The Time Contessa (The Time Mistress Book 3)

by Georgina Young-Ellis

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m tired of being protected from the elements. If the air is hot, I want to feel it.” He stripped to his white boxers while Cassandra walked to the edge of the roof and looked away.

  Then she turned to him. His body was wonderful, muscled but slim, his chest sparsely covered with dark hair.

  “This beautiful, hot night. This is what Tuscany feels like.” He stood with his arms wide, his face turned up to the sky.

  Cassandra peeled off her dress and let it fall; with it went its built-in bra. All that remained was her pale pink, lace underwear. She inhaled the humid, warm air.

  He was looking at her. “Contessa, you take my breath away.”

  He walked toward her. She stood and waited. He touched her shoulders and let his hands run across the sides of her breasts and to her hips. A chill rippled over her skin. He pulled her close and kissed her. She pressed her body into his. His hands moved to the curve of her butt. She grabbed his strong arms. He stepped back and looked into her eyes, then led her by the hand to a lounge chair covered with cushions. She slipped off her panties. He let his boxers drop to the floor of the roof. She lay on the pillows and took his hand, pulling him on top of her. He grasped her hair as he kissed her again, his kisses traveling down her neck across her shoulders and to her breasts. Her body arced. He positioned himself over her as she wrapped her legs around his waist. They made love slowly, kissing and caressing. Cassandra looked up at the stars twinkling brightly overhead and felt the sweet movement of their united bodies. His thrusting became more urgent; his lips pressed into hers, her tongue sought his. The motion was too much. She climaxed, and soon after he did too, their cries of ecstasy loosed into the night sky.

  Chapter Seven

  There was a knock on Cassandra’s door. She opened her eyes. Lauro was still sleeping next to her. How young he looked. Wait, how did they get there? Oh yes ; , some time after they’d fallen asleep on the roof, he’d awakened her and they’d slipped into her room.

  She got quietly out of bed, shrugged on her robe, and tiptoed over to open the door a crack. Rosa stood there with an anxious look on her face.

  “What is it?” Cassandra asked.

  “I found something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something interesting I think you and Signor Sampieri should see. I tried his door but he doesn’t answer, neither does Dr. Hershowitz. I’m a little worried. After last night….”

  “Signor Sampieri fell asleep on the roof last night.” That was close enough to the truth. “And Jake, well, I left him with the mayor. They may still be dealing with the crisis. Anyway, give me five minutes. I’ll get Lauro and we’ll come down.”

  “Can you meet me in my study?”

  “Yes.” Cassandra shut the door. Why didn’t she want Rosa to know she was sleeping with the artist? She turned to him. He was awake.

  They quickly dressed and hurried down the stairs. They found Rosa sitting in front of her desk, a book open before her.

  “This is my Dante: the Paradiso,” Lauro said as he approached.

  “Yes, it is. I was thinking about what you said, that the books should be displayed flat so people could look at them. I had never looked into this one before; I just dust them. So I took it down and opened it. When I did, I found this.” She pointed to a very old piece of parchment sitting on the open page.

  Lauro went to pick it up.

  “Careful!” Cassandra said. “It’s probably very brittle.”

  Lauro went to the other side of the desk. “May I?” he said to Rosa.

  “Of course.” She moved away from the chair so he could sit. She turned the desk light on.

  Lauro studied the picture carefully. “It’s a drawing of this room. But there’s something different here,” he pointed at the paper for Cassandra and Rosa to see, “something extra.” He looked around the room. “Could it be indicating a false wall?”

  “That’s what it looked like to me,” said Rosa.

  “Over there, behind the bookcases.” He pointed to the end of the room.

  “Yes, I think you might be right,” Rosa agreed.

  “There seem to be objects stored behind it. My spectacles.” He patted his shirt pocket and withdrew them, placing them on his nose. “These drawings are very rudimentary, but this looks like my telescope, my olive picker…all of my inventions!”

  “What?” Cassandra looked carefully. “Somebody built a wall and enclosed your inventions inside?”

  “Perhaps it was my housekeeper. She couldn’t read or write, but she might have drawn this to indicate, perhaps to some future tenant of the house, they were in there.” He rose. Together they walked to the wall. He reached his hand above the books on one of the shelves and knocked.

  “It’s hollow,” said Cassandra.

  “I thought this room seemed smaller,” Lauro observed, “but I decided it was just my imagination.”

  “So, you think Ottavia Schiatti walled up your inventions in here? I had no idea,” declared Rosa.

  “It appears that way.” Lauro continued to knock here and there on the wall. “Yes, hollow.”

  “How will we get into it?” Rosa asked.

  “We’ll have to take it down,” Cassandra said, “or cut a hole in it.”

  “Oh dear,” said Rosa.

  “If this is what we think it is, Signorina, my entire life is in there,” said Lauro, looking meaningfully into her eyes.

  “Of course, Maestro. We’ll do it,” Rosa agreed. “But carefully, please.”

  “Jake will help us,” Cassandra broke in. “I’m sure he can find just the right tools for this kind of delicate operation.”

  “When can we start?” Lauro wanted to know.

  “I’ll call him right now—”

  “My inventions, Cassandra, my inventions!” He grabbed her hand before she could activate her link. He looked happier than she’d seen him since they’d brought him to the future, or, at least, when he wasn’t in her arms.

  “I hope so, Lauro,” she said, squeezing his hand. Their eyes met and locked. “Give me my hand, though, so I can call Jake.”

  Cassandra told Jake about the discovery. He’d been up all night, working with the mayor, talking to Carver and the other team members. He said he’d be right there.

  It had taken another day to gather the equipment Jake said he’d need to excavate the wall. When they met in Rosa’s study that morning, she had already pushed the large bookcase away from the false wall. Giulia was there also, having pulled herself away from the turmoil of the city’s emergency. With their protective goggles in place, everyone watched as Jake made the first, delicate cut in the wall.

  “How does he know that thing won’t cut into one of my inventions?” Lauro asked, brow furrowed.

  “He has it calibrated to approximate the depth of the wall.”

  Jake cut a three-quarter arched shape, leaving one side of the arch attached. He then made a cut about six inches from the floor at the base of the arch. He pasted construction fabric over the attached side, and with strong adhesive glue, attached a handle on the other side of the arch. The glue dried instantly to a kind of cement. Then he and Lauro pulled on the handle together, and the arched shape swung open like a door, creaking and moaning. The wall, as it turned out, was made of wood, covered with a thin coating of plaster. The air that rushed out at them was musty, but dry. Rosa shined a flashlight inside.

  “May I?” said Lauro.

  “Yes, Maestro,” Rosa replied.

  He stepped inside the makeshift room. “Jacopo, can you use your saw to cut this crate open? Carefully!”

  Jake did as he was asked. Lauro lifted the boards away and asked Rosa for the flashlight. He peered inside, then reached in and pulled something out, something wrapped in a cloth that fell away in tatters as soon as he touched it, revealing its contents.

  “It’s my mechanical olive-picking hand.” He blew the dust and fragments of cloth off. He then turne
d the levers and they creaked into action. “Mamma mia,” he whispered. He handed it to Jake who examined it with fascination. Lauro reached into the box and pulled out another cloth-wrapped object. “If it was my housekeeper who did this, she certainly did it with care.” He brushed it off to reveal his brass telescope. “My occhio-grande.”

  “We call it a telescope,” said Cassandra gently, “not a ‘big-eye.’”

  “May I?” asked Jake. He took it from Lauro and aimed it out the window. “Unbelievable.”

  “What is, Jacopo?”

  “That you invented the telescope one hundred years before Galileo chanced upon one made by some Dutch scientist.”

  “I’m sorry, who is this Galileo?”

  “You haven’t told him about Galileo?” Jake said to Cassandra.

  “No,” Cassandra replied giving Jake a stern look, “I didn’t exactly know how to tell him.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “That Galileo,” Jake hurried to say, “is the man we credit as being the first to use the telescope to look at the moon, the stars, and the universe.”

  “That is outrageous,” Lauro cried, stepping out of the wall and seizing his telescope. “I invented this object and I was the first to discover that the earth was not the center of the universe.”

  “Yes but….” Jake began.

  “But I was supposed to die,” Lauro continued staring at his invention. “If I died in 1511, no one would know what I did.”

  “And you might have been punished severely for heresy if they found out before that. Which is why Ottavia must have hidden your inventions,” Cassandra pointed out.

  “She couldn’t have known the implications. But my uncle might have guessed. When he sold her the house, he must have told her to destroy them or hide them. The good woman couldn’t bear to obliterate them—perhaps she thought I’d come back.”

  They finished unpacking the crate until Lauro was surrounded by his creations. He looked at each, examined each lovingly, but never let go of the telescope. Finally he looked back at Cassandra. “I want to know more about this Galileo.”

  It had been a long night. The explanations, first of Copernicus and his ideas about a sun-centered universe, then of Galileo and his use of the telescope to not only confirm Copernicus’s theories but to prove and expand on them, were exhausting, and required Cassandra to use various means of showing and demonstrating using the media available to her in Rosa’s house. By the time they were done, it was nearly three in the morning, and Lauro was more energized than worn out.

  “So, Copernicus was in Bologna just six years ago. I mean, in 1503.” He walked around the room, gesturing. “You could send me back there, I could meet him. We could work on his theories together. I could show him my telescope; we could prove his theories, and then they couldn’t laugh at him. The church couldn’t argue with what is right in front of them.”

  “Oh, yes, they could. They could charge you with heresy and hang you both. You can see that, even fifty years after Copernicus first came up with the idea of a heliocentric universe, Galileo was treading very carefully to say the things he did, even with proof. And ultimately, he was punished for the publications he produced that spouted his theories. He wasn’t tortured, thank God, but he was put under house arrest under the care of Archbishop Piccolomini right here in Siena, sometime around the year 1630, I think.”

  “Piccolomini—yes—a prominent family in the church in my day and before. But Cassandra, if I go back to work with Copernicus, then the world will have the telescope a hundred years earlier and this will speed up the process so that by the time Galileo comes along, he can go on to even further leaps in science.”

  “No. It doesn’t work that way. No matter when you go back, you can’t change anything. Things are the way they are, partly because you died in 1511. If you go back and introduce the telescope, all of history will change. Copernicus’s life, Galileo’s life, everything. We can’t do that.”

  “Cassandra, what am I to do?” he wailed. “Now that I know about Copernicus and Galileo, I can’t just go back, and sit quietly in San Gimignano, or wherever, with my invention, keeping it all to myself, regardless of what the church does to me. The telescope must be known.”

  Her mind was a whirl. “Wait a minute. Lauro, what if….” She paused. Suddenly, it all seemed to come clear. But could they really do it? “What if we send you back a hundred years later, I mean, around the early 1600s, and…no, I have to talk to Jake and Professor Carver. It’s too radical. I can’t think they’ll approve it.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll like it either.”

  “Tell me, my love.”

  It was the first time he’d used that term, and with the words a wave of happiness washed over her. She shook her head to focus. “What if we send you back to Florence to the time just before Galileo was given the telescope by this Dutchman, who, well, it’s not clear it was he exactly who even gave it to Galileo, it’s just speculation. So what if you give Galileo the telescope.”

  “And let him take credit for my invention?”

  “No. He isn’t credited for inventing the telescope, just for first using it to look at the stars. However, you could show him, Lauro, you could work with him, be his silent partner, as we say.”

  Lauro narrowed his eyes, looking at her intently.

  “You would have to truly be silent,” she continued quickly. “History could not know your name. But just think, Lauro, you would be a part of that wondrous time, and make discoveries with him. Many people helped Galileo in his lifetime. Even his daughter, who was a nun, transcribed his notes and did all kinds of useful things for him. You could be one of those people.”

  “A great scientist and inventor like me, relegated to an assistant.”

  “And yet, what was your destiny to be otherwise? Death. Your work completely unknown. This way, you have the chance to live and fulfill your scientific dreams.”

  “I don’t know, Cassandra. A hundred years later? Will the world be as foreign at that time as it is to me now?”

  “I don’t think so. So little changed in that hundred years between you and Galileo. The early 1600s is still a long ways from the industrial revolution, when the world really started to transform. You’ll find it much the same.”

  “You say he lived here in Siena?”

  “At the time we’re talking about, but when he first encountered the telescope, no. He was living in Florence and remained there many years.”

  “Florence? I’ll have to live in Florence?” He looked like he had swallowed a bitter pill.

  “He lived in a beautiful compound outside of Florence called Bellosguardo. Perhaps you could find a place nearby and even travel to Siena sometimes.”

  “Bellosguardo….”

  “Beautiful sight.” Cassandra softly translated to herself.

  “I will think about it. And you?”

  “And me?”

  “What about you? How can I leave you?” He took her hand.

  Tears threatened to sting her eyes. “Lauro, one thing I have learned about time - travel is this: just when you think it is impossible to go back again, you very well might. You and I will have to part.” She looked down and away. “But maybe not forever.”

  He moved close to her, lifted her face to his, and kissed her. “Let’s go to bed. We’ll think more about this tomorrow.”

  She took his hand, and he led her to his room.

  Late the next morning, Cassandra, Jake, and Lauro conferenced with Professor Carver and James, using a program that allowed them to appear to be sitting in the same room together. The London lab miraculously melded with the Senese villa.

  “I had an idea in the middle of the night,” said Cassandra, eager to speak. “James, you’re scheduled to arrive in Elizabethan England on September 23, 1602, right?”

  “That’s the date we’ve decided on.”

  “I’m thinking perhaps you could take Lauro with you.”

&nbs
p; James and Professor Carver looked at each other. Cassandra went on to explain her thoughts about Lauro introducing the telescope to Galileo, and slowly their faces lit with understanding.

  “From there,” continued Jake, who had been filled in on the plan by Cassandra before the conference, “Lauro can travel to Florence on his own. It will be up to him to find Galileo and connect with him. With the telescope, the introduction shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  “There may be dangers along the way, Lauro,” Cassandra added. “The journey by boat isn’t long, but always treacherous. There will be the usual dangers of thieves and killers.”

  “However,” chimed the professor, “I propose we inoculate Lauro against the deadly diseases rampant at the time: plague, cholera, scarlet fever, small pox, and typhus of course, so he has a greater chance of survival and success.”

  “You can do this?” Lauro asked.

  “Yes, easily. And, of course, just like James will have on his person the money to enter London society as a young man of means, you, Lauro,” said the professor, “will be wealthy. At least as long as you can keep it from being stolen. We have certain ingenious ways of hiding the money on your person.”

  “How could I ever repay you?”

  “This is part of our operating budget,” James replied. “Besides, what it costs in silver or gold to make you a rich man of the seventeenth century is nothing compared to today.”

  “And what clothes will I wear?”

  “Like for me,” responded James, “clothing will be made for you. You’ll carry a bag with some clothes, but it’s best to travel light. Our costume designer will make you clothes of the finest cloth, fitting the fashion of the time. No one will know you are a man coming from the future, who originally lived in the past.”

  In spite of the sadness prickling the edges of Cassandra’s thoughts, James’s observation made her laugh.

  “I will have to go again in that terrible time machine, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said, placing a hand on his arm. “However, going with James is a much better idea than sending you alone.”