Putting the knife back where he had found it, Modesto turned his attention back to the second book, bound like the first in vellum and fastened shut with thin leather laces. This too was carefully inscribed Book of Encounters, and had been dated some year or so previously.
He flipped open the loose-knotted laces and turned to the first few pages. Reading through a few lines, he clicked his tongue in irritation.
“Was it that long ago? Bloody man—I can’t believe he’s been coming here this long!”
***
And then this evening I find myself persuading an anxious new patron that, as far as I am concerned, it is in fact entirely acceptable for him to vent his frustrations with his—so he tells me—frigid wife upon my expensive arse as often and as vigorously as he wishes. So long as he pays me what I ask for. (Which I think in his case will not be too much. He’s certainly not rich.) He’s a big, sweet-natured man and much to my surprise, he’s charmingly reluctant to do anything which might cause me the merest fraction of a second’s discomfort. In fact, it takes me much of our time together, on this first occasion, to persuade him to lay hands on me at all, despite his obvious hunger for relief—such is his guilt at his infidelity.
***
“I’ve never understood why you indulge him the way you do,” Modesto muttered moodily, shaking his head in disbelief. Turning over several more pages, he read;
***
But sometimes I feel as though I am doing no more than wallowing through my life like a sun-warm sow in a swamp. I watched a big black pig yesterday, deliberately tipping over its water trough and then coating itself in the resultant glistening mud. It lay on its side with its little eyes closed and with a smug smirk of blissful decadence on its face, and as I watched, I saw myself, sweat-damp and bone-weary, basking in the admiration of a satisfied customer and looking, I’m sure, just as complacent as did that sow, lazing in the heat of the afternoon sun. Though perhaps—I hope—a little prettier.
***
Modesto now puffed his amusement in his nose. He looked up, hearing footsteps on the stairs, and Francesca came back into the room, with a piece of bread and a length of smoked sausage in her hands. Her mouth was full; she chewed and swallowed quickly and clumsily, waving her sausage at him, obviously wanting to speak, and then said, “What are you reading?”
Modesto raised an eyebrow. “Your description of yourself as a pig in the mud…” he said.
Frowning quizzically, Francesca crossed the room to peer over Modesto’s shoulder, and then laughed. “I don’t remember writing that at all. I’m not sure why I keep all those books.”
“Because I tell you to, that’s why,” Modesto said, snapping shut the volume he held and holding it up toward her, pointing it at her like an accusatory finger.
Francesca smothered a laugh, and bobbed a curtsy. “I’m so sorry, Signore,” she said in a servant’s wheedling tone of subservience. “Whatever you say, Signore…”
“Oh, go and finish your sausage,” Modesto said. He could feel a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, but deliberately twitched it to immobility. Then the smile faded, and he said quietly, “Where does the knife come from, Signora?”
“Knife?”
He pointed into the box.
A pause.
“It’s Michele’s. I took it away from him the other day. Much to his annoyance, I have to admit.”
“When was that?”
“Couple of weeks ago.”
Modesto remembered with a little lurch of his guts the scuffle he had watched from the doorway, and the glittering object that had clattered to the floor.
“Would you like me to…dispose of it for you?” he said.
“No. Thank you, caro, but I suppose I should really give it back to Michele. He says he feels naked without a knife and he’s too mean to buy a new one. I’ll let him have it back next time he’s here, but I’ll tell him to take it away.”
“Make sure you do.”
Francesca smiled and ducked into another little curtsy. “Whatever you say, Signore,” she repeated, once more in a husky parody of servility.
Modesto shook his head. “I mean it.” He paused, then said, “Did you say you wanted to go back to the Via Santa Lucia this morning, Signora?”
“Yes. I promised Bella and Beata I’d take them down to the docks today. But, oh, dear.” She yawned, and rubbed her eyes with the back of the hand holding the bread. “Oh, Modesto, it’s not that I don’t want to—I love taking them out and I know they adore seeing the ships—it’s just that—I really am tired today.”
“I’ll take them, if you like.”
“Oh, caro, would you?”
“I’d be pleased to. I’ll tidy up in here, we can go back to Santa Lucia together, then you can sleep for a couple of hours while I walk the girls down to the waterfront. They like going with me, I think.”
Francesca smiled. “Do you know, I’ve never stopped being grateful to the Duke of Salerno for having decided to engage a castrato soprano to sing at his thirtieth birthday party.”
She finished her sausage, sucked the tips of her fingers, leaned across and kissed Modesto on the cheek. Then, sitting down in a chair near the window, she tipped her head back so that the sun fell across her face and closed her eyes, heaving in a long sigh and blowing it out again softly. Watching her as he began to collect up her scattered undergarments, Modesto saw her obvious fatigue and frowned. He shook his head. Her heart’s not in this game like it used to be, he thought. Not since that boy’s visit.
Fourteen
Carlo della Rovere swore as a thick-set man in filthy, salt-stiff breeches stepped backward and trod heavily on his foot. “Mind where you’re bloody going, stronzo!”
“Beg pardon…” the seaman muttered, shifting his clearly heavy armful of rolled canvas more securely up into his arms and moving away from Carlo without turning his head. Carlo scowled at the man’s back and spat onto the dockside. He bent down and rubbed his foot.
Looking about him, he saw some dozen ships of varying sizes—two- and three-masted caravels, a heavy, square-rigged galleon, one very battered old carrack with filthy brown sails, and a pretty little sciabecco, very like beloved —had been made fast alongside the many wharves and jetties, while several more vessels rode at anchor out in the glittering water of the bay. A stiff breeze had picked up since the morning, and the air was now heavy with the ceaseless slap of rope against wood, with the muffled crumpling of furled canvas and with the screaming oaths of the thousand wheeling gulls that rode the wind in buffeting circles overhead. The dock itself was crowded: flamboyantly dressed merchantmen arm-in-arm with women decked out in peacock-bright finery; nut-brown, bone-thin sailors with white-rimed breeches and bare torsos, seemingly carved from polished teak; wide-eyed urchins gazing in envy at the insolent faces of those boys already employed aboard ship; ill-clad women with tousled hair and provocative expressions, on the lookout for work.
Carlo pushed his hair out of his eyes and began to chew one of his fingernails. “Come on! Come on!” he muttered under his breath, the words distorting around his fingertip. “Don’t keep me bloody waiting too much longer, you bastard!”
Sitting on the butt end of an ancient old gun, embedded in the wharf as a bollard, Carlo searched the crowd for the hundredth time, one leg twitching convulsively, his eyes flickering from face to face, from stranger to stranger. He stopped chewing his nail and began tapping his closed lips with his fingers; exasperation was now clamping his teeth together until they ached.
And then his attention was caught by a man, hand in hand with two little girls in matching dresses. This was not the man he sought, but for some reason the new arrival seemed vaguely familiar. As Carlo watched, the newcomer released the children’s hands and pointed up into the web of rigging above him. Both girls stared upward in the direction indicated, nodding a
t the miming of what appeared to be the tying of a complicated knot. Then the man smiled, now spreading his arms wide in illustration of some explanation Carlo could not hear, his face alight with pleasure, and the little girls laughed. Carlo could not immediately place him, but he knew he had never seen these children before. He stared at them. They were identical. Absolutely indistinguishable. His gaze flicked from one to the other; momentarily distracted from his irritation, he found himself amused and entertained by the girls’ extraordinary likeness.
And then, with a sudden stab of realization, he knew where he had seen the man before.
***
An evening a few weeks previously. A doorstep in the Via San Tommaso.
“Signore, this is my brother, Gianni. I imagine you are expecting him—he has an engagement here this evening.”
The stocky man with the black eyes nods and steps back, arm outstretched in welcome, but Gianni does not move. He stands with his arms folded and his shoulders up near his ears. Carlo grabs his elbow. “Now, now, fratellino,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint the lady…”
“Get off me, Carlo.”
“A little nervous, Signore, I’m afraid,” Carlo says in amused apology.
The man at the door says nothing. Carlo sees the expression of suppressed terror on his brother’s face, and laughs aloud.
***
It was her pimp—that woman’s—that overpriced whore of Michele’s, Carlo thought, remembering the money he had lost on that venture.
The “pimp” caught his eye and started in recognition. Inclined his head.
“Signore!” Carlo called, and, welcoming the distraction, he stood up and began to walk toward the three newcomers. “Signore!” he said again.
Another nod.
“I didn’t know you had children, Signore.”
A pause.
“They are not mine.”
The girls’ liquid-eyed prettiness made sudden sense to Carlo. “Ah—they’re hers, then?”
“These are Signora Felizzi’s daughters, if that’s who you mean, yes.”
The two children stared up at him.
“And what brings you to the dock, Signore?” Carlo said.
“The children enjoy seeing the ships.”
“Their mother…otherwise engaged, then, is she?” Carlo said, raising his eyebrows and smirking as he imagined the possibilities.
The man with the black eyes smiled, but said nothing.
And then, pounding feet and an anxious shout from behind them. “Rovere!”
Carlo spun around. A squat figure with a softly wizened face like an ageing apple was elbowing his way through the milling crowd.
“Ramacciotti! About bloody time!”
The little man was panting, and sweat was beading his forehead and upper lip.
“Where the hell have you been?” Carlo said.
***
Modesto watched as the man called Rovere gripped the newcomer by the upper arm and leaned in close toward him. Both men began to walk away up the wharf toward the brightly painted galleon.
“Who was that man, Desto?” one of the girls asked in a whisper. Her grip on his hand had tightened.
“Someone I met recently.”
“Does he know Mamma?”
“No.” Modesto crouched down between the girls and smiled at each in turn. “No, he doesn’t. Don’t let’s worry about him. Let’s think about food instead. Are you hungry? Would you like to see if we can find some comfits? Or some dried figs? Or perhaps, if you’re very lucky a…a sugar pig?”
Enthusiastic nods.
“Come on then, see over there—there’s somewhere we should be able to buy something, and then, if you like, I’ll finish my story on the way home.”
Modesto pointed along the wharf to where a likely stall was attracting a fair amount of attention, and the three of them began to walk toward it. The stabbing pain in his chest occasioned by Rovere’s presumption that the girls were his children was subsiding. A needling sense of unease, however, continued to unsettle him, though he could not determine why this should be.
Fifteen
“I shall be home well before sunset, I hope, Maria,” Filippo said as he drained his cup of watered wine and wiped it out with the last piece of bread. “I had thought I would be detained again tonight, but Vasquez for some reason seems to have other things than work on his mind for once—I have no idea what those things might be, of course; he does not see fit to tell me of his private affairs, but he has been quite distracted for days—and, thank Heavens, he has not mentioned…mmn…that accurshed piece of transhlation since lasht week.” He had taken an apricot from a bowl in the middle of the table as he spoke and bitten it in half: with his mouth thus packed, his last few words were almost incomprehensible. He picked the exposed stone out of the other half of the apricot with one finger and threw it into a nearby bowl.
“Translation?”
Filippo waved the rest of the apricot at her as he swallowed. “Oh, you know—that infernally tedious document that I have been working on for a couple of weeks. I’ll bring it home with me and work on it here.”
Maria said, “I thought you told me that was finished.”
Filippo frowned. “I know what I said. I know what I told Vasquez. But, well…perhaps ‘finished’ was something of an exaggeration…”
“Filippo, is there a problem with it?”
He sighed and shook his head. “No. I must simply apply myself to it a little more diligently. It is not difficult, merely intensely boring.”
Maria looked into her husband’s entirely familiar face and, with a pinprick of shock, felt Filippo’s gloomy anticipation of tedium as though it were her own—the feeling moved within her as if she had occasioned it herself—and in a buffeting tangle of sensation, for a fractured second, she was her husband. She saw him from the inside outward. All Filippo’s frustrations, his boredom, his guilt at his lies and deceit, his desire for her, the despairing anger Maria saw in him when he came to her bedchamber on those occasions when he could not contain himself—it all screamed through her mind and her body, passing so swiftly that as fast as she acknowledged the sensation, it was gone. Shuddering in its wake, though, was a new and raw appreciation of Filippo’s vulnerability.
And to her intense surprise, at that moment, she wanted very much to lean across the table, hold his face in her hands, and kiss him.
But she couldn’t move.
“I’ll expect you in time for a meal tonight then,” she said.
***
The wind was from the southwest, and a smell of wet ropes and fish from the wharves pricked at Maria’s nostrils as she began to walk alone toward San Giacomo degli Spagnoli. Filippo had left the house; Emilia was preparing a meal in the kitchen and now wanted to spend a few moments alone in the church to try to settle her unquiet thoughts.
There were times when her sister’s company became irksome even to her: she knew that Filippo struggled to contain his dislike of Emilia and, while Maria loved her sister and was still glad she had been able to offer her a home, she could easily understand why another might find her company difficult. Emilia was intractably conservative in her tastes and, raised as Maria had been by the passion-fearing Sisters, found any display of emotion unpleasant and upsetting. Maria wondered again, as she had done the other day, if Emilia was concealing as much turbulence and confusion behind her expressionless face as she herself hid so carefully inside her own dignified exterior. She did not feel close enough to Emilia to ask her.
Maria held in one hand her copy of The Book of the City of Ladies, which she hoped to read for a while after she had finished at San Giacomo. She needed to be quite alone for a while. She had little more than a few pages left—the red calfskin strip now lay almost flush with the back cover of the book
—and she wanted to find a quiet spot where she could finish the story without fear of interruption.
She reached the church, opened the door, and stepped into the gloom. No more than a handful of silent figures sat or stood dotted around the cavernous interior as Maria walked up to a bench toward the front and knelt down. The young priest who normally heard her confession walked across the width of the church, peered down the length of the building, and quickened his pace. She placed her book on the seat, clasped her hands, and rested her forehead against her knuckles; her elbows pressed painfully into the wood of the pew in front, and her crossed thumbs pushed up against the bridge of her nose. Eyes tightly closed, she tried to contain her fragmented thinking and order it all into something resembling a prayer, but the words and images danced before her, mocking her attempts and refusing to be disciplined.
Maria felt tears sting behind her eyes as anger began to seep through her. Anger with Filippo for wanting so frequently what she found so difficult to give him—and then for obtaining it elsewhere. Anger with the Sisters for so effectively having bricked her up inside her own body—and anger with herself for suddenly, after so many years, needing to break through those fortifications, but so pitifully lacking the means to do so. Anger with God for playing such thoughtless games with her emotions. It all churned in her chest and up into her throat; she swallowed quickly to suppress a scream. She pressed so hard against her forehead with her clasped thumbs that it hurt and she began to feel sick.
After a moment’s acute discomfort, she lifted her head. Several people had seated themselves near her while she had been struggling. With a needling start of recognition, Maria saw that one of them was the beautiful woman with the braided hair whom she had seen last time she had made her confession. The woman’s head was bent over her hands: the elaborate decoration around the upper edge of her dress gave to her neck a sense of slender vulnerability.
Her own attempts at prayer quite forgotten, Maria watched the woman again for some moments, fascinated by her air of exotic opulence. She stared at her, awed by the richness of the fabrics the woman wore, fascinated by the brazen glitter of the ornaments adorning her hair, neck, ears, and hands, charmed by the voluptuousness of the painted mouth as the woman silently murmured her clearly heartfelt orations. Then, catching the baleful eye of a black-clad old crone across the aisle, Maria felt herself blush, embarrassed to have been caught so openly watching another penitent.
Courtesan's Lover Page 14
