The Masquers

by Natasha Peters

  Alessandro looked startled. “I doubt that.”

  “It’s true. I know you both so well. You’re both incredibly stubborn and pig-headed. As hard to move as a couple of boulders. You’re both proud, and strong-willed, and passionate. You control your passion better than he does because you have a cool head. You’re like a sleeping volcano with a snowy peak. And you’re both very, very easy to love. Good-bye, Alessandro. Think of your Lia now and then. She will be thinking of you.”

  “Won’t you at least take some coffee—”

  “No. Go along. I want to—to look at some of those embroidered handkerchiefs back there. They were quite beautiful, I thought.”

  She touched his cheek with her gloved hand and walked away quickly, but not before he saw the glint of tears on her cheeks.

  She bought a half-dozen handkerchiefs and wept into three of them as soon as she left the shop. So Fosca Loredan had won her husband back. Well, that was all to the good, wasn’t it? If she loved Alessandro she would be no rival for Raf’s attentions. And what about Raf? Lia thought dismally. Yes, there had been messages, but only because of Aunt Rebecca. He still loved Fosca, and when he returned to Venice, he would go to Fosca first.

  Lia lifted her chin and walked in the direction of the theater. She was thankful that at least she had hard work to take her mind off her troubles. Lazy bitches like the Loredan woman had nothing.

  The days were lengthening as 1796 relaxed into summer. It was June, and the nights were warm, but not hot, and just right for living.

  Her gondola dropped Fosca at the foot of the Campo Sant’ Angelo and she crossed the square and turned into the Calle Cristo. So far the game with Alessandro had not lost its interest and its thrill. He was a charming companion, sophisticated and amusing without being obsequious, handsome, elegant, a superb lover, a wit, a raconteur—and yet, when she was with him, she wasn’t quite sure that he knew he was speaking to his wife when he talked about “his wife.” It was maddening, and fascinating.

  He handled his part beautifully, never slipping, never varying his attitude towards her when they met in the halls of Ca’ Loredan. There he was a different person from the Masked Lady’s ardent lover. When she felt the sting of one of those cold silences, she was sure that he didn’t know that she was his masked mistress. How could he possibly utter professions of love in the evening, and shun the object of his affection in the morning? Could any man be so expert at dissembling? Yes, she thought. Loredan could.

  She tapped lightly on the door. He flung it open immediately and she came into his arms.

  “My Lady,” he said, kissing her fondly, “when darkness falls, the moon and all the stars come out. You are the most brilliant. I find myself hating the daylight.”

  “You always have some pretty speech to greet me.”

  “I spend all my time thinking up ways to amuse you. Someday I will show you the moonstruck verses I have written about you.”

  “I would love to see them! Tonight, perhaps?”

  “No, I have another treat for tonight,” He took her light shawl but did not touch her mask, and led her over to the mantelpiece in the sitting room. He had acquired a new figurine, a pretty porcelain statue of a masked woman, dressed in the style of the early part of the century. Her voluminous gown was light blue, and her elaborately-dressed hair was just the color of Fosca’s, Titian red-gold. She was seated on a low stool, and she was laughing behind her white oval mask. You could almost hear the bell-like tinkle of this tiny creature’s laughter. She seemed to breathe.

  “How charming!” Fosca exclaimed. “Where did you ever find her?”

  “In a run-down shop near the Rialto. She’s you, my Masked Beauty. I want you to have her.”

  “Charming,” Fosca said again, turning the figurine around. “But I think I shall leave her here, to keep you company before I arrive.”

  “I accept. Although I don’t need reminders of you. You are in my thoughts at all hours of the day and night.” He pressed her hand to his lips.

  “Oh, I wanted to tell you,” Fosca said casually, “that my husband has decided—at long last!—that it’s high time we left for the country. We have a villa on the Brenta, near Vicenza. I wondered, though, what this will mean to us? Shall we not see each other again until the Autumn?”

  Alessandro frowned. He was determined to follow through with this charade until Fosca tired of it, or of him. He hated it. He saw how his behavior towards her at Ca’ Loredan baffled and wounded her. She wasn’t a good actress and she couldn’t conceal her hurt. He had started snubbing her long ago because he wanted to hurt her. But he couldn’t stop now. He couldn’t drop his guard until she was ready to drop the mask. The choice was Fosca’s.

  Yet they had to leave for the country. It was already well past the normal time for beginning villegiatura and most of their friends were already ensconced in their country homes. The poor parasites who were accustomed to making their way to the Loredan villa had no place to go. People would begin to suspect that they were too poor to afford the mind-boggling expense of constant entertaining.

  But where did this leave him and his Masked Lady? He sighed. “You will forget me, I fear. You will find another to love.”

  She felt a little surge of disappointment. “Perhaps we could meet during the summer?” she offered sweetly. “Have you no villa of your own?”

  “I do. Coincidentally, near Vicenza, like yours. But it would be fairly dangerous.”

  “Yes, it would. If my husband, or your wife, discovered our secret—”

  “What a scandal!” He grinned and added, “Lady, in the country there are no masks. Nothing to hide behind. You would have to show yourself to me undisguised. Are you ready to do that?”

  She thought a moment. “No, I think not. Not yet.”

  “So.” He lifted his hands helplessly and dropped them again. “We must bid each other good-bye tonight. Perhaps we may meet under the summer moon. But my true hope is that you will come back to me when once again we return to Venice. I won’t ask for a promise. Many remarkable things can happen in the course of the summer. Who knows? You might even fall in love with your own husband.”

  “Never,” she said crisply. “He is undeserving of love. I wish he were more like you. He has never shown me the least kindness, and you have been kindness itself.”

  “It’s easy to be kind to Beauty,” he said. “Look, it’s night.” He took her hand and led her to the balcony. “See the stars. How bright they are tonight. They give me courage to say what I feel. In the few weeks since we have been meeting, I have come very close to happiness, Lady. Something I thought I would never experience while I lived. For that I thank you.”

  Fosca was touched. She was tempted to throw off her disguise, to heal the breach that existed between Fosca and Alessandro Loredan. She touched the edge of her mask. To take it off? To speak? To begin their marriage over again, as lovers rather than as combatants?

  She found she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t ready to commit herself to reality. Drop the mask and they would be Signor Loredan and Donna Fosca again, their memories restored, their anger sharpened by the period of truce, their old hostilities intact. No, she wasn’t ready to give up the game. Not yet.

  Instead she left his side, extinguished the candles in the room, shed her mask, and came into his arms in the darkness. His kisses thrilled and excited her as a husband’s never could. The attraction they shared was make-believe, lovely pretense, the shimmering dream of a summer evening. It could never survive truth, the harsh light of day, the memories and antagonisms they shared as husband and wife.

  He held her close. He had sensed the moment when she made her decision not to trust him. He sighed inwardly and resigned himself to living longer with the masquerade that he loathed, for her sake. He felt no pride now. He would willingly have prostrated himself in front of her and begged tearfully for her love, if he thought that could win her. But he couldn’t rush her. He knew that if he shattered the fragile mirage of
their happiness now, she would turn cold, and he would lose her.

  “So, we won’t see each other in the country,” Fosca said with regret. “Well, it wouldn’t be the same. There is magic in Venice that exists nowhere else. We might find, away from Venice, that we didn’t like each other at all.”

  He smiled at her in the darkness. “No, I think that I would like you even if by some miracle we were transported to the moon.”

  “I doubt that,” Fosca laughed. “None of the people we know would be there. We would have nothing to gossip about!”

  “Then we would have to make love all the day long,” Alessandro said. “Would that be so boring?”

  “It sounds wonderful,” she whispered against his cheek. “Take me there, now.”

  At first his lovemaking was gentle, tender. Then a demon seemed to take possession of him and he treated her roughly, violently, grabbing her by the hair, grinding his mouth down on hers, biting her throat and breasts and belly, pinning her hands above her head and battering her until she swooned. When it was over he stumbled away from the bed and leaned heavily against the window frame. She could see him silhouetted against the moonlit sky.

  She waited until the throbbing in her body eased a little, and then said, “What happened? I’ve never seen sou like that before? You’re angry with me, aren’t you?”

  “With you? No, no, certainly not. With myself. Not with you. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

  “Oh, you didn’t hurt me. I rather enjoyed it, actually. Why are you angry with yourself?”

  “Because I’m such a damned idiot. All the time I’ve lost. Wasted. Happiness I might have enjoyed—if only I had thought with my heart instead of my head. Long ago, that is,” he let out his breath. “Not now. You have captured my heart and I haven’t had a coherent thought since we met.”

  “How perfectly delightful!” she laughed. “Come back to me.” She opened her arms and welcomed him with a kiss.

  Later she lay with her head pillowed on his chest. She could feel his breath on her hair.

  “I have observed,” he said thoughtfully, “that most people are not such victims of fate as they claim to be. No, we’re really victims of our own characters. We earn our fates, our happiness or misery, through our actions. Our lives are the results of the choices we have made or failed to make. The things we have done, or failed to do. I was cold, overbearing, selfish and ambitious. And intolerably lonely. I thought I could live without love. What a fool I was. It’s taken me years to learn these lessons, Lady. I share them with you, free of charge.”

  “What you say is true,” Fosca said. “I was headstrong, stubborn, willful. I wasn’t happy with myself. I couldn’t be happy with anyone else. I thought I was, once. Perhaps that was just a dream, too.”

  “Are you happy now?” he asked softly.

  “Yes, because I have pleased you,” she answered.

  “That’s not what I mean. Are you happy with yourself, with the woman you have become?”

  She thought about it, for the first time in her life. “No,” she admitted truthfully. “I don’t think so. Perhaps I will be someday, but not now. Not yet. Will you help me?”

  “I can’t,” he said gently. “These are things you must learn for yourself, without the help of those who love you.”

  “Ah, so you admit that you love me!”

  “Was there ever any doubt of it in your mind, Lady? I loved you the first moment I saw you.”

  “Then you saw through my mask,” she said, turning her face up for a kiss.

  Alessandro complied. “Yes, I saw through all your masks.”

  Trunks of china, glassware, clothes, provisions, books, games, musical instruments, linens, and household items were loaded into flat-bottomed, boats and taken to terrafirma, then transferred to coaches and wagons and hauled through the dusty countryside to the Loredan villa near Vicenza. Even Rosalba Loredan permitted herself to be dislodged from her room in Ca’ Loredan and installed in another, equally comfortable, overlooking the broad lawns and the Brenta River.

  The villa, designed and built under the supervision of the great architect Palladio in the sixteenth century, stood on a broad plain with low mountains at its back and the sluggish Brenta at its feet. White and symmetrical, roofed with red tiles and studded with columns and statuary, it resembled a richly decorated birthday cake set on a green platter with sprigs of olive and citrus trees at its base. There was a huge rotunda at the center, two stories high, and four wings of equal size sprouted out from the sides, exactly facing the points of the compass. A balcony ran around the waist of the rotunda, giving access to the bedrooms on the second floor. The rooms were airy and large and less elegantly furnished than those of Ca’ Loredan.

  There were broad brick terraces all around, where guests could dine and listen to music being performed under the rotunda while they enjoyed the soft breezes, sweet fragrances, and mosquitoes out of doors. The gardens had been designed before the craze for natural wildness came into vogue, and they were stiffly formal, with well laid-out paths lined with hedges, closely shaved lawns, ornate fountains that shot columns of water thirty feet into the air, an orangerie and greenhouse, and a boxwood maze that had grown up over the years until it was nearly twenty feet high. So intricate and confusing was the maze that guests had to be extricated from its devious twists and turns and cul-de-sacs by gardeners and footmen every year, and some said that on a summer’s evening you could hear the plaintive wails of ancient guests who were still wandering, hopelessly lost, searching for the single exit.

  While the Venetian nobles did little entertaining in their imposing homes in the city, preferring the more congenial atmospheres of the cafés and salons and restaurants, during the summer months their villas were crowded with guests, some spending the entire season with their affable hosts. There were games on the lawns, picnics on the water, horse-races, balls, concerts , theatricals, charades. Here the Inquisitors and the censorious Council of Ten held no sway. The atmosphere of freedom, plus the warmth of summer nights, was highly conducive to romance.

  It was the most restful summer Fosca had experienced for years. She felt wiser, more sure of herself, less desperate for love. She knew that Loredan loved her, and the knowledge brought her a new serenity and peace. She wasn’t quite sure yet how she felt about him. In the country he continued his policy of cold behavior towards her, never once indicating that there was something more between them. But they rarely saw each other. The Senate dispatched him to France in July, and he didn’t return until mid-August.

  Fosca spent a large part of her day with Paolo, and the rest with her friends and guests. Alessandro liked to ride and went out for hours by himself, without even a groom for company. In the evenings he shut himself up in his library and worked on his correspondence. He, too, spent a generous amount of time with Paolo, but not when Fosca was present.

  She wondered occasionally why he didn’t approach her. Why didn’t he come to her room, and try to break through the barriers that had grown up between them? Could he really love her as much as he said, and not give in to his desires? She felt cheated an annoyed, and when her pique was particularly sharp she tried to recall the violent feelings she had so long harbored against him. But she found to her amazement that while the memories of the humiliations she had suffered still burned, she understood why he had acted as he did. Try as she might, she no longer hated him.

  The talk that summer was of war and the ongoing conflict between France and Austria. The Venetians were divided into two camps, those who believed that Venice should arm and prepare to defend herself against the encroaching French armies, and those who preached neutrality and non-involvement at all costs. The Senate was heavily weighted with the latter, and although they issued a stern warning to the warring parties that they would tolerate no violation of their neutrality on land or sea, they refused to do anything to put teeth in their warning, like authorize expenditures for arms.

  “Like Switzerland we have tried to r
emain neutral,” Alessandro argued one night. “Unlike Switzerland we have not the advantage of nearly impassable natural borders. We have no mountains behind which we can hide, and we are shockingly vulnerable to attack by sea because we have failed to keep our navy strong. How can we possibly repel the invader? I’m afraid the time has come to pay for two centuries of mindless pleasure.”

  “But my dear Alessandro,” another man sighed, “are you suggesting that a state should be in constant readiness for war?”

  “Yes, if she wants to remain free and not become a vassal of some greedier power.”

  “But it is in times of peace that civilization grows and flourishes! The arts, music and theater, pleasant conversation and fine literature.”

  “Venice was never more civilized than during the sixteenth century, when she was warring with everyone. Someone should have told Titian, Tintoretto, and the rest that they weren’t supposed to flourish.”

  Fosca had to admire her husband’s quickness of mind, his directness and eloquence. He wasn’t like the rest, who were softened by years of self-indulgence. He was more like the Venetians of old whom he admired so much, warriors who ventured forth to conquer Greece, Dalmatia, the whole of the Adriatic. Men who also fostered art and architecture, who built the palaces and cathedrals that everyone took for granted nowadays.

  Her mind cleared of the mists of prejudice, she was able to look at him clearly and honestly. He had changed over the years. He was more patient, less ambitious, more tolerant of weakness in others. Sorrow had aged him, fatherhood mellowed him, love humbled him. She could not imagine this Alessandro deliberately seducing an innocent girl for political gain. Yes, he was worthy of respect and admiration, and even love.

  Fosca’s friend Antonio noticed a change in her that summer.

  “You’re very preoccupied and dreamy lately, my dear,” he remarked one afternoon as they were sitting on the south terrace watching some young men showing off their boating skills. “You’re like women are supposed to be when they are about to become mothers. You’re not hiding something from me, are you?”