In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  The struggle will have stopped. The deed will be done. She will be one of those now.

  And what of us? What are we now?

  “Bucino?”

  I don’t hear the door opening, so her voice, though quiet enough, runs like a knife through me.

  She is in her robe, her hair long and untidy down her back. Of course she has not slept either, simply kept her own vigil. She is carrying a pottery drinking cup. “Mauro made this for you: warmed malmsey.”

  “He is up?”

  “They are all up. I don’t think anyone has slept.”

  I take a sip. It is sweet and warm. Not like the water at all. After a while she puts her hand on my shoulder. I hear someone crying from inside. Gabriella. There is a lot to cry for. She will have no one to soothe the stabbing pains she gets during her cycle of the moon anymore.

  “It’s done,” I say.

  “Yes, it’s done. Come in now and we will sleep a little.”

  But it seems it is not done. Not quite over yet.

  I sleep, though for how long I have no idea, because, when the frantic knocking wakes me, it feels as if it is still dawn. Somehow I get myself to the door and open it to see Gabriella’s amazed, excited face. Oh, God, oh, God, what if they have pardoned her? What if we are saved?

  “You have to come, Bucino. She’s downstairs on the dock. Mauro saw her when he went out to throw away the rubbish. We don’t know what to do. My lady is there, but you have to come.”

  My legs are bowed with tiredness, and they almost trip me as I rush, I am so bandy. I move to the portego loggia first, for at least I can see from there. My lady is standing almost directly beneath me on the dock, still, almost frozen. In front ofher is a small child. She has a cloud of white hair, with the rising sun ablaze behind her. And at her feet sits a small, bulging bag.

  I fall down the stairs and out through the water doors. My lady throws her hand behind her to stop me from going any farther. I halt. The child glances up, then down again.

  My lady’s voice is richest silk. “—tired to have come so far so early. Who brought you? Did you see the sun come up over the sea?”

  But the child says nothing. Just stands and blinks in the light.

  “You must be hungry. We have fresh bread and sweet jams inside.”

  Still nothing. Her mother pretended to be blind; now her daughter is as adept at faking deafness. It is a shrewd test, to be so good at keeping one’s own counsel. And a skill one cannot learn early enough. I move around my lady’s skirts carefully until I am in front of her.

  She is smaller than I, and in the last weeks her legs have grown sturdier. I daresay she is using their new firmness now to back up her will. My God, she has enough of her mother in her to hound me to my grave. Oh, the pain of it, to see her again. But also the utter, utter joy. Her eyes flick to me, hold there for a whole, unblinking, solemn second, then move away again. At least she has acknowledged I am here.

  My lady rests her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll go and fetch us some food.”

  I nod. “And bring the engraved goblet out too,” I say quietly. “The one that Alberini brought you as a first gift.”

  Her footsteps move inside.

  I study this imp in front of me. There is griminess around the edges of her mouth, as if she has recently eaten something sticky, and there is a smudge on her forehead. Maybe she slept against the dirty wood on the boat and woke up with it. Under the halo of wild, white curls, her cheeks are fat, as if they have great bubbles caught inside them, and her mouth is pouting full. My God, she is lovely. I can see her on the ceiling of a room in a palace, wings too small for her chubby body, her truculence transformed into mischief, as she holds aloft our Lady’s train while they propel themselves toward Heaven. Tiziano could use her to charm a flood of ducats out of his tightfisted mother superiors. But is it innocence he would capture here? I am not so sure. Certainly there is strength. And suspicion. I warrant something of her mother’s intelligence too.

  Of course she would have known better than anyone that there would be no children in this house unless someone gave us one, and how much it would be loved and cared for if someone did. An old great-grandparent and a mother at the bottom of the sea. The last will and testament of Elena Crusichi. And I understand that this is how it will be for me: how every time I look at her I will taste one in the other. Now and for as long as I live. That is the nature of my punishment.

  My punishment, but also our saving.

  My lady is so nervous with excitement that she almost drops the glass. The bread is warm in a basket, half a dozen small balls of it. I hold one out to her, for its smell would tempt Saint John the Baptist out of the wilderness. She wants it, I can tell. She won’t give in, though. But this time there is slight movement of the head.

  I put down the basket and pick up four or five more rolls. They are almost too soft for it, but I try anyway: juggling a few of them in the air until the aroma of fresh baking is all around us. She is watching now, and there is excitement in her face.

  I let one drop. It falls close to her foot. I catch the rest, then pick it up and solemnly hold it out to her. Her hand comes out, and she takes it. For a second it looks as if she will just hold it, but then in one swift move it goes into her mouth, all in one bite.

  “Look,” I say as she chews. “I have something else for you.” I lift my hand to take the goblet from my lady. “See? This here on the side, the writing? Isn’t it clever? Does your grandfather do things like this?”

  She nods slightly.

  “It’s for you. He left it here with us. Do you see? Look. Look at the letters. Here is your name. F-i-a-m-m-e-t-t-a.”

  Behind me, I hear my lady’s sharp intake of breath.

  The child looks eagerly to see where I’m pointing. Though she is too young to decipher letters, she knows her name well enough.

  “It’s for you. To drink out of while you are here. You can hold it if you want. Though you must be careful, for it will break easily. But then I think you know that already about glass.”

  She nods and holds out her hands for it, cupping it between her palms carefully as if it were a living thing that she is holding, and staring at the letters. And already I think I see a flash in her eyes that makes me know she will be reading them soon enough. She looks at the goblet for a long time, then hands it back to me.

  “So, shall we go in?”

  I pick up her bag, and she follows us into the house.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Venice of this novel is deeply rooted in research. While its main characters, Fiammetta Bianchini and Bucino Teodoldi, are born of my imagination, the city (like Rome before the sack) was famous for her courtesans, and a few such women were known to have kept dwarves, along with parrots, dogs, and other “exotics.”

  Some of the other players in the novel are real. The painter Tiziano Vecellio (Titian as he is better known) and the writer Pietro Aretino both lived in Venice at this time, as did the architect Jacopo Sansovino, who was responsible for many of the city’s most beautiful High Renaissance buildings, though his most famous commissions were just beginning during the years in which this book is set.

  During his long and stellar career, Titian painted a number of nudes, in particular a portrait of woman lying on a bed with a small sleeping dog and two maids in the background. The setting of the work was a room in his own house, and the canvas seems to have been in his studio in the mid-1530s. It ended up in Urbino in 1538, purchased by the duchy of Urbino’s heir apparent of the time. Hence its present title, The Venus of Urbino. While art historians differ on the meaning of the painting, it seems likely that the model Titian used was a Venetian courtesan. The work hangs now in the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

  Pietro Aretino is less well known outside his native land. He was nicknamed the Scourge of Princes, and his letters and satires earned him as many enemies as friends. He was known for his relationships with courtesans and was remarkable in that he penned both religious wo
rks and pornography, in particular “The Illustrious Sonnets,” written in support of his friends Giulio Romano and Marcantonio Raimondi to complement their series of sixteen drawing-engravings known as The Posti or The Modi, which caused a huge scandal in Roman society in the mid-1520s. There is no extant copy of the original engravings, though a few fragments are held in the British Museum. Aretino’s verses were republished alongside more crude woodblock copies of the originals, and from the mid–sixteenth century onward they were (and are still) highly sought after by collectors of erotic memorabilia. Two of the sixteen drawings and the accompanying sonnets, however, have been lost entirely. Aretino later went on to write The Ragionamenti, another largely pornographic tract including a section on the training of a courtesan, published in the 1530s. A few years after his death in 1556, the Counter-Reformation produced the Index of Prohibited Books. Aretino’s work was high on the list.

  With regard to the Jewish Ghetto in Venice, it is known that one Asher Meshullam, the son of a leader of the Jewish community, converted to Christianity in the mid-1530s. Because I could discover very little about him, I chose to give my convert a different name, and no doubt a different experience.

  Which brings me to La Draga…A woman called Elena Crusichi, more popularly known as La Draga, is actually mentioned in court records of the time. She had a reputation as a healer and was partially disabled, with failing eyesight. I was entranced by the fragments of her story that are available and also by her name, but I have taken considerable fictional liberties with her character and her fate, for the real La Draga appears to have survived into old age, despite brushes with the authorities. Venice, in fact, behaved better than many states when it came to accusations of witchcraft, and there are no existing records of public burnings. However, criminals who embarrassed the state with either their crimes or the timing of them, were known to be dispatched more quietly at night by drowning in the Orfano Canal.

  Also in the spirit of confession, I should add that, while a Register of Courtesans (a somewhat satirical tract with comments about the prowess and charges of such women) did indeed exist in Venice, I have predated its existence by a few years.

  This is the extent of my conscious manipulation of history. Other mistakes, for which I apologize here, are due to the fact that extensive research and a deep love of the period cannot, alas, turn a fiction writer into a historian.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could not have written this novel without the inspirational support of many people.

  For his scholarship and his invigorating conversation, I am greatly indebted to the Renaissance historian Lauro Martines. Also to my former art teacher Berenice Goodwin, and to Sheila Hale, Titian’s latest biographer: each contributed her sharp eye and love of Venice, which saved me from many of my own mistakes. Tom Shakespeare helped me create Bucino as a living, breathing character. Gillian Slovo, Eileen Quinn, Michael Cristofer, and Janessa Laskin all proved to be stalwart companions on my journey. In Venice, Estela Welldon offered me the most perfect place to write, and in London, the staff of the British Library and the Warburg Institute made my research as painless as it could be.

  I am indebted to everyone at Little, Brown, U.K., and Random House, U.S., for their powerful encouragement and support, and most especially to my agent, Clare Alexander, and longtime editor and friend Lennie Goodings.

  Special mention must go to my teenage daughters, Zoe and Georgia, who endured endless spontaneous lessons on Venetian history, Renaissance Catholicism, and the sexual politics of the time with remarkable good humor and only the occasional hint of exasperation. And who, as the going got rough, devotedly fed their mother dinner when—because of the excitement of the story—she forgot to feed them.

  But most of all, my love and gratitude go to Tez Bentley, who accompanied me intellectually on this rich, sometimes intimidating journey into the past, and whose acuity, sensitivity, and vision helped me to be more ambitious than I would otherwise have dared.

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  ABOUT THE AUT
HOR

  SARAH DUNANT is the author of the international bestseller The Birth of Venus, which has received major acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Her earlier novels include three Hannah Wolfe crime novels, as well as Snow Storms in a Hot Climate, Transgressions, and Mapping the Edge, all three of which are available as Random House Trade Paperbacks. She has two daughters and lives in London and Florence.

  ALSO BY SARAH DUNANT

  The Birth of Venus

  Mapping the Edge

  Transgressions

  Under My Skin

  Fatlands

  Birth Marks

  Snowstorms in a Hot Climate

  This is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Sarah Dunant

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, an imprint of the Time Warner Book Group U.K.

  Endpaper credit: Grande Pianta Prospettica—Venice, c. 1500 (engraving), Barbari, Jacopo de’ (1440/50-1515)/Museo Correr, Venice, Italy;/Bridgeman Art Library

  eISBN-13: 978-1-58836-550-7

  eISBN-10: 1-58836-550-6