The Girl Behind the Mask (36 page)

When I agreed to the plan, Umberto the monkey returned, just as promised. This time, instead of the cylinder about his neck, he carried a small bottle. The sleeping draught. I was tempted to try the draught on the monkey first, but there were several problems with that plan. I had to send word back, of course, that the plan was going ahead. Also, how would I have explained a half-dead monkey beneath my window? The sisters would have worked out that something was afoot.

So, I tied a piece of straw to the monkey’s collar as promised and sent him back to the boat with all my love both for Giacomo and for Ernesta who had lent us her dear little messenger. Then I sat down on the edge of my bed and took the draught in one, throwing the empty bottle out of the window so the nuns would not guess what had happened. A long sleep and freedom, or death? Either one was preferable to the slow death of the spirit I was suffering now.

I lay down. For a moment it seemed as though nothing was happening. The vile herbs certainly tasted poisonous, but I did not feel them working in my veins. Had we been duped? Was this poison as effective as the medicine my father had forced down my throat when I was a child? While I was pondering this my thoughts chased their tails and then . . . nothing . . .

A dreamless sleep, as promised. Quite dreamless. Still. Silent. When I woke I brought nothing with me. Indeed, the life I lived before seemed to be the dream. I was waking new and unformed, wrapped in a membrane.

Wrapped in a sheet.

‘Get it off me! Get it off me!’ I shouted. Giacomo obliged straight away. He was there beside me. That dear face smiling down on mine.

‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I thought I was going to have to leave you here overnight.’

I sat up at once. The roof of the tomb raked my hair.

‘Be careful. Move slowly. You have been asleep for a very long time.’

‘Hours?’

‘Four days.’

‘Where am I?’

‘Where do you think you are?

There was enough light to guide us to the dock where the gondola would be waiting but I was still dressed in a shroud. I argued that the priest should not be surprised to see a girl in a shroud on San Michele, but everything had been thought of. I donned a mourning dress. Boats arrived at San Michele all the time. The priest should not be surprised to see a woman in mourning he had not noticed slip onto the isle.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You can’t go back to Venezia.’

‘Then where?’

‘I have arranged lodgings for you in Trentino.’

‘And you with me?’

‘I can’t come with you,’ he said. ‘There are things I must do in the city.’

I understood at once. Ernesta had been right to warn me Giacomo’s heart was very full.

‘But you will be provided for,’ he continued. ‘I have taken care of that.’

‘By whom?’ I asked. ‘Your new woman will surely put a stop to you sending me a stipend.’

‘By you. You will provide for yourself,’ he said.

I understood what Giacomo had put in place a few days later when a package arrived at my new lodgings. I had two rooms in what must once have been quite a grand house. As Giacomo suggested, I passed myself off as a young widow. In my new life, I was a girl with no family.

The woman who ran the house was perfectly uninterested, thank goodness. All that mattered to her was that the rent was paid on time and I didn’t bring home any visitors. Had she been in the habit of opening correspondence, my new freedom might have become very uncomfortable indeed.

Inside the package was a book. Inside the book, a letter. Inside the letter, details of my very own bank account with the Monte dei Paschi di Siena. Of course, I had read the letter first, thinking it might be full of protestations of love and ways in which we might yet be together. Instead, it was brief and simple. It made my heart sigh. I turned to the book. I didn’t recognise the title. Nor the author. Of course, that was the whole purpose. The author was ‘anonymous’.

The Lover’s Lessons
, was the title. ‘The sexual awakening of an innocent young girl.’

It was my story in my words.

Epilogue

Inside the Palazzo Donato, Marco Donato stood at the desk in the library where Sarah had worked for the past two months. He ran his sore, stiffened fingers along the back of the chair, imagining her sitting there. If she were there now, he would put his hands on her shoulders. She would turn to face him and look up into his eyes. She would smile and he would know that everything would be fine. She would not care what had become of him. She would love him no matter what she saw.

But Sarah wasn’t there any longer. She had gone and he had let her go. What agony it had been to see her at the ball and discover he still did not have the courage to reveal his new face. Not after the moment in the library. Perhaps he should have written the truth in response to her last letter, but would she have believed it? The truth had been buried such a long time ago.

So he was alone again and Sarah had never come to see the last jewels he had kept for her. The loose pages from Luciana’s diary of September 1753 had been separated from the bulk of her papers, along with a single letter. For some reason both had been tucked into a collection of correspondence by the letter’s addressee: Giacomo Casanova. Marco read the letter from Luciana again.

My lost love, how often do I think of you? I think of you every moment of every day. And when I think of you, I find I am happy. Without you, I do not know what I might have become, but with you I became myself. From my window, I look out on green hills outlined by sad cypress trees, but my heart is with the birds. I have the freedom to walk where I choose, to think what I choose, to be the woman I always wanted to be. And I am the woman I wanted to be because, my dear heart, of your love.

Marco folded the letter closed. He might never see Sarah again. But he felt he was just a little closer to being the man he once hoped to be, because she had loved him.

Sarah’s story continues in the second book in the Hidden Women series:

The Girl Behind the Fan

Stella Knightley

Hurt and confused by the sudden end of her strange love affair with Venetian millionaire Marco Donato, Sarah Thomson is persuaded to take her bruised heart to Paris by her ex-boyfriend Steven, who is hoping for a reconciliation.
 
While she and Steven rekindle their psychologically and sexually tortured relationship, Sarah tries to forget her yearning for Marco by throwing herself into a new project: a study of the life of notorious nineteenth-century courtesan, Augustine Levert, whose sensual charms parted many a man from his fortune. But when her life begins to parallel Augustine's story, Sarah realises she will never erase Marco from her heart.
 
Faced with a choice between safety and overwhelming passion, will both women make the right decision?

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