In the Garden of Sin (9 page)

“Sì
, signore.” She told the rest of us she was going to linger there for a bit, and would see us in the morning.

“Buona notte,”
Bianca said with a sly little smile.

As I followed Elic, Inigo, and the two novices down the footpath to the castle, Bianca said, with amusement in her voice, “Don Domenico, it make him, how you say,
eccitato
to watch us take our lesson,
sì
?”

Tossing me a grin over her shoulder, Lucy said, “Methinks ’twas watching Hannah that excited him so. Gave him quite the cockstand, seeing her lick that splendid lob—I saw him shift his breeches to hide it—but at the same time, he looked none too pleased, never mind he’d ordered her to do it. I don’t think I’ll ever understand that man.”

“He have too much of the black bile,” Bianca said. “It make him
malinconico.”

I paused to look behind me. The bathhouse still glowed from the light of all those candles. Through its wide, arched doorway, I saw Vitturi leaning against one of the statues, guiding the rhythmic movements of Sibylla’s head as she knelt before him.

He lifted his own head to rest it against the column. His eyes closed, then quickly opened.

He’d seen me. Our gazes locked for a breathless moment. I turned and hurried back up the path.

As I was brushing out my hair that night, there came a knock at my bedchamber door. I draped a shawl over my night rail and opened the door to find Domenico Vitturi standing there.

“Signore,” I said, reflexively pulling the shawl around me.

“Mistress,” he said with a bow, taking in my nightclothes and unbound hair as he straightened up. His doublet was unbuttoned over his shirt, as if he’d thrown it on hastily on his way out of his own chamber. With a glance at the room behind me, he said, “May I?”

I stepped aside, clutching the shawl over my chest. He entered the room and perused it with an expression of idle curiosity, his gaze lingering on the ornate tapestries lining the walls. “Beautiful.”

“Aye, they—” My throat clutched. “They are exquisite.”

He looked at me. “What would you do if I were to offer you an income of ten thousand pounds a year for the rest of your life, with no conditions at all save that you leave here tomorrow and return to England?”

I hesitated only a moment before saying “I would turn it down, signore.”

He came toward me until he was standing so close that I could feel the warmth emanating from him. There was only one candle lit in the room, and it was behind him, casting his face into shadow.

He said, “Then what if I were to tell you to get undressed and lie upon that bed?”

I held his gaze unblinkingly, the blood roaring in my ears. He didn’t look away.

The shawl slipped down to puddle on the floor. My night rail closed down the front with half a dozen little ribbon bows, which I began clumsily untying. When the third bow came loose, the gown slid off one shoulder.

As I was plucking at the fourth, Vitturi took my hands and lowered them to my sides. Gathering my great rippling mane of hair behind me, he reached for the half-undone fourth bow, rubbed the satin ribbon between his fingers.

His throat moved.

I waited, my heart pounding.

He retied the bow, then pulled up the side of the gown that had slipped down and set about retying the rest.

Without looking up, he said, “What I had you do tonight in the bathhouse, with Inigo…There was a reason for that.”

Was there a hint of contrition in his tone, or was it just a fancy of my imagination?

“I realize I must learn to pleasure a man in the French manner,” I said.

With a fractional shake of the head, he said, “I told you to do it to see if you would.” He tied the top ribbon, retrieved my shawl from the floor, shook it out, and wrapped it around me.

Turning away with a sigh, he said, “Why are you here, Mistress Leeds?”

“To become a courtesan,” I said, as if it were obvious.

He glanced at me over his shoulder, looked away with a scowl. “Possibly.”

I held my breath.

Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, “I don’t know what to think. You bewilder me. The pieces of you…they don’t add up to a whole that makes any sense to me.”

As I was struggling to summon a response to that, he crossed to the door, saying “You’d better get to sleep if you’re to be ready in time for your morning lesson. The dancing
master is a temperamental sort. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

“I won’t be late.
Buona notte
, signore.”

He paused in the doorway to look back at me, almost smiling.
“Buona notte
, Mistress Leeds. Sleep well.”

UCY!” I CALLED, tapping on her bedchamber door the following morning. “Are you in there? We’re all waiting for you downstairs. The dancing master’s screeching mad.”

I waited a moment, then knocked again. Upon hearing only silence, I opened the door and stepped into the room, which was cool and dark, the shutters and curtains being closed against the morning sun. By the light from the sconces in the hallway, I saw that Lucy’s bedchamber was as lavishly appointed as my own, with a beautifully carved tester bed, its curtains pulled closed all around.

“Lucy?” I said.

There came a somnolent grunt from beyond the curtains.

With a groan of exasperation, I stalked to the bed and
whipped the curtains aside. “Lucy, you’ve got to get up and get dressed and come downstairs right now.”

Rubbing her eyes, she said groggily, “In the middle of the night?”

“The middle of the… Lucy, ’tis a quarter past… Oh,” I said upon seeing the man lying facedown next to her under be-tumbled sheets. No doubt she’d gotten very little sleep the night before.

Her bedmate hauled his head off the pillow to blink at me, and that was when I noticed his sleep-mussed sandy hair and the devilishly handsome face that Lucy had been mooning over ever since we’d set out from London.

“Mistress Leeds,” Jonas Knowles said with a drowsily lecherous smile. “Take off that dreary frock and join us.”

“Master Knowles?” I said. “Lucy, what on earth is he doing here? Don Domenico will be furious if he finds out you’ve been—”

“You won’t tell him, will you?” Lucy, naked but for a snarled mantle of flaxen hair, sat up and pressed her palms together in an attitude of supplication. “I pray you, Hannah, we’ll both be in such a pickle if—”

“Of course I won’t tell, but you were mad to have…” I squinted in the semidarkness at her wrists, which were braceleted with knotted ropes. A strip of black fabric was looped around her neck. A gag? A blindfold? “What the devil…Were you tied up? Did he force himself on you?”

Knowles snorted in bemusement. “Cuds me, is she serious?”

“Hannah, you really are too much,” Lucy said through a yawn. “I asked him to do it. ’Tis lovely, being tied up and ravished.”

“Climb in and I’ll show you,” Knowles told me, patting the bed in invitation. “Better yet, you and Lucy can tie
me
up and use me any way you like, no matter how vile or degrading. I’ve
always dreamed of being bound and gagged and mastered, and to have not one but two lusty little lightskirts forcing me to submit to their every nasty whim. Oh, I know, Luce!” He sat up excitedly. “You can ask Elle to join in, and the three of you could—”

“Aye, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? He’s mad for Elle,” Lucy told me with a forbearing little chuckle. “I do believe he’d give his right arm to bed her.”

Far from denying it, as I’d expected, seeing as he’d just awakened in the bed of another woman, he said, “I’d give every appendage I’ve got, save the one that matters most.” He grabbed his crotch, just in case I hadn’t grasped his meaning. “Go fetch her, would you, poppet?”

“Not till I’ve eaten,” Lucy said. “I’m famished. I suppose I shall have to find the larder and help myself. ’Twill be hours till they serve breakfast.”

“Breakfast is over,” I said. “’Tis a quarter past eight. Our dancing lesson was supposed to have started—”

“A quarter past eight?”
Knowles bolted out of bed, utterly naked, tore the curtains aside, and grabbed a shirt off the floor. “Fuck!
Fuck!
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” He yanked the shirt over his head and struggled into his breeches, tumbling to the floor in the process. “I was supposed to be in the courtyard at dawn.”

“Jonas is hunting boars with the duke and his men this morning,” Lucy explained as she tugged at the rope around her left wrist.

“I know which direction they’re headed, so perhaps I can catch up with them,” Knowles said as he snatched up the remainder of his cast-off garments. “Buckingham will be livid if he finds out why I was late.” Hurrying to the door with his trailing wad of clothing, he said, “Prithee, Mistress Leeds, you cannot breathe a word of this to a soul, I beg you. The duke
will cut me loose and send me home in disgrace if it gets back to him that I spent the night with Lucy.”

“Is he that opposed to adultery?” I asked.

Knowles blinked at me. “Ah. Adultery. Aye, he, er… he takes a very dim view of it, very dim indeed.”

“I shall keep your secret,” I assured him. “But may I suggest that in the future—”

“Thank you!” he called out as he raced down the hall. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am forever in your debt!”

Shaking my head, I asked Lucy, “Are all of the duke’s retainers in such thrall to him?”

“Jonas is His Grace’s favorite,” she said through her teeth as she tried to bite through the knotted rope. “’Zounds! Can you help me with these bloody things?” she asked, extending her arms in my direction.

“His favorite?” I said as I worked on the knot, which Knowles had tied more thoroughly than I felt was truly necessary. “He took my—Guy Goodchild’s place in the duke’s affections, then?”

“Aye, and after the way Goodchild betrayed him, His Grace is determined to keep those closest to him on a short leash.”

I nodded pensively as I freed her left wrist and started on the right.

Misinterpreting my brooding expression, Lucy said, “You mustn’t judge Jonas, Hannah. He’s a landless younger son with no prospects save preferment at court, for which he’s entirely dependent upon the Duke of Buckingham’s patronage. You and I are in much the same position, you know. Jonas is no more beholden to His Grace than you and I are to Don Domenico.”

It was a concept I needed no help in comprehending, for had not my uncle’s advancement to the rank of emissary to the
Spanish court been due in large part to his friendship with Buckingham? Would that he had never become the favorite of such a powerful man. Then he would not be chained up in the Tower of London, awaiting his execution.