‘You are angry with me,’ said the Duchessa quietly.
‘What did you expect?’ said Arianna bitterly. ‘You gave me away and forgot about me for more than fifteen years. I don’t know why you decided to tell me now, unless it was to save my life.’
‘Of course that’s a part of it,’ said the Duchessa. ‘But everything is changing now. I have known for some months that a crisis was coming in my affairs and those of the city.’
‘How? What crisis? I don’t understand,’ said Arianna.
‘Let me try to explain,’ said the Duchessa. ‘Perhaps it would help if you could see more of my face.’
And she lifted her hands to the silver ribbon and undid the blue silk mask she was wearing. She looked steadily into Arianna’s eyes and the girl felt her heart lurch. If all she had been told was true, she was seeing her mother’s face for the first time. And in the back of her brain a little voice told her that she was also looking on the unmasked face of her city’s absolute ruler, the most powerful person she was ever likely to meet. It was all too much. Arianna had to look away. But not before she had realized that she and the Duchessa were very much alike.
‘When I knew that I was going to have a child,’ the Duchessa continued, speaking to the back of Arianna’s head, ‘I was afraid for myself and for you. Knowing that I had someone so dear to me would have been an awful weapon in the hands of my enemies. I had long since decided to remain unmarried and without children. My city was family enough for me. So I decided – and perhaps I was wrong, but you will be my judge – to have the child looked after by someone I could trust, someone who would never betray me. My own sister. Valeria agreed, when I sent for her, and she was rewarded with a daughter, something she had longed for after her two sons.’
‘But how did you manage it?’ asked Arianna, her natural curiosity getting the better of her. ‘I mean, didn’t anyone notice that you were, well, getting bigger? And what about my mother, I mean, your sister?’
The Duchessa smiled. ‘It wasn’t easy. I have one serving woman whom I trust above all others. Her name is Susanna and she knew everything. I could not have carried off the deceit without her. For a long time there was nothing to see, but as the child grew, I took to wearing looser fashions and it was given out that I was unwell with a stomach disorder that lasted some months. At the same time, Valeria took to padding her undergarments and she let her women friends know that she was expecting again. They were very surprised.’
‘Yes,’ said Arianna. ‘I’m always being told what excitement there was on Torrone when they knew I was coming.’
‘That was the hardest part,’ said the Duchessa. ‘The women of Torrone had put their childbearing years behind them and they were so interested in the coming baby. Of course they wanted it to be one of them that delivered it. But Gianfranco said he would have a midwife from the city, since there had been no call for one on the island for many years.’
‘And when the midwife came, she brought me with her, I suppose?’ said Arianna.
‘That’s right. I had taken to using substitutes on State occasions, once my body’s changes were beyond concealment. A young woman was appearing in my place, wearing my gorgeous clothes at the Epiphany banquet, while I lay upstairs in my chamber, with only Susanna and the midwife to attend me, getting on with the business of giving birth to you.’
There was silence in the cell. ‘Didn’t you care about giving me away?’ asked Arianna.
The Duchessa took her hand. ‘I had made up my mind to do it. I could not let myself care. I made no sound when I bore you and I said no word when I gave you away. I had already chosen your name and that was all I could do for you then. That and giving you to my sister was all I honestly believed I could do for you.’
‘But couldn’t you have pretended to be my aunt at least? I mean I never knew till last night that my… that Valeria even had a sister, let alone that it was you.’
‘That was also for the best. Of course people knew when I was first elected that I had come from the islands, though I too was born in Bellezza, as the Duchessa must be. Your grandmother, Paola, was on a shopping trip to the city when I was born. I, like you, was in a hurry to enter this world and came before my time. But people’s memories here are short and even if they remembered that my parents lived on Burlesca, it would have taken a very persistent enemy to track down a sister on Torrone. And even if they had, then there would be no reason to doubt that you were her child.’
‘But if it’s worked for all these years, why change things now?’ asked Arianna, moving her hand away.
The Duchessa sighed. ‘A few months ago Rodolfo came to me with a strange story. He had been making his divinations as he does every full moon, and had come up with a repeated pattern that he could not quite understand. Whether he asked the cards, or cast the stones or threw the dice, an urgent message was being revealed to him but he lacked the one piece of information he needed to interpret it. He didn’t know about you.’
‘What was the message?’ asked Arianna.
‘About a young girl and danger, about a mage and a young man, about a talisman and a new Stravagante from the other side, about the dukedom and the number sixteen. Once he told me about it, I knew that some of it referred to you and your coming birthday and that I must take steps to ensure your future safety. So I sent messages to my sister and mother and waited to see what plan of my enemies would bring danger to you – or to me through you.’
Arianna was silent for a while. ‘Is Rodolfo my father?’ she asked in a low voice. The Duchessa got up with a gesture of impatience and walked to the other side of the cell.
‘Don’t you think you owe me the truth about that too?’ Arianna persisted.
‘I told you last night, I have never spoken to your father about your existence,’ said the Duchessa. ‘That was essential for your concealment. When I consider it necessary to tell him, then you will know too. Until then the less you know, the safer we shall all be.’
Her voice was quite hard and Arianna could see that she was going to get no further with this line of questioning today. So she tried another.
‘And have you been content to know nothing of me for all these years?’
‘What makes you think I have known nothing of you?’ said the Duchessa, turning back with her eyes flashing. ‘I knew when you cut your first tooth, when you said your first word – it was ‘no’ if I remember rightly – when you took your first step. I knew when you went to school and how you were pert with your teachers, I knew that your brothers and Gianfranco spoiled you and that you were the darling of the island. I knew everything about you except what you looked like. As soon as I saw you with Luciano I had you followed and my hunch was confirmed. But I never guessed that you had come to Bellezza on the forbidden day. Of all the fates I have considered, I never dreamed that the danger would be brought here by you yourself!’
Arianna couldn’t bear to leave the Duchessa the advantage of standing tall over her. She sprang to her feet, expecting to meet her ruler’s angry gaze, words of self-justification springing to her lips. But then she saw that the Duchessa’s eyes, so like hers, were bright with tears.
The week in Venice was over. Lucien had done everything he had meant to. He thought he would never forget the view of the city from the water when they had taken the boat back from Torcello, which called at the Lido and then crossed the lagoon to the piazzetta. The whole city seemed to float on the water, its gold spires and domes and gilded towers glowing in the setting sun.
It reminded Lucien of his last boat journey back from Torrone, when he had been with Arianna and had suddenly stravagated home. Then the city had been silver but both were magical.
On their last evening, Dad had hired a gondola with lanterns and they had been serenaded in the manner of an ice-cream commercial.
‘You have to pay extra for the singing,’
whispered Dad. ‘I wonder how much extra you’d have to pay to get him to stop?’
Lucien had chosen the gondola, picking the best-looking gondolier, in honour of the Duchessa, though he was clearly over twenty-five.
‘You’re so funny, Lucien,’ said his mum. ‘Why does it matter what the man looks like?’
‘I just think everything in Venice should be perfect,’ said Lucien, ‘and it would be distracting if the gondolier was ugly.’
They floated lazily up the Grand Canal in the balmy evening air and forty-five minutes later they were back in the Piazza San Marco. Lucien noticed again how only tourists walked between the two columns with the statues on top. He had a very strong feeling that he didn’t want to go near them himself.
‘What does it say in your guidebook about those columns, Mum?’ he asked.
She looked it up. ‘The columns of San Marco and San Teodoro,’ she read, ‘were the site of a gruesome spectacle. Executions of criminals took place here up to the eighteenth century. Even today, superstitious Venetians will not walk between them.’
In spite of the warm summer evening, Lucien shivered.
‘Ugh,’ said Dad. ‘Let’s go for a last drink.’
They went to one of the expensive cafés with tables outside in the Piazza. Since it was their last night, Dad ordered Bellinis – cocktails made from prosecco and white peach juice.
‘Can I have an ice-cream too?’ asked Lucien.
‘Let’s all have them,’ said Dad. ‘It will be a long time before we taste proper Italian ice-cream again.’
The Duchessa sat in her glass audience room, waiting for the Ambassador. She had commissioned the glass for the room soon after her election and after nearly twenty-five years it still gave her satisfaction. Each wall was decorated with patterned and mirrored glass from Merlino. But each section had been separately commissioned and only the Duchessa and one craftsman knew the secret of how they fitted together to form deceptive reflections.
It gave her the edge on negotiations in all formal audiences, unnerving and disconcerting her visitors, who were never sure which Duchessa they saw was the real one. This suited Silvia very well, particularly in the long wearying sessions she had had in this room with the Reman Ambassador. She sighed at the thought of having to go through another one of them again today.
There was a knock at the door and a manservant came in bearing a small package.
‘Excuse me, milady,’ he said. ‘I know you are expecting the Ambassador. But the messenger was most insistent that you should have this straightaway. He said it was the lace you ordered from Burlesca and that you were in a hurry for it.’
‘Quite so,’ said the Duchessa, who nevertheless had ordered no lace. ‘Thank you, you did quite right.’
She dismissed the manservant and opened the package. The lace panel was intricate and delicately worked. The Duchessa held it in front of her, as if it were a book to be read. As indeed for her it was. Her mother, the old lacemaker, had taught both her daughters what she called the language of lace.
Ever since Silvia had visited her on the island, her mother had known that a crisis was coming. The existence of the child would not be a secret for much longer. And now, by a stroke of luck, she had learned information that might save her own daughter’s life. Paola had put all she knew about the di Chimici plot into that piece of lace and, before the Ambassador arrived, the Duchessa knew exactly what he was plotting.
‘Good,’ she said under her breath. ‘I shall have it made into a bodice and wear it in front of the stupid man. It will take more than Rinaldo di Chimici and his grubby little henchman to take Bellezza from me.’
Chapter 16
The Glass Room
Lucien had benefited from his week in Venice in more ways than one. For a start, he had slept like a log every night, catching up on months of sleep loss. And it was a city that, in spite of its reliance on waterways, required a lot of walking. The exercise had done him good. And the change of scene had been wonderful. Just to get out of the house and see new places would have been good after his months of confinement. But for that new place to be Venice...
And yet, ever since that moment on the towpath in Torcello, he had been feeling a sort of low-level anxiety. All the time he had been so ill and having treatment, he had known that his life was in danger but this was quite different. He was sure that this new threat had its roots in Bellezza and he couldn’t wait to get back and find out what it was.
The Duchessa’s gaoler had known nothing like it. First an obvious miscreant had been well treated and then released without charge and now the girl-prisoner, charged with one of the most heinous crimes in Bellezza, was being treated like an honoured guest. The Duchessa had ordered her moved to a larger, airier cell with its own garderobe. And then furniture had been moved in! A red velvet sofa, an armchair, a little escritoire and a stack of books.
The prisoner had her own oil-lamp and candles and a rug to cover the flagstones. The cell was snugger and more cosy than the gaoler’s own apartment. He might have been envious, except that the girl really was a fetching little thing and he had come to the conclusion that she must be innocent of the charge. He certainly hoped so or she would face a horrible fate. But then, if she was innocent, why did he have to keep her locked up?
Arianna was actually relieved to be in prison. She had so much to think about that she didn’t want anyone or anything to distract her. After her second interview with the Duchessa, Rodolfo had brought her parents to her and, as soon as she saw them, she had clung to them sobbing, begging them to tell her it wasn’t true. Though they were surprised to find she knew the secret of her birth, they did not deny it. They just looked at her gravely, relieved that that same secret would now save her life.
And then they had held her tight and cried their own tears, promising that they would always love her as their own child. And Arianna had sobbed all the harder, feeling that now there would always be a barrier between them.
The Duchessa had come a few times since, bringing small presents of food or clothing. Once she had sent her own woman to wash and dress Arianna’s hair. Arianna submitted to all these attentions like someone in a dream. When the Duchessa had first made her revelations, she had been angry. She had always loathed the idea of the arbitrary ruler and as soon as she had met the Duchessa in person, she had a new reason to hate her. But she couldn’t, not after she had seen how moved the Duchessa had been. Arianna felt torn in two.
She must learn to think of her parents as her aunt and uncle, her brothers as her cousins. The only thing that was still the same was that her grandparents really were her grandparents. That was a rock to cling to in a sea of swirling uncertainties. But even that rock had its sharp and uncomfortable edge: Paola and Gentile had lied to her just as much as Valeria and Gianfranco had.
Bigger than all of this was the idea that her own real mother was a person so powerful and charismatic as the Duchessa. It gave Arianna a completely different view of herself. She wasn’t the child of gentle, elderly parents, a housewife and a museum curator. She was the daughter of the most powerful person in Bellezza, the only head of State able to hold out against the di Chimici, the centre of political intrigues and assassination attempts. And the worst of it was that, despite everything, Arianna found herself excited by the idea.
All her life she had wanted adventure and incident and now she would have more of it than she could handle. She would no longer have to fear being married off to someone dull. She needn’t marry at all if she didn’t want to; the Duchessa hadn’t. And that would set her off on the other round of thoughts. Who was her father?
It was all very well for the Duchessa to say that the less she knew, the safer she would be. Arianna still hoped it might be Senator Rodolfo, even though she was a little afraid of him. She knew, as everyone did in Bellezza, the rumours about his relationship with th
e Duchessa. But he had looked so grim and distant when he brought her parents to her – her aunt and uncle, she corrected herself – that she did not think he could possibly be her father. And though she still wanted to ask the Duchessa more about it, now whenever she came she had a waiting-woman with her and Arianna had to remain silent.
The trial before Council was set for the next day and Arianna was no longer afraid that she would be convicted. But she was worried about Lucien. Rodolfo had said, in answer to her question, that there was still no sign of him and he didn’t know when he would return.
As soon as they were back home in London and had unpacked, Lucien pleaded tiredness and the need for an early night. He took down the mirror above his bed and hung the silver mask on its hook; it would do for now. He propped the mirror against the wall at the foot of his bed. He put the pencil on his bedside table and the book in the pocket of his pyjamas. As soon as he was ready for bed, he lay in the dark for a long time, touching the book and waiting for sleep to take him to Bellezza.
William Dethridge had not been idle. He had spent some time comforting Leonora, who was still distracted with worry, in spite of Rodolfo’s assurances, and now he was trying to find a way to communicate with Lucien that would be less uncertain than stravagating forward to an uncertain time. Rodolfo had shown him the way in which his mirrors worked and he was now trying to open up a link with the world he had come from and where Lucien still lived. The combination of his occult knowledge from one world and Rodolfo’s science from another was formidable and he was beginning to make some progress.
In one of the mirrors, an image was forming which he didn’t understand. At first he thought it was somewhere in Bellezza, because he could see a silver mask. But underneath it was a boy’s head on a pillow. He had just realized that it was Lucien, when the face in the bed closed its eyes and Lucien himself appeared in the laboratory.