Venetian Mask

by Rosalind Laker

  “He was stillborn.”

  “Oh, my God!” His groan racked through him.

  Slowly she raised her head and shook back her hair. He sat with an updrawn knee, his arm folded across it, and his eyes were closed in anguish. Hesitantly she began to tell him how it had all come about. He neither opened his eyes nor moved. When she had finished all she had to say, even that Elizabetta had a strain of Celano blood in her veins, he still remained motionless. If only he had flown into a well-justified temper, which would have been more in character, she could have responded in kind until some sort of healing took place. It was a measure of the depth of his agony that he should be so silent. She did not dare to touch him.

  “Do you hate us both?” she whispered fearfully.

  He opened his eyes as he turned his head to look at her. “Any hate I’ve ever felt has never brushed against you or Elizabetta. I have had plenty of time during my incarceration in this place to evaluate my life and to know what matters most to me. It’s been a comfort to think of your having the companionship of our daughter, for that is what she is, except for an accident of birth in more senses than one.”

  “I’m hoping that out of this night I shall have conceived again.” She seemed unable to raise her voice above a whisper as if the momentum of all that had been revealed had affected her vocal chords. When he made no comment she turned away and pressed her fingers over her quivering mouth. Then she felt his hand slowly drawing her hair back from her face.

  “If that doesn’t happen,” he said quietly, “it won’t be through any lack of love between us.”

  As she looked at him again, he gave a serious smile and drew her to him, her head coming to rest against his shoulder. It was as if they had crossed a great abyss together and were resting safely on the other side.

  When Captain Zeno unlocked the door at six o’clock they were both dressed and standing with their arms around each other. Obedient to the captain’s instructions, Marietta and Domenico immediately exchanged a last fleeting kiss and then she went through the door with a swirl of her cape. As they had arranged, she did not look back after the key was turned on him once more. He did not want her to remember him looking through the bars at her, although he watched her out of sight.

  When Marietta emerged from the prison Sebastiano was waiting for her. The tears she had kept back at her parting with Domenico now overwhelmed her and she was thankful for Sebastiano’s arm as he supported her to the waiting gondola.

  Afterward, as day followed day, Marietta was so haunted by Domenico’s living conditions that she could scarcely eat, and at night she found it impossible to sleep. Lucretia’s instruction in serving at the shop was given by an assistant and her first singing lesson postponed several times before Marietta felt duty-bound to begin teaching her. Elizabetta, as if sensing that Marietta’s thoughts were elsewhere, became difficult and naughty. This added to the strain from which Marietta seemed unable to surface. Adrianna and Elena, whom she had told of her visit to the prison, became increasingly concerned about her, but none of their good advice had any effect. It was as if Marietta had willed herself into sharing Domenico’s suffering.

  Then, early one morning as she wearily left her bed, she experienced a queasiness that was strangely familiar. As the possible reason dawned on her she was overcome by a bout of nausea from which she emerged with rising hope. Throughout that day the improvement in her mood was marked by Adrianna and by those working with her in the shop. Before long Marietta knew beyond any doubt that she was pregnant. Only then did she write to tell Domenico. The letter she eventually received in reply confirmed that he shared her joy.

  SISTERS SYLVIA AND Giaccomina came with Bianca to call on Elena after the siesta hour one afternoon, only to discover that she was away from home. Not wanting to miss an outing, they decided to visit Adrianna instead.

  Bianca was permitted to go on her own into the shop next door in search of Marietta. An assistant showed her through to the office. Marietta, looking up from the accounts, smiled with surprise and closed the ledger immediately, returning her quill pen to its stand.

  “Am I interrupting your work?” Bianca asked. She had grown tall and willowy with a fine figure and a delicate beauty.

  “Not at all. Sit down. I didn’t expect to see you here again so soon. It’s a pleasant diversion for me.”

  Bianca explained how the visit had come about. “Signor Celano was at the palace and invited us to stay for refreshments, but the nuns chose otherwise. He is immensely interested in my flute-playing, always inquiring about my progress. I told him that I’ll be going to Padua with the orchestra soon for a concert.”

  “Are you? That’s splendid. I went there several times to sing. It is an interesting old city.”

  “So Signor Celano told me.” She smiled dreamily, playing absently with her Pietà medallion on its silver chain. “I would have heard more about the place if we had stayed. What a dear man he is!” A soft sigh escaped her and she leaned back in her chair. “Elena can’t have a care in the world, living as she does in such a grand palace with such an attractive husband.”

  Marietta eyed her thoughtfully. Surely the girl was not cherishing romantic dreams of Filippo? Yet, though Bianca was eighteen, that Pietà-protected ingenuousness would make her susceptible to an experienced man’s compliments and smiles, even though she was shy in male company. At a recent Pietà reception Marietta had seen her constant blushes and her swift drifting away from men eager to pay her amorous attention.

  “You mustn’t let yourself be deceived by appearances,” Marietta advised. It was impossible to elaborate to the girl.

  “I’m not,” Bianca answered, believing her own words. “I’ve never heard Elena say a word against him.”

  “No, I’m sure you haven’t,” Marietta commented without expression. It was only to Adrianna and herself that Elena opened her heart. The keen sense of responsibility Marietta had always felt for her goddaughter, even though there were not many years between them, welled up. Maybe it was time the girl emerged from the chrysalis of the Pietà into the outside world. “I was wondering if you would like to come and work in the mask-shop. I need another assistant, and you would have your own room in my apartment. Elizabetta and I would be happy to have you with us.”

  Smiling, Bianca tilted her head to one side as she regarded Marietta fondly. “Dear, kind Marietta. That is what I had always hoped for when I was growing up, wanting to be your sister in a family. But things are different now.” Her voice dropped a note. “My future lies at the Pietà. After another three or four years with the orchestra I shall become a fulltime teacher there.”

  Marietta could understand how the settled routine and security of the Pietà would appeal to the girl’s gentle temperament. “Is that what you really want?”

  Bianca lowered her lashes. “Not exactly, but it is the only option open to me. The man I love is married to someone else.”

  Marietta was dismayed. What she had suspected seemed to have been confirmed. “Tell me you don’t mean Filippo Celano!”

  Bianca threw up her head defiantly. “I know you don’t like him because of the vendetta, but how can you judge? You’ve never talked to him or known how brave he has been about that terrible scar. There is something so boyish about him when he is with me. I believe I understand him better than anyone else and he realizes that, but daren’t tell me.” She clasped her hands together in her lap. “But you needn’t worry. He’ll never know how I feel about him and neither will Elena. I’ve only told you because you’re my godmother and have a right to know why I intend to stay on at the Pietà.”

  “Oh, my dear.” Marietta felt relief. This misplaced worship from afar would soon fade. Venice was full of young men who Bianca would notice eventually and many of them visited the Pietà. “What you have said shall remain between us. It’s right that nobody else should know. But if you do change your mind about coming here you have only to say. Even if by some miracle Domenico should be released fro
m prison it would make no difference, because he was in agreement when I once mentioned I should like you to live with us one day.”

  “How you must miss him!” The girl’s voice was full of sympathy.

  “He is never out of my mind. One day he has to be free again and I live for that.”

  Bianca kept to herself her doubt that it would ever be.

  IT WAS ADRIANNA who first remarked on the increasing time lapses between Elena’s visits. “I don’t understand it. She never used to miss visiting on any one of the children’s birthdays, but recently if those days are out of her routine calling she simply sends a gift with a servant.”

  “It’s the same with our walks,” Marietta remarked, puzzled. “She is full of reasons why she can’t manage to meet me on one day or another.”

  Adrianna did not say any more, but it seemed to her that Elena’s seeing less of the two of them dated from Marietta’s telling her friends under a seal of secrecy about her pregnancy.

  When Marietta next met Bianca at the Pietà she asked the girl if she saw Elena as often as before.

  “Yes,” Bianca replied. “In fact I’m seeing her even more because Sister Giaccomina and I are recataloguing a small section of the Celano library. She is such an authority on ancient volumes and I was her choice as an assistant.”

  “Doesn’t the work interfere with your music?”

  “I take my flute with me and practice there whenever Sister Giaccomina doesn’t need me, which is quite often.” Bianca’s eyes danced. “I believe she would like to make the task last as long as possible. Signor Celano has as many priceless books as Domenico had in his library, according to her.”

  Marietta was still puzzled. “I can’t understand why the Pietà should have been approached when the great library in the Piazzetta would have provided someone for the work. I suppose Elena must have suggested Sister Giaccomina to her husband.”

  Bianca made no comment. “Why did you ask me about Elena?”

  “Neither Adrianna nor I have seen her for three weeks. She must be extremely busy.”

  “Is she? She often wanders into the library to see how we’re getting on and sometimes she listens to me when I’m practicing on my flute in the neighboring salon and gives me guidance.”

  “Do you see much of Filippo?” Marietta asked directly.

  “No. He came once to the library to make sure that the nun and I had settled in and had all we needed.” Bianca shook her head in emphasis. “I told you all there was to tell a while ago. Nothing is amiss and it never will be.”

  Marietta tried to be reassured.

  After she had gone, Bianca went to rehearsal. She was beginning to resent any activity that kept her away from the Palazzo Celano, for every time she went there she hoped Filippo would come again to the library. During that one short visit he had told her, out of the nun’s earshot, that it made him content just to see her there. “In my hectic and somewhat troubled life, Signorina Bianca, you are like a ray of sunshine,” he had said.

  That was all, but she had hugged his words to her and quite often she still felt shy with pleasure at the thought of his paying her such a compliment. She had known already from Sister Giaccomina that when he had interviewed the nun at the Pietà he had suggested that his wife’s goddaughter would be a good choice as her assistant.

  “I’m only a kind of adopted goddaughter to Elena,” Bianca had felt bound to point out to the nun.

  Sister Giaccomina had held up her hands and laughed, already exulting in the honor of having been entrusted with the commission. “The way she helped Marietta look after you and nurse you when you were sick and the constant encouragement she has given you over the years in your flute-playing must give her the right to consider you her goddaughter, even if she did not actually make the vows at your baptism.”

  As the rehearsal dragged on, Bianca wished there was some way she could avoid these sessions, but that was impossible. Fortunately the number of music lessons she was obliged to give had been reduced to one at an early hour each day. At least Sister Giaccomina never went to the Palazzo Celano without her and they were going again that afternoon.

  Elena was on her way out when they arrived. Bianca told her about Marietta’s visit. “She was concerned that neither she nor Adrianna had seen you recently.”

  “I’m on my way to the Calle della Madonna now,” Elena replied.

  When Bianca and the nun had been working for two hours, a steward brought them some refreshments. Afterward, Sister Giaccomina sent her to practice in the salon that opened out from the library. As always, Bianca left the door between the two rooms ajar. She set her music on the stand she was permitted to keep there, and it was not until she came to the end of her second piece that she realized another door had opened silently to admit a listener. His applause took her by surprise and she turned swiftly. Filippo stood in the doorway several feet from her and made no move to come nearer.

  “There are love-words to that traditional Venetian piece. Do you know them, Bianca?”

  “I have heard them.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “I can’t.” She was flustered. To speak such passionate words to him was out of the question, even in the form of a poem, which it had been before being set to music long ago. “The words are written on the music sheet if you wish to read them.”

  Hastily she snatched the music sheet from the stand, scattering others to the floor, and held it out to him. He came across the room and took it from her, but before glancing at it he stooped down even as she did to gather up the fallen sheets. After these had been returned to the stand, Bianca remarking how clumsy it had been of her, he looked at the song again. She was intensely conscious of his height and powerful masculinity. She had never felt more vulnerable. Had she not formed her own judgement of him as a dear man, it might have been possible to believe that he could have snapped her spine like the stem of a flower.

  “Shall I read it aloud?” he asked. “I want to please you.”

  “No! Read it to yourself,” she insisted.

  He glanced sideways at her. She was as frantic as a graceful, swanlike bird fearful of being netted. “You mustn’t mind my flirting with you a little. Most women expect it.”

  “I like nothing false.”

  He was inwardly amused. “I’ll remember that in future,” he promised glibly. “In the meantime, would you object to my singing the song? I know it well.”

  She relaxed immediately. The world of song was entirely different from unembellished spoken words. “I won’t offer to accompany you on my flute, but I do play the harpsichord as well.”

  “Then you shall sing with me!” He caught her by the hand and slid with her, as if on a frozen canal, across the marble floor to the harpsichord at one end of the room. She laughed and he with her. If he had not caught her by the arms when they came to a halt she might have fallen. His gaze went to her mouth, but she moved swiftly away to seat herself at the harpsichord. He put the music in front of her and she sang with him as she played. Their duet brought Sister Giaccomina from the library as Bianca had known it would. The nun smiled and listened attentively.

  “I had not expected a concert at this hour of the day, Signor Celano,” she reproved gently when the song had come to its end. “It was enjoyable, but you have interrupted Bianca’s practice time. I had sent her in here for that reason.”

  Filippo bowed to her. “My apologies, Sister. It was remiss of me. I trust you and Bianca will both forgive me.”

  The syrup worked. The nun was reassured. As he left the room he held Bianca’s eyes with his own. She thought she read in them all that had been conveyed by the love song, and she spent the rest of the day in a dreamlike state. Even though he loved Elena he had deep feelings for her too. She saw Filippo and herself as two noble people turning away from temptation. At the same time she discovered that the burden of self-sacrifice could be extremely heavy.

  ELENA WAS NO longer at ease with Marietta. Her friend’s new preg
nancy had renewed her feelings of guilt for having failed to prevent Domenico’s incarceration, and this burden was eroding the bond that years of close friendship had built up. Indirectly it had affected Elena’s relationship with Adrianna too, since visits to the Savoni household often meant seeing Marietta as well. Elena had begun to dread their concerned queries about her noticeable absences, which somehow she managed to fend off with excuses that she hoped sounded reasonable. It was the difficulty of keeping up this front that made her cut down even more the times she went to see them. Yet these two Pietà women were still her dearest friends, their well-being all important to her, and her feelings for them unchanged.

  The drifting apart, however, could not be rectified so long as Domenico was in prison. Elena despised herself for having failed to gather anything to aid his defense during the trial. Nothing could shake her conviction that if she had used her wits better or strained her ears harder, she would have gathered some proof of the conspiracy that the Celanos had plotted against him. Her sense of shame at her failure, which had never left her, renewed itself to a point where she scarcely knew how to live with herself whenever she remembered that Marietta, now into her fifth month, was to bring up a second child without the man who should have been at her side.

  Again and again Elena went back in her mind, trying to imagine what else she could have done in Domenico’s cause and what her own incompetence had caused her to overlook. As well as eavesdropping at the meetings—pathetic in itself as she recalled, with a sting of embarrassment, the lawyer’s almost derisive comment—she had searched through Filippo’s desk and anywhere else that might have revealed papers from those conclaves of the Celano brothers. Had she been as diligent as possible in that search? How could she be sure of anything when blame weighed so heavily on her brain?

  “Sister Giaccomina and Bianca are at the Palazzo Celano again this afternoon,” Elena said as she sat drinking hot chocolate with her two friends at Adrianna’s house.