In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  “Yes, partners. For good and bad. Wasn’t that what we agreed?”

  “Which means what? Two people who tell each other the truth, however difficult it is.”

  “Yes.”

  But she keeps on looking at me.

  “So why don’t we talk about Meragosa, Bucino? The woman who cheated us out of a small fortune. Except it wasn’t just us, was it? Because she cut her thieving teeth on someone else. Before us she cheated my mother, too. Didn’t she?” And her voice is steady and cool.

  “I…What do you mean?”

  “I mean you told me that Meragosa looked after her. That she cared for her in her last illness. And because I believed you, I believed her when she told me the same thing. But it wasn’t true, was it? She didn’t help her. She just watched her die and bled her dry. La Draga told me yesterday before she left. She said the rumor on the streets was that my mother died of the pox. And that she had never once been called to visit her. Yet she is the best healer there is. Maybe she couldn’t have cured her, but she would have helped. But Meragosa didn’t ask her. She left my mother to rot.” She holds my gaze. “Are you telling me you didn’t know that, Bucino? Was I really the only one who was so fooled?”

  I open my mouth to let out the lie, but it gets caught in my teeth. She is right. If we cannot tell the truth to each other, we are lost, and, my God, we need each other now.

  “Look…I…at the time I didn’t think it would help you to know.”

  “No? You don’t think if you had told me that I might have suspected her more, watched her more closely? And in that way we might not be here today.”

  Ah, but this is a swamp in which we will both drown. I take a breath. “Actually, you know what I think, Fiammetta? I think you did know. Somewhere. Only you preferred to believe what she told you because it hurt less.”

  “In which case you have nothing to blame yourself for. Do you?” And the words come out roasted in scorn as she turns away.

  If I am the more guilty, then my penance takes a cruel form: thrumming legs and howling backache as I cross the length and breadth of the city trying to find her. Day after day I trudge the markets to see if I might spot her lumpen figure gloating over new fabrics or fingering cakes of sweet scented soaps with which to clean her foul crevices. But if she is buying, it isn’t in any shop or stall I ever find. I try to see the world through her eyes. Where would I go now, what riches would I covet or what rock would I find to crawl under? Three hundred ducats. You could live like a noble for months or a rat for years. For all her greed, I think she is too shrewd to squander it all.

  After the markets I go to the rat runs, places near the Arsenale where the ship workers live, where strangers can disappear into streets of one-room slums and a woman can spend a lifetime sewing sails or braiding strands of ropes together in a hall so big that those who have seen it say you could launch a ship in it. A person who wanted to could get lost easily enough here. Once I think I see her crossing a wooden bridge near the walls of the shipyard itself, and I run till my thighs are singing to catch up with her, but when I reach her, she turns into another ugly, old crone wearing a cloak that is too rich for her, and her screams send me reeling. I walk slum streets and knock on doors, but I have no money to loosen tongues, and while the abuse I take suits my mood, even humiliation becomes tedious after a while.

  Eventually, I end up in some foul part of town where my nose is assaulted by the stink coming from a drained canal, now a quicksand of mud into which a dwarf would sink as fast as a fat pebble. Running from its stench, I find a drinking hole where I spend the night turning my stomach on teriaca, a tipple that would be poison in any state except one where the government earns revenue from brewing it. That doesn’t keep me from drinking more of it. For a man scared of drowning, I am lost in liquid now, but then punishment can be a sweet pain sometimes. I forfeit another day and night throwing my guts up and finally wake on the edge of a canal with the stark comfort that there is no farther to fall.

  It is three days since I left the house. I have never been away without my lady’s knowledge for so long. It is time to leave Meragosa to her devils and come home to face our own.

  By the time I drag myself back, it is early afternoon. I arrive at the house by way of the bridge, where the sun plays so bright on the water that it hurts my eyes to look. My God, one day Venice will be beautiful and I will be ready to appreciate it. But not today. I see her before she sees me. She is standing at the window staring out through half-open shutters, a robe pulled around her, her hair crumpled over her shoulders, as if she is waiting for someone. I am about to call to her, for I know she will be worried, when something in her gaze stops me. On the other side, the leathery old bat is at her station, mouth silently muttering into the empty air. They seem to be staring at each other. What do they see? The journey from the dream to the nightmare? For when it comes down to it, what is it that separates the two of them but a slice of water and a fat span of years?

  When I study women on the street (for it is my business, remember, as well as my pleasure), I think sometimes of how their bodies remind me of fruit: budding, firming, ripening, and softening, before they fall into blowsiness and decay. It is the decay that scares most, tending as it does to either the wet or the dry: flesh blowing up like a pig’s bladder, fat, pasty, as if it might split open—pulp for worms—or the slow attrition of desiccation and shriveling. Is that how it will be for my lady? Will there come a time when those pillow cheeks are loose parchment and those lips, so full that men’s tongues itch to press inside, wither to the thinness of a closed mussel? Is that what she is thinking now? Staring across at her own decay? With fewer than forty ducats in our purse and the rent due within the week, it is time for both of us to stop crying and start working. I climb the stairs with renewed determination.

  She turns as I open the door, and for that split second I don’t know what to look at first: the way her arm is cradled to her side or the body on the bed. The flash in her eyes decides me. He is half dressed, his shirt open on a thick barrel chest, his naked legs sticking out from under the sheet, long and hairy like a spider’s. His breath is so heavy and snorting that it is hard to tell if this is the stupor of sexual satisfaction or the sledgehammer of booze, since the smell coming off him is easily rivaled by my own.

  I look at her again. He has done something to her arm. God damn it. What is the first rule of good whoring? Never be alone with a man without backup behind the door.

  “What—”

  “It’s all right. I’m not hurt.” And she is firm and focused now: whatever reverie she had fallen into is fast dissolved. “I didn’t realize he was so drunk till I got him up here. He was sober enough on the piazza.”

  “How long has he been out?”

  “Not long.”

  “You got his purse?”

  She nods.

  “Anything else?”

  “He had a medallion, but it’s not worth much.”

  “What about the ring?” I say, both of us staring at the thick band of gold embedded in a sausage finger.

  “Too tight.”

  “Well, we had better get him out of here.” I glance around the room, thinking as fast as my gut will let me. The lute, with its fat wooden base, sits by the door.

  “No,” she says quickly. “Not that. We need it. He has a dagger. We can use that instead.”

  I find it as she pulls the shutters closed. The sound of their clacking rouses him a little, and he heaves and flops over on one side. So now his face is at the edge of the bed. I give her the knife, throw his clothes near the door, and position myself in front of him so that my face is staring straight into his. I am in good shape for this: my breath is fouler than his and I warrant I have the look of a man for whom Hell holds no horrors anymore. I glance at her, and she nods. My God, I swear it is almost excitement I feel as I yell into his face, my mouth stretched open wide to show my fangs.

  He is so befuddled and so shaken by the roar and the sigh
t of me that he is half out of the bed before it occurs to him to question my size. And when he does, he is greeted by the glint of the blade held low—and not without intention—in her hands. In my experience, it is always harder for men to be brave with their balls flapping between their legs. He yells a bit as he moves toward the door, but it is more for the sake of his vanity. By the time he finds his manhood again, he will probably be halfway home and worrying about the pox. In this way does our chastisement bring sinners a little closer to God. Until the next erection undermines all our good work.

  Our reward, which is the exhilaration that comes from action, fades faster.

  “I tell you, I could have dealt with him. I was on my way to reintroduce myself to the Turk when I met him in the piazza. His cloak was new, and while I could barely understand his accent, he had the look of a successful merchant, and he said he was leaving in two days’ time. I thought he was richer than he was.”

  “I don’t care if his prick was gold plated. The rule is you don’t bring them home alone. What if he had turned on you?”

  “He didn’t.”

  “So what is wrong with your arm?”

  “Just a bruise. He was too drunk to notice what he was doing.”

  “Hmm. Your choice was never so flawed before.”

  “My choice was never so limited before. Sweet Jesus, Bucino, you were the one who wanted me working again.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been like this if you’d been here, would it?”

  She looks away from me, and I see her at the window again, staring at an empty future.

  “You should have waited,” I say quietly.

  “So where were you?”

  “You know where I was. Looking for Meragosa.”

  “For three days and two nights? It must have been an absorbing search, Bucino.”

  “Well…I—I fell into some hole and started drinking.”

  “Good. Because for a moment I thought the stink on you might have come from finding her. That she’d made you a better offer and you had taken it.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You know I would never leave you.”

  “Do I? Do I really?” She stops herself angrily, then shakes her head. “Three days, Bucino. With no word. This city throws up corpses with every tide. How did I know where you were?”

  There is a silence as the flame of our newfound energy fades. If she were not so angry, I think there might be tears.

  Through the slit of the shutters, the old woman is shouting out loud now, a stream of abuse about our nosiness and our dubious morals. I go to the window and throw the broken shutters open. I swear, if I had an arquebus, I would let off a shot now and blow her to kingdom come, for I am sick of her beady eyes and muttering drivel. I look down at the water with its flashes of sunlight, and suddenly I am back in a wood outside Rome, with a river in front of me, the sparkle of a newly washed ruby in my palm, and the promise of a future planned between us. God damn this poxy city. I never wanted to come here anyway. She is right. It swallows paupers faster than a carp swallows minnows. It would not take much for us both to die here, facedown in a sewer canal.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  She shakes her head. “Or I to send you away.” She stops, and her fingers play with the mark on her arm. “It does not do for us to argue.”

  How scared was she of his violence? I wonder. She would not admit it if she was, even, I doubt, to herself. Of all the courtesans I have met—and I brushed against the skirts of a fair many in Rome—she has always resisted the vulnerability that comes with feeling with the most vibrancy.

  “I—I have been thinking about what you said. About Aretino’s offer. I should have listened to you.”

  I let out a breath, for now it feels less a victory than a further hurdle.

  “Look, I would not suggest it if I didn’t think he still held some feeling for you. I know he crossed you in Rome and you are angry with him for it. But his job was to offend people then, yet there were still those who spoke of him as having a generous heart, and I think he has mellowed here.”

  “Mellowed! Aretino?”

  “I know it sounds unlikely, but I think it’s true.”

  The fact is I have not been so completely consumed that I have failed to keep my ears and eyes open, and it does seem he is changed. Whereas in Rome he was a self-proclaimed public figure, vomiting out his views to any who would pay for them, here he is a more private citizen. No political satire, no lampoons, no civic vivisection to keep the city honest. While there are rumors of letters written to the pope and the emperor to bring the two back together (his arrogance is not quite dead), when it comes to his views on Venice, there is only a river of praise for this earthly paradise of a state, rich in liberty, prosperity, and piety. Personally, I liked him better as a lion than as a house cat, but his pen has made him enemies all over Italy now, and he too is in need of a safe home and new patrons to flatter and fawn over. For now he nuzzles close to those who are already feted: Jacopo Sansovino from Rome, who, it seems, is indeed employed to stop the San Marco’s domes from falling down—there are shipments of lead piling up in the piazza now, ready for work to begin—and Tiziano Vecellio, who some say is as good a painter as any that Rome or Florence has produced (I am a dolt when it comes to such things, though I like the way his scarlet Madonna amazes all the men beneath her as she swirls up to Heaven above the altar of Santa Maria dei Frari). With friends such as these, Aretino can afford to wait for the right patrons.

  Which means, for now at least, his soirees would be worth attending.

  “Well, since we have no other option, you had better go to him and tell him I will come.”

  And I believe I would indeed have done that had it not been for our visitors two nights later.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Come on! Open your doors, you great whore.”

  “Wooh, yes! Get ’em open. We’re here for the renowned courtesan of Rome.”

  We are awake and by the shutters within seconds. It is blackest night, and from the sound of them they have been drinking for hours. A lesser boatman might already have lost a few of them to the water, but even through the slats it’s clear it is a fancy craft with lamps on either end. And from the looks of them they are an even fancier flock—nobles, maybe six or seven of them, all young enough still to be wearing colored stockings and rich enough not to care who else they disturb while they are disturbing us.

  “Fiam-met-ta Bian-chi-ni.”

  They slap their oars on the water with each syllable, their voices about as melodious as artillery fire.

  “Sweet, white Bianchini.”

  “Little flame, Fiammetta.”

  “Sweet, white, little flame.”

  “Hot tart without shame.”

  And a great guffaw goes up at their own excruciating poetry. There will be no house for half a mile around that has not been woken by their cacophony. Young men with the poisons of booze and privilege flowing through their veins. The truth is they break more laws and split open more women’s bodies than those who live in poverty. But how often do you find them strung up with half their backs peeling off as examples to others? My God, I despise them, even when they’re paying proper rates for it—and I doubt that’s what they have in mind tonight.

  There is only one way in which men of their status could have learned who and where we are. While I think Aretino is not a cruel man, he is an inveterate gossip, and whatever he has told them about her, they have taken it as a sign that she is available. I can feel her fury in the dark beside me. I make a move to open the window, but her hand snaps out to stop me. At the same instant, there come the creak and bang of shutters nearby and then a stream of foul insults moving to and fro. She is right. If they were to see us now, it would only make it worse. The pantomime grows louder in the night.

  “And you can close your poxy legs, lady. We’re not here for scrawny hags.”

&
nbsp; “Not when your neighbor has had cardinals and popes inside her. Aaagh.”

  But they have met their match here, and from the howl that goes up I daresay the liquid that hits them is richer than water. We stay behind closed doors as the screaming and swearing go on for a while, until finally the youngbloods tire of the game and the boat slaps off noisily into the night. We wait until their voices are swallowed up by the silence, then turn from the window and try to go back to sleep. But their drunken insults echo through my brain, and I am still awake when the first light comes.

  I slip out early to fetch the bread. The line is long, and I can hear people muttering around me. Across the campo, a group of old women hiss at me as I move back into our street, and when I arrive at my door I find myself staring at a crude drawing of a prick and balls scrawled large in burned charcoal on our outside wall. God damn it, even our neighbors are our enemies now. I climb the stairs with my heart heavy, bracing myself for more fury or despair.

  To my astonishment, what I find instead is excitement.

  I can hear their animated chatter through the door. Inside, my lady is up and dressed, while opposite her on the bed sits La Draga.

  “Oh, Bucino. Look. See what Elena has brought me—cream for my skin. To help its whiteness.”

  “How kind of her,” I say dryly.

  La Draga turns toward my voice, and we face each other. Though it is only I, of course, who do the seeing. Her eyes are wide open today, pits of dense white cloud that suck you in even as you look at them. Barely two weeks ago she and I were clawing at each other over this bed, yet now she walks back into the lion’s den. She has courage, that much I grant her, and she has made my lady smile when there is nothing to smile about, which is no small thing.

  “She is come to offer help if we need it.”

  “Then I only wish we had the money to employ her…you,” I say, stumbling over the words, for she still makes me nervous.

  “Oh, she doesn’t want payment. It is an offer of friendship after our loss, isn’t that right, Elena?”