‘Do you like what you see, boy?’ she said in a soothing tone. Then, rapidly changing: ‘Is it worth dying for?’
She clicked her fingers at her waiting-woman. ‘Call the guards. Tell them we have an intruder.’
‘No, wait!’ stammered Lucien. ‘Rodolfo sent me here.’
The Duchessa gestured to the woman to wait. ‘I didn’t imagine you’d be using his secret entrance without his knowledge. But who are you?’ She got up and took his chin in her hand. He found himself looking slightly up at the tall woman. ‘Aren’t you one of my new mandoliers?’
She didn’t wait for an answer.
‘Whatever is Rodolfo thinking of? He knows as well as anyone that it is death for any outsider to see me without my mask.’
Lucien was panicking. It seemed as if death waited at both ends of the passage. ‘He told me to come here because Rinaldo di Chimici was coming up the stairs. He said he would kill me.’
The Duchessa froze. ‘That will be all,’ she said imperiously, dismissing her waiting-woman.
‘The guards, Your Grace?’ she asked tentatively and was rewarded with a stare that would have turned a lesser woman to stone.
‘Tell them to polish their weapons,’ said the Duchessa finally.
When the woman had left the room, the Duchessa pointed to a chair next to hers.
‘Any foe of the di Chimici must be a friend of Bellezza’s. And I am Bellezza. Now tell me who you really are.’
Chapter 5
Lagoon City
Much to her surprise, Arianna was bored. True, she was off the island and away from the prying eyes of its tiny population. But here on Bellezza she was nothing special, just another young girl. As she queued with her aunt at the fruit and vegetable stall, a basket on her arm, no one greeted her by name or asked after her grandfather’s bad leg. Arianna’s eyes roved towards the cathedral. This was all her big adventure had led to. Instead of sculling rich tourists round the canals of the big city, she was acting like a housewife, with no more thrilling prospect than choosing the shiniest aubergine.
Arianna sighed. Not for the first time, she wondered what would have happened if she had stayed with Luciano. She could have said she was his sister and then perhaps taken his place once the Duchessa had gone. The Duchessa! It simply wasn’t fair that she had so much power when Bellezzan women had so little. Arianna hated her.
There was a sudden flutter in the queue as the women made way to let a tall, black-clad figure pass. ‘Good morning, sir,’ ‘Greetings, Senator,’ they murmured, curtseying and nodding. Arianna looked up, mildly intrigued as the Senator paused to talk to her aunt. Leonora looked quite flustered. Perhaps she had a new beau? He was handsome enough and a fine match for a wealthy widow, but weren’t there rumours about him and the Duchessa?
‘This afternoon then. Good-day. Good-day, ladies,’ and he was off, striding across the Piazza, leaving many hearts beating faster behind him.
‘What was that about?’ asked Arianna, on their way back to Leonora’s house. ‘I didn’t know you knew Signor Rodolfo.’
‘Only slightly. He helped my husband once,’ said her aunt, glancing furtively around to make sure they were not overheard. ‘It’s you he seems to be interested in.’
Arianna was astonished. ‘Me? Why ever?’
‘I have no idea. But he’s coming to visit us this afternoon and he told me to tell you especially that he will bring news of your friend, Luciano.’
Arianna snorted. ‘Some friend!’ But she wouldn’t say any more and as Leonora knew no more, they passed the next few hours in anxious anticipation. Leonora worked off her curiosity by cleaning every inch of her already immaculate house and polishing a treasured silver coffee-pot. Arianna did what she was asked to do but her mind was elsewhere.
As the great bell of the campanile struck three, the Senator was shown into the courtyard garden. He looked round with approval before seating himself and greeting Leonora. Then he turned his penetrating gaze on Arianna. In spite of herself, she blushed. He was such a very composed and distinguished figure and she had the strangest feeling that he knew all about her ill-fated attempt to become a mandolier. Luciano must have told him, the unfeeling brute! But Arianna’s embarrassment soon turned to fear as she realized that it was dangerous for anyone to know what she had tried to do.
When the coffee and pastries had been brought out, Rodolfo leaned forward and addressed Arianna courteously.
‘I believe you are familiar with my young apprentice, Luciano?’
‘Your apprentice, sir? I thought he was to be a mandolier.’ Arianna couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Didn’t the Duchessa choose him?’
‘Yes,’ said Rodolfo. ‘But I persuaded her of her error. A natural mistake, but he had not come to the Scuola to enrol. He was on his way to see me.’
What is he playing at? thought Arianna. Luciano wouldn’t have known Senator Rodolfo from a dish of herrings when she had rescued him a few days ago. As for becoming his apprentice... But she realized that she was happy to hear he wasn’t going to be a mandolier, happier than she had been for days. Now she could stop being cross with him.
‘Would you like to see him?’ asked Rodolfo, turning immediately to Leonora to add, ‘I mean, if that is acceptable to you, Signora. He knows no people of his own age in Bellezza and I thought your niece would be a suitable friend for him. He is new to the city and she could perhaps show him around?’
Leonora looked thoughtful as she said goodbye to their visitor an hour later. She fixed Arianna with a thoughtful stare.
‘So Signor Rodolfo’s apprentice is not a Bellezzan and yet he was at the Scuola on the day after the Marriage with the Sea? That makes two of you in the city on the forbidden day. Would you like to explain to me how you met him?’
Lucien woke to find his mother looking into his face. This was so startling that it took him a while to register that he was no longer in Bellezza.
‘Oh, Lucien,’ she said, biting her lip. ‘You gave me such a fright. I couldn’t wake you. How are you feeling?’
It was a question he couldn’t answer. On one hand he was feeling just as wretched as he always did nowadays in the real world. But he was also wildly elated and the adrenalin was making him strong. Bellezza was real and he had safely negotiated his first voluntary journey there and back. He had practised ‘stravagation’, as Rodolfo called it, and it had been surprisingly easy.
He smiled at his mother. ‘Fine. Really. I’ve had a really good sleep. A deep one – I suppose that’s why I didn’t hear you.’ He stretched and yawned elaborately and saw the fright recede from her expression. She smiled back at him.
‘Would you like some breakfast?’
‘Yes thanks. Could I have a bacon sandwich?’
She went off happily. He hadn’t asked for anything like that for weeks and it would be a pleasure to make it for him.
Lucien fell back on his pillows, his head whirling. He had thought his time was up when he had come face to face with the Duchessa, but fortunately Rodolfo had soon followed him through the doorway and explained everything to her. It was amazing how much less alarming she seemed when Rodolfo was around. They had obviously known one another for a long time and Rodolfo equally obviously wasn’t intimidated by her.
Together, the three of them had worked on a cover story for Lucien. He was Luciano, a young cousin of Rodolfo’s, from Padavia, who had come to be his apprentice. He would be given Bellezzan clothes in keeping with his position and a room in Rodolfo’s palazzo. But in order to protect him, he must genuinely learn from Rodolfo. Quite apart from anything else he mustn’t disappear back to his own world involuntarily and must be taught the science of stravagation.
There was much that Lucien still didn’t under- stand. He had worked out for himself how to get to Bellezza from this world and it s
eemed to involve falling asleep clutching the book and thinking about the floating city. The first time he had made the journey back home it had been a matter of chance, but it seemed that if he lost consciousness in Bellezza, he would return to his own world – but only if he had the book in his hand.
‘Does this mean I can’t sleep in Bellezza?’ he had asked, when he was back with Rodolfo in the laboratory.
‘Not if you are touching the book,’ said Rodolfo, who had questioned him hard about the mechanics of his previous journeys.
‘And I can only get here when I’m asleep in my own world?’ pursued Lucien. ‘I’ve noticed it seems always to be day here when it’s night at home.’
‘So it would seem,’ said Rodolfo. ‘It worked that way for Doctor Dethridge too, although even he did not know why. All we know is that it is easier for Stravaganti from your world to enter and leave ours than it is for us to travel in either direction. Perhaps because the first of the brotherhood, Doctor Dethridge, opened the way through and he was from your world. We still know very little about the time differences between the two worlds.’
For whatever reason, Lucien had been able to get back by holding the book and concentrating on his home. He had even returned briefly to Bellezza that same night, to report to his new master on how the journey had gone. It seemed to be the rule that he arrived in the same place he had departed from and after the lapse of only a few moments, although it had taken him hours to get back to sleep in his own world.
Perhaps that was why he was so exhausted now. But when the bacon sandwich came, he was able to eat almost all of it, to his mother’s delight. Lucien had a secret hope that all the activity in Bellezza – walking, eating, behaving normally – might carry over into his everyday life and strengthen him there. Now all he could think of was going back to the city and being there every night.
‘You must learn everything you can about Bellezza,’ Rodolfo had said, just before Lucien returned home at dawn, as the evening candles were being lit in Rodolfo’s house. ‘I shall arrange for someone to take you around and teach you everything you need to know.’
How on earth was he going to fill the time in his world before nightfall?
Arianna was at a loss. In the end she told her aunt exactly what had happened. ‘And when I saw the Duchessa was going to pick him, I ran away and went back home,’ she finished.
Leonora paced up and down the small courtyard. ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘None of it makes sense. And I’m afraid to let you get caught up in it. Politics always mean trouble in the lagoon, in all Talia come to that. And if this has anything to do with the Duchessa, then there’s bound to be politics behind it. Still, Senator Rodolfo is a respectable man and if he has taken this strange boy under his wing, I don’t suppose there is any harm in your spending time with him.’
Leonora seemed much less concerned about Lucien’s being from another world than about his being involved in one of the Duchessa’s schemes. Then she remembered the rest of the story.
‘But the risk you took being in the city on the forbidden day! If you had been caught you would have been arrested and put on trial for your life! Your mother was quite right to worry about you. Be a mandolier, indeed! I never heard anything like it.’
Arianna started to argue but stopped herself. At least Leonora was going to let her see Luciano again and now that she knew he was Rodolfo’s apprentice, she was even more fascinated by the idea of him. ‘He must be a good scientist himself,’ she thought, ‘or Signor Rodolfo wouldn’t take him on. And he wants me to show him round the city, which is bound to mean adventures. At least I’ll have more chance of something interesting happening than if I’m sitting here polishing silver!’
*
In a bar in the north of the city, a man in a blue cloak was knocking back glasses of Strega. He felt he deserved it after his recent experience. One minute he had been spying on Senator Rodolfo’s house – the next he had found himself in Padavia. It had taken him days to walk back to Bellezza and he was in a thoroughly bad mood. In future he was going to charge his masters a lot more if he was to spy on a powerful scientist like Rodolfo – at least enough to pay for his coach fare back if he were to be spirited away from the city again.
‘Ancora!’ he ordered the barman. He had no thought but to get very drunk indeed and then perhaps he would go and call on his fiancée, Giuliana.
*
‘You!’ said Lucien when Rodolfo’s servant let Arianna into the laboratory.
She laughed at his discomfiture.
‘You seem very much at home in Bellezza now, baldy boy,’ she taunted. ‘Do you know how many natives would give their eyes to be in your shoes? Signor Rodolfo is a very important man, you know.’
‘Thank you,’ said the tall Senator, stepping out of the shadows. ‘I’m glad you approve.’
Arianna fell to her knees in a clumsy curtsey and made the sign of the ‘hand of fortune’.
‘No need for that,’ said Rodolfo, disapprovingly. ‘There is no place for superstition in a place of scientific enquiry.’
‘I had no idea my guide was going to be you,’ said Lucien. ‘Let me explain what happened at the Scuola.’
‘I know what happened,’ said Arianna, still a trace bitterly. ‘The Duchessa saw you and liked what she saw. That’s the way it works here in Bellezza. Appearances are everything. I know it wasn’t your fault.’
‘It’s the way things work in Bellezza that I want you to teach Luciano,’ said Rodolfo. ‘We are giving it out that he comes from Padavia, but I think you know that is not the case?’
Arianna nodded slowly and turned to Lucien. ‘So it’s true. You are from another world?’
‘Yes,’ said Lucien. ‘I’m a Stravagante.’
Arianna couldn’t help herself; her curled hand went immediately to her brow. Everyone in the lagoon had heard the word but few knew what it meant. Only that it signified power and mystery and danger. Here was her adventure without looking further.
‘Will you do it?’ said Rodolfo. ‘Will you teach Luciano to pass as Bellezzan?’
*
The next few weeks were the happiest Lucien had ever known. His days passed slowly and painfully as before. But at night he slipped easily back into his Belezzan life. He wore velvet, drank wine, spent the morning in science lessons unlike any he had known at school and passed every afternoon with Arianna, roaming the streets and bridges of the wonderful city. The only worry he had was remembering to keep out of full sunlight in case anyone saw that he didn’t have a shadow.
In his waking life, he read everything he could get hold of about Venice. His dad was really pleased with this new interest and brought him volumes from the library and bought others from the local bookshop.
‘You’ll be quite an expert when you get back to school,’ he said. ‘Should help with history and geography.’
But the more Lucien learned about Venice, the more Luciano knew it was different from his Bellezza. For a start, in Bellezza it was silver that was valued, way above gold, which was considered an inferior material. All the domes and mosaics of the great cathedral were made of silver in Bellezza. When he pointed this out to Arianna, she gave her characteristic snort.
‘Of course, what do you expect? Gold tarnishes. You know, goes black. It’s the ‘morte d’oro’. Doesn’t that happen in your world?’
‘No,’ said Lucien. ‘It’s silver that goes black if you don’t clean it. Gold never needs cleaning.’
‘We don’t clean silver here,’ said Arianna. ‘Just polish it sometimes.’
Lucien began to wonder what would happen if he took some gold, which was readily available and cheap in Bellezza, back to his world.
‘Now you are beginning to think like a di Chimici,’ said Rodolfo, when he asked him about it.
Lucien was horrified but realized i
t was quite true. ‘So it works both ways?’ he asked. ‘I mustn’t take anything back from here?’
‘Only the book you brought with you,’ said Rodolfo. ‘And, much later on, when you are an adept, you might be chosen to take another talisman, some object which would help a future Stravagante make the journey from your world to ours.’
‘Like you taking the book?’
Rodolfo nodded. Lucien sighed. He couldn’t imagine ever being as much of an adept as Rodolfo. The lessons were hard. There was a lot about matter and geology but that was as close to what Lucien might have described as science as they got. Mostly it was more like meditation. Rodolfo was very keen to develop Lucien’s powers of concentration.
‘Empty your mind,’ he would say, which Lucien found impossible. ‘Now focus on a point in the city. Visualize it. Describe it to me. Colours, smells, sounds, textures.’
This was an exercise which Lucien got better at over time, thanks to his afternoon wanderings with Arianna. There came a day when he was as familiar with the calles and campos and sotoportegos of Bellezza as he was with the streets and parks and alleys of his bit of North London. But it never lost its strangeness for him.
The city was like a net. Its hundreds of little waterways were what held it together. The odd-shaped patches of land, linked to one another by a myriad of little bridges, of wood or stone, were packed with tall thin houses, some grand and palatial, others poorer and more functional. Every tiny square had its own well, the natural meeting-place for all the locals. And much more of life was lived outdoors than in Lucien’s London.
He had to remind himself that this city was functioning more than four hundred years in his past. There were no motor-boats on the canals, no electric lights, no proper toilets. He got very used to hanging on till he got back to his own world, rather than tangle with the Bellezzans’ primitive plumbing. He knew that however fascinating he found the city, he was a tourist, in time and space.
One thing that convinced him of how long ago it was in Bellezza was the newness of some of the grand buildings. And everywhere in the city there were new buildings going up; mandolas and barges carrying blocks of stone thronged the waterways. Arianna’s world was a busy one, full of new schemes.