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A manservant entered to set the table for tea.
“Arnaldo, have you heard anything about the Ca’ Munetti?” Francesca asked him.
“The baggage came first, late yesterday,” said Arnaldo. “Not very much. They have hired the gondolier, Zeggio, who is a cousin of the wife of the cousin of our cook. He says the new master is connected to the Albani family. He desires to study with the Armenian monks, as your friend Lord Byron did.”
Eyebrows raised, Giulietta met Francesca’s gaze. Then they laughed.
“Byron studied with the Armenian monks,” said Giulietta. “But he was not a monk.”
“Still, only two servants…” Francesca watched the water gates open.
“Perhaps the new tenant is a Venetian, after all,” Giulietta said. “They are too poor to keep a proper staff. Only foreigners and whores can afford a houseful of servants.”
Arnaldo went out, and the conversation reverted to English.
“My new neighbor might be a miserly foreigner,” Francesca said. “Or a hermit.”
“In any of these cases, he is not for us.”
“Good heavens, no.” Francesca let out a peal of laughter.
Her laughter was as famous as her unusual looks, perhaps more so.
After the divorce set her adrift from respectable Society, she’d had to learn how to manage men. She’d learned quickly. Fanchon Noirot, her Parisian mentor, had told her she had the gift.
The most important lesson Francesca learned was how to talk to men—or, more important, how to listen to them.
But when Francesca Bonnard laughed, men listened, with all their being.
“When you laugh,” Lord Byron had told her, “men catch their breath.”
“They’d do better to catch hold of their purses,” she’d answered.
Then he’d laughed, albeit ruefully, because it was true.
Francesca Bonnard was a courtesan, so expensive that very few men could afford her. Lord Byron wasn’t one of them.
Meanwhile, across the canal
Of all the cities in all the world, she had to come to this one.
It was deuced inconvenient.
Not to mention wet.
James’s gondola had set out from the mainland in a drizzle and traveled the Grand Canal in a torrent so fierce that they’d closed the casements of the felze, the vessel’s black passenger cabin. Only a blur of houses and stone piers was visible through the blinds. No sound came to him but the rain drumming on the cabin and deck of the boat.
One might almost believe this was the underworld his Roman ancestors had believed in. He might be floating upon the River Styx, among the shades of the dead.
That flight of imagination thudded to earth—or water, rather—when he heard the echo of oars under a bridge and their gondolier’s announcement, “Ponte di Rialto.”
The gondolier’s name was Zeggio. At first glance, the Venetian appeared too young to guide anybody anywhere, too pretty to be performing manual labor, and too innocent to be taken seriously. This appearance explained why James’s associates deemed Zeggio the most suitable guide in Venice. He was, in fact, thirty-two years old, far from innocent, and they’d employed him before.
He was a highly regarded local agent. Nonetheless, he aspired to become the Venetian version of James Cordier.
Poor sod.
After turning off the Grand Canal into a narrower waterway, then another, they came at last to the Ca’ Munetti.
“Ah, Venice,” James said as he took in the view—such as it was—in front of and behind him. The buildings and gondolas were merely darker shapes in the grey haze. “A fine place, indeed, but for the damp.”
His servant Sedgewick said something under his breath. He was a small fellow, so thoroughly nondescript that people tended to take no notice of him whatsoever. That would be their first mistake, possibly their last.
“What was that, Sedgewick?” James said.
“Wish I was in England,” his former batman muttered.
“Who doesn’t?” said the master. England would be colder, and certainly no sunnier, but it was England, after all, not yet another damned country filled with foreigners.
Not that James was a foreigner here, precisely. His mother was related to at least half the great families of Italy, her ancestry as distinguished as that of his father, Lord Westwood.
Venice, however, wasn’t Italy.
Venice was…Venice.
The gondola paused at the water gate and James glanced up at the house opposite, where she lived.
She being Francesca Bonnard, daughter of the infamous swindler, the late Sir Michael Saunders; former wife of the so-called pillar of rectitude Lord Elphick; and at present the most expensive whore in Venice.
Some would say that winning the last title was not the achievement it might have been, say, three centuries earlier. Venice had come down in the world, most obviously in recent decades. La Bonnard, however, was reputed to be the most expensive of her ilk in all of the Veneto and very possibly all of Italy and, some said, the Continent.
Why the queen of courtesans should come to Venice at all was the pertinent question. The fabled city was poor, a large number of its noble families had departed, and its floods of visitors had thinned to a trickle.
Why hadn’t she remained in Paris, where she’d first achieved fame three or four years ago and where she might choose among multitudes of wealthy victims? Or why not Vienna? Or, at the very least, Rome or Florence?
He’d probably find out why, sooner or later, if he needed to. It had better be sooner. He had plans, and she’d interrupted them.
He’d recovered the emeralds from Marta Fazi and delivered them to their owner. In exchange for the British government’s doing him this little favor, the owner had signed an important treaty. He’d rewarded James as well, quite handsomely.
That was supposed to be James’s last mission. He was supposed to be on his way home, to a well-earned retirement.
But no.
He was wishing Lord Elphick’s discarded wife in Hades as the water gates opened and the gondola came to a stop.
He stepped out of the boat onto the stone and marble squares that paved the andron. Dark boarding covered the walls. The space was cold, and the musty odor of damp filled his nostrils.
They followed Zeggio up a staircase to the piano nobile, and found themselves in a vast central hall. This portego, as the Venetians called it, ran from one end of the house to the other.
It was clearly designed for show. The line of magnificent chandeliers down the center of the ceiling and rows of immense candelabra standing on tables along the wall—all dripping the famously magnificent glass work of Murano—would, when fully lit, have made a dazzling display of the gilt, the plaster ornamenting the walls, the sculpture, the paintings.
“All this, on top of water,” Sedgewick said, shaking his head as he looked about him. “What sort of people is it, I wonder, goes and builds a city on stilts on a swampy lot of islands?”
“Italians,” said James. “There’s a reason they once ruled the world, and a reason Venice once ruled the seas. You must at least give credit for a marvel of engineering.”
“I’ll give them credit for an easy route to malaria,” said Sedgewick. “And another easy one to typhus.”
“Oh, but there is no disease now,” Zeggio assured them. “The malaria she comes in the summer and the typhus he comes in the spring. Now is a most healthy time.”
“There’s always your pneumonia,” Sedgewick said. “Your putrid sore throat. Your consumption. Your affection of the lungs.”
“That’s my Sedgewick,” James said. “Likes to look on the bright side.”
Zeggio led them down the great hall into one of the side rooms at the canal end. “You will see,” he said. “In the autumn and the winter, Venice is more agreeable than the mainland. This is why everyone returns on the day of San Martino.”
Everyone except her.
