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As bits of plaster fell on his head, he wondered why he’d never thought of that: tuck the packet of letters into a convenient crevice and plaster the lot over. It wanted only a thin coat of plaster and a little skill to make it blend in. An artist—the one who’d done the work in the first place, would have noticed. But even a sharp eye like James’s could easily miss it. The packet would appear to be another fold in the drapery—and he’d been looking for letters, paper.
“You needn’t fear they’re damaged,” she said as she went on with her cautious work. “I took care. I wrapped them in oilcloth to protect them from the wet plaster, then I wrapped a rough cloth over that, so the plaster would stick properly. It worked out well. It made the packet more rounded, so it resembled a fold of the drapery.”
“I had read that the great courtesans of Venice were extremely well educated and multitalented,” he said. “But I never heard of their learning plasterwork.”
“They were blondes; did you know that?” she said. “I think a reddish blond was the fashionable hair color. The ones who didn’t come by it naturally used a rather ghastly bleaching process.”
“I like your hair exactly as it is,” he said. “But did these beauties work in plaster?”
“They might have done,” she said. “Lots of ladies do in England, certainly. We learn in the schoolroom. Artistic pursuits. Sticking shells and such on the walls of playrooms, decorating man-made—or woman-made grottoes. Making plaster casts of our hands. Masks.”
More chips fluttered down. She reached behind the boy’s bottom and took out a rounded packet. Then she quickly climbed down. Her eyes sparkled and her face was flushed.
He moved out of the way back as she stepped off the last rung onto the floor.
She set down her knife. “There,” she said. She held out the packet. Bits of plaster still stuck to the outside. He took it.
He stared at the thing in his hand. After all this time, after all the trouble, here it was. If he’d had to search again, he still wouldn’t have found it.
He looked up at the ceiling, at the little bottom and legs, where only a few chips in the plaster offered any hint of something extra having been there. Even then, who’d know? The plasterwork was more than a century old, cracked here and there, patched here and there.
“The only thing that truly worried me was the house burning down,” she said. “That was why I panicked the other night.”
He nodded.
“What?” she said. “Are you dumbstruck at last?”
His gaze drifted down to meet hers. He saw the triumph in her eyes, and laughter, too…and the ghost.
“Only you would make a little boy’s bum your hiding place,” he said. “What fun you are.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.” She backed away and gave a little wave of her hand. “Well, run along now and do whatever it is you have to do.”
He remained where he was, gazing at the packet in his hand, then at her, in her schoolgirl dress, which she contrived somehow to make exotic and seductive.
He thought of how clever she’d been, how she’d outwitted her devious spouse and England’s best agents. He thought of how brave she was—stupidly brave, as one needed to be at times. He thought of the shame and misery she’d undergone and how she’d turned disgrace into triumph.
He thought of what he’d felt like when he first came to Venice: utterly weary, in body and soul, and utterly disgusted. He didn’t even know who that man was anymore.
Because of her.
Because he’d fallen in love, stupidly, hopelessly, incurably in love.
But if he said so she wouldn’t believe him and he couldn’t blame her for not believing him.
And so, instead, he said, “This thing I have to do…I wonder if you’d like to do it with me?”
She studied his face for a moment. “Is that an innuendo? Forgive me if I didn’t quite understand but it’s wretchedly early in the morning.”
“Not an innuendo,” he said. “I told you I had a plan. I didn’t tell you much about it. Would you like to be my accomplice?”
Her face came alight then, the way it had done the first time he’d spoken to her, when he’d been Don Carlo and she’d started to talk of Byron. “Cordier, that is the first sign of true intelligence you’ve shown this morning.”
“I take it that’s a yes?” he said.
She threw herself at him so hard that he dropped the packet. He didn’t care. She pulled his head down and kissed him hard, too. He didn’t mind that, either. He wrapped his arms about her and kissed her back with the same energy, and hoped he had not just offered to make the gravest mistake of his life.
That night
It was not hard to hide in Venice if one were clever, knew where to go, and made friends easily. This was not the case for Piero, unfortunately.
He would not have ended up in the pozzi had he not tried to steal a gondola. He had not realized how much skill it required to maneuver them. He had not realized how possessive gondoliers were about their ridiculous boats.
Marta Fazi should have told him. Unlike him, she’d traveled a great deal, especially during the war, and she’d been to Venice before. She had money, and a comfortable room in a house in the neighborhood of the Rialto Bridge.
When Piero appeared at her door, she welcomed him as one might a long-lost son.
While not the world’s deepest thinker, he knew better than to believe she was so very happy to see him. Still, he knew, too, that she was desperately short of men, because all the ones who’d gone after the Englishwoman the other night had been captured. Unless Marta took one of her fits, he ought to be safe from her knife.
She sat at a small table in a comfortable little room. Two other chairs stood at the table. Under it lay a rug. A fire burned in the little fireplace. He knew she was used to grander surroundings these days. Yet once upon a time, she’d lived on the streets. She could make herself at home anywhere.
At present, she sipped wine from a pretty glass. He had known her to drink straight from the bottle. She offered him none. But she didn’t take up the knife that lay on the table next to the bottle. She listened patiently while he explained why the governor had let him go.
“It’s because of the English lady,” he said. “She’s afraid of you.”
“Why? She doesn’t know me. You wouldn’t be such a fool as to tell her or anyone else about me.”
He shook his head. “They said your name to me—one of the foreigners did, the first night. Then the governor said your name. But every time, I said I’d never heard of you. Only tonight, when they say what they want me to do, I tell them I will try to take a message to you.”
She glanced at the knife, which gleamed in the lamplight. “Piero, I hope you haven’t been an idiot again.”
“One tried to follow me,” he said. “I lost him in a crowd near a theater.” He didn’t add that he’d got lost several times before and after that.
“And the crowd didn’t scatter when you came?” she said. “You stink like a fish ten days dead.”
“I’m sorry for the smell,” he said. “There was no time to wash. I came as fast as I could. When I tell you how it is, you can judge if I was wrong.”
She waited.
“I know you want papers from this English lady,” he said. “One of the foreigners knew about those papers, too.”
She nodded. “If they didn’t know, my friend in England would not have asked me to perform this little service for him.”
“The two men who came to me tonight did not want to give the papers to you,” Piero said. “But the English lady is afraid you will hunt her wherever she goes. She makes her friends do as she says. The prince—the one with the yellow curls—he’s one of her friends.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve seen him. Very pretty.”
“He’s the one who made them set me free,” said Piero. “He argued with the other one—a bigger man, dark. That one’s obnoxious. To make the time pass, I dream of ways to kill him.
”
“Poor Piero! The time goes slow in prison, I know.”
She would have let him rot there or be hanged or have his head cut off on that devil’s device, the guillotine. But Piero would have done the same if she had ended up in the pozzi. One had to look out for oneself.
“The prince doesn’t care what anyone else wants. The lady is more important, he says. He wants no more trouble for her. He wants you to go away. He says you’re a nuisance.”
Marta gave a short laugh. “A nuisance? It’s true. But I wouldn’t be this great nuisance if my men did as I told them. We should have had those papers the first night we came here. But no, you and Bruno had to play with the whore.” She lifted her glass and eyed him over the rim.
“That was Bruno’s fault,” Piero said. “He was the one who didn’t follow orders.”
“And you were stupid enough to get caught,” she said. “Trying to escape in a stolen gondola. What kind of imbecile steals a gondola?”
Piero lifted his shoulders in the “I Dunno” gesture.
