His Rags-to-Riches Contessa

by Marguerite Kaye

  Luca didn’t understand. He thought they had a choice, but the worst of them had no more choice than an opium addict, inexorably drawn to their preferred drug. He thought Becky’s conscience would be eased, knowing their losses were added to the coffers to be returned to Venice. It helped, but only a little.

  Her opponent was betting wildly now, his concentration so entirely on his own cards that it would have been easy to turn the deck in his favour for the last two hands, reducing the point differential in the final tally, thereby curtailing his losses somewhat. But there were too many onlookers for that. When he tried to insist on playing on, Becky gave the secret signal to summon Luca. She had no idea how he did it, cloaked and masked, but the authority which must have made him a formidable captain in the navy made him a very formidable protector. With a final mumbling protest, the man left the table. The used deck was replaced. Luca discreetly pocketed her winnings and summoned her next adversary.

  She did not need the fleeting touch on her shoulder to warn her. She knew as soon the black-cloaked figure with the white bauta mask approached that it was Don Sarti. His walk betrayed his sense of superiority, the arrogant tilt of his head, the length of his stride, the faux-humble way he clasped his hands. She had studied him closely on the few occasions they had met socially, her actor’s eye noting what others might have missed. He made only the briefest of bows to the Queen of Coins before taking his seat. She wondered briefly what had betrayed his identity to Luca.

  She was glad to have one game against a wild player already under her belt, to have had the opportunity while doing so to observe the room, to have settled her customary stage fright. The endless nights of playing at the other ridotti, Luca’s endless hours of meticulous preparation, her complete trust in him as her protector, left her free to concentrate on the turn of the cards now. She did not know where he stood now, but she knew wherever it was, he would be on hand if she needed him. He seemed never to watch the play. No chance of her protector being accused of aiding or abetting. Not this time.

  Becky deliberately allowed Don Sarti to win the cut for the privilege of dealing the first hand. He was not wearing his heavy gold ring with its flashy diamond, but he couldn’t remove the tiny mole on his right knuckle she had noted previously. He dealt the cards for the first hand, and she turned her mind to the game.

  * * *

  ‘We did it!’ Luca exclaimed triumphantly, appearing in the doorway of the secret room behind the library with a tray containing a bottle of grappa and two glasses. His eyes blazed with excitement. ‘All our hard work—all your hard work, I should say—has paid off. Tonight, for the first time, Don Sarti crossed swords with the Queen of Coins and lost. I think that deserves a toast.’ He poured two glasses of grappa and handed one to Becky, who was seated on the chaise longue, having just removed her mask. ‘To the Queen of Coins, Don Sarti’s nemesis and my avenging angel. I know we have only taken the first step, but there is no doubt he’ll be back, and he’ll keep coming back until he has returned all of Venice’s money. We have him, Becky. Salute.’

  ‘Salute.’ Becky took a cautious sip, coughing as the fiery liquid burned her throat. ‘Assuming it was Don Sarti?’ she teased.

  Luca laughed. ‘I spotted him the moment we walked into the salon. It took all my self-restraint not to approach him before he approached me. I did not have to wait long.’ He lifted his glass to Becky and tossed the remainder of the contents back. ‘He tried, but he could not contain his own eagerness. Your reputation for invincibility has him in thrall already.’

  Becky tipped the remainder of her grappa into her mouth. The tension of the night, the strain of the many games she had played after Don Sarti had departed, began to ease as the digestivo hit her stomach. She relaxed back on to the chaise longue. If she needed any reassurance as to how much this meant to Luca, she had it now in the form of his euphoric expression. A glow of satisfaction suffused her, and she smiled at him, quite forgetting that she had resolved not to smile in that particular way at him again.

  Ever since her first outing as Queen of Coins and the aftermath in this very room, Luca had taken to bidding her a curt goodnight, leaving her alone immediately upon their return. Now here he was, smiling back at her, and her heart was racing, and she was thinking about all the things she had been trying so hard not to think about. Becky sat up abruptly. ‘It’s late,’ she said meaningfully.

  But Luca for once didn’t take his cue. ‘What kind of player was he, Becky?’

  ‘He’s very good. Possibly the best I’ve played.’

  Luca frowned. ‘Yet he loses.’

  ‘Everyone loses if they play often enough. Trappola is not only a game of skill. All card games involve an element of chance.’

  Within the confines of the little room, they were as far apart as it was possible to be, but it was still too close. Or not nearly close enough. She mustn’t think this way.

  ‘You never lose,’ Luca said.

  ‘Because I remove the element of chance. I control the cards. Or, to put it another way, I cheat.’ Let him leave now, Becky thought, though she wanted him, she so desperately wanted him to stay. Five weeks since they made their pact not to distract one another, and only that one sign, when their hands touched as he helped her from the gondola, suggested that they had not successfully doused the flames.

  ‘If he is such a good player, why doesn’t Sarti quit when he is winning?’ Luca asked, still showing no signs of departing.

  ‘He is not content with winning,’ Becky replied. The reality of the situation was beginning to dawn on her. We have him, Becky. Her excitement began to fade. ‘The more he wins, the more he wants to win. Tonight I kept the point difference between our scores low to encourage him to believe he could beat me when we meet again.’

  Luca leaned back against the door to the library. It clicked shut, but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘I still don’t understand. As a skilled player, he should win more than he loses when he plays anyone other than you.’

  He truly didn’t understand, Becky thought, despite her attempts to explain. His poetic justice would destroy the man and possibly also the man’s family. And she was aiding and abetting him.

  We have him, Becky. Justice required a price be exacted, she knew that, but still, it left a nasty taste in her mouth, that her role should be so ambiguous. ‘When he loses,’ she said, ‘he cannot resist the urge to recoup those losses. When he wins, he foolishly believes he is fated to win more. Don Sarti, like the first man I played tonight, is irrational when in the grip of gambling fever. He must feed his craving. It is why he will come back to the Queen of Coins again and again, as a drunkard will to the bottle.’

  ‘If Sarti lived in London, he’d have been ruined years ago,’ Luca said, shaking his head. ‘Only Venice’s strict rules, which limit gaming to Carnevale, have spared him until now. Yet ironically, it is our city which funds his play. Tonight we made a start on taking back from him everything he has stolen.’

  ‘You mean your father’s estimate of what he stole. You can’t know the exact figure, Luca. Black-market fences—men who deal in stolen goods—they don’t pay the full value, far from it.’

  ‘Sarti is hardly likely to have sold Venice’s treasures through a common—Fence, did you call it? Many heads of state throughout Europe are renowned collectors. The Russian emperor, for example, is an avid acquirer of important artefacts.’

  Sometimes the gulf in social class between them seemed like a chasm, Becky thought. ‘Regardless of who bought them, they will not have paid the full value,’ she said patiently.

  ‘What Don Sarti was paid is immaterial. What matters is what my father believed the treasures were worth. And the truth is they were priceless.’

  Becky sighed. ‘So we must take everything he has. His palazzo? His wife’s jointure? His daughter’s dowry?’

  ‘The crime is Sarti’s. If others suffer, then the blame lie
s squarely with him.’

  She could point out that Luca was in the grip of a compulsion of his own, so intent on his thirst for vengeance that he did not care if innocent people were caught in the crossfire. We could aim lower, she wanted to say, but what would be the point? He wouldn’t listen, any more than the man who had been the Queen of Coins’s first victim tonight, and she was too tired to argue. She didn’t want to argue at all. Especially not with Luca.

  He had taken off his mask and his cloak, loosened the buttons on his coat and waistcoat. His hair, limp from the heat of the salon, flopped over his brow. Their eyes met, and he smiled, and her tummy flipped. She hadn’t forgotten that smile, but she’d tried very hard not to think about it.

  ‘You saw the darker side of Carnevale tonight,’ he said. ‘I am sorry I had to expose you to it.’

  ‘It was all a game to them, in that downstairs salon, wasn’t it? I thought the females were doxies, at first, but they weren’t.’ Becky wrinkled her nose in distaste. ‘I thought I’d seen it all, but otherwise respectable women gambling their favours just for the hell of it, hiding what they no doubt call their minor indiscretions behind a mask, that was something new to me. I’m not sure I like this Carnevale very much.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve not seen the lighter side.’ Luca sat down on the chaise longue beside her. ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘Would Cousin Rebecca like to see the sights tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m due to visit...’

  ‘I’ll clear it with my mother. You’ve earned a break, Becky, and it would be a pity if your memories of Carnevale were restricted to its seamier side.’

  ‘Thank you. I will look forward to it.’

  ‘We’ll be amongst the crowds,’ Luca said with a small smile. ‘Quite safe from temptation.’

  For the second time that night their eyes met and held. For the second time that night, Becky’s stomach lurched, and now her pulses began to race, her blood heat. Just one kiss, surely just one kiss would do no harm. She forced herself to remain perfectly still.

  ‘I know how they feel, those men who look at the Queen of Coins,’ Luca said. ‘Forbidden desire. A seductress who cannot be touched. I know how they feel. I wish I did not want you so much.’

  ‘All passion dies,’ Becky said. ‘You told me so.’

  ‘I did, and it was the truth until I met you.’

  He reached out to push her hair back from her brow. His fingers trailed down the column of her neck to rest on her bare shoulder. She could tell herself that his hand compelled her to lean towards him, but it would be a lie. ‘I’ll be gone soon,’ Becky said.

  ‘Yes. You will.’

  She caressed his cheek with the flat of her hand. It was rough, his beard soft in contrast. Her touch made him exhale sharply, and the warmth of his breath made her lean into him, and their lips met. For an agonising moment, they were quite still, each waiting on the other to break the contact, neither able to move. And then it was too much. She opened her mouth to him, he opened his mouth to her, and they kissed.

  It was a searing kiss, dark with desire and over before it had begun. They jumped to their feet. Becky’s heart was racing. Luca, hands shaking, poured two more glasses of grappa. ‘Another toast,’ he said with a mocking smile. ‘This time to the beginning of the end.’

  * * *

  It was very cold the next day, the sky leaden, turning the Grand Canal a palette of brown tinged with copper, pink and grey. Though Isabel had appeared content to release Rebecca from her scheduled round of social calls, Becky knew better. The Contessa was going along with her son’s plan, but under duress. The lure of spending the day with Luca was a much more attractive proposition than a tedious day spent making calls, however. Becky slipped into her warmest coat of dusky-pink wool. With a dove-grey velvet collar, belt and cuffs, gloves, boots and a charcoal-grey hat, she looked as if she had chosen her outfit to complement the colours of the canal.

  Luca was waiting on the jetty, dressed in his customary black, but a long greatcoat with several capes replaced his preferred short cloak. There was no sign of the gondola. ‘I thought we’d walk, if you’re amenable,’ he said.

  ‘Very. It will be a relief to feel the ground beneath my feet for a change.’

  He tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and led her away from the Grand Canal, along a footpath which followed one of the narrower bodies of water. ‘Though Carnevale is not so celebrated as it was in the last century, it is still a festival of the people, as you will see today. Unlike the ridotti, the spectacle at Piazza San Marco is open to everyone, and a good many go in disguise.’

  ‘In masks, you mean? In the daytime?’

  ‘And costumes far more elaborate than any you have seen in the ridotti, where they would make some of the nocturnal activities somewhat problematic,’ Luca said drily. ‘In Piazza San Marco it takes the form of an informal parade. Of course, part of the fun is that no one knows who is parading. It has been known for a high-born donna and her maid to wear the same costume on different days. At Carnevale you must be on your guard. You never know who you’re talking to.’

  ‘Or liaising with? Are you speaking from experience?’

  Luca laughed. ‘No. It is true that some people take pleasure in such encounters, and many more visit Venice during Carnevale with such encounters in mind, but I am not and never have been one of them.’

  He pulled her away from the edge as a gondola bedecked in garlands swept past, waiting for the wake splashing on to the walkway to die down. ‘You take such enormous pride in being a Venetian,’ Becky said, ‘but there are times when I wonder if you are a Venetian at all.’

  She’d meant to tease him, but he took her seriously. ‘While I was away, I thought myself Venetian to the core. Now I am not so sure. I think perhaps there is more of my mother’s blood in me than I realised.’

  ‘It is your mother’s blood that sent you to England and then to sea.’

  ‘I always thought that was my Venetian blood,’ Luca said, taking her other arm as they resumed their walk and the pathway tapered, placing her on the inside, away from the canal. ‘Because that was what my father always insisted.’

  ‘It seems to me that he made sure your mother had very little influence on you, even as a child.’

  ‘A son is raised by his father,’ Luca said, frowning. ‘It is the custom here, especially for an eldest son. And you forget I was sent to England with my mother’s blessing.’

  ‘It’s true. Isabel said that you were so restless no school could contain you.’

  He smiled at that. ‘And for many years, my mother’s family gave me a home, so you see, she has had a great deal of influence on me.’

  ‘Yes.’ Becky concentrated on the shallow, moss-covered flight of steps which led first down and then straight up again, before the walkway came to an abrupt halt and they were forced to turn sharply through one of those dark passages populated by feral cats and no doubt a quota of rats. Fortunately, this one was short, emerging in a run-down campo with an empty fountain.

  A flock of startled pigeons flew up into the air. Luca made for the canal at the other side of the campo. ‘You do not sound convinced.’

  ‘I suppose it’s because I could never be happy with this way of life. I can’t see that you could either.’

  He stopped at the edge of the canal, where a humpbacked bridge to the other side seemed to be the only route. ‘You are referring to my marriage. You know it’s not exactly imminent. In fact I’ve been thinking that it would make sense to concentrate on putting our winnings to good use before considering anything else. A year, perhaps two or three, to accustom myself to the idea.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s significant that you feel the need to accustom yourself, Luca?’

  He laughed shortly. ‘I can trust you always to get straight to the point, Beck
y.’

  ‘That’s because I’m not Venetian.’

  ‘No.’ They climbed the steps up to the top of the bridge. There was an odd little stone bench built into the centre of it. Despite the cold, of one accord they sat down. As ever, the green shutters of the overlooking houses seemed to Becky like closed eyes. Beneath them, the canal reflected the crumbling stone, the grey lowering sky. ‘You’re right,’ Luca said. ‘I’m not as wholly Venetian as I imagined I was. I don’t want a marriage such as my father’s, I do not think that my mother is more suited than I to select a wife for me.’ He slanted a smile at her. ‘You see, Becky, I do listen.’

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  He sighed impatiently. ‘I will know that nearer the time, I hope. I must marry to continue the line. My wife must possess suitable lineage. But at this moment—since I have no idea how I, as Conte del Pietro, wish to live my life—I am hardly in a position to say how I expect my wife to live hers.’

  ‘You don’t think she’d wish to have a say in it?’

  He laughed. ‘She will not be Becky, determined to lead her own life on her own terms.’ His smile faded abruptly. ‘She will be as unlike Becky as it is possible to be.’

  Something she’d always known, but for some reason the words were like a punch in the stomach. ‘I should think not,’ she said with an attempt at a smile. ‘A woman who was dragged up rather than raised, who doesn’t even know who her father is, who’s made a living by cheating gullible men.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ Careless of the fact they were in public, Luca grabbed her hands. ‘You are the bravest, most honest, most loyal woman I’ve ever met. With your talent, you could have made a fortune for yourself, whereas the truth is I suspect that there are times when your principles have left you both cold and hungry.’