught in my throat as I hoped, prayed. Not quite a lie. But hardly the complete truth.
“The pleasure is all mine, signorina,” Signor Vivaldi said, though his courteous response was belied by his suspicious tone and the frown creasing his brow. “But a violin lesson, so late?” He looked from me to his son and back again. “Surely this is not a safe or seemly hour for a young woman to be out and about in Venice alone?”
“I am a servant in one of the noble houses, signore,” I said, squirming uncomfortably. “It is only once my mistress releases me from my duties that I am able to come for a lesson, and Maestro Vivaldi has most graciously agreed to accommodate me. I show some small talent for the instrument, you see.”
“A great deal of talent,” Vivaldi corrected, just as a teacher would do for a favorite student.
I marveled at the ease with which the lies rolled off our tongues. “And I did not come alone. My brother is a manservant in the house where I am employed as well,” I went on, “and so he accompanies me and then returns to fetch me home.” I dipped my head slightly, deferentially. “I thank you for your concern, though, signore.”
He nodded, still frowning. “Well, do not let me keep you from your lesson, then, signorina. I came to dine with my son and have stayed later than I meant to.”
“No—no,” I said hurriedly. “I … I fear that I have mistaken the date of my lesson.” I looked at Vivaldi. “It is tomorrow, maestro, no? My apologies. I—”
“Do not leave on my account,” Signor Vivaldi said shortly. “As I said, it is past time for me to take my leave.”
I was unsure as to whether it would be more or less suspicious to protest further, so in the end I kept silent.
“Yes, stay, signorina,” Vivaldi said finally. “Your brother has no doubt already departed and cannot be fetched back to see you safely home.”
Signor Vivaldi shrugged on his cloak. “I think I will come by tomorrow, Antonio, if that is agreeable,” he said. “You quite forgot to show me that new concerto you spoke of.”
The look he gave his son, however, was one with which I, possessed of a disapproving father myself, was all too familiar. “Yes … of course,” Vivaldi said. “Buona notte, padre.”
He saw his father to the door and watched, body rigid, until the older man had moved out of sight. He slumped against the door frame in relief.
I could barely summon my voice from the depths of horror and mortification to which it had sunk. “Tonio, I … I am so sorry. I did not know—”
“No, of course you did not,” he said, spinning to face me, eyes blazing angrily. “Why do you think that we arrange nights to meet, Adriana? Do you think I see no one but you? Do you think no one comes here to seek me but you?”
I felt that I could die of shame and regret; a part of me wished I would. “No, of course not. I only wanted to see you, after—”
“I am not some plaything for your pleasure, to be at your beck and call whenever you grow bored with the view from your palazzo,” he cut me off, advancing on me. “I have a life that does not include you, and the two must stay separate!”
“That is not fair, and you know it,” I said, my voice small.
He ignored me. “This will be the undoing of everything! You know that, do you not? It is catastrophic!” His hands were balled into fists as though he wanted to strike something. He pushed past me and began pacing in front of the fire.
“Perhaps he believed us,” I ventured.
The look Vivaldi gave me was one of utter contempt. “He did not believe us. He knows. He knows the truth about us. About me.”
“And so?” I asked. “He is your father. Surely he will not tell anyone. Surely he would not do that to you.”
“It is not that,” he said, stopping and facing me. “Can you not see, you foolish girl? No one was to know of this, least of all my father!”
“You speak as though you are ashamed of me,” I said.
“Of course I am ashamed!” he shouted, causing me to flinch. “How can I not be? I am a priest with a mistress! Of course I am ashamed of you, of all of this!”
I could not have been more shocked had he slapped me across the face. Yet soon enough my own anger allowed me to recover my voice. “And yet you have been sinning quite joyfully these past few months, I notice,” I spat. “How dare you say such things to me, as though I am some common whore whom you pay to spend the night?”
“We are both of us whores,” he shot back. “Is this what you wanted, Adriana? Is this what you were dreaming of in your silly romantic fantasies? An illicit, tawdry love affair with a musician before you go off and marry your rich Foscari, and please him with the tricks you learned in my bed?”
I could have screamed aloud in fury. “Are you listening to your own filthy words? You quite literally told me to marry him, and now—”
“And yet there you were in that box, dressed like a queen, your hand in his and the two of you staring at each other like you would never look away,” he said. “Just what manner of woman are you, Adriana? How am I to know?”
Rage nearly blinded me, and my entire body shook.
“Parlar non vuoi?” he demanded. “Why do you not speak?”
“Because I have no desire to waste my breath on you ever again, you bastard!” I shrieked.
“Keep your voice down, lest you want the whole city to hear you!”
“Let them hear!” I cried. “Let them hear how you speak to the woman who gave herself to you out of love, only to have you shame her with that very fact!”
“What do you—”
“And do not attribute your own fantasies to me,” I raged. “You with the wealthy, forbidden virgin in your bed before you send her off to marriage, always knowing that you were the first. And what of you? How many have there been before me?”
Now it was his turn to look shocked, horrified. I knew that I had crossed a line with my words, that what I had said was unforgivable, but I could not stop myself. All I wanted was to hurt him as much as he had hurt me.
“Surely you cannot think—”
“I know not what to think!” I exclaimed. “The man I love would never have spoken to me thus, and so I know not what to make of the man who stands before me now!”
His mouth hung open as he stared dumbly at me.
I had arrived so excited to put to rights the dissonance that had slithered between us last time. Yet now I saw this serpent of discord had already struck and left its poison behind, when neither of us noticed, and now all that was left was for the wounds to fester. “I am leaving,” I said. “No doubt it will not bother you if I never return.”
With that, I turned and stalked out the door before he had a chance to respond.
In spite of it all, though, I could not resist one glance back. Through a parting in the curtains, I could glimpse him standing completely still, his face buried in his hands, body rigid with tension. Then, in a sudden burst of rage, he reached out and swiped one of the empty wineglasses off the table, sending it shattering against the stone of the hearth.