Inamorata (14 page)

S
OPHIE

M
y efforts to find a place to lease were unsuccessful. Katharine Bronson had been right. The moment that most discovered I was American, the price for lodgings went up, taking each palazzo firmly out of our grasp.

I was despairing when I returned to the Danieli late that afternoon, but Joseph was in a good mood. He was wearing only a sheet tied about his waist, dragging to the floor, and his hair was wet, sending rivulets over his shoulders and his bare chest. His white trousers, striped green with what looked like algae, hung over a chair, steadily dripping into a chamber pot he’d set below.

“I went swimming,” he told me at my question. “With Frank Duveneck over at the Palazzo Rezzonico.”

“You were swimming at the Rezzonico?”

“In the Canal,” he said. “The tide was coming in. I thought you might like to try it too, but Duveneck tells me ladies bathe only at the Lido.”

I felt a momentary resentment, a little jealousy that he’d been splashing about in the cool of the Canal while I’d sweated and climbed innumerable stairs to look at innumerable rooms too rich for our purse.

“Will you help me take this off? I’m about to perish.” I took off my boots and my stockings while Joseph came over to unfasten my gown, helping me out of it, and then loosening the laces of my corset so I could unhook it and let it go too.

“Did you find anything?” he asked.

I shook my head. “There’s nothing to be had. Or I mean, there are a hundred places, but they’re all too dear. I hardly know what to do. I don’t want to return to New York yet—”

“We won’t be returning to New York before the spring,” he told me calmly as he went to the dresser. When he turned around again, he was holding a little basket. “I bought you some figs. Sit down for a moment and eat one. They’re very good.”

I smiled with gratitude. My brother’s thoughtfulness was the one good thing in a discouraging day. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding the basket out to me, and I came and sat beside him, taking a fig and biting into it. “I think this might be the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.”

Joseph laughed. “So tell me what you looked at today.”

I gave him the litany, but he seemed unfazed. “I imagine someone at the salon will help before the week is out. But I’ll go looking with you tomorrow, if you want.”

I knew he would be able to help—he could make anyone do anything just by smiling. But I shook my head and rose to go the washbasin. “You’ve work to do.”

“Wait,” he said.

When I looked over my shoulder, he was staring at me with that expression I knew very well, dazed and intent at the same time.

“You look . . . you’re pearly.”

“It’s sweat,” I said, grimacing. “I’ll wash and—”

“Not yet.” He rose and stood back, rubbing his chin as he looked at me. “Take it off.”

I felt a familiar shiver of excitement and longing as I obeyed him. I pulled down the sleeves of my chemise, letting the whole thing fall to my feet, slipping out of my drawers until I stood naked before him. Joseph surveyed me critically, but I was used to that. I waited until he gestured to the bed. “Lie down.”

When I did, he directed, “On your side,” and then he leaned over, positioning me, running his hand over my hip, placing my arm just so. He handed me a fig. “Press it to your lips—as if you’re just getting ready to take a bite. Yes, that’s it.” His sketchbook was on the floor by the bed, and he grabbed it, hooking the leg of a chair with his foot and pulling it over, reaching into a pocket for a piece of charcoal before he realized all he wore was a sheet. He took a piece from the pile on the bedside table, and began to draw, quickly, efficiently, giving me curt orders. “Open your mouth more—I want to see your teeth. Look at me. Yes, that’s it. Pull your shoulder back a bit.”

This was second nature and always had been. I could not remember a time when Joseph had not drawn me—he’d done so from the time he’d first known what paper and pencil were. There had been dozens of sketches about our house in New York. Portfolios full of them. They were pinned to the walls in the nursery, in his bedroom, in mine—a hundred different aspects of me, illustrating nearly every moment of my life, from childhood to adolescence, into adulthood—captured forever. Most of them, the ones Joseph and I did alone, were lovely, but some—the ones posed for Miss Coring, the ones she’d insisted on, had been . . . I had no words for them. Even now, thinking of her, thinking of those terrible times—

“Soph.” Joseph’s voice broke through my thoughts. I looked up to see he’d gone still, the same shadows in his eyes that I knew were in mine. His voice was deep, whispered. “Don’t. Don’t think it. It’s past. It’s done. It can’t hurt us now.”

It wasn’t true—I felt the past at my back always, ready to destroy the fragile world we’d made, but I blinked and tried to smile. Though I knew it didn’t fool him, I said, “Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Did you want me to actually bite into the fig?”

He sighed and put the sketchbook aside. He came onto the bed, stretching himself out beside me. He took the fig from my fingers. My heart felt full and heavy.

“I know a story,” he said. “About a prince and a princess. She was very beautiful, but he had a big nose—”

“It wasn’t that big,” I protested.

“—and they lived in a room that was dark and full of terrors, but even though they were prisoners, the two of them liked it because it belonged just to them. They knew there was a world beyond it, and there were beautiful things in it, but nothing seemed as beautiful as what they had together. They needed no one else. They wanted no one else. Then one day, the demon-queen who kept them prisoner threatened to take the prince away forever. The princess was desperate to save her brother—what would she do without him?”

The story was old as time, one of the first I’d ever invented for him, for us both, and I knew what he was telling me. To put this memory away, to put it into a box with all the little boxes we kept locked and hidden away in a place where light rarely escaped. This was second nature too. Stories to hide truths that didn’t bear looking at. Stories that clothed ugliness in bright costumes and golden crowns, where Joseph and I escaped on pretty white horses, riding into a brilliant Venetian sunset, leaving demons and dragons and sieges behind.

I continued with the words we both knew so well. “Then the princess discovered that a golden crystal owned by a terrible wizard could defeat the demon-queen. If she could win it, she could save the prince.”

“Though the way was hard, and the only way to reach this wizard’s stronghold was to take a bridge over a chasm—”

“—and there was no rail, only a narrow bit of twisting, flexible gold that wound and dipped and swayed with every footstep—”

“But she could not fall, or the chasm would swallow her alive.”

My heart seemed to swell with gratitude and yearning and sorrow. I ran my fingers down his cheek, needing the feel of him. He grabbed my hand, keeping it there.

“She was a very brave princess,” he whispered.

“Who could not live without her brother,” I whispered back. “She would have done anything for him.”

He brought my fingers to his mouth and kissed them, and I felt the moment flare to life between us, the way he struggled to control it, to resist. “If that’s so, she should do what her brother wants now, and not think of the past. It’s only the future that matters. All right?”

I felt sorrow, relief—too many things. “Yes. All right. But only if you promise too.”

He said nothing, but pressed the fig he held to my lips, feeding it to me as if I were some ancient Roman queen and he was my servant. Then he sighed. “I suppose we’d best get dressed. I’ve promised Duveneck we’ll be at the salon tonight.”

I climbed off the bed. “I wish I had another gown to wear. They’ll know we have nothing when I show up in the same one every night.”

“You’ll have another gown.” Joseph’s voice was low and fervent. “I promise it. We’ll have everything we want, Soph. Everything we deserve. As soon as we convince Dane to recommend me to Loneghan.”

N
ICHOLAS

M
y meeting with Odilé had sharpened my senses. It seemed I felt everything too strongly as I came into the salon of the Alvisi and saw the Hannigans. Sophie Hannigan was laughing, revealing that slight overbite, and I felt the quick and brutal sting of desire. She had her hand on her brother’s shoulder, and I noted that same strange magic between them that held the eye. I felt oddly as if I were falling into something I was not quite prepared for, though there was nothing overt, nothing I could point to and say,
yes, there it is, that’s it.
They were in a group with Duveneck and Giles, and I made my way over, snagging a glass of sherry on the way. Giles looked up from his sketchbook, and pushed his glasses back into place. “Nick, there you are! Where the hell have you been?”

“About.” I smiled at Sophie Hannigan, who met my gaze with a steady one of her own.

Joseph Hannigan said, “We thought perhaps you’d fallen into a canal.”

“Like that unfortunate organist,” said Duveneck. “Did you hear about him, Dane? That one at San Maurizio? Found dead just last night. He’d been floating in a canal near San Anzolo. Knocked himself in the head, apparently. You’ll have to be careful of that when you’re walking to your new place, Hannigan. Those
calli
are as dangerous as canals.”

I frowned. “Your new place? You’re leaving the Danieli?”

“Mrs. Peabody found us a place to live at last,” said Sophie Hannigan.

I felt a quick dread. I had not thought of this, and it seemed a gross lapse. Please, God, that the lodgings Mrs. Peabody had found were far from the Dana Rosti. As casually as I could, I asked, “Close by, I hope?”

“Yes, indeed. The Palazzo Moretta.”

“Do you know it?” asked Hannigan.

I nodded in relief. Close, yes. On this side of the Canal, near St. Mark’s. Nowhere near Odilé. “I think everyone knows it. It’s a good choice. I’m certain you’ll like it. When do you take it up?”

“We’re to make arrangements tomorrow,” Miss Hannigan said. Truly, she was glowing, as if finding a place to live had eased some great burden, and I cursed myself for not seeing before how important it was to her. I could have found them someplace easily enough, had I applied myself to it. It was only a sign of how distracted I was in their presence that I hadn’t already seen to it. It was only pure luck that my momentary lack of attention hadn’t been fatal.

I forced myself back to my purpose. They would be moving tomorrow, and no doubt Odilé would still have her street singer. But the next day . . .

“Ah, well, I’d hoped tomorrow to show you both the Lido. The weather won’t hold long, and the two of you should see it. But perhaps the day after? Once you’ve moved in?”

Hannigan said, “Duveneck and I planned to go to Torcello.”

“Well, that’s pretty enough, if you like empty campos full of weeds,” I persisted. “But the Lido is something altogether fine. Do you know Byron used to gallop his horses there?” I ignored the usual uneasiness I felt at the thought of him. “Not to mention sandy beaches and a Jewish graveyard.”

“A Jewish graveyard?” Hannigan asked with interest.

Duveneck put in, “You’d like it, Hannigan. Desolate and falling apart. Mostly abandoned. Dane is right. We should go there instead while the weather’s good.”

“We could make a party of it,” said Miss Hannigan.

“It sounds the perfect way to spend the day,” Giles agreed.

Two mornings later, the five of us took the omnibus to the Lido. The steamer had a loud and annoying whistle it blew at every fishing boat that wandered into its path, and its cloud of trailing gray smoke was often blown by the breeze into our faces, both obscuring the view and choking us as we crossed the lagoon to the long and narrow island of sand that protected Venice from the Adriatic.

But for the steamer smoke, the weather happened to be good. The early morning fog had dissipated by the time we left, and though there was a definite edge in the air, the skies were blue and clear.

“How do you and your brother like the Moretta?” I asked Miss Hannigan.

She favored me with a bright smile. “It could not suit us better. There are fantastic murals in the salon. Neptune and his mermaids. And painted pillars and balconies . . . it’s beautiful. Or it was once. Now it’s rather decrepit, though still lovely. Mrs. Bronson helped us win acceptable rent, so I’m quite satisfied.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I should like to see those murals sometime.”

Her smile grew, and I thought I saw a singular warmth in her eyes when she said, “Oh, I quite mean for you to.”

Again, her directness was disconcerting. Before I could respond, Giles said, “It’s a good thing we came today. It’s starting to be cold.” He shivered as we leaned over the rail, watching the passing islands, one of which held the male lunatic asylum, and the other the monastery of San Lazzaro.

“Oh, I think it perfect,” said Miss Hannigan, lifting her face to the breeze coming off the bow. “It was too hot for me.”

“It’s all those clothes you wear,” her brother teased.

She made a face at him and then turned to me. “San Lazzaro—
that’s the monastery where Byron studied, isn’t it?”

“The same,” I said. “There’s a plaque there commemorating his stay, if you want to see it.”

“Hmmm. Not today,” she said, closing her eyes. “Today I want to lie in the sand.”

The image that brought to mind was too provoking; I couldn’t look away. I had recovered myself by the time the omnibus brought us, along with quite a few others, to Santa Maria Elisabetta, where there was a restaurant and a bathing establishment. At the height of the season, the sandy beaches were crowded with bathing tents and Germans, but today it seemed relatively quiet. The cold fog had frightened everyone away. There were no bathers bobbing in the shallow, shoaled waters, which were an astonishing blue.

The Lido had changed from Byron’s time; the fields dotted with poppies were mostly gone, and the unpaved walk leading from Santa Elisabetta to the Adriatic had been improved. Now, the walkways were paved and gaslit; there was a slew of lodging houses and a salon with an orchestra and shops. The restaurant’s food was no better than it had been then, perhaps, but the wooden platform that reached out over the water made up for a multitude of sins.

It was the first place we went, and Joseph and Sophie Hannigan took in everything with a pleasure that seemed to put a bloom on their already impossibly captivating sensuality. Once again, I felt irresistibly drawn to them, and I knew the others were no better. Duveneck laughed longer and harder than I’d seen in a long time, and Giles did whatever he could to please them both. The twins were like some strange, addictive drug, a spell I had to work to resist, and I was not doing a very good job of it. We lingered over a meal of olives and cheese, watery crab soup and crisply fried minnows, washed down with a considerable amount of wine, all set to the tune of talk and laughter.

When we were finished, we took off our boots and walked along the beach, trailing our toes in the foam of the slight waves. Mist wisped from the water, curling about us and then dissipating again. We settled at a spot a short way down the beach, stretching out in the warm sand. Giles and Duveneck opened the sketchbooks they’d carried with them and began busily capturing the view. Hannigan laid himself out, crooking his arms beneath his head, closing his eyes and looking for all the world as if he meant to spend these hours asleep.

“You don’t mean to draw?” Giles asked him in disbelief.

Hannigan slitted open an eye. “When Sophie decides she wants to dance in the surf, I will. Until then, I’ll leave the view to Turner. He’s done it best.”

“What an extraordinary thing to say.” Duveneck stared at him in dumb surprise, his hand paused over his paper. “Do you really mean that Turner’s had the last word on it, so the rest of us should not even try?”

Hannigan had closed his eyes again. He didn’t bother to open them. “Not at all. I only mean that the view I want to draw is Sophie in the waves.”

“Well I’m not bathing,” Miss Hannigan said. “I haven’t even got the costume, and I can’t spoil my dress.”

“You could take it off and still be fully clothed,” her brother pointed out. “You’ve six hundred petticoats on. But I wasn’t talking about that anyway. It would be pretty to see you walk along the shore as if you were surveying your kingdom.”

“With Venice like a fairy city in the background,” I heard myself say.

She looked at me in obviously delighted surprise. “Why, Mr. Dane, did I just hear a poetical observation?”

I smiled at her. “Hardly. One can’t help but see it. I’m not the only one who’s made the comparison.”

Hannigan leveled himself onto his elbows, squinting into the distance. “It looks not quite real,” he agreed. “Look at the way the mist gathers off the water.”

“It makes it look as if the city’s floating,” Giles said.

“Or emerging from the clouds,” Duveneck put in.

“Or just waking from a spell,” Miss Hannigan said, her voice soft and reverent. “The eyes of the Doge’s Palace are blinking open after a century asleep—do you see them? How fine they are. All the ghosts in the city have fled beneath their gaze. That’s what the mist is, you know. The spirits racing away.”

And as with her story of Mestre, it wasn’t the words so much as the way she spoke them. That storyteller’s voice, that compelling timbre. She raised a vision of the Palace—the center of spies and duplicity, executions and betrayal—as a benign and benevolent guardian of the city. The ugliness in it she’d swept away. We were all staring at her, and her brother whispered, “Go into the waves, Soph. Dance for us.”

She turned to look at him, and what passed between them raised in me such a yearning to touch her that I dug my hands fiercely into the sand. And strangely, too, I had the sense that it was what Hannigan wanted of me—that he had somehow, and quite deliberately, used his own allure to feed hers. Foolish to think it, of course. How was such a thing even possible?

Miss Hannigan rose. “Very well, I’ll do it. And you can all draw me. We’ll have a contest.”

“What’s the prize?” Hannigan asked.

“A kiss,” she said, ruffling his hair.

“Well, that’s hardly fair,” I protested. “I can’t draw.”

“Then you must write a poem,” she said, turning to me, her hands on her hips. “In fact, I charge you with this commission, Mr. Dane. Write me a poem, and I’ll give you a kiss whether you win the contest or not.”

The thought of it was impossible. I could not be kissing her. Feeling this desire could only be dangerous. I did not want or need a lover. My task required all my attention. Still, my mouth went dry. “No matter that it would be a very bad poem?”

“I can’t imagine it could possibly be.”

“I’ve told you, Venice has taken my words.”

“Then I will endeavor to be your inspiration,” she said.

She reached up, took out a long pin and then lifted off her hat. She flung it to the sand, where it landed neatly beside her boots and limp stockings. Then she reached up again, and I realized she meant to take down her hair. The thought of Sophie Hannigan like that, hair down, barefoot in the waves. . . .

Her brother said, “Leave your hair up.”

She frowned and lowered her arms. “Up? Are you certain?”

I thought all of us would have protested—I didn’t think there was a man on that beach who wouldn’t have liked to see Sophie Hannigan’s hair falling—but there was some unspoken command between the two of them that kept me silent, and I was certain the others felt it too.

Hannigan nodded, and his sister said, “Very well. Are you all ready?” and sashayed down to the water’s edge.

She paused there, her purple skirt gleaming in the sunlight, the stripes of her bodice blending from this distance to look like gold. She looked for a moment at the haze of the city beyond, and then she turned to us, and lifted her skirts. Slowly. Revealing pale ankles and slender calves. Teasing so deliberately and well I could not imagine that she hadn’t done it before. I could not take my eyes from her. The skirt came higher, just above her knees, the start of her thighs, before she stopped. She laughed—a sound that rang over the beach and echoed in the water. I was stunned to silence; she was nearly the most sensual thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to tumble her into that water.

She skipped through the light surf, splashing it into filmy rainbows about her legs, changing before my eyes into the very essence of abandon. She was a naiad, a mermaid, otherworldly and beguiling and enchanting. I felt she’d been invented just for us, with no other purpose than to twist and turn as her brother directed—
Dance for us. Leave your hair up.

It was disquietingly erotic, a surrender such as I’d never before seen. She had become what he’d told her to be, but she was in her own story too, not just the princess surveying her kingdom, but one who danced among the fleeing ghosts as if she delighted in the brush of their spirits against her skin.

The others were drawing furiously; I heard the scratch of charcoal on paper, but when I glanced at Joseph Hannigan, I saw he wasn’t drawing at all. He was motionless, staring at her with a raptness that seemed to match her surrender. As if he felt my gaze, he turned. For a moment, his emotions were starkly visible: a tormented fascination, painful longing.