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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.
