The Rossetti Letter (v5) (12 page)

“That’s enough wine, thank you,” said Claire, abruptly coming to her senses.

Giancarlo smiled and stood there for a moment, as if he were going to say something, then seemed to think better of it. “
Buon appetito,
” he said, nodding, and left them alone once again.

“Do we really have to go to this conference thing tomorrow?” Gwen asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you could go and I could just hang on my own.”

“Not a chance.”

“But history is so boring.”

“How could you possibly think that history is boring?”

“Doesn’t everyone think it’s boring?”

“Of course not. History is fascinating. It makes the world come alive.”

“But it’s all about stuff that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

“That’s not true. History is all around us. Especially here. It’s in architecture, in art, in social customs and laws…” She picked up her fork. “It’s even in this. History is much more than memorizing dates or wars or presidents. It’s about people—what they accomplished, what they invented, what they imagined. History is—well, it’s stories. You like stories, right?”

“Sure.”

Claire thought for a moment. What kind of story would capture Gwen’s interest? “Have you heard of Casanova?”

“You mean the guy with all the girlfriends?”

“Yes.” Close enough, anyway. “Casanova was born here in Venice, in 1725. Apparently, you’ve heard of his amorous adventures, but there’s something else he’s famous for. He’s one of the few people ever to escape from the Doge’s Prison, the one we passed by earlier.”

“How did he escape?”

“Carved a hole in the ceiling of his cell, climbed over the roof of the prison, and jumped into a gondola. He’d left Venice before anyone even knew he was gone. In his memoirs, he wrote that he’d had so much experience sneaking in and out of women’s boudoirs that escaping from prison was easy by comparison.”

“Why was he in jail?”

“For debts, most likely. Casanova was also the inventor of a vanishing ink that disappeared after a few days. He said it was perfect for signing bills—and for writing love letters.”

“He was jailed for suspected espionage.” The Englishman, a few tables away, spoke as if he’d been a part of their conversation from the beginning. “It was never proved, however. In fact, there was never even a trial.”

Claire stared at him, slightly aghast. She still felt embarrassed by their encounter at the airport and had hoped that they would avoid his notice entirely. Unfortunately he was the only diner, besides themselves, who remained in the restaurant. After a few seconds, it dawned on her that he didn’t even remember her. He was simply the kind of person who felt entitled to butt in on any conversation he happened to overhear. She wasn’t sure which of these things she liked least.

“A fascinating story, though, as you tell it,” he went on.

“It’s not just a story,” Claire replied. “It’s a fact.”

“Are you sure? I suspect that Casanova was as much a liar as he was a lover.” As he spoke, he seemed to be looking toward her, but not quite at her, which Claire found annoying.

“I’m a historian,” she replied. “I study early modern Europe.”

“Pardon me, I didn’t realize I was speaking to an expert. Exactly how do you define ‘early modern’?”

“End of the Renaissance to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.”

“Really?”

It was amazing how much a person could say with only one word, Claire marveled. His “really” sounded as if it were a terse code that, deciphered, meant: you are ignorant, unintelligent, and possibly insane as well.

“That seems a rather broad scope of time,” he continued. “I thought that historians studied meaningless, obscure bits of history, like, for instance, how the third battle of the Boer War affected the wool industry in early twentieth-century Scotland, or some such thing that no one in their right mind gives a rat’s ass about.”

It was startling to hear him swear, and oddly funny; when he said “rat’s ass” it sounded like “rot’s oss.” Gwen stifled a guffaw, but Claire didn’t feel like laughing. He’d belittled her life, ridiculed her entire existence. Her face felt flushed and hot.

“It’s true that many historians, myself included, write on lesser known subjects and events,” Claire said, “but even historical events that seem small and obscure can be considered important if they change the course of history or if they help us to understand…”

Suddenly she was at a loss for words. What exactly was she trying to say? Something about how stories from the past can help us understand personal motivations, our inner selves, the human heart. Yes, to understand the human heart. Oh, crap. She couldn’t actually say that. Not to him, anyway.

“To understand the human condition,” she finished weakly. If he said “Really?” again she would attack him with her cutlery.

“Well,” he mused thoughtfully, “perhaps you’re right.” He stood up, glanced at the check lying on the table, and counted out some euros. “I must admit that I was much more intrigued by your Casanova story than I was by your pithy analysis of the EU.” He looked at Gwen. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes,” she answered in a small voice.

“Well then,” he said, nodding, “have a good evening.” The bells on the restaurant door tinkled merrily as he walked out.

“You were right,” Gwen said.

“About what?”

“Not all men like you.”

“I don’t like him, either, so it doesn’t count.” She discreetly looked around for the man she did like. Where was Giancarlo? Their dinners were finished, but there was no sign of him. The elderly waiter came over to remove their plates. By all appearances he was a sweet man, but he was no substitute for a sun god.

“May we have the check, please?” Claire hoped that her request would inspire Giancarlo’s reappearance from the kitchen, but the elderly gent brought the check, and the change that remained after she’d paid the bill. She scanned the restaurant as she pulled on her jacket and walked to the door, but it was clear that Giancarlo had already left for the night.

Claire sternly reminded herself that Giancarlo was beautiful, yes, but he was just a waiter. They’d had a little flirtation and nothing more. He probably flirted with any number of women every night, and it was silly of her to imagine that she might see him again in different circumstances. Certainly they would have nothing in common, nothing to talk about. The whole idea was ridiculous.

Why then did she feel so disappointed?

T
HE SUN WAS
up but the Piazza was still in shadow. In a few more hours, the cavelike chill produced by so much stone would dissipate, but as she walked into the gray, empty square, Claire could feel the cold seeping right through her workout clothes.

She had planned to jog a few laps under cover of the arcades before heading for a more important destination at the eastern end of the island near the Public Gardens, but the Piazza’s lack of light made it less appealing than she’d imagined. She thought it was lovely to be there so early, though, and so completely alone. The shops and cafés were still closed, and there wasn’t another soul in sight. Poetic justice demanded that her footsteps echo as she crossed the silent, unoccupied expanse, but her Nike Air soles only squeaked a little as she headed toward the Piazzetta and the Riva degli Schiavoni.

She turned right at the Campanile and encountered the sight of San Giorgio Maggiore, glorious in the morning sunlight and rising from a blue lagoon that glistened with a jewel-like brilliance. Bobbing on the water’s shimmering surface, a row of gondole at the Molo gently tugged at their moorings; farther east, at boat docks spaced along the waterfront, unmanned vaporetti waited patiently for the day to begin.

Thank god for jet lag. Otherwise she wouldn’t have woken up at six
A
.
M
., and wouldn’t have seen Venice like this, unpeopled and pristine. Not surprising, Gwendolyn had still been fast asleep when Claire had quietly sneaked out of the room. She’d left a note, but Claire suspected that she’d be back before Gwen was awake to read it.

With its wide, sunlit sidewalk, picture-postcard views, and small, stair-stepped bridges, the Riva turned out to be the perfect place to run. At least it was perfect in the early morning, before the crowds arrived. The only other people Claire saw, at first, were a few fellow joggers. As she made her way along the promenade, signs of the city coming to life gradually appeared: a suited man carrying a briefcase stepped out of a doorway; a woman carrying a baby on her back traipsed steadily along in the opposite direction. There were unseen signs, too: in the air drifted the tantalizing aroma of baking croissants.

She jogged past the Hotel Danieli, where George Sand’s passionate affair with the poet Alfred de Musset had ended with appropriately operatic fury: after he became ill from drink and debauchery, she decamped with his Italian doctor. Farther along she passed La Pietà, the church belonging to the orphanage where Antonio Vivaldi taught music for most of his life. The orphan girls of La Pietà were the first to perform many of his compositions, in concerts that drew audiences from all over Europe. The church was already open for visitors, but Claire didn’t stop. The place she most wanted to see was a bit farther on.

A small but lush garden in front hid the house from view. Only when Claire reached the top of the last bridge before the Public Gardens could she see its distinctive lancet windows, set off against the Moorish-style, terra-cotta colored house by thick, white crenellated sashes. Claire stopped and consulted her map just to be sure: yes, the canal flowing beneath the bridge was the Rio di San Giuseppe.

She unfolded a Xerox of a black-and-white photograph from a forty-year-old book and compared it to the scene before her. Nothing had changed: not the four-story villa overlooking the canal and the lagoon; not the water-level entryway and candy-striped boat mooring on the canal side; not the overgrown garden bursting with plum-colored bougainvillea that lay between the house and the Riva dei Sette Martiri. As she’d suspected when she’d first seen the photo, nowhere else on the canal offered a view of the eastern tip of the island.

This had to be Alessandra Rossetti’s house; every piecemeal bit of information she’d been able to find added up to it. A letter written in 1617 by an unknown Venetian mentioned the “comforting establishment” of the Signorina Rossetti, who lived on the Rio di San Giuseppe; in one of her letters, Alessandra mentioned seeing the eastern tip of the island from her parlor as she watched ships sailing into the lagoon. Where else on this canal would she have had the view she wrote of? The Rio di San Giuseppe was wider than the average Venetian waterway, lined on both sides by a narrow sidewalk, or
fondamenta,
and colorful houses dotted with flowering window boxes. It looked essentially the same as in the photograph. In a sixteen-hundred-year-old city, Claire reflected, forty years didn’t mean much.

Four hundred years was a slightly different story: then, the wide, paved Riva and the bridge she was standing on didn’t exist. There would have been a very simple wall or dike between the garden and the lagoon, a wall that was probably buried under the present-day fortifications. Of course, that would fit perfectly with Salvatore Rossetti’s account of a flood in 1612, one that had necessitated his family’s hasty removal from the premises.

Claire wondered what Alessandra’s daily life had been like. During her childhood, she’d been surrounded by family, of course, her father, her brother, and her mother. There’d been lessons in Latin, rhetoric, and mathematics, music played on the lute and the virginal, visits from family and friends, annual celebrations and festivals.

All that must have changed for her when her father and brother embarked on their fateful journey to Crete. How long did Alessandra wait, watching the lagoon for their return? Claire could imagine her waiting forever, through endless, stormy winters and dew-dappled springs; through late summer and its poignant harvest of sweet, tangy berries; through the ripening autumn as the sun faded into mist and the lagoon turned cold and gray as stone. Even on such a bright, sunny morning, Alessandra’s house felt lonely and remote, as if her ghost still stood on her widow’s walk, looking out to sea.

Claire wondered how Alessandra felt about being a courtesan. She preferred to think that her heroine was happy, or at least complacent, knowing that she’d made the best of what life had offered her. But was it possible to be happy living the life that Alessandra lived? Or even content? Perhaps the demands of simple survival made those kinds of questions immaterial; maybe happiness and contentment were concepts that people thought less about, then.

And what about love? Nothing Claire had read indicated that the courtesan had a deep emotional attachment to any of her suitors. Perhaps romantic love hadn’t mattered to Alessandra. Perhaps it was enough to be independent, to be mistress of her own fate. Or was she? Claire watched the bougainvillea rippling in the light wind. She realized that upon seeing Alessandra’s house, she’d hoped to experience some insight, a revelation. Instead she felt longing and despair. Was it really possible to discover what had happened almost four hundred years ago?