And he was gone. Dad shrugged and opened the bottle with a pop. He poured three glasses of the cold wine and handed the smallest to Lucien.
‘I can see you’re going to be very useful here. Your very good health!’
‘Cheers!’ said Lucien.
In Talia the door slammed in one of the Duchessa’s dungeons. Arianna waited until the guards’ footsteps had faded away before she flung herself on a heap of straw and burst into tears.
Chapter 14
The Bridge of Sighs
The Mulhollands were up early for their first morning in Venice, determined to beat the crowds in the Piazza San Marco. They were almost first in the queue for the Basilica and spent some time in its shadowy interior. Lucien was not as bowled over by the mosaics as his parents were. They seemed garish to him in gold, used as he was to the cool silver finish of the mosaics in Bellezza’s Basilica of the Maddalena.
He soon retreated up the steep precarious stairs to the museum, with its gilded bronze horses, and stepped out on to the loggia with the copies, and looked out over the square from what had been Arianna’s hiding-place in Bellezza. It was breathtaking. The sky was an incredible postcard blue, swirled with sudden flights of pigeons over the square and wheeling white gulls out over the lagoon. Elegant black gondolas bobbed on the water along the Piazzetta and the Saint and the winged lion stood on their tall columns guarding the city.
And yet. Lucien could no longer think of this as the real city and Bellezza as the alternative. It was stunningly beautiful and a great deal cleaner than the Talian city, but to Lucien it was like a painting in a gallery compared with its subject. It was hard to believe that the water was really moving, the birds flying and the tourists milling around the square.
He rejoined his parents in the doorway of the cathedral. His mother had her guidebook in her hand. ‘That was lovely. Now let’s go and see the Doge’s Palace.’
They set off towards the water, threading their way between other tourists and the pigeons underfoot, avoiding the stalls with their gaudy jesters’ hats and gold-sprayed plastic gondolas. The rose-coloured palace along the side of the Piazzetta was attracting its own share of visitors and a queue was forming.
The high spot of the tour was walking through the covered Bridge of Sighs to the Doge’s dungeons, following the route of the despairing condemned prisoners. People were queuing to get through. But ever since they had entered the palace, Lucien had been feeling uneasy. The State rooms were all so dark and gloomy with their panelled wood and huge paintings grimed with age. Even the Doge’s private apartments were nothing like the Duchessa’s. There was no Glass Room, and nowhere a room like the one with the peacock sconce and the secret passage. In fact, Lucien had been able to see from outside that there was no palazzo corresponding to Rodolfo’s. The differences between the two cities were giving him a headache.
But his parents were already lining up for the Bridge of Sighs, so he tagged along. Half-way across the bridge the pressure inside Lucien’s skull became unbearable but strangers had interposed between him and his parents. He was borne along by the crowd. On the other side of the bridge were the tiny cells. They were now filled with T-shirted and shorted visitors ghoulishly imagining the previous inhabitants.
Lucien didn’t know what was happening to him. It wasn’t like being ill before. He had difficulty breathing and his head pounded. He was propelled into one of the cells and immediately thought he was going to be sick. A feeling of dread and terror had hold of him. And he had a strong sense of someone else’s fear, someone who had been incarcerated here before a horrible death.
‘Whoa there!’ said an American. ‘What’s with the kid? Looks like he’s going to pass out.’
That brought Mum and Dad to Lucien’s side in a flash and soon there was a flurry of people saying, ‘Stand back’ and ‘Give him air’ like extras in a film. His parents got Lucien back across to the other side of the bridge. The further away they were from the dungeons, the better he felt.
‘I’m OK, really,’ he said to his parents, who were muttering about doctors.
‘It’s the atmosphere in that place,’ said the American, who had caught Lucien just as he was about to lose consciousness and come with them across the bridge. ‘Hundreds of men went from there to their deaths. Something like that’s pretty well bound to leave its mark. Your boy’s just more sensitive than most, I’d say.’
The young woman took a boat to Burlesca, with a heart as full as her purse. There were some in her family who had doubted that Enrico would ever name the day; they had been engaged rather a long time. But now, with her money from the Duchessa and the extra silver that her fiancé had given her, she was in a position to order her wedding-dress. And where in the lagoon would you go for white lace if not Burlesca?
There was one old woman whose work was so light and delicate that her fame had spread beyond her island. Paola Bellini might charge more than the other lacemakers of Burlesca, but then she was the best. Giuliana’s friends had told her how to find the lacemaker. ‘Look for the white house,’ they said. ‘It’s the only one.’
*
Rodolfo sculled Dethridge swiftly, by the backwaters, to a convent in the north of the city where the Duchessa was presenting a gift of silver for the orphan girls in their care. As she came out, her eyes widened when she saw him at the stern of his own vessel. In a moment, she had dismissed her own mandolier and stepped instead into the Senator’s craft. She looked curiously at the white-haired man already seated in the cabin. He doffed his hat and introduced himself as Guglielmo Crinamorte, though his tongue stumbled over the name.
Rodolfo took the mandola into a side canal and tied it to a pole. He jumped down into the cabin.
‘Why all the mystery?’ asked the Duchessa. ‘And who is your companion?’ But the smile died on her lips when she saw Rodolfo’s expression.
‘It’s not often that I tell you something is a matter of life and death,’ said Rodolfo. ‘But today that is exactly the case. Did you know that a warrant has gone out for a foreigner seen in the city on the Giornata Vietata?’
The Duchessa nodded. ‘Yes, I signed it this morning. Unusual, isn’t it? I suppose it will turn out to be a misunderstanding.’
‘I hope so,’ said Rodolfo. ‘Do you know who it was for?’
‘No,’ said the Duchessa. ‘You know how many papers I have to sign every day. I didn’t look at the name – just noted the offence.’
‘It was for Luciano,’ said Rodolfo, and was astonished by her reaction. All colour drained from her face and she clutched her throat as if unable to catch her breath.
‘It is al righte,’ said Dethridge, patting her other hand. ‘The yonge mann was not at home. Hee is goon backe to his own worlde and will not bee backe hir for a while.’
‘But, I’ve remembered something,’ said the Duchessa, still in distress. ‘I signed two warrants. I’m sure the Commander of the Watch said that one was for a girl. I didn’t look at the name on that one either, but wasn’t it the day after the Marriage with the Sea that Luciano first came to Bellezza? And wasn’t that when he met that girl Arianna?’
Rodolfo was surprised. He had never told the Duchessa who it was that was teaching Lucien about the city. And he didn’t know about Giuseppe and her own investigations.
‘We must get back and I will go to see the girl’s aunt, Leonora,’ he said. ‘It is a terrible fate to hang over so young a girl.’
‘No, Rodolfo, you don’t understand,’ said the Duchessa bitterly. ‘This is not just any girl. There is something I have to tell you.’
Lucien’s parents took him to the coffee bar in the Doge’s Palace. It was a place worthy of Bellezza, where you could watch gondolas skimming past the window while drinking your cappuccino. The American tourist had shown them where it was before going back up to finish his tour.
?
??Now, what was all that about?’ asked Dad, when they were sitting down with their frothy coffees and hard little almond biscuits.
‘I think it was just the heat and all those people,’ said Lucien. ‘I suddenly felt claustrophobic.’ But he knew it had been more than that. For now, though, he had to convince his parents that he was completely well and didn’t need to be taken straight back to the hotel.
Lucien wondered how long it would take, if he recovered from his cancer, for his parents to stop treating him like a piece of Merlino glass. Would they always have that anxious, haunted look every time he sneezed or yawned? And what about if he didn’t get better? Lucien didn’t usually mind being an only child but now he longed for a sibling to take from him the pressure of being the sole vessel for all that parental love. ‘I know how Arianna feels,’ he thought.
In a white house on the island of Burlesca an old woman was showing piles of lace to a young one. The bride-to-be was cheerful and chatty, choosing the material for her dress, her veil and various undergarments for her honeymoon, as well as lace edging for the linen already stacked in a cedar chest in her parents’ house. The old lacemaker was curious as to how this admittedly pleasant and attractive but clearly uneducated girl could afford such a luxurious Corredo dalla Sposa.
But choosing and commissioning such a quantity of material took time and over the course of the day, Giuliana became communicative. Being so close to the achievement of her ambition made her careless and she dropped so many hints that it wasn’t difficult for Paola to fill in the gaps. And she did not like the sound of that Enrico or his wealthy di Chimici employer.
If Giuliana was surprised at the number of fittings the old woman thought would be necessary, she didn’t show it. She was quite content to spend more days such as this, sitting among the foaming lace and chatting to a sympathetic person about her wedding.
*
Arianna wanted her mother. So far she had been treated quite kindly, but not allowed any visitors. She was in an agony of uncertainty. Had Lucien been arrested too? Or had he stravagated back home before the guards came? At least he would have been with Rodolfo, who had more influence than Aunt Leonora.
The night in the cell was the worst. It was dark, much darker than her bedroom on Torrone or the one in Leonora’s house, because there were no candles in the cell and no torches in the passageway. The straw of her bedding was clean at least, but all night she was kept awake by its rustling, terrified that it might be caused by rats.
And she had no hope of rescue. She had committed the crime of which she was accused. If there were witnesses, she was done for. Of course she had known what the penalty for discovery was. When she had laid her plans, they were all based on not getting caught. She had calculated that if she were taken on as a mandolier, by the time she was discovered to be a girl it would be that which would attract all the attention, not the day on which she had enrolled. And there was no penalty for pretending to be of different sex.
Now she had to face up to the truth. The invariable sentence for the crime she had committed was death by burning. No one in living memory had been convicted of defying the law on the Giornata Vietata, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about what would happen to them if they had.
And there had been other burnings, for other crimes, such as treason, in Arianna’s own short lifetime. She knew that the fires were built between the two pillars, the one with the Maddalena and the one with the winged ram, which stood guarding the entrance to the city from the water. The burnings were public events, Bellezzans believing that anyone who would betray the city deserved no mercy and no pity.
Arianna had never seen one; her parents would not have taken her to such a gruesome spectacle. But she had seen the remains of one such bonfire and she had a vivid imagination. Here in the Duchessa’s cell, it was all too easy to picture the flames, the smell of her own flesh singeing, the agonizing pain. Arianna could not bear it – she screamed out loud. But there was no one to hear her.
And then an extraordinary thing happened. A vision of Lucien appeared in the cell, surrounded by strangely dressed people. He was looking straight at her, with such a stricken expression that Arianna forgot her own suffering. The image lasted only a moment before fading, but after that, she felt much calmer. Though she was in terrible danger, so was Lucien and he was completely innocent.
He had no knowledge of the law and had not known he was breaking it. But the truth would not save him, for who would believe it? Arianna felt responsible too. If she had not taken him away from where she found him, perhaps he would have returned to his own time and place sooner?
Thinking of how she might help him and planning to get a message to Rodolfo, Arianna fell into a troubled sleep.
Lucien was feeling much better. He had one further moment of queasiness, passing between the two pillars on the way to the vaporetto stop, but it soon passed. Looking back, he noticed that only tourists walked through that gap; all the locals skirted round the pillars, even if it involved a detour. Lucien made a mental note to look it up in Mum’s guidebook.
‘It says here,’ she said, ‘that you can buy a season-ticket on the vaporetti. Let’s do that, David. Let’s get three weekly seasons and go everywhere by water like true Venetians.’
Lucien smiled at her enthusiasm and she smiled back, her worries over his health temporarily suppressed. It was really good of them to bring him on this amazing holiday and he was determined to enjoy it to the full. He might be a bit old for holidays with his parents but, as an only child, he had always got on well with them and enjoyed their company
Now he stood on the San Marco landing stage, looking across at the huge domed church of the Salute, standing roughly where the Chiesa delle Grazie was in Talia. It was from here that the bridge of boats had taken the fake Duchessa over to the church, while the real one had been threatened by the assassin and Lucien had gone diving for treasure in the filthy canal.
The vaporetto came and they went the five stops to the Rialto, crossing back and forth over the canal. Venice was so much noisier than Bellezza that it was sometimes possible to forget about the Talian city for whole hours together. This was especially true on the Rialto, where cheap trinkets for tourists mingled with unaffordable gold jewellery.
The only thing here that reminded Lucien of Bellezza was the masks, shop after shop and stall after stall of them. Many of the Venetian masks were the kind that covered the whole face, to be held up before it on a gilded stick. But there were others that were more like the Duchessa’s or those of other Bellezzan women Lucien had seen. These just surrounded the eyes and the bridge of the nose and in Venice were held in place at the back by elastic, though the ones in Bellezza were tied with velvet or satin ribbons.
‘Would you like one?’ asked Dad, seeing Lucien stare at the masks.
‘Oh, no thanks, Dad. I mean I do want a mask, but I haven’t seen one I really like yet.’
‘There are enough of them, aren’t there?’ said Mum. ‘I bet there are hundreds more Venetian masks used as ornaments in people’s homes around the world than have ever been worn here at Carnival.’
‘What’s that one with the beaky nose that they have in all the shops?’ asked Dad.
Mum consulted her book. ‘It’s the Plague Doctor mask. Apparently they had the plague very badly here in the sixteenth century and doctors wore the beaky mask to protect them from the germs.’
‘But they didn’t know about germs in the sixteenth century, did they?’ said Dad and they started one of their meandering discussions that Lucien knew from long experience he could just tune out of. As they walked back towards San Marco through the back streets, he thought about the plague that had wiped out a third of all Bellezzans just before Arianna was born. Surely if the doctors had known how it was spread, it would not have claimed so many lives?
‘I can’t believe it!’ Mum suddenly sai
d loudly, as if she had found a germ herself. ‘That’s disgusting!’
Lucien looked where she was pointing. There in the corner of a square was a McDonald’s. His mother was practically foaming at the mouth. She was famously anti what she called the pollution of American chains in the most beautiful cities of Europe.
‘Fancy a burger and chips, Lucien?’ said Dad winking.
‘Don’t wind her up, Dad,’ laughed Lucien. ‘Perhaps we could grab a slice of pizza?’
When they had found a bar that sold pizza slices and focaccia sandwiches and cans of cold drink, they sat on the stone wall of the fountain in the middle of the square, eating their lunch and watching the passers-by, Lucien’s mother wincing at the ones munching on burgers. Then they continued their walk, following the bright yellow signs with their confusing bent black arrows pointing the way back to the Piazza San Marco.
‘Look, Lucien,’ said Dad, stopping suddenly. ‘Here’s a shop that sells books like that one I gave you. You know, the one that got you interested in Venice in the first place.’
They went in. It was an Aladdin’s cave of marbled paper and beautiful notebooks from pocket-size to the kind you’d need an executive desk for. The prices were astronomical. Dad was disappointed until Lucien found a pencil decorated with exactly the same purple and red swirls as his precious notebook. He took the somewhat battered book out of his pocket to compare.
‘Are you sure that’s all you want?’ asked Dad. ‘I agree it’s a perfect match. Shows the old book up a bit though, doesn’t it? What have you been doing with it, writing in the bath?’
Next to the paper specialist was a very superior mask shop. There Lucien found a silver mask shaped like a cat’s face, which reminded him of Bellezza. It was much better made than the ones in the Rialto stalls and Mum and Dad were happy to buy it for him. Then they found a stall selling figured velvet and bought a green scarf for Mum and a pair of red slippers for Dad. They made their way back to the hotel in a very good mood.