City of Masks (16 page)

The night in the cell was the worst. It was dark, much darker than her bedroom on Torrone or the one in Leonora’s house, because there were no candles in the cell and no torches in the passageway. The straw of her bedding was clean at least, but all night she was kept awake by its rustling, terrified that it might be caused by rats.

And she had no hope of rescue. She had committed the crime of which she was accused. If there were witnesses, she was done for. Of course she had known what the penalty for discovery was. When she had laid her plans, they were all based on not getting caught. She had calculated that if she were taken on as a mandolier, by the time she was discovered to be a girl it would be that which would attract all the attention, not the day on which she had enrolled. And there was no penalty for pretending to be of different sex.

Now she had to face up to the truth. The invariable sentence for the crime she had committed was death by burning. No one in living memory had been convicted of defying the law on the Giornata Vietata, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about what would happen to them if they had.

And there had been other burnings, for other crimes, such as treason, in Arianna’s own short lifetime. She knew that the fires were built between the two pillars, the one with the Maddalena and the one with the winged ram, which stood guarding the entrance to the city from the water. The burnings were public events, Bellezzans believing that anyone who would betray the city deserved no mercy and no pity.

Arianna had never seen one; her parents would not have taken her to such a gruesome spectacle. But she had seen the remains of one such bonfire and she had a vivid imagination. Here in the Duchessa’s cell, it was all too easy to picture the flames, the smell of her own flesh singeing, the agonizing pain. Arianna could not bear it – she screamed out loud. But there was no one to hear her.

And then an extraordinary thing happened. A vision of Lucien appeared in the cell, surrounded by strangely dressed people. He was looking straight at her, with such a stricken expression that Arianna forgot her own suffering. The image lasted only a moment before fading, but after that, she felt much calmer. Though she was in terrible danger, so was Lucien and he was completely innocent.

He had no knowledge of the law and had not known he was breaking it. But the truth would not save him, for who would believe it? Arianna felt responsible too. If she had not taken him away from where she found him, perhaps he would have returned to his own time and place sooner?

Thinking of how she might help him and planning to get a message to Rodolfo, Arianna fell into a troubled sleep.

Lucien was feeling much better. He had one further moment of queasiness, passing between the two pillars on the way to the vaporetto stop, but it soon passed. Looking back, he noticed that only tourists walked through that gap; all the locals skirted round the pillars, even if it involved a detour. Lucien made a mental note to look it up in Mum’s guidebook.

‘It says here,’ she said, ‘that you can buy a season-ticket on the vaporetti. Let’s do that, David. Let’s get three weekly seasons and go everywhere by water like true Venetians.’

Lucien smiled at her enthusiasm and she smiled back, her worries over his health temporarily suppressed. It was really good of them to bring him on this amazing holiday and he was determined to enjoy it to the full. He might be a bit old for holidays with his parents but, as an only child, he had always got on well with them and enjoyed their company

Now he stood on the San Marco landing stage, looking across at the huge domed church of the Salute, standing roughly where the Chiesa delle Grazie was in Talia. It was from here that the bridge of boats had taken the fake Duchessa over to the church, while the real one had been threatened by the assassin and Lucien had gone diving for treasure in the filthy canal.

The vaporetto came and they went the five stops to the Rialto, crossing back and forth over the canal. Venice was so much noisier than Bellezza that it was sometimes possible to forget about the Talian city for whole hours together. This was especially true on the Rialto, where cheap trinkets for tourists mingled with unaffordable gold jewellery.

The only thing here that reminded Lucien of Bellezza was the masks, shop after shop and stall after stall of them. Many of the Venetian masks were the kind that covered the whole face, to be held up before it on a gilded stick. But there were others that were more like the Duchessa’s or those of other Bellezzan women Lucien had seen. These just surrounded the eyes and the bridge of the nose and in Venice were held in place at the back by elastic, though the ones in Bellezza were tied with velvet or satin ribbons.

‘Would you like one?’ asked Dad, seeing Lucien stare at the masks.

‘Oh, no thanks, Dad. I mean I do want a mask, but I haven’t seen one I really like yet.’

‘There are enough of them, aren’t there?’ said Mum. ‘I bet there are hundreds more Venetian masks used as ornaments in people’s homes around the world than have ever been worn here at Carnival.’

‘What’s that one with the beaky nose that they have in all the shops?’ asked Dad.

Mum consulted her book. ‘It’s the Plague Doctor mask. Apparently they had the plague very badly here in the sixteenth century and doctors wore the beaky mask to protect them from the germs.’

‘But they didn’t know about germs in the sixteenth century, did they?’ said Dad and they started one of their meandering discussions that Lucien knew from long experience he could just tune out of. As they walked back towards San Marco through the back streets, he thought about the plague that had wiped out a third of all Bellezzans just before Arianna was born. Surely if the doctors had known how it was spread, it would not have claimed so many lives?

‘I can’t believe it!’ Mum suddenly said loudly, as if she had found a germ herself. ‘That’s disgusting!’

Lucien looked where she was pointing. There in the corner of a square was a McDonald’s. His mother was practically foaming at the mouth. She was famously anti what she called the pollution of American chains in the most beautiful cities of Europe.

‘Fancy a burger and chips, Lucien?’ said Dad winking.

‘Don’t wind her up, Dad,’ laughed Lucien. ‘Perhaps we could grab a slice of pizza?’

When they had found a bar that sold pizza slices and focaccia sandwiches and cans of cold drink, they sat on the stone wall of the fountain in the middle of the square, eating their lunch and watching the passers-by, Lucien’s mother wincing at the ones munching on burgers. Then they continued their walk, following the bright yellow signs with their confusing bent black arrows pointing the way back to the Piazza San Marco.

‘Look, Lucien,’ said Dad, stopping suddenly. ‘Here’s a shop that sells books like that one I gave you. You know, the one that got you interested in Venice in the first place.’

They went in. It was an Aladdin’s cave of marbled paper and beautiful notebooks from pocket-size to the kind you’d need an executive desk for. The prices were astronomical. Dad was disappointed until Lucien found a pencil decorated with exactly the same purple and red swirls as his precious notebook. He took the somewhat battered book out of his pocket to compare.

‘Are you sure that’s all you want?’ asked Dad. ‘I agree it’s a perfect match. Shows the old book up a bit though, doesn’t it? What have you been doing with it, writing in the bath?’

Next to the paper specialist was a very superior mask shop. There Lucien found a silver mask shaped like a cat’s face, which reminded him of Bellezza. It was much better made than the ones in the Rialto stalls and Mum and Dad were happy to buy it for him. Then they found a stall selling figured velvet and bought a green scarf for Mum and a pair of red slippers for Dad. They made their way back to the hotel in a very good mood.

The Duchessa swept over the Bridge of Sorrow, her dress swishing on the flagstones. As soon as the guard had unlocked the cell, she dismissed him. As the man hesitated, she waved him away impatiently. ‘I hardly think a girl is much of a threat. I presume you searched her for weapons? But if she attempts to suffocate me with her straw mattress, I promise to call out for help.’

The man lit a torch in the corner of the cell, then turned and walked back over the bridge.

The girl was asleep. She looked exhausted, her hair tousled and full of straw-stalks. The Duchessa closed the cell door quietly behind her. But even that sound woke the girl, who sprang up and stared at her visitor. Then she sank down again, disappointed.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you were my mother.’

The Duchessa winced but said with her usual asperity, ‘Is that any way to speak to your sovereign? No wonder you are in here for an act of treason.’

Arianna leapt up again. ‘Your Grace,’ she stammered. ‘I’m sorry. You surprised me. I didn’t mean to be rude.’

Whatever she was expecting, it wasn’t what happened next. Arianna had hated the Duchessa for so long that she had stopped thinking of her as a real person. Now this great lady, who held Arianna’s life in her hands, stepped forward and looked her full in the face, her violet eyes glittering behind her mask. Then she took Arianna in her arms and hugged her.

Chapter 15

The Language of Lace

Rinaldo di Chimici was fuming. Only half his plan had worked and it was the weaker half. The girl was safely in prison and he was pretty sure the evidence he had bought would see her convicted and sentenced to death. But would Senator Rodolfo care enough about the girl if the boy were not caught? And it was as if the boy had simply vanished into thin air. He wasn’t at the Senator’s house and no one had seen him leave.

Di Chimici had two other spies employed full-time to watch outside the Palazzo and pounce on the boy as soon as he returned, Enrico having been promoted to more important duties. But the Ambassador was now worried that Rodolfo knew where the boy was and had tipped him off so that he was lying low. And if the boy was what he suspected him to be, he had places to hide that were not open to di Chimici spies.

The trial was not far off; it was not the Bellezzan way to delay on something so momentous. Council would meet in a few days and the outcome would be swift. With the girl dispatched, the Ambassador doubted if the boy would ever return.

‘We must find the boy!’ fretted di Chimici to Enrico. ‘Or I shall have no bargaining power with the Duchessa! And she must sign that treaty!’

*

He might have been happier if he could have seen Rodolfo pacing the night away on his roof garden. The Senator had been racking his brains about how to get a message to Lucien, to prevent him from returning unwarily to Bellezza and walking straight into a trap. It was true that Lucien usually stravagated direct to the laboratory, but Rodolfo didn’t know what the effect would be of a week having passed in Lucien’s own world, with his being out of his accustomed place. If he stravagated in the middle of his night, he might go straight to Arianna’s.

Ever since the day Rodolfo had had him transported to his laboratory from the Scuola Mandoliera, Lucien had not missed a morning’s lessons until his parents took him away from England. As far as Rodolfo could understand it, Lucien’s nights in his world were the daytimes in Bellezza, just as they had been for William Dethridge. If Lucien stravagated in either direction more than once in the hours of daylight or of night in either universe, he would arrive back in the other world only moments after he had left it. But if he left it till the next night to stravagate, a day had passed in Bellezza.

But the break of a week in Lucien’s regular departures from his world brought an unprecedented absence in Talia and Rodolfo did not know how long it would last. He and Lucien and William Dethridge had spent hours discussing the time differences between Lucien’s England and their Talia.

Dethridge told them that the date of his first, unplanned, stravagation, on the day he was trying to make gold, was 1552, twenty-five years ago according to Bellezzan history. But it was four hundred and twenty-five years behind Lucien’s time. If the gateway between worlds behaved consistently, one year in Talia equalled nearly seventeen in Lucien’s world. But that was the trouble: the gateway didn’t behave consistently. During the period of Lucien’s visits, the dates had matched one to one in the two worlds, but at other times the difference between one and the other had obviously been accelerated and it was impossible to tell when that would happen again.

‘Even if I go away for a week and don’t visit Bellezza,’ Lucien had reasoned, ‘I should still be back here in a week at the most.’

But none of them really knew whether this would happen. When Dethridge had told the Duchessa that Lucien would be away a while, he really thought they might not see him for a week. Now, on their way back to the laboratory, Rodolfo was worrying that time in Lucien’s world might have speeded up again and that he could be back within hours. He was calculating whether he or Dethridge could get a message to Lucien by stravagating to his time.

‘I am willinge to goe,’ said Dethridge, ‘yf it wolde holpe the boye.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rodolfo. ‘It is good of you. But I think it would not help. You would find the twenty-first century very confusing and difficult. I certainly found the twentieth century so. And I am sure the time you would arrive in would be after Lucien’s next stravagation so you would be too late to warn him.’

‘Thenne we moste fynde anothir waye,’ said Dethridge simply.

Unaware of how many thoughts were focused on him in Bellezza, Lucien continued to explore Venice. His parents were overwhelmed by his knowledge of the city, even though he would occasionally lead them by a Bellezzan route to something that did not exist in Venice or was in a completely different place. Still, he became more and more skilful at covering up these discrepancies and most of the time showed an impressive familiarity with the city and its customs. ‘Your reading’s certainly paid off,’ said Dad.

Today they were going on a boat trip to the islands and Lucien had to keep the names right. Merlino was Murano, Burlesca was Burano and Torrone was Torcello. The boat took them to Murano first and the endless glass shops with their touts outside pouncing on tourists to drag them in for demonstrations of glass-blowing in their ‘factories’.

‘
Ingresso libero
,’ Dad read on the doors. ‘But doesn’t that mean “entrance free”? Why wouldn’t it be? They’re shops for goodness sake!’

None of them liked the brightly coloured and hideously expensive glass very much, though Lucien did buy a plain glass ram, without wings. He longed to tell his parents what real lagoon glass could be like. The museum was nothing like the one on Merlino. There was no Glass Master, no fateful mask. Even though his parents were interested in the old and broken bowls and jugs, Lucien soon got bored and went to sit in the cool, cloistered garden, where semi-wild cats played in the long grass.

The best bit of Murano was having lunch in a restaurant by the canal, sitting on a little terrace overlooking the water. On the other side of the canal was an ancient church which, according to Mum’s guidebook, housed the bones of a dragon killed by the spit of a saint.

Burano was more like its Talian equivalent, except that there was no single white house, though Lucien searched hard for it.

‘Oh, just look at that lace!’ cried Mum, and Lucien saw with a jolt that there was a white-haired old woman making lace outside her front door. It was a blue house and the work was not as fine as Paola’s, but it was beautiful nonetheless and Lucien was thrilled that his mother had seen it. He insisted on buying her a tablecloth, even though it took virtually all the money he had brought with him to Venice.

‘No, Lucien, you can’t possibly,’ she protested, but nothing would have stopped him.

‘Remember my dream,’ he said, ‘about the lace – when you couldn’t wake me up? I really want you to have it.’

Arianna was astonished. The Duchessa regained her composure with some difficulty and began a story so improbable that Arianna found it difficult to take in.

‘You believe yourself to be the child of Valeria and Gianfranco Gasparini, do you not?’ the Duchessa asked.

‘Believe? No, I know I am,’ said Arianna.

‘Yes, I know your story,’ said the Duchessa. ‘The
Figlia dell’Isola
, the only child born on Torrone for years. Only you weren’t.’

‘Weren’t what?’

‘Born on Torrone. You were born here, in Bellezza, in this very palace, and smuggled to the island when you were only a few hours old.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Arianna. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because I was present at your birth,’ said the Duchessa, with a touch of her old humour. ‘In fact I was very closely involved in it. Can’t you guess how?’

Arianna tried to imagine the Duchessa as a midwife but couldn’t.

‘I gave birth to you myself,’ said the Duchessa, gently. ‘You are my daughter, Arianna, and I had you brought up by my older sister Valeria and her husband.’

Arianna’s head was whirling. Valeria and Gianfranco not her parents? That was like saying that Bellezza wasn’t a city. It just didn’t make sense. And the Duchessa her mother? Everything Arianna had known about herself until today seemed to be untrue. But among all the many emotions swirling through her, one fact burned in her brain: if she had been born on Bellezza, then she was guilty of no crime on the Giornata Vietata! She would not be burnt. She seized that thought and held on to it.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked the Duchessa.

‘Many things,’ said Arianna. ‘But if what you say is true, then I don’t need to stay in this cell a moment longer.’

The Duchessa sighed. ‘That is true, but I would prefer it if you remain here voluntarily until your trial in a few days’ time. I shall produce evidence enough to convince the Council that you are a true-born Bellezzan, but I should prefer to keep your parentage a secret a little longer. It puts us both in danger.’

Then Arianna grasped another thought from the whirl of ideas in her head. ‘If Gianfranco is not my real father, then who is?’

Torcello was just as Lucien remembered Torrone, apart from the mosaic in the tiny cathedral, which was gold instead of silver. The whitewashed houses beside the canal where Arianna lived, the stalls selling lace and glass, though they had no merlino-blades, the grassy area outside the cathedral, all made Lucien feel more at home than he had so far on this trip, even though he had been to Torrone only once.

He was tired on the walk back along the canal to catch the ferry back to the city, but happy. But as they passed what he thought of as Arianna’s house, he had another strange experience. It wasn’t as bad as the one in the Doge’s prison. There was not the same terror. But there was a strong sense of danger and this time it seemed to involve him.