The stranger appealed to Francesca. “I know it is strange, my sudden appearing. But here is the cause: I visit the lady who has breasts of great beauty.” He pointed. “There in that house she lives. But alas, the esposo of the lady—how is the word for him?”
“The husband,” Giulietta supplied.
“That one,” said the stranger. “He comes home early because he has a discord—what is it when they scream at each other?—he has a disputing with his mistress.”
“You mean a quarrel?” said Giulietta. She glanced at Francesca, her mouth twitching.
“The quarrel, yes,” the man said. “Then with me”—he thumped his chest—“with me he makes the quarrel. What have I done? Almost no time he gives me to assume my pantaloni. How do you call them? My breeches, which they are down on my feet, so.” He pointed to his ankles. “The esposo he shouts at me,” he said indignantly. “He chases me with a knife very big.”
Giulietta giggled.
Francesca couldn’t help but smile. She and Giulietta had encountered his type before. Some of Lord Byron’s romantic escapades were equally comical. She signaled the gondolier to proceed.
Uliva shrugged. This was Venice, after all. The vessel proceeded smoothly along the canal.
The stranger lightly tipped his hat, then kissed his hand to her. “You are so much kindness to come to my succor. So genteel. It is too shocking, what happens. My lady she is married, not a virgin. All the married ladies here, they have lovers, no?”
“A virtuous wife has only one lover,” said Giulietta. “But sometimes the husband acts crazy, as though she had twenty. This one, it seems, was in bad temper because he quarreled with his mistress. It is most unusual, I agree, for the Venetian husband to make a fuss about his wife’s amoroso.”
“One or two lovers is normal for a married lady,” said Francesca. “A wife with twenty lovers is a little wild, though. Then people talk. You must be new to Venice.”
“Ah, yes.” He smote his forehead, tipping the curious hat askew. “Alas, my so bad manners. I am Don Carlo Frederico Manuelo da Guardia Aparicio. But you.” He pressed his hand to his heart. “No, do not tell me who you are. I am killed and you are angels in heaven…though I think,” he added with a frown, “I did not expect to find myself in heaven. My mama always told me I would go to the other place.”
“You’ll see us there in due course, no doubt,” said Francesca. “But for the present we remain in Venice. I am Francesca Bonnard and this is my good friend Giulietta Sabbadin, and you needn’t worry about our husbands chasing you with big knives, for we are cortegiane.”
“Ah, but of the certainty,” he said. “So stupid I am. I should have seen at once—so much the beauty, so much the elegance, so much the costly gowns of the most fashionable.” He kissed his hand to them.
“At any rate, I believe you’re safe now,” said Francesca. “Where would you like to get out?”
“It makes no moment to me,” he said. He came off his knees and shifted to a sitting position as smoothly as the gondoliers’ oars glided through the water.
She saw then, with shock, that he was bigger than she’d assumed. His long legs, angled to fit the small quarters, blocked the front of the felze. The shoulder resting against the frame of the open door was very broad…and familiar. She tried to recall where she’d seen him before.
The trouble was, Italy contained so many good-looking men—not to mention the countless paintings and statues of magnificent males. More than likely the physique, like the curious facial hair, called to mind a portrait she’d seen in somebody’s palazzo.
In any case, she’d nothing to fret about, she told herself. This was merely a man lounging in a boat, merely a man at her feet—where she preferred them, by the way. Yet her heart beat fast, and under its pounding she was aware of a sharp pull in the pit of her belly.
Not harmless, she thought. Not this one.
Leaning back and tilting his hat over his forehead, he said, “I am content to go where you go, most beautiful ones. I am the courtesan like you. You will allure the men and I will allure the women.”
It was true enough, James thought, as he watched them from under the brim of his hat. He’d whored before for his country and was doing it again. If he caught the clap and his pego fell off, well, too bad. He’d get no sympathy from his superiors. Men lost parts in war, didn’t they, and he was a soldier, wasn’t he, and better paid than any of them. That would be their attitude.
In any event, a man didn’t get far in this trade if he couldn’t improvise. Bonnard was clearly more cautious and mistrustful than her friend. She’d wound up as tight as a clock spring when he settled in the cabin’s doorway, but his claiming to be a whore like them seemed to calm her somewhat. Now she was watching, waiting, deciding whether to have him pitched overboard or not.
He was watching and waiting, too.
“But you are a man,” said her doe-eyed friend, Giulietta.
“Yes, thank the saints,” he said. “But this night, if I run only a little more slow, I think I would not be all the man I was before.”
“A courtesan is a woman,” said Giulietta.
“What word then?” he said. “My English speaking, better than my Italian speaking, but still of no perfection.”
Giulietta looked at her friend.
“The man prostitute,” he prompted, “who costs very much. What is his name in English?”
“Husband,” said Bonnard. And she laughed.
James sucked in his breath.
He’d heard about the laugh, and dismissed it as another of the myths men created to explain their stupidity about a woman.
He knew—knew—it was her art, yet the husky invitation in the sound caught him. It was a lover’s laughter, hinting at private jokes amid tumbled sheets. It was the laughter of shared secrets, almost unbearably intimate.
It was like those sirens, calling to what’s-his-name. Ulysses.
Tie me to the mast, he thought.
He recalled the look she’d given him at the theater, the smile as she turned away. It was the kind of smile Helen must have given Paris, the kind Cleopatra must have bestowed on Mark Antony.
Damn but she was good.
A challenge, then, and wasn’t that what he wanted? Hadn’t he balked at this mission at first because—among other grievances—he’d believed it a waste of his time? Hadn’t he told his employers that any tyro could relieve a female of a packet of letters?
“Husband?” he said, pretending to be baffled. “But no, not to marry, you see, but only so.” He made a hand gesture universally understood to indicate the carnal act. “To make happy the more old woman, who sometimes she is ugly, but very, very beautiful in the purse.”
“Francesca teases you,” said Giulietta. “She is speaking of English husbands. The English are crazy. She is English but she is only a little crazy.” She looked to her friend. “Is there an English word? I cannot think of one. A hundred words for bad girls like us, but what is a man courtesan?”
“A penniless aristocrat,” said Bonnard.
James suppressed a smile. Wit, of course. The best whores had it. The famous harlot Harriette Wilson had nothing remarkable in the way of looks apart from her fine bosom. Her great assets were her lively personality and her sense of humor.
So far, so good, then. If Bonnard had relaxed enough to ply her wit, he’d made progress.
“This is so true,” he said gravely. “I have many brothers and sisters and I am one of the younger ones.” That bit was fact, at any rate. “There is not enough money for everyone. And so I make my way in the world, you see.”
“If you want to make your way in Venice,” said Giulietta, “I will give you some good advice. Keep away from Elena da Mosta. She has the clap. She gave it to Lord Byron. This is why Francesca would not have him, though he was so charming to her and very sweet.”
“He was charming and sweet to every woman he found attractive—and that meant nearly every young woman who crossed his path,” said Bon
nard. “How he could tell which one among the multitudes gave him gonorrhea is beyond my comprehension.”
“But he loved Francesca very much,” Giulietta said. “He wrote poems to her.”
“He writes poems to everybody,” said Bonnard. “That is how he converses with the world. That is how he experiences the world. Have you read his new poems?” she asked James, starting forward in her seat, her otherworldly face lighting up. “Are they not remarkable, so different from the others?”
The abrupt appeal, the sudden openness, took him unawares.
Why, yes, they are, he was about to say.
She made an impatient gesture. “But no, how could you have read them?” she said. “They’ve been published only in English.” She sank back into the seat once more.
James swore silently. He’d come within a breath of betraying himself.
He’d read those new poems, and he’d been amazed. They were so immediate, so conversational, and so completely different, he thought, from what he deemed the overwrought romanticism of Childe Harold. But he had no one with whom he could discuss them. In London, it would be different. In London one might easily find a group of gentlemen, a club, a salon, where people talked of poetry, music, plays, and books.
A man didn’t find such people—or have time for literary discussions with them if he did—as he dashed from city to city, country to country, saving the world.
“She reads the poems to me, else I would not understand them at all,” said Giulietta. “I speak English well, and practice with her all the time. But to read it hurts my head. The way the English spell: Where is the logic? Nowhere can I find it. They spell like madmen.”
James nodded. “More easy it is to read Greek.”
Bonnard had turned away. She leaned out of the open casement and looked up at the night sky.
Giulietta was chattering on amiably. James listened with a part of his mind. The rest was on her companion. Bonnard had put up her guard again and distanced herself from him. He could feel it, as palpably as if she’d thrust him away with her hand.
Very possibly, had she possessed the strength to throw him off the gondola, she’d do it. He was not sure what had happened, what had made her withdraw. All he knew was that he felt her mistrust humming in the air between them.
This was going to be a good deal trickier than he’d imagined.
This wasn’t another Marta Fazi. This one was complicated. She had a brain and something more, though he wasn’t sure yet what the more was.
He had no doubt now, though, that Francesca Bonnard was going to be a considerable challenge. He hadn’t had a true challenge in a long time.
His heart went a little faster.
Perhaps this would be fun, after all.
Francesca finally got rid of their new friend at the Caffè Florian.
After the theaters emptied, the attendees often spent two or three hours at the coffeehouses. The Florian in the Piazza San Marco was the most popular with Venetians and visitors sympathetic to their cause. The Austrian soldiers and their friends preferred the Quadri, across the way. Like other social centers, the Florian offered the usual Venetian mix of classes and degrees of respectability.
Among other patrons this evening was the Countess Marina Querini Benzoni. Age might have withered her—she was sixty if she was a day—but it had not sapped her animal spirits or diminished her eyesight when it came to attractive, virile young men.
Three years ago, she’d attempted to captivate Lord Byron.
This night she pounced on Don Carlo.
Once the countess had the “alluring” Spaniard firmly in her clutches, Francesca told Giulietta it was time to leave.
As soon as they were out of the door Giulietta broke into giggles. “Oh, you are wicked,” she said.
“He said he wanted to make an older woman happy,” Francesca said as they started across the Piazza. “How lucky for him. He found what he was looking for without even trying.”
“He would not have found her if you had not pushed into the crowd near her table,” said Giulietta. “What is it? Did you not like him? I found him so entertaining. I like a man who makes me laugh.”
“You like men,” said Francesca, “generally speaking.”
“And, generally speaking, you do not,” said Giulietta.
“You know I’d rather have a dog,” said Francesca. “But a dog won’t support me in the style to which I’ve chosen to become accustomed.”
“I thought Don Carlo was sweet,” Giulietta said.
Francesca pointed to her head. “Too much pomade. When he took off his hat, I thought at first his hair was carved and painted on his head. What does he use, I wonder? Lard? His valet must apply it with a trowel.”
That had given her a jolt: When he took off his hat in the coffeehouse, she saw thick black hair, plastered to his skull and gleaming greasily in the candlelight. The sight hadn’t turned the Countess Benzoni’s stomach, though. She probably hadn’t noticed his head. His lower body was of far more interest.
“Madame.”
Francesca turned. “Drat,” she muttered.
The golden-haired prince of Gilenia strode toward them, smiling. “At the last, I find you,” he said. “Everywhere am I looking. I had the great hope of us to meet again at the Florian.”
Losing his place to the Russian count had not dampened his ardor for long, it seemed.
Even in the uncertain light near the Campanile, the bell tower of St. Mark’s Square, Francesca had no trouble discerning the happy sparkle in his eyes. Once upon a time, John Bonnard had looked at her in that way, and made her heart flutter. The moth to the flame. The old story. The old cliché.
Now she experienced an irrational urge to weep. John Bonnard was a treacherous man. This man was utterly guileless. She hated to disappoint him. It was like kicking a puppy.
But she wasn’t sure she wanted him, and pity was not the way to commence an affair. In any case, she knew very well that if she made it too easy, he’d quickly lose interest.
“The café was so crowded and hot,” she said. “And I’m fatigued.”
Instantly his beautiful face was all concern. “But of course,” he said. “This weather so strange in this place. One day so hot and the air like the soup. The next day, cold, with rain and wind. And everywhere madame goes, a crowd happens, to admire her. But please, you will allow me the honor so great, to escort you to your house?”
“Thank you, your highness, but not this night,” she said gently. “Another time.”
“I worry for you,” he said. “These are times of too much danger. Everywhere is revolt, the insurrection. Only a short time ago is the Duke du Berri murdered.”
“You are kind to worry,” she said. “And you flatter me, putting me in the same category as the heir to the French throne.” Lightly she patted his sleeve. His face lit at the touch.
Her conscience screeched.
“But please be assured,” she went on, “I am in excellent hands. My gondoliers can deal with any would-be brigands or revolutionaries. Good night, your excellency.”
She made her deepest curtsy, offering him a splendid view of her bosom. Giulietta did likewise. Then, while he was still blinking, dazzled by the display, she took Giulietta’s arm, and walked on.
They soon passed the Campanile and turned into the Piazzetta San Marco, the smaller square between the Doge’s Palace and the Zecca, the city mint. The area was far from deserted at this time of night. Now and again she nodded to acquaintances as they passed, walking to and from the landing place.
She was aware of Giulietta, unusually silent beside her, as they made their way to the gondola waiting at the water’s edge.
Only when they were settled aboard the boat and gliding past the palaces bordering the Grand Canal did Giulietta speak. “Poor boy,” she said.
“What would you have me do? Bed him out of pity?”
“I would.”
“I can’t,” Francesca said. “I need a lover, a formal arr
angement, not a night’s amusement.”
“I know. It is not good for one’s reputation to take to bed every pretty boy—or man—who appears. Too easy, too cheap, we lose position. One becomes common, a mere whore, una puttana.”
Francesca looked out at the boats passing, weaving in and out among their fellows, the lights of their lamps bobbing in the darkness. “Men are investments,” she said. “One must choose carefully, and think of the future.”
“You think Lurenze will lose interest as soon as he has bedded you?” Giulietta said. “I do not think so.”
Francesca shrugged. “I’m not sure what I want at the moment. He isn’t the only candidate.”
“You seemed to enjoy his company before,” Giulietta said.
Francesca looked at her.
“Before you saw the servant at La Fenice. He gave you ideas, I think.”
“Of course he did,” Francesca said easily. “As an amusing fantasy, yes. As a lover—impossible. Unless he’s a jewel thief.” She grinned. “A very good jewel thief.”
Giulietta grinned back at her. Jewelry was a powerful form of financial security. Better yet, unlike bank notes, it was security one might display to the world. Francesca knew—and Giulietta understood—that Lord Elphick gnashed his teeth every time his wife sent him word of one of her acquisitions. It was one delicious form of revenge.
Thinking of him, she laughed, and Giulietta, knowing what she was thinking, laughed with her.
A few hours later
While Zeggio watched, fascinated, James stood at the mirror, carefully removing the thin mustache and beard.
“I’ve always found simplest disguises the most effective,” James explained. “People sort strangers into categories—servant, foreigner, and so on. Remember, too, that they notice only what’s unusual: a scar, a curious mustache, a flamboyant hat. The Florian was well lighted, and being indoors, I was obliged to take off my hat and keep it off. But Bonnard found my hair so revolting, she took no notice of my facial features. The next time she sees me, she won’t know me.”
Zeggio nodded. “She remembers the pomade, and the hair flat upon the skull. She does not know it curls.”