Inamorata

by Megan Chance

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But—”

  “But what?” I frowned, confused.

  Edward only gave me a long, slow look, very contemplative, an expression that made me nervous for no reason I could say.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Why do you look at me that way?”

  He shook his head and handed me back the drawing. “You’re right. They’re all very beautiful.”

  I put the drawings away. I thought no more about it. I was naive, I suppose—no, more than that, stupid. It never occurred to me to think the sketches were anything but sublime. I loved how Joseph captured yearning and desire and love with every stroke. I was not quite me in them, but at the same time I was more me than anyone could know. I believed Edward had seen that as well.

  It wasn’t until two days later that I realized what Edward had really seen.

  He had arrived in the afternoon, which was odd—he usually visited me in the morning, after Joseph had gone off on one of his excursions. I hadn’t been expecting him, but I was glad, as always, to see him. As he drew me upstairs to Joseph’s room, he seemed possessed by some strange fever. He undressed me with such slow care I didn’t understand it—he’d never been anything but hurried before, impatient. And though he was slow and thorough, he seemed oddly anxious, as if he were waiting for something. As he unlaced my chemise, he said, “Let’s take our time, darling, shall we? We’ve all afternoon.”

  But we didn’t, I knew. We were coming to the time when Joseph would be home, and I knew he would not like to come upon Edward and me like this. And then, just as I had the thought, I heard the front door open and close; I heard my brother call, “Soph? I’m home. Where are you?”

  I panicked. I started for the door. Edward held me tightly in place. “You don’t understand,” I told him desperately. “He’ll hate this—”

  “Will he?” Edward asked, and there was a blandness in his tone that made me stop to look at him.

  “Sophie!” Joseph was coming up the stairs.

  I said again, “You don’t understand.”

  “What don’t I understand?” Edward asked, and there was an excitement in his eyes that startled me, a vibration that told me he’d been waiting just for this, that he’d come at this time deliberately, meaning to confront my brother. But I had no idea why. I didn’t understand at all.

  And then I heard Joseph reach the top floor. I heard his step stall as he noticed the cracked door of the bedroom that was always kept closed. “Sophie?”

  I heard the strain in his voice, and just as I wondered how I would explain this to him, what I could possibly say, he pushed open the door. He paused, taking in me with my hair down, clad only in a chemise falling from my bared shoulders, and Edward without a shirt.

  Joseph said, “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  I tried to push away from Edward’s hold, but his hands squeezed almost painfully tight, holding me in place. I said, “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “Oh, no—it’s exactly what it looks like,” Edward said to my horror, a satisfied look in his eyes. “It’s not as if he doesn’t know what’s been going on, darling. You do know, don’t you, Hannigan, that I’ve been fucking your sister?”

  “Edward,” I breathed.

  My brother didn’t even blink. He only stood there like a statue, pale and chiseled and beautiful, with a look in his eyes that made me want to be sick. “I know,” he said softly.

  Edward said, “We were just getting ready to commence. So why don’t you—”

  “Edward, please,” I managed.

  “—join us?” Edward proposed.

  I gasped, turning to him in surprise.

  Edward looked at me almost contemptuously. “Come now, don’t act so shocked. Don’t tell me you haven’t played this game before.”

  Joseph said in a strained voice, “I think you should go.”

  Edward released me. His muscles were clenched; he leaned toward Joseph as if he were pulled. “Join us.” His voice fell to a whisper, a plea. “Please God, join us.” The urgency in it alarmed me. He crossed the room in two steps, moving before I knew he’d done so. He was not taller nor bigger than Joseph, but he pushed my brother up against the wall easily, pressing himself to him the way he’d once pressed himself to me. He grabbed Joseph by the back of the head, thrusting his fingers into my brother’s hair, and Joseph let him, doing nothing as Edward Roberts jerked him down to kiss, hard and thoroughly, as if he might swallow him whole. I could only watch in shock as Joseph surrendered to it. It was as if Miss Coring were in the room again. There was no point in resistance—how well she’d taught us that. How well I understood.

  Edward pulled feverishly at Joseph’s shirt, pulling it from his trousers, his hands beneath it, running up my brother’s bare chest. “Christ, I want you,” he was whispering—I think he had forgotten I was even in the room. “I have wanted you since I first laid eyes on you.”

  And then I knew. I knew what it was Edward Roberts meant to have from us, and it wasn’t me. It had never been me. I had never been special to him. It was Joseph, always, and suddenly every strangeness I’d noted about Edward’s desire, every little thing I’d found odd and dismissed, the way Joseph’s presence excited Edward even in his absence, made sense. I cried out, putting my hand to my mouth almost immediately to stop it, too late, and it was that sound that seemed to galvanize my brother. He looked at me—I saw the misery in his eyes, that haunted look again—and then he pushed Edward hard, so hard that Edward stumbled back. Before Edward gained his feet, Joseph hit him. The cracking thud of the blow resounded. Edward went flying, sprawling on the floor at my feet, hitting his head on the bedpost. A bruise was already forming on his eye.

  “Get the hell out,” Joseph said steadily. “Don’t trouble my sister or me again.”

  Edward scrambled to his feet. He grabbed his shirt from the bed. His eyes were blazing even as the one swelled shut. “You’ll regret this. Both of you,” he snarled. “There’s a word for the two of you. You’ve fooled everyone, but don’t think I’ll let you get away with it.”

  He stumbled from the room. Joseph and I both stood numbly, listening to him clatter down the stairs. The front door slammed shut so loudly I felt the shudder of it up to the third floor.

  It wasn’t until then that my heart broke and the horror of it hit me. It wasn’t until then that I began to cry.

  Joseph took me in his arms. He lifted my chin and kissed away my tears. “Sophie. Sophie. It will be all right, I promise. I promise.” He brought me down on the bed with him, the bed he never slept in, the one he hated, and held me close. We stayed there until dawn as if it were a badge of courage, as if we could somehow banish the old demons that lingered and the ones that had just appeared.

  The next afternoon a message came from Edward’s father saying that he was canceling the commission he’d given Joseph, and, for his wife’s trouble, he would keep the sketch Joseph had already made—a thing of beauty in itself. He hadn’t paid us a cent. By the following day, three invitations to teas and suppers had been rescinded on some pretext or another. The day after that, two women I knew turned away when I stepped into a shop, and hurried off as if they hadn’t seen me.

  “I don’t know what he’s told them,” I said to Joseph in dismay. “What could he have said that wouldn’t hurt him as well?”

  “You do know,” my brother said grimly. “You know very well.”

  That night, at the cafe, as we drank beer and laughed and talked with the artists I thought were our friends, I caught some of them whispering, though they quieted when we came near, and I saw one or two of them staring at me when they thought I wasn’t looking. I knew Joseph saw it too. When we got home that night, he went out again right away, saying only that there was someone he needed to talk to, no matter that it was one in the morning.

  He didn’t return, not until I was at breakfast, when he came through the door of the nursery looking so thunderous I dropped my spoon
into my tea.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Roberts has some of the sketches,” he said, sinking into a schoolboy’s chair that was far too small for him. It creaked beneath his weight. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands.

  “The sketches?” I asked stupidly.

  “How would he have found them?” he asked. “Why would he have them?”

  “I . . . I showed them to him. I didn’t let him take one.”

  “But he knew where they were, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Yes, he did. I didn’t know they were secret.”

  He looked up at me bleakly. “They aren’t secret, Sophie. But why did you need to show him?”

  “What do you mean?” I began to feel uneasy. “They’re beautiful. I wanted him to see how talented you are. And you’ve shown them to others.”

  He let out his breath and looked away. “The salons . . . people there appreciate them. They’ve helped us.”

  “Yes. But I don’t understand what you mean about Edward.”

  Joseph met my gaze steadily. “You already had him, Sophie. There was no point. And now he has two of the ones she made me draw.”

  “I didn’t show him those,” I whispered. “They’re obscene.”

  “Well, he has them. He’s been telling people about them, but thankfully he hasn’t shown them yet.”

  “It wasn’t our fault,” I said weakly. “She made us—”

  Joseph gave me a look. The truth in his eyes silenced me.

  “No one understands,” I managed.

  “No, they don’t. But it doesn’t matter, does it?” He didn’t elucidate, and I didn’t need him to. I knew what it would mean, what people would see. I’d seen it before, hadn’t I? That long-ago morning when Miss Coring had come upon us. Horror and jealousy, arousal and disgust. And while the other sketches had shown the love I felt for my brother, and that he felt for me, Edward had found the ones that showed the ugliness, that made our love into something else. They could destroy us.

  “What does he want?” I asked.

  “Money,” Joseph said frankly. “Money to keep him quiet and buy them back. But it will take almost everything we have. And . . . and we’ll have to leave the city for a time, Sophie. The rumors . . . it would be best if we left.”

  “We could tell everyone the truth. We could tell how he . . . how he attacked you and—”

  “And what? It would only make things worse. He’ll show the sketches in reply and then . . . then it doesn’t matter what’s true. No, it’s best to go away for a while and let the talk die down.”

  “Where would we go?”

  Joseph hesitated. Then he said, quickly, as if he’d been thinking about it for some time, “Everyone’s talking of Venice. And there are people there—people who have money. People who would make good patrons.”

  I remembered the talk I’d heard. “The Bronsons are in Venice, aren’t they? And the Loneghans.”

  “Yes. We won’t have much left when this is over. Maybe not even enough to get us there. But you could figure it out, couldn’t you? You’re good at managing. Perhaps you could find enough to tide us over for a few months. Until the spring at least.”

  “And if you found a patron, it wouldn’t matter how little we start with.”

  He nodded. “I’ll make it all right, Soph. I promise. I’ll make it work. You know I can.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

  He smiled, and in that lovely smile, everything fell away, Edward and the ugliness he’d brought, my own hurt and anger over the way I’d been worked, my foolishness. I forgot it all when Joseph crooked his finger at me, when I went to him, into his arms, the plan and his will already easing, mending, healing. We would go to Venice. We would leave all this behind. We would make my brother as famous as he was meant to be.

  The two of us are marked for something special.

  I felt his kiss on my hair as I clutched him, as I pressed my face into his chest and breathed deep of him, the other part of me, rolling the promise around and around in my head until I was reassured and safe again in the world we had made for each other.

  ODILÉ

  The singer’s body had been taken away. Antonio’s silent efficiency asked no questions, and I’d said only that the man had suffered from a heart condition, which was true—my leeching of his creative vitality had stopped his heart. I regretted it—such a loss of control was not ever what I liked, and it was only further evidence that I could no longer delay. And now two days had passed. I told Antonio to ready the gondola, and pressed my hands to my stomach as if I could press away the pain, and with it, my fear. The monster churned, struggling to emerge. There was no more time.

  “Padrona, there is a man here to see you. Signor Balbi.”

  I jerked around, startled at my maid, Maria’s, voice. Impatiently I said, “Balbi? I don’t know who that is. Get his card and send him away.”

  “He is the police.”

  “The police?”

  She nodded vigorously. I was surprised, and then annoyed and then curious enough that my pain eased. I could not think what the police would want with me, though I was not the least bit trepidatious. What reason had I to fear mortal police? “I see. Very well. Show him in.”

  Mr. Balbi was a tall man with graying hair and an equally gray Vandyke beard. I had the impression of robust fastidiousness, discerning perception, and not a little vanity. His hair was well oiled, his beard immaculately trimmed. He wore black, which reminded me of the old days in Venice, when the nobility had worn only that color, and I had the sense that he’d deliberately dressed to suggest it. His watch chain—only one and unadorned with any kind of charm—was his only decoration.

  “Madame León,” he said as he strode toward me—he spoke immaculate French, though with that Venetian accent, that mangling of consonants. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Inspector Alberto Balbi, of the police department. Thank you for seeing me.”

  I took the card he offered, barely glancing at it before I put it on the table. “How can I help you, Inspector?”

  “A trifling matter, really,” he said with a very pleasant smile. “Last night, we found a body floating in the Rio Orseolo. A man by the name of Giovanni Santo.”

  He looked at me as if he expected a reaction. I had none to give him. The name was unknown to me. “And?”

  The inspector frowned. “Giovanni Santo was last seen with you, madame.”

  My hunger roiled. I could not help the catch of my breath. The Inspector heard it too, I realized. And took it for some admission.

  “It is true, then?”

  I tried to smile. “True? I’m afraid I don’t recognize his name, so I could not tell you.”

  “No? He was a peasant. A street singer.”

  This time, I had to sit down. “Pardon me, Inspector, but I am not at my best this morning.”

  “Ah. I hope you are not ill.”

  “No. A . . . chronic condition, I’m afraid.”

  “A chronic condition?” His dark eyes narrowed. “No other reason? You were not hurt? Not beaten?”

  I realized suddenly what he was truly asking, and I gave him a cold look. “Would you care to check me for bruises, Inspector?”

  “Oh no, I don’t think that will be necessary.”

  “Why are you here, Inspector? Do you mean to ask me if I killed Giovanni—what was his last name again?”

  “Santo.”

  “I haven’t seen him for two days.”

  “But I think you were the last to see him alive, madame. He had been in the water that long.”

  “Do I look as if I could overpower a man like that?”

  He shrugged. “What could not happen in a moment of surprise? An easy push into a rio . . .”

  I regarded him wryly. “You should have been a storyteller, Inspector.”

  “He was your lover, was he not?”

  “He was,” I said wearily. “F
or all of two nights.”

  Balbi raised a dark brow. “How sad for you.”

  “I didn’t know him well enough to be sad,” I told him frankly. “I saw him on the street, and I brought him home. I never asked his name, and I didn’t care to have it. Does that shock you?”

  “Nothing in Venice surprises, madame. We have heard you had an . . . attachment to Nelson Stafford and Jonathan Murphy too.”

  “Yes. What about them? Are you accusing me of killing them as well? Nelson Stafford was a suicide. Jonathan an accident. They had nothing to do with me.”

  “Ah, then it is only that you’re unlucky?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very unlucky. But I do not believe that is a crime.”

  “No, no crime,” Balbi said, shaking his head, a thin smile. “When did you last see Giovanni Santo? Was he alive?”

  “Very much so. He was exhausted. We’d been up all night.” I did not take my gaze from the Inspector’s as I lied. I had no worry for the servants, as both Antonio and Maria were devoted—and overpaid. “I kissed him goodbye. He went off into the morning. I’ve not seen him since.”

  “You didn’t follow him?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t have him followed?”

  “Why would I care to?”

  “To see that he did not go back to his fiancée, perhaps? You were not jealous? Not enraged that there was another?”

  I laughed. “I had no idea that there was. But even so . . . my dear inspector, do I look to you like a woman afraid of competition?”

  His gaze swept me. “No indeed. I should say the opposite in fact, that other women are afraid of you.”

  It was a compliment, but I did not acknowledge it. “I wanted Giovanni Santo for nothing more than his skill as a lover. Which he provided. Gladly. What other women he had, or what else he did, I have no idea. Nor do I care.”

  I waited for him to do what was polite and take his leave, but he only stood there for a moment, looking at me as if he expected some answer to come to him. The only answer there was I couldn’t give him. Nothing about the truth would satisfy. There was nothing he would believe.