Rapture In Ruin, Book 2

The water in the basin was turning red.

Isabella held her hands beneath the surface and watched it leave her. It came off her fingers in threads, curling out through the clear water, spreading, darkening, until the whole bowl had blushed.

She rubbed her palms together. More came away. It had worked into the creases of her knuckles and under the rims of her nails. She dug at one thumb with the nail of the other. The red stayed.

Beside the basin the pestle lay across the mortar, its head stained crimson. A little paste still clung to the bowl, ground fine with a drop of gum and a drop of rose water, as Madame liked it for the evening.

She scrubbed. The water went darker.

Blood had come up through white linen from somewhere inside him. It had spread between gloved fingers that pressed and pressed and could not hold it in.

A crack, flat and enormous, like a door slammed in an empty church. The pistol leaping in her hands. Smoke between them, white, stinking of sulphur. Through it a small movement, almost nothing. His hand going to his stomach. His head bowing to look at it.

The water had gone still about her wrists.

She could hear his breath. It dragged in behind the silver, wet, wrong. Somewhere below it came the drip of something upon stone.

“Go.”

“Bettina.”

A spatter of cold water struck her cheek. She flinched so hard that the basin rocked upon its stand.

Marietta stood at her elbow with her fingers still wet, laughing.

“Santa Lucia, look at her face.” She flicked the last drops at her. “Where were you, signorina? Paris?”

“Washing the skin off her own hands.” Tonina did not look up from the bench. “She has been at that thumb since the bell rang.”

The room came back to Isabella in pieces. The long scrubbed table beneath the window. The irons cooling upon the hearth. Madame’s night shift spread over the back of a chair to air, the lace at its throat pressed into small stiff waves.

The light was going. Beyond the panes there was nothing but the white of the river fog, through it, very faint, the poplars along the bank bending and straightening in the wind that had been rising since noon. Somewhere above them a shutter knocked against its frame.

She drew her hands out of the basin. The water fell from her fingers pink. She took up the cloth to dry them.

“Dreaming of a lover,” said Marietta, dropping onto the bench beside Tonina. “A tall one. With very fine hands.”

Tonina did not look up. She had a printed sheet spread across her knees and was bent over it, her finger crawling along beneath the lines, her lips shaping each word before she let it out. “Hush. Listen to this.”

Isabella knew the sheet before she could read a word of it. Cheap rag, furred at its edges. At its head sat a woodcut so worn that its lines had thickened and run together: a figure in a cloak with two curling horns upon his brow, and at his feet a woman lying back in a swoon, her bodice open.

Beneath it the type had been set in a hurry. Someone had pulled it on a tired press without troubling to wipe the forme, and she could very nearly have named the street behind the Rialto where it was done.

Her fingers closed upon the cloth.

“Lament,” Tonina read, “for the Count With No Name. Who is drowned.” She lifted her eyes, round and shining. “Drowned. They found his mask in the lagoon off San Giorgio, it says. Only the mask.”

Marietta sat up. “Drowned?”

She pulled the sheet toward her across Tonina’s knee. For a moment she only looked at the black blot of the woodcut, her lips pressed together.

Then she let out a breath and pushed it back. “Pah. They drown him every other Carnival. And if any man alive could seduce Death herself into letting him live, it is that one.” She tapped the sheet. “Read the part about the Contessa.”

Tonina found it. She cleared her throat. She read it as though it were scripture.

“He bound her with her garter-lace, and left the silver on his face.”

Marietta let out a long breath through her nose. She leaned back against the wall, her eyes half closed, her hands folded over her stomacher. She smiled at the ceiling.

“They say he has dark tastes.” She lowered her voice. “In the bedchamber. Very dark.” She shivered deliciously. She was quiet a moment, her chin sunk on her hand, her eyes gone somewhere past the window.

“I have half a mind to buy Beppo a mask at Carnival,” she said, “and make him keep it on.”

Tonina snorted without lifting her eyes from the sheet. “It would do you no good. You have seen what is under it.”

Isabella bent over the basin.

The heat had come up from her collar into her face, into the roots of her hair. Her wrists prickled beneath the water, there, on the tender inside of each, where a crimson cord had once bitten. The marks had faded weeks ago. She could feel them all the same. She kept her hands in the cold until her fingers ached, and did not lift her head.

“Well.” Marietta sighed. “He will not be tying anyone at the bottom of the lagoon.”

“That's just it.” Tonina had not laughed. She smoothed the sheet over her knee as though it might be hurt. “They have killed him before. Hanged him at Padua. Had him shot by a husband at Mestre. And every time, inside the week, some great house woke with its strongbox empty.” She laid her finger upon the horned figure in the woodcut. “Since San Michele there has been nothing.”

Marietta’s smile had gone. She turned her head to the window, to the white fog pressing at the glass.

“Somebody would have to be very clever,” she said, “to kill a man like that.”

“Or very close to him.”

Isabella folded the cloth. She folded it in half, in half again, then pressed the folds flat with the side of her hand.

“And you, Bettina?” Marietta had turned her head upon the wall to look at her. “You were in the city all last year. Did you never see him?”

The fog pressed its white face to the glass. The shutter upstairs knocked again.

“I take no interest in thieves.”

She laid the folded cloth upon the board, square to its edge.

“Nor in women who leave their doors open for them.”

Her hands had found the cloth again. They were wringing it. She watched them do it, twisting the linen round upon itself, tighter, until pink water ran out between her knuckles and pattered onto the flags.

Tonina’s finger had stopped upon the sheet.

Then Marietta’s eyebrows went up, very slowly, and stayed up.

“Well.” She drew the word out. “Madame’s Frenchwoman has opinions.”

“Leave her be.” Tonina had bent back to her sheet, but there was a small smile in the corner of her mouth. “Madame will ring for her in a moment, and then she will be too fine for the likes of us again.”

Isabella said nothing. It was true. They both knew it. Madame Gradenigo kept her close because Madame liked to be spoken to in French, and nobody else in the house could do it.

She had come to the villa with a letter of character in a fine sloped hand, from a Madame de Valincour of Lyon who had never drawn breath. Madame had read it with her lips pursed. She had asked one question in French. Isabella had answered from somewhere at the bottom of her childhood, from a schoolroom with a globe in it and a tutor who smelled of snuff, and that had been the end of it.

The bell above the door jangled on its wire.

Marietta flicked her a look. “Run, then, mademoiselle.”

Isabella gathered the shift over her arm and took up the little pot of rouge, and went.

The back stair was dark and smelled of tallow. She climbed it with one hand trailing along the wall, the shift soft over her arm, and found that she was not thinking of the stair at all.

Off San Giorgio. Only the mask.

It was nonsense. It was a printer’s fancy, set in a hurry by a man who wanted his pennies before the next sheet came along. She knew that better than anyone in this house. She had set such lines herself more often than she could remember, and never once believed them.

Yet she had not heard. In all these weeks she had not heard a single word.

Whether he had died upon the floor of his own hall, with the men coming up the stair. Whether the shout she had heard behind her had found him breathing.

She did not know which answer she wanted.

The stair turned. She turned with it, her head down.

She walked straight into a wall.

It gave a little. Its heat came through her sleeve; it smelled of the yard. She rebounded from it. The rouge pot jumped in her fingers and she caught it against her breast.

She looked up. She had to look a long way.

The new groom filled the stair from one side to the other. She had an impression of an enormous shoulder, of a dark coat and a hat pulled down, of a great deal of man standing very still in the gloom above her.

“Scusate,” she said. “Forgive me. I was not looking.”

He made a sound in his chest. A groan, deep and rough.

Then he turned his shoulder to the wall to let her by, and went on down past her into the dark without another sound.

She stood a moment with her heart going quick and the pot pressed to her breast. Then she gathered her skirts and went on up.

Madame Gradenigo came up from supper late, with wine in her cheeks over the carmine.

She sat at her glass while Isabella drew the pins from her hair one by one, laying them in their dish. Candlelight moved in the mirror. Outside, the wind had found its voice. It went round the house in long gusts, pressing at the casements, sighing down the chimney so that the fire leaned, flattened, rose again.

“Monsieur est encore dans son cabinet?” (*Is Monsieur still in his study?)

Madame asked it of the mirror, in her careful convent French.

“Oui, madame. Ser Gradenigo’s lamp was lit when I came up.”

“Bien sûr.” Madame’s mouth thinned. She watched her own reflection while Isabella brushed out her hair. “Bien sûr qu’il y est encore.” (*Of course he's still there.)

She said nothing more about it. Isabella had seen the way Madame’s eyes went to the study door whenever she passed it, and the way they came away again.

“The laces now.”

Madame rose. Isabella stood behind her and loosened the bow at the foot of the stays.

It was the most ordinary thing in the world. She had done it every night since San Michele. She drew the lace from the lowest eyelet. She drew it from the next. The stays eased apart beneath her fingers, opening a hand’s breadth of white shift down the length of Madame’s back.

Steel, cold upon her breastbone.

One stroke, swift, downward. Her own laces springing apart one after another with small sharp sounds. The cold air of the chapel upon her skin. A breath drawn in through the mouth of a mask, slow, deep, let out with a catch in it.

Her fingers had stopped upon the cord.

She made them move. Another eyelet. Another. Each one was a small sound in the quiet room, and each sound was his.

He came at night. That was the worst of it.

She could hold him off all day, with the irons and the pins and the rouge and the endless stair. She could hold him off through supper, through prayers.

Then she lay down in the narrow bed under the eaves, the moment she closed her eyes the chapel came back to her: the incense, the moonlight, the slow terrible patience of his hands. She woke from it in the grey hours with her shift twisted about her waist, and her skin damp.

She would lie there in the dark afterwards and hate him. She hated him with her whole body. It made no difference at all. The next night he came again.

The lace went taut in her fingers.

“Bettina.” Madame’s voice was sharp. “Tu me tires.” (*You're pulling)

She had pulled it hard enough to drag Madame back against her. She let go at once.

“Pardon, madame.” (*Sorry, madame.)

Madame turned her head and looked at her over one shoulder, a long look, from her face to her hands and back.

“Tu es pâle,” she said at last. “Va te coucher.” (*You look pale. Go to bed.)

The house took a long time to go to sleep.

Isabella lay in her clothes upon the narrow bed and listened to it. The footman’s tread on the floor below. A door. Another door. Madame’s bell, once, then not again. At last there was only the wind, and the slow tick of the house settling in the cold.

She rose. Her hand went into her pocket and found the little vial there, the feather beside it.

The study lay at the end of the long passage on the piano nobile, past the dark doors of the salon and the card room.

She went down to it in her stockinged feet with a shaded candle, keeping to the wall. The portraits watched her go by: a row of dead Gradenigos, long-faced and bewigged.

At the study door she knelt.

The lower hinges she had seen to already, one each night while the house slept. The last hung at the top, out of her reach unless she stood upon the chest beside the door, so she had left it until now.

She set the candle down, climbed onto the chest, unstoppered the vial.

A hinge tells on you. Faber’s voice, mild, patient in her memory, as he crouched at the broken door in the palazzo with his sleeves turned back. A lock tells on you quietly. A hinge tells the whole house.

She dipped the feather and worked the oil into the knuckle of the hinge, deep, where the pin went through. She pressed the door a finger’s breadth. It groaned. She worked in more. She pressed it again, back, again, the way he had shown her, until the groan thinned to a sigh and the sigh to nothing at all.

She climbed down. She laid her palm flat upon the panel and pushed. The door swung open into the dark without a whisper.

She stood a moment in the doorway with her breath held. She went in.

The study smelled of tobacco and lamp oil. The fire had sunk to a red seam beneath the ash. Her candle found the great desk under the window, its leather chair pushed back, a dish of sugared almonds at the corner of the blotter, half empty. Behind the desk the tall casement stood shut, its curtains open.

Somewhere in this house there was a sworn statement with a name at the foot of it. His name. The one she had never been given.

She did not know which room it lay in, nor which drawer, nor behind which lock. She knew only that a man who kept such a thing would write of it somewhere, to someone, and that letters lie in drawers.

She set the candle on the desk and opened the first drawer.

Bills. A tailor’s, unpaid. A wine merchant’s, unpaid. She went through them with the tips of her fingers, lifting each corner, laying it down again where it had lain. Nothing. She closed the drawer as softly as she had opened it. She drew out the next.

The smell reached her before the candle did. Violets.

The letters lay tied in a bundle with a lilac ribbon. The hand on them was round and quick. She loosened the ribbon. She unfolded the first.

Mon cher gros ours. (*My dear great bear.)

She ought to have skimmed it. She was looking for a word, only one, a name, a file, a cabinet. This was a woman writing to her lover. There would be nothing in it.

She read it anyway.

The writer missed him. The writer could not sleep. The writer had gone to Mass on Sunday and heard not one word of it, because she had been thinking of the last time, in the little room above the stables, and of his hands upon her laces.

His hands upon her laces.

The candle flame leaned. The wind was pressing at the casement behind the desk. The glass hummed with it. The room went away.

Gloves. Black, soft, a little worn at the fingertips. A thumb at the corner of her mouth. A voice so low that she had to stop breathing to hear it. Breathe out slow for me, cara.

Her breath went out of her. Her free hand had come up to her throat. She stood with the letter open in her fingers, her eyes upon nothing. The heat went down through her, slow and heavy, into the pit of her belly.

She hated him. She hated him.

Behind her, very close, a sugared almond cracked between a man’s teeth.

She turned so fast that the letter tore across.

He stood in the doorway.

Ser Piero Gradenigo was a big man gone soft, in a banyan of figured silk that had been splendid once and was now stained at both cuffs. He had taken off his wig. His hair was cropped close and grey. Without the curls his head looked smaller, rounder, pink as a ham. He had a paper twist of almonds in one hand. He was chewing.

He swallowed. He looked at the torn letter in her fingers. He looked at the open drawer. Then he looked at the door beside him, and swung it, idly, to and fro upon its hinges. Not a sound.

“Well, now.” His voice was large and pleased. “Would you look at that. I have been meaning to have that door seen to for a year, and the moment I stop meaning it, it mends itself.” He laughed. It was a short laugh, delighted, and it went on a little after there was anything left to laugh at. “A miracle. I shall have to write to the Patriarch.”

He came into the room. He shut the door behind him.

“Signore.” Her voice came out thin. “I was sent for Madame’s…”

“Madame’s what? Madame’s violets?” He picked an almond from the twist and pointed it at the letter. “Go on. Which one is that? The one about Mass? She does lay it on, poor creature.” He popped the almond into his mouth. It cracked. “Read me the best part. Go on. In your lovely accent.”

She said nothing. The torn halves of the letter lay in her hand.

“No? Shy. How charming.” He came round the corner of the desk, chewing. “My wife is not shy. My wife sends her little French spaniel to put its nose in my drawers, and thinks I shall not notice. She has been thinking I notice nothing for as long as we have been married. It is the great comfort of her life.” He smiled at her. He had small even teeth, very white, with sugar caught between them. “What does she give you for it? A ribbon? Her old blue gown, the one that makes her look like a drowned nun?”

“Signore, Madame did not…”

“Of course she did not. Nobody did anything. That is the way of this house.” He set the twist of almonds down upon the blotter beside her candle and dusted the sugar from his fingers against his silk. “Now. Here is how I see it, and you will tell me if I am wrong. I am very often wrong. Ask my creditors.”

He laughed again, at that.

Then he stopped. The laugh went out of his face all at once. What was left behind it was quite cold.

“I could have you put on tomorrow’s barge with your box and a note pinned to your bosom that says thief. Every house from here to Fusina would have heard it by Sunday.” He let her think about that. “Or I could not. I am a generous man.”

He stepped closer. She stepped back. The edge of the desk met the backs of her thighs and stopped her.

“So we shall be friends, you and I.” His voice had gone soft and reasonable, as though he were explaining something very simple to a child. “You will go on carrying tales to my wife. Only now you will carry the ones I give you. And in return…”

His hand came up. It took her chin between finger and thumb. The fingers were sticky with sugar, damp. They turned her face up toward the candle.

“You will be a little bit kind to me.” He smiled. “That is all. A little kindness, now and then, to a lonely old man in his study. To begin with, a kiss. We are not savages.”

His thumb moved upon her jaw. She could smell the wine on him. She could not move. Her mind, so full a moment ago, had gone entirely white.

He leaned down.

Behind her, the casement burst open.

It struck the wall with a crack like a shot. The wind came in after it, roaring, wet, enormous, full of fog: the raw night air of the Brenta, smelling of river mud and wet fields and leaves rotting under the poplars.

The candle went out. The curtains flew up toward the ceiling like two wings. Every paper on the desk leapt into the air at once and went whirling about the room in the dark.

He swore. He let go of her chin. He lurched past her toward the window, flailing at the curtains, grabbing for the casement as it banged and swung and banged again against the wall.

“Christ’s wounds. The catch. Where is the cursed…”

She ran.

She ran the length of the passage in the dark with her skirts in her fists, the dead Gradenigos watching her go. Behind her, muffled, she could hear him still cursing the wind.

The wind howled through the whole house now. Somewhere a door was banging. Somewhere a pane rattled in its lead. She took the back stair at a run, her hand on the wall, her breath sobbing. She came out at the top into the narrow passage under the eaves that led to her room.

She stopped.

It was dark here. A single small window at the end of the passage let in a little grey from the fog outside. There was nothing to see. Yet she had stopped. Something had reached her that did not belong in a servants’ passage in November. She stood very still with her heart slamming and breathed it in.

Oranges. Sharp, sweet.

She went toward the window. On its sill, pale against the dark wood, lay a curl of orange peel.

She knew before she touched it. It was cool, damp. When she lifted it from the sill it fell open from her fingers in one long unbroken spiral, round and round upon itself, the way peel falls only when someone has turned the fruit beneath a very sharp blade with a great deal of patience.

She stood holding it. Her heart had not slowed. It had changed its beat. It had dropped somewhere lower.

She looked out of the window. There was nothing beyond it but the fog.

She closed her fist upon the peel until the juice ran.