Kit (30 page)

‘Why?’

He waved one gloved finger from side to side. ‘I will tell you at dinner.’

She set her chin. ‘I need a reason first.’

‘The best reason for taking dinner is that one is hungry. Are you not hungry?’

She was. All she had eaten along the road was a meal a day in the taverns where she’d stayed, always keeping some coin back for oats, always mindful of the passage to be bought at Venice.

He smiled. ‘I’ll tell you what. You come to dinner with me, in the finest palazzo in Venice. You hear my proposal. If you don’t like my proposal, I will bring you here in the morning and buy you a passage directly to Dublin myself. What do you say?’

She considered. He had once given her a coin and asked little in return. He had let her go in peace then, might he not do so again? He had not molested a fresh girl of sixteen, and with her new instinct for these kinds of things she sensed that, with Ormonde, it was as it had been with Lambe. Whatever the duke wanted from her, it was not her body.

‘I have a condition,’ said Kit.

His smile widened. ‘
You
have a condition?’

‘I amuse you?’ she asked.

‘You have no money for your passage nor a place to stay. You are in a two-shilling dress that’s three weeks on. You are sitting in a golden coach with a duke of the realm and yet
you
have a condition. Yes, you amuse me; I like you more and more.’

‘I had to sell my horse. I want her back.’

He knocked his cane on the roof. A face topped by a tricorn appeared at the window. ‘Get Miss Kavanagh’s horse back,’ he said.

‘She’s the grey at the ostler’s by the French schooner,’ began Kit, but the duke stopped her with a wave. ‘He knows. He’s been pursuing you for the better part of the afternoon. You can no more clip him from your heels than your own shadow when he’s been ordered to follow. Give a fair price,’ he told his man. The tricorn bobbed and disappeared. ‘Oh, and Pietro,’ called the duke, as an afterthought. ‘Meet Madame Berland off the Paris ship and tell her to get back on board and go home.’

Then the Duke of Ormonde held out his hand for her to shake just as the horse dealer had an hour past. As Kit took it she understood; Ormonde was a horse dealer too.

As we went a walkin’ down by the seaside …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

The carriage rolled forth along a broad thoroughfare by the lagoon, Flint trotting happily on a leading rein behind. Kit’s eyes followed the
White Hind
sailing to England, now a mere speck on the horizon. This time she watched without a qualm. She could own it now; she had never really wanted to go home.

She was torn between the vista at each window and the intriguing character opposite. Ormonde regarded her openly, so she had no qualms about scrutinising him. He was of middle years, perhaps the age that Sean Kavanagh might be now, had he lived. He had a smooth, florid complexion, and plump cheeks; his eyes were so deep set that Kit could not determine, nor could she say with any certainly many years after, what their colour was. His wig, in the latest fashion, was piled high at the crown and flowed long to his breast. He wore a coat of the finest velvet, the colour of ox blood, and breeches of moleskin tucked into boiled leather boots. The cut of his clothes was faintly military, but each one of his diamond buttons would pay the entire regiment of the Scots Greys for a year. He stood her gaze with amusement, but said, after a little, ‘There are better vistas to be had,’ and nodded to the window. They were passing a beautiful palace as white as flummery. It was ornamented with a delicate filigree crown of stone, and a hundred windows shaped like little roundels and staring like eyes. And beyond this confection of a city, hanging in silver swags and ruffles like a backdrop at the playhouse, hung the distant mountains, their peaks burnished in rose-gold. The mountains where she’d been just days ago, where Richard dwelt with his new wife and where Ross slept in his officer’s billet. Whatever Ormonde had to offer, at least she was still in the same country as Ross and the same sun set on the captain too. She wondered whether Bianca had given him her sword, and what he’d thought of the gift. Did he carry it? Or did he cast it away? Did he mourn the loss of his beloved companion Kit Walsh, or did he think Sergeant Walsh a coward and a deserter, a milksop who had turned his coat and run rather than face the lash?

The carriage passed between two pillars into a vast paved square, scattering a flock of leaden pigeons. Pietro opened the door.

‘We must leave the horses here,’ the duke said.

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

Stepping down from the carriage with the aid of Pietro’s cold hand, she did see. There was no more road to travel, only water. At the marble quayside, a black boat, curved like a Saracen’s blade and low-slung in the water, waited for them. She stepped in and settled on the scarlet cushions opposite the duke. Pietro doffed his tricorn and the boatman, with the aid of a long skinny pole, pushed off from the mooring.

They sailed silently into the mouth of a vast channel, flanked by a domed church on one side, and another palace on the other. The boat slid silently, but there was noise everywhere, chatter, singing, even music as fiddlers and pipers played in the other boats. The boatman slid expertly between all the other traffic on the canal, and Kit marvelled at the other passengers – dressed in silks and velvets, loaded with jewels, most of them were masked, their eyes glittering, watching her. It seemed as if the fabulously opulent palaces that ranked the canal watched her from their glass roundels, too, the windows now lit from behind by candles and glittering chandeliers.

At length, at a breathtaking curve of the canal, they came to the most beautiful palace of all, a rose-pink façade with pillars and capitals of snowy marble. The boat sailed directly into the bowels of the palace, between ornate wrought-iron gates that opened at their approach as if by magic.

Kit, slightly unsteady on her feet, followed Ormonde into a vast marble atrium, across a pied and polished floor and up a wide marble staircase. Halfway up the stair she was confronted by a full-length mirror, and by some trick of another mirror set in the landing behind her met a multitude of her own reflections, diminishing into infinity, like the ranks of a female army.

She had not seen her likeness since the polished silver looking glass at Maria van Lommen’s house in Genova, and the image she had seen there had been set like amber in her mind’s eye for over a year. She still expected to see a soldier when she looked in the mirror. The reality was different.

She looked like a ragged whore. The dress, made and over-mended by an innkeeper’s wife, had been in fashion when the
frau
was a young bride, before her spreading flesh had split the seams and her workaday tasks had scuffed the muslin. Above the faded cloth Kit was paler than she remembered, and thinner–her collarbones jutted forth and the ridges of the top of her ribcage showed at her chest above the swellings of her bosom. Her waist seemed painfully thin in the gown compared to how it had appeared in the bulk of the uniform, but her arms, by contrast, were strong and well muscled.

Her face, though, was the revelation: so thin, so pale; violet shadows beneath the eyes. Her lips were still full, and now too full for her sunken face, as if she had been struck about the mouth. Only her eyes were the same, green as the Liffey, determined, fringed by glossy dark lashes, and framed by dark brows. ‘You’re lucky,’ Aunt Maura had once said. ‘Redheads’ lashes are usually as pale as straw.’ She did not look lucky. Her skin looked pinched and thin across the bridge of her nose, but the same scattering of freckles sprinkled her cheeks as they had since childhood. She could see the blue of her veins, as if the blood ran cold and too near the surface of her skin. Her hair was dark auburn with grease and grime, the candle fat she had used to smooth it back into a queue sticking to each strand, the careful braids and buns Bianca had made on the top of her head now sitting muddled and tangled like a bird’s nest. She saw no promise in the face – nothing that excited her in the way it had evidently excited Ormonde. The duke appeared in the mirror behind her. ‘Don’t get used to her,’ he said enigmatically. He did not spare his own reflection a glance; she knew then that he had been raised with mirrors, that they clothed the walls of his house like tapestries. More than that; he inhabited his own skin perfectly, like a well-fitting suit of clothes.

They continued up the stair and into a great salon on the first floor lit by a hundred candles, reflected in a quintet of crystal windows. The canal outside was now black and gilded like a slick of oil, and the perfect palaces opposite watched them with candlelit eyes. But inside was a far finer sight, a table set for two by the window, groaning with fowl and fishes and sweetmeats.

‘Pietro,’ said the duke, ‘see that we are alone.’

Kit sat down uninvited, and at once began grabbing and gobbling and chewing. There was a great round silver plate before her, with a ring of dressed birds arranged upon it. She grabbed one, dismembered it, and tore it with her teeth. She would have eaten it whole if she could.

Ormonde watched her indulgently as if she were a favourite lapdog. ‘Good?’

She nodded. ‘What is it?’

‘A dish of doves.’

‘Doves.’ She smiled through her mouthful, but did not stop eating. Doves. What else would they eat in a city like this?

Ormonde took nothing himself, but served them wine from a basin of ice sunk into another little table at his elbow. She gulped it like water and it rushed up her nose – unlike the rough red army wine it was as yellow as straw and fizzing with a million tiny crystalline bubbles. The duke watched every mouthful she took, every bone she sucked, every finger she licked intently. But she ate her fill, undaunted. At length she stopped, sat back and belched loudly as she would have done in uniform.

‘So,’ she said, her new devil-may-care confidence bolstered by the food and wine. ‘I’ve eaten your dinner. Suppose you tell me what you are doing here?’

Ormonde placed his glass down on the table carefully. ‘Do you ever play chess, Bess?’ He rhymed playfully, but his eyes were serious.

She recalled Marlborough’s chess set in the Castello at Rovereto, and the pieces he’d placed on the map for the Prince of Savoy – white king, black king. ‘I have seen it played,’ she said truthfully.

He sat forward, and took up two silver-capped salt cellars in his beringed fingers.

‘So you must know,’ he said, ‘that the objective is to place the king in check. Two evenly matched opponents will go along merrily at the outset, losing a few pawns perhaps, then a bishop or a rook here and there; sometimes a knight is lost in the action. Then slowly, imperceptibly, the play slows, clots, and solidifies.’ He placed the little crystal towers together, abutting, trapped. He looked up at her. ‘You have heard, perhaps, of the war that is raging in the mountains?’

‘I have heard a little about it,’ she said drily.

‘The Duke of Marlborough has been trooping up and down the country, with the Prince of Savoy at his elbow, but Louis of France has been matching him at every turn. Perhaps you heard, too, of the capture of Maréchal Villeroi, the French commander?’

She remembered every detail. ‘Somewhat.’

‘Even the capture of Villeroi availed us nothing; they replaced him with De Catinat, then Villeroi escaped and was reinstated, and on we go. Now they have their citadels, we have ours, and no one can move. Stalemate.’ With his forefingers, Ormonde pushed the salt cellars together so they chinked like wine glasses. ‘We have entered what is known as the endgame – the last stage of the conflict; something audacious must take place; something brave and unexpected. You ask me what I am doing here? I have been sent by Queen Anne. I am here to break the stalemate.’

She looked at the salt cellars, and back at him. ‘And what am
I
doing here?’

Ormonde sat back and clasped his hands across his waistcoat.

‘Bess,’ he said. ‘I want you to be a spy.’

‘On whom?’

‘The French.’

‘For whom?’

‘For me. For the queen.’

She took his first answer. ‘For you.’

He inclined his head. ‘Very well. For me.’

She felt, for the first time, a frisson of danger, twin to the one she had felt in the castle of Riva del Garda when she had become Atticus Lambe’s night-time confidante.
Having told me this much, he will never let me go.

‘You will summer at my house on Lake Maggiore. You will put yourself entirely in my hands. I will train you and mould you to become someone else.’

‘Why me?’

‘You speak perfect French. You are clearly brave.’
You have no idea
, she thought, wryly. ‘And,’ he said simply, ‘you are beautiful, and will be even more so when I have finished with you.’

This was a strange thing to hear after so many months in uniform, and after seeing her rag-and-bone reflection, but it was not wholly unpleasant.

‘Who would I become?’

‘You will assume the identity of a French countess – a woman who came here with her husband and lost him to an ambush on the road. You will shed your low birth and become a noblewoman. You will forget your low manners and become the model of decorum. You will walk like a lady, not a laundress. You will speak English with a French accent, and French with no accent at all. You will sleep in a feather bed every night. You will be clothed in silk, bedecked in jewels. Your hair will be dressed and perfumed and burnished at night with a silken cloth. You will learn the history of your family by rote, right back to the days of Charlemagne. And at the end of three months, when my caterpillar has become a butterfly, I will test her wings, and if I find her ready, I will release her into the French court, there to flutter and settle and hear what foolish men will tell a beautiful woman. Then I will make your fortune.’

Kit considered. She had become well used, in the last year, to dissembling, to acting the part of someone else. And she knew that given the choice between returning to Kavanagh’s as a single woman, and staying here and fighting on somehow, she would stay. For the siren call of adventure rang out to her, from a great distance, barely audible but sweet as a bell. She felt as if her choice was inevitable, as if she was caught at a point of no return. It was thus that she’d first met Ormonde, poised at the top of Killcommadan Hill, and had started to fall and could not stop.