In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  “So.” And her voice is different, as if it too has changed with the weather. “This is how it seems to me. If we substitute the bachelors for the clergy and add all the businessmen and foreign merchants and ambassadors, then there is as good a market here as in Rome. And if the others are all as they were today, then in the right clothes I could take on any one of them.”

  As she says the words, she stares straight at me to read any shadow of doubt she might see there. Her hood is pushed back and her hair secured into a wide band woven with fake flowers, so that it is impossible to tell its real length. While the decoration is secondhand, the face is her own. In Rome, toward the end of her reign, she had been known to let young painters measure the distances between her chin, her nose, and her forehead in their search to verify the dimensions of perfect symmetry. But what made their hands tremble was the way those fierce green eyes looked directly into theirs and the stories of how, when she was naked, she could cloak herself in her hair alone. Her hair. That is my only question.

  “I know, I think about it constantly. But La Draga has a source. There are certain convents where she heals sick nuns and where there is a market for novitiates’ locks. And she knows a woman who can weave new hair into old using golden threads so that the join leaves barely a mark. I think we must try it. If we wait for mine to grow back long enough, I’ll be using as much chalk on my cheeks as the Salvanagola woman. We have enough money for it, yes? How many rubies do we have left?”

  I take a breath. “After this last one I changed, two, including the great one. And a few good pearls.”

  “We have spent four rubies in six months? How is that possible?”

  I shrug. “We feed a household now. Your hair grows again and your face is lovely.”

  “Still, La Draga’s prices are not so expensive, surely?”

  “No, but neither is she cheap. We gambled you would recover quickly, and so you have. No one doubts her skill, but she charges witches’ rates and it’s a sellers’ market.”

  “Oh, Bucino…La Draga is no witch.”

  “That’s not what the gossip says. She does a good enough imitation. Her eyes are turned inside out, and she walks like a spider with half its legs cut off.”

  “Ha! You are a dwarf who waddles with a grin like an imp from Hell, yet you’d be the first to skewer anyone who read the Devil into your deformity. And since when do you listen to gossip as if it were fact?” She stares at me. “You know, Bucino, I do believe you’re cross with her because she spends more time with me than you do. You should join us. Her wit can be as ripe as yours, and she sees well enough into people without using her eyes.”

  I shrug. “I’m too busy for women’s talk.”

  It’s true that while my lady’s recovery is as much in my interest as in hers, the endless business of women’s beauty can crush a man with boredom. But it is more than that. My crossness, as Fiammetta calls it, is real enough. For all her magic fingers, La Draga still sends shudders through me. I came upon them together once at the end of the day, in a fit of laughter over some tale my lady was telling about the wonder and richness of life in Rome. They did not notice me right away, and though no one can read greed into a blind woman’s eyes, I swear in that moment I could feel longing like a fast fever in her, and I wondered how wise my lady was to trust her so.

  For her part, La Draga is as wary of me as I am of her. I get none of her laughter or wit; instead we meet only briefly at the end of each week, when she comes for her money. She stays standing at the kitchen door, twisted inside her cloak, her eyes milk-thick so that she seems to be looking backward into her own skull. Which suits me well enough, for I don’t want her looking any further into mine. She asked me a few weeks ago if my ears hurt with the cold and said that if they did, she could give me something to help with the pain. I hate the fact that she knows so much about my body, as if she feels herself superior to me, she with her twisted spine and mad blindness. Her eyes and the stink of her remedies make me think of drowning in scummy water. At first, when I was more homesick than I would let myself admit, she summed up all that I loathed most about the city. Now, even if I am wrong about her, it is hard to break the habit of crossing swords.

  “Well, all I know is she can cure more than wounds, and despite her bent body, she feels sorry for no one, least of all herself. Which is a quality you share with her. I think you would like her if you gave her a chance. Still…we have more important things to do than argue about La Draga. If we put the pearls and the great ruby together, do we have enough to set ourselves up?”

  “It depends on what we’re buying,” I say, relieved to be back to business. “For clothes, it’s better than Rome. The Jews running the secondhand market are sharp, and they sell tomorrow’s fashions before today’s are old. Yes”—I put up my hand to stem her objection—“I know how much you hate it, but new clothes are a rich whore’s luxury, and for now it will have to do.”

  “Then I do the choosing. That goes for the jewelry too. Your eye is good, but Venetians can spot a fake long before the foreigner can. I’ll need my own perfume too. And shoes—and they cannot be secondhand.” I bow my head to hide my smile: the pleasure is as much in the edge of her hunger as in the rush of her knowledge. “What about furniture? How much must we buy?”

  “Less than in Rome. Hangings and tapestries can be hired. So can seats, chests, plates, linen, ornaments, glasses…”

  “Oh, Bucino.” She claps her hands in delight. “You and Venice were made for each other. I had forgotten how much it is the city of the secondhand.”

  “That’s only because so many fortunes are broken as well as made here. And,” I say, because she needs to remember that I am as good at my job as she is at hers, “to that end, if we have to hire a house, we will start in debt, and we have no security to buy us credit.”

  She stops and thinks for a moment. “Is there any other way to begin?”

  “Like what?”

  “We take a house but hold it only until we have snared the right prey.”

  I shrug. “God knows, you have grown lovely again, but even with new hair, it will take time to build up a trade.”

  “Not if we were offering something special. Something—immediate.” And she rolls the word in her mouth. “So imagine this. A lovely young woman comes to town and takes a house in a place where the world walks by. She is new, fresh. She sits at the open window with a copy of Petrarch in her hands—my God, we even have the right book already—and smiles at those who pass. Word gets around, and some young—and not so young—men come and look at her. She doesn’t move away as modesty demands she should but instead lets them gaze more, and when she does notice them, she is coy and flirtatious at the same time. After a while a few of them knock on the door to find out who she is and where she comes from.” And there is mischief in her eyes as she tells it now. “You didn’t know me then, Bucino, but I played this once to perfection. Mother took a house near the Sisto bridge for a week when we first came to Rome. She had had me practice every smile and gesture for weeks before. We had twelve bids within the first two days—twelve!—most of them from men of substance. We were set up in a small house on the Via Magdalena two weeks later. I know, I know, it is a risk. But I was never seen here—my mother made sure of that—and I am not so old that I couldn’t pass for younger. As far as they are concerned, I could be fresh merchandise.”

  “Until they get you between the sheets.”

  “Ah, that’s where La Draga comes in. She has a trick”—she is laughing now, so I don’t know if this is sport or not—“for women who need to fool their husbands on their wedding night. A plug made with gum alum, turpentine, and pigs’ blood. Imagine that! Instant virginity. See—I told you you would like her. It’s a shame you aren’t taller with less stubble. We could dress you to play my mother.” But we are both laughing now. “As it is, they’d have to go through Meragosa, and I’d lose the highest bidder before they even got halfway up the stairs…. Oh, Bucino, you should h
ave seen the look in your eyes. I do believe that I took you in for a moment. Though I am not saying I couldn’t do it, you understand…. Oh, it is an age since I have fooled you so well.”

  There were times in Rome—when the money was flowing and when the wit in our house was such that it was the best place to spend an evening even if you didn’t end up sleeping with the hostess—when we had laughed until the tears rolled down our faces. For all its corruption and hypocrisy, the city was a magnet for clever, ambitious men: writers who could use words to charm their way under women’s skirts or to launch satires as deadly as a hail of arrows into their enemy’s reputation, artists with the talent to turn empty ceilings into visions of Heaven, with Madonnas as beautiful as any whores rising out of the clouds. I have never known such excitement as when I was around them, and though we are alive when so many of them are dead, I still miss it dreadfully.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing…Of the past.”

  “You still don’t like it here, do you?”

  I shake my head. But I keep my eyes somewhere else.

  “It doesn’t smell so bad now.”

  “No.”

  “And with the ships in and my looks back, we can make things work for us.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are people who think Venice is the most wonderful city on earth.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’ve met them.”

  “No you haven’t. You’ve met the ones who boast about it because it makes them rich. But they don’t really understand its beauty.” She looks out over the sea for a moment, her eyes squinting in the sunlight. “You know what is wrong with you, Bucino? You live with your eyes too close to the ground.”

  “It’s because I’m a dwarf,” I say, with an irritation that surprises me. “And it stops me from getting my feet wet.”

  “Ah. Water again.”

  I shrug. “You don’t like men with big bellies, I don’t like water.”

  “Yes, but when they come with purses the same size as their paunches, I get over it quickly enough. I can’t make the water go away, Bucino. It is the city.”

  “I know that.”

  “So perhaps you have to learn to look at it differently.”

  I shake my head.

  She pushes herself against me playfully. “Try it now. Look at it. There—in front of you.”

  I look. A wind has come up under the sun and is cutting the surface into fitful waves. If I were a fisherman and saw a man walking toward me over it now, I would surely lay down my net and go with him. Even if his Church did end up selling pardons to the rich and damning the poor.

  “See how the light and the wind move over it, so that the whole surface shimmers? Now, think about the city. Imagine all those rich houses with their inlays and frescoes, or the great mosaics on San Marco. Every one of them is made from a thousand tiny fragments of colored glass, though of course you don’t notice that when you first see them because your eye makes the picture whole.

  “Now look back at the water again. Squeeze your eyes, tight. See? It’s the same, yes? A surface made up of millions of fragments of water lit by the sun. And it’s not only the sea. Think of the canals, the way the houses are reflected in them, still, perfect, like images in a mirror; only, when the wind blows or a boat goes by, the image breaks and trembles. I don’t know when I first saw it—I must have been a child, because I was allowed to walk out with my mother or Meragosa sometimes—but I can still remember the thrill of it. Suddenly Venice wasn’t solid at all, just made up of pieces, fragments of glass, water, and light.

  “My mother thought there was something wrong with my eyes, because I kept squinting as we walked. I tried to explain it, but she didn’t understand. Her eyes were always focused on what was in front of her. She had no time for frills or fancies. For years I thought I was the only one who could see it. As if it was my secret. Then, when I was thirteen and started to bleed, she put me into the convent to learn decorum and protect my precious gum alum, and suddenly it was all taken away from me. No water, no sunlight. Instead, everywhere I looked there was only stone and brick and high walls. For the longest time I felt as if I’d been buried alive.” She pauses. “I felt the same thing when we first went to Rome.”

  I stare out over the sea. We used to talk together about all manner of things, she and I: the price of pearls, the rise or fall of a rival, the wages of sin, the judgment of God, and the wonder of how two paupers like us came to find themselves invited to the feast. If I had been born full-size with a purse as big as my prick, it would have been her brain as much as her body that ensnared me. But, as she often tells me, I am more a woman than a man in some things.

  A small fleet of boats are making their way across from Murano to the north shore, their hulls splashes of solid black in a multicolored sea. She is right, of course: once you look hard enough, the surface is its own mosaic, each and every fragment a sparkling mix of water and light.

  But that still doesn’t mean you can’t drown in it. “How long did it take you to get used to it?” I ask grimly.

  She laughs and shakes her head. “From what I remember, I don’t think I began to feel better until the money started flowing in.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The world becomes busier as we move back into town. We pass noisy knots of men, some laborers, some youngbloods in embroidered jackets with legs as colorful as the striped mooring poles in the Grand Canal. My lady keeps her body covered and her head well down, but neither of us can miss a rising excitement in the air. For a city known for its sense of order, Venice also understands the need for release. There have been so many feast days since we got here that I am beginning to lose count of the saints we have celebrated. By nightfall the Piazza San Marco will be heaving. Though it is too early for street mayhem yet.

  As we turn in to the Campo Santa Maria Nova, I hear the rush of the feet too late, and they hit us head-on. The impact hurls me against the wall, knocking my breath out at the same instant as I see her lose her balance and sprawl onto the cobblestones. The men are so intent on their destination they don’t even pause to register the damage. But halfway across the campo, a Turk in turban and flowing green robes has watched it happening, and before I can recover myself, he is at her side, solicitous for her welfare.

  Her cloak is half off, her hood has fallen from her head, and as he raises her from the ground, I watch their eyes meet and I know that she will not be able to resist the challenge.

  If there were not so many rules to hinder them, I think that men would look at women all the time. Once there is food enough in one’s stomach, what else is there to do in life? You see it every day with women in the market or on the streets: the way men’s eyes fix on them, like iron snapping onto a magnet, scooping their breasts out of their bodices, lifting petticoats and parting shifts, savoring thighs and bellies, burrowing into the beard that hides the moist little pleat beneath. Whatever the priests may tell you about the Devil, for most men it is so natural that it is like a second language, chattering away under the surface of life, louder than prayer, louder even than the promise of salvation. And while I may be small, I am as fluent in its vocabulary as any man twice my size.

  So I also understand something of the thrill a man might feel if such a moment were to be reversed and a woman were to look at a man in the same way. In all my years, the only women I have ever seen do it with conviction are either drunk or professional. And while most men, if they were honest, would not refuse either, if they had the choice they would surely take the second, for it is only women like my lady who make the idea of desire as much a thing of joy and mischief as of sin and desperation.

  Or such has been my observation of Christian men. As to the effect of her talent on a heathen—well, I have never seen it until now, though the gossip on the street is that the Turks are so jealous of their women that they do not even allow their painters to put their likenesses onto canvas in case their beauty should inflame other men. Which, i
f you think about it, would suggest that they are as susceptible to temptation as any men, regardless of creed.

  By the time I get my breath back, it is over. They are standing, facing each other: she smiling, sweet now rather than coquettish, her hand on her breast, protecting and exposing the paleness of her skin underneath, while he, dark eyes in a dark face, is still looking, his attention as fierce as a bright ray of sunlight. Her skills work, it seems, with heathens too.

  “Are you hurt, my lady?” I say loudly, shouldering my way into the magic circle and kicking her in the shin somewhat more sharply than I had intended.

  “Ah! Oh, no, I am quite fine. This courteous gentleman—er…?” She stops.

  “Abdullah Pashna. From Istanbul, or Constantinople, as you still call it.” And while there are no doubt as many Pashnas in Constantinople as you might find Corners or Loredans in Venice, the name comes laden with mystery. “At your service, Madam…?”

  “Fiammetta Bia—”

  “If you are well, then we are late,” I interrupt rudely. I look up at him. “Sorry, Magnifice Pashna, but my lady is due at the convent.” And I hit the word hard. “To visit her sisters.”

  To my disgust, his look is more amused than aggrieved. “Then I will accompany you both to the door. Your fellow Venetians are fighting one another on a bridge in the Cannaregio, and the city has gone mad to see the show.”

  “Thanks. But we prefer to go alone.”

  “Is that your opinion too, my lady Bia—?”

  “Bianchini.” She enunciates carefully. “Oh, you’re very kind, sir,” she goes on, her voice like a feather over skin. “But it is probably better that I travel with my servant.”

  He stares at us both, then turns and gives her a little bow, holding out his hand. The wild scent of ambergris from his glove rises up to torment us with its price tag. I feel her waver, and if there were not a risk of crippling her, I might kick her again. But she holds firm.