Courtesan's Lover (16 page)

I
cannot
see
Vasquez
now without imagining him fingering his way beneath that poor girl's habit. Every time he lays hands on me, I think of her. What was she like? Had she wanted to lie with him? Or did he coerce her into her sin? Perhaps she was afraid of him. I wonder what has happened to her. And the child. Were they cast out into the street as soiled goods, or have the sisters taken pity on them?

***

There
was
an
interesting
moment
yesterday
evening. After our rut, Vasquez disappeared off to the room where his close-stool is kept, as he often does, and he didn't come back for some time. This is not unusual for him—his digestion can be problematical, it seems, which I suppose is not surprising considering the amount he eats and the speed at which he always eats it. He was out of the room for longer than usual yesterday; I became bored waiting for him, and decided I would start dressing.

I
wanted
to
go
home.

Now, Vasquez had taken his clothes off after me, on this occasion—he often does, as he likes to watch me undress—so his breeches and doublet were all piled on top of my things. I picked up his breeches, wanting to move them off my skirt, and as I did so, a piece of paper fell out of a pocket. It was folded over and over, and had clearly been crumpled and smoothed out at one time. I recognized it at once. It was that letter. The missive that had so angered Vasquez the other day—I'm quite certain of it.

Of
course, with a quick glance at the door, not wanting to be discovered openly reading his private papers, I immediately flattened it out and started to try to decipher it. Most irritatingly, it was in Spanish—I could only understand a few words. It was signed “Alfàn,” though and had an official-looking seal at the bottom broken, but still attached.

Oh, I so badly wanted to bring the letter home with me—I could have asked Filippo to translate it—but I didn't dare. If its contents had so angered Vasquez the other day, then finding it gone might provoke him to violence! And, of course, I would be the obvious suspect.

I
thought
it
might
be
entertaining
to
sow
a
seed
of
doubt
in
Vasquez's mind, though, so I smoothed the letter out flat and tucked it under the pile of clothes. I was dressed and ready to leave before he arrived back from his close-stool, and saw myself out.

***

Now
he'll just have to wonder whether or not I've read it, and if I have, whether or not I've understood what I've seen.

Modesto stood at the end of the Signora's bed, with his weight heavily on one foot. He squinted against the morning sun, which, now he had fully opened the shutters, was pouring in through the casement and effectively bleaching out the color of everything in the room. Dust motes seethed in the brightness.

Francesca sat at her table, somewhat disheveled, in her wrap, her cheeks rather flushed and her hair unkempt. Her fingers were ink-stained—he was pleased to see that she had been writing. His earnest recommendation—right from the very beginning of their time together in Napoli—that she record everything she said and did with every patron, had seemed to have been forgotten by her over the past weeks, but she had committed something to paper this morning, at any rate, whatever it was.

“So,” he said, “how was our
Maestre
de
Campo
yesterday?”

“I've just been writing it all down. You can read it if you want.” Francesca stretched, winging her elbows up on either side of her head, her fingers in her hair. She yawned. Closing her eyes, and rolling her neck and shoulders, she said, “
Caro
, is Lorenzo here? I'm starving.”

“Mmm, the fat old bastard's in the kitchen, busy making you something he says will be delicious.”

Francesca flashed him a smile. “Don't be so horrible. I'll just run downstairs and see what he has for me, and then I'll go back to the girls. I promised them I'd be back by midday. Could you bear to tidy up in here a little?”

Modesto watched her go

On the Signora's table was a painted wooden box, its brightly patterned lid propped open, the key protruding from the lock. Two vellum-bound books lay inside the box, one on top of the other. Modesto picked up the top one. The words
Book
of
Encounters
were inscribed across the front cover in Francesca's hand. He let it fall open, the spine resting in the palm of his hand. He read quickly through the most recent pages, and then riffled back to the beginning of the book.

***

God, I ache all over! Michele never seems to know when to stop…I've no conception of where his endless energy comes from. I do wonder sometimes about him: about his early life. He never talks about himself, but he often seems to have this big, dark anger, burning away like a smoldering furnace, somewhere inaccessible. Somewhere I don't think I have ever reached. There are moments when Michele frightens me. I'm not sure how to describe it. It's like a blankness. An emptiness. There's a kind of nothingness that sometimes flickers across his eyes…as though, just for that moment, he is entirely unaware of what he is doing. Or what he might do next. I don't think I like him very much. So many times I have said to myself that I should finish with him…but I never do. Maybe it's this sense of danger. Maybe it's the money. Perhaps I actually like dancing thoughtlessly around the crumbling edges of potential disaster. I've done it before, after all. Or perhaps it's just that his wild, unthinking, explosive abandonment is…is intoxicating and, like some pathetic inebriate, I'll keep on and on returning to something I know might well destroy me.

***

Modesto shivered. He pictured Signor di Cicciano's disdainful arrogance and felt a familiar wash of antipathy push up through him like a ripple of nausea.

He closed the book, put it back down on the table, and reached back down to the painted box. Inside, beside the second notebook was a small ivory-handled mirror and, very much to Modesto's surprise, an intricately tooled dagger, its blade a damascened blue steel. He picked it up, weighed it in his palm, then tested the needle point against a fingertip. He frowned at it. The handle of this knife was unlike anything he had seen—instead of the usual protruding pommel, it rose straight up, no wider than the blade, ending in two round, angled “ears” of delicately worked silver. It was, Modesto observed with a cold lurch of distaste, slim, beautiful, and quite obviously lethal. He wondered why on earth, with her history, Francesca would want such a thing anywhere near her.

Putting the knife back where he had found it, Modesto turned his attention back to the second book, bound like the first in vellum and fastened shut with thin leather laces. This too was carefully inscribed
Book
of
Encounters,
and had been dated some year or so previously.

He flipped open the loose-knotted laces and turned to the first few pages. Reading through a few lines, he clicked his tongue in irritation.

“Was it that long ago? Bloody man—I can't believe he's been coming here this long!”

***

And
then
this
evening
I
find
myself
persuading
an
anxious
new
patron
that, as far as I am concerned, it is in fact entirely acceptable for him to vent his frustrations with his—so he tells me—frigid wife upon my expensive arse as often and as vigorously as he wishes. So long as he pays me what I ask for. (Which I think in his case will not be too much. He's certainly not rich.) He's a big, sweet-natured man and much to my surprise, he's charmingly reluctant to do anything which might cause me the merest fraction of a second's discomfort. In fact, it takes me much of our time together, on this first occasion, to persuade him to lay hands on me at all, despite his obvious hunger for relief—such is his guilt at his infidelity.

***

“I've
never
understood why you indulge him the way you do,” Modesto muttered moodily, shaking his head in disbelief. Turning over several more pages, he read;

***

But
sometimes
I
feel
as
though
I
am
doing
no
more
than
wallowing
through
my
life
like
a
sun-warm sow in a swamp. I watched a big black pig yesterday, deliberately tipping over its water trough and then coating itself in the resultant glistening mud. It lay on its side with its little eyes closed and with a smug smirk of blissful decadence on its face, and as I watched, I saw myself, sweat-damp and bone-weary, basking in the admiration of a satisfied customer and looking, I'm sure, just as complacent as did that sow, lazing in the heat of the afternoon sun. Though perhaps—I hope—a little prettier.

***

Modesto now puffed his amusement in his nose. He looked up, hearing footsteps on the stairs, and Francesca came back into the room, with a piece of bread and a length of smoked sausage in her hands. Her mouth was full; she chewed and swallowed quickly and clumsily, waving her sausage at him, obviously wanting to speak, and then said, “What are you reading?”

Modesto raised an eyebrow. “Your description of yourself as a pig in the mud…” he said.

Frowning quizzically, Francesca crossed the room to peer over Modesto's shoulder, and then laughed. “I don't remember writing that at all. I'm not sure why I keep all those books.”

“Because I tell you to, that's why,” Modesto said, snapping shut the volume he held and holding it up toward her, pointing it at her like an accusatory finger.

Francesca smothered a laugh, and bobbed a curtsy. “I'm so sorry, Signore,” she said in a servant's wheedling tone of subservience. “Whatever you say, Signore…”

“Oh, go and finish your sausage,” Modesto said. He could feel a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, but deliberately twitched it to immobility. Then the smile faded, and he said quietly, “Where does the knife come from, Signora?”

“Knife?”

He pointed into the box.

A pause.

“It's Michele's. I took it away from him the other day. Much to his annoyance, I have to admit.”

“When was that?”

“Couple of weeks ago.”

Modesto remembered with a little lurch of his guts the scuffle he had watched from the doorway, and the glittering object that had clattered to the floor.

“Would you like me to…dispose of it for you?” he said.

“No. Thank you,
caro
, but I suppose I should really give it back to Michele. He says he feels naked without a knife and he's too mean to buy a new one. I'll let him have it back next time he's here, but I'll tell him to take it away.”

“Make sure you do.”

Francesca smiled and ducked into another little curtsy. “Whatever you say, Signore,” she repeated, once more in a husky parody of servility.

Modesto shook his head. “I mean it.” He paused, then said, “Did you say you wanted to go back to the Via Santa Lucia this morning, Signora?”

“Yes. I promised Bella and Beata I'd take them down to the docks today. But, oh, dear.” She yawned, and rubbed her eyes with the back of the hand holding the bread. “Oh, Modesto, it's not that I don't want to—I love taking them out and I know they adore seeing the ships—it's just that—I really am tired today.”

“I'll take them, if you like.”

“Oh,
caro
, would you?”

“I'd be pleased to. I'll tidy up in here, we can go back to Santa Lucia together, then you can sleep for a couple of hours while I walk the girls down to the waterfront. They like going with me, I think.”

Francesca smiled. “Do you know, I've never stopped being grateful to the Duke of Salerno for having decided to engage a castrato soprano to sing at his thirtieth birthday party.”

She finished her sausage, sucked the tips of her fingers, leaned across and kissed Modesto on the cheek. Then, sitting down in a chair near the window, she tipped her head back so that the sun fell across her face and closed her eyes, heaving in a long sigh and blowing it out again softly. Watching her as he began to collect up her scattered undergarments, Modesto saw her obvious fatigue and frowned. He shook his head. Her heart's not in this game like it used to be, he thought. Not since that boy's visit.

Carlo della Rovere swore as a thick-set man in filthy, salt-stiff breeches stepped backward and trod heavily on his foot. “Mind where you're bloody going,
stronzo
!”

“Beg pardon…” the seaman muttered, shifting his clearly heavy armful of rolled canvas more securely up into his arms and moving away from Carlo without turning his head. Carlo scowled at the man's back and spat onto the dockside. He bent down and rubbed his foot.

Looking about him, he saw some dozen ships of varying sizes—two- and three-masted caravels, a heavy, square-rigged galleon, one very battered old carrack with filthy brown sails, and a pretty little
sciabecco
, very like
beloved
—had been made fast alongside the many wharves and jetties, while several more vessels rode at anchor out in the glittering water of the bay. A stiff breeze had picked up since the morning, and the air was now heavy with the ceaseless slap of rope against wood, with the muffled crumpling of furled canvas and with the screaming oaths of the thousand wheeling gulls that rode the wind in buffeting circles overhead. The dock itself was crowded: flamboyantly dressed merchantmen arm-in-arm with women decked out in peacock-bright finery; nut-brown, bone-thin sailors with white-rimed breeches and bare torsos, seemingly carved from polished teak; wide-eyed urchins gazing in envy at the insolent faces of those boys already employed aboard ship; ill-clad women with tousled hair and provocative expressions, on the lookout for work.

Carlo pushed his hair out of his eyes and began to chew one of his fingernails. “Come on! Come on!” he muttered under his breath, the words distorting around his fingertip. “Don't keep me bloody waiting too much longer, you bastard!”

Sitting on the butt end of an ancient old gun, embedded in the wharf as a bollard, Carlo searched the crowd for the hundredth time, one leg twitching convulsively, his eyes flickering from face to face, from stranger to stranger. He stopped chewing his nail and began tapping his closed lips with his fingers; exasperation was now clamping his teeth together until they ached.

And then his attention was caught by a man, hand in hand with two little girls in matching dresses. This was not the man he sought, but for some reason the new arrival seemed vaguely familiar. As Carlo watched, the newcomer released the children's hands and pointed up into the web of rigging above him. Both girls stared upward in the direction indicated, nodding at the miming of what appeared to be the tying of a complicated knot. Then the man smiled, now spreading his arms wide in illustration of some explanation Carlo could not hear, his face alight with pleasure, and the little girls laughed. Carlo could not immediately place him, but he knew he had never seen these children before. He stared at them. They were identical. Absolutely indistinguishable. His gaze flicked from one to the other; momentarily distracted from his irritation, he found himself amused and entertained by the girls' extraordinary likeness.

And then, with a sudden stab of realization, he knew where he had seen the man before.

***

An
evening
a
few
weeks
previously. A doorstep in the Via San Tommaso
.

“Signore, this is my brother, Gianni. I imagine you are expecting him—he has an engagement here this evening.”

The
stocky
man
with
the
black
eyes
nods
and
steps
back, arm outstretched in welcome, but Gianni does not move. He stands with his arms folded and his shoulders up near his ears. Carlo grabs his elbow. “Now, now,
fratellino
,” he says. “You wouldn't want to disappoint the lady…”

“Get off me, Carlo.”

“A little nervous, Signore, I'm afraid,” Carlo says in amused apology.

The
man
at
the
door
says
nothing. Carlo sees the expression of suppressed terror on his brother's face, and laughs aloud.

***

It was her pimp—that woman's—that overpriced whore of Michele's, Carlo thought, remembering the money he had lost on that venture.

The “pimp” caught his eye and started in recognition. Inclined his head.

“Signore!” Carlo called, and, welcoming the distraction, he stood up and began to walk toward the three newcomers. “Signore!” he said again.

Another nod.

“I didn't know you had children, Signore.”

A pause.

“They are not mine.”

The girls' liquid-eyed prettiness made sudden sense to Carlo. “Ah—they're hers, then?”

“These are Signora Felizzi's daughters, if that's who you mean, yes.”

The two children stared up at him.

“And what brings you to the dock, Signore?” Carlo said.

“The children enjoy seeing the ships.”

“Their mother…otherwise engaged, then, is she?” Carlo said, raising his eyebrows and smirking as he imagined the possibilities.

The man with the black eyes smiled, but said nothing.

And then, pounding feet and an anxious shout from behind them. “Rovere!”

Carlo spun around. A squat figure with a softly wizened face like an ageing apple was elbowing his way through the milling crowd.

“Ramacciotti! About bloody time!”

The little man was panting, and sweat was beading his forehead and upper lip.

“Where the hell have you been?” Carlo said.

***

Modesto watched as the man called Rovere gripped the newcomer by the upper arm and leaned in close toward him. Both men began to walk away up the wharf toward the brightly painted galleon.

“Who was that man, Desto?” one of the girls asked in a whisper. Her grip on his hand had tightened.

“Someone I met recently.”

“Does he know Mamma?”

“No.” Modesto crouched down between the girls and smiled at each in turn. “No, he doesn't. Don't let's worry about him. Let's think about food instead. Are you hungry? Would you like to see if we can find some comfits? Or some dried figs? Or perhaps, if you're very lucky a…a sugar pig?”

Enthusiastic nods.

“Come on then, see over there—there's somewhere we should be able to buy something, and then, if you like, I'll finish my story on the way home.”

Modesto pointed along the wharf to where a likely stall was attracting a fair amount of attention, and the three of them began to walk toward it. The stabbing pain in his chest occasioned by Rovere's presumption that the girls were his children was subsiding. A needling sense of unease, however, continued to unsettle him, though he could not determine why this should be.