The Rossetti Letter (v5) (2 page)

C
LAIRE STOOD ON
the grassy oval in the center of the four-hundred-meter track at Forsythe Academy, an exclusive preparatory school located at Harriot’s west end, on Harriot Harbor. She looked out across the water, where small boats with brightly colored sails glided as swiftly and smoothly as skaters on ice.

She was waiting for the arrival of her closest friend and jogging partner, Meredith Barnes, Forsythe’s assistant dean. Fourteen years before, Claire had been studying in her Columbia dorm room when Meredith had stepped through the open door. She’d paused for just a moment, as if she were one of those chic 1930s movie stars who needed to remove her gloves and hat before delivering her lines. Then Meredith said she’d “heard about her” and wanted to meet the only person who’d aced McNulty’s ancient history class. Meredith was a philosophy major, an occasional Maoist (her current boyfriend had radical tendencies), and a self-described “inveterate theorist.” Claire soon learned that this meant she could talk for hours on almost any topic. They’d immediately become friends and had remained so ever since.

Tall and willowy, Meredith was naturally and devastatingly glamorous, even now, walking toward Claire in a pair of baggy shorts and a gray jersey with
GO
,
FORSYTHE FOXES
! emblazoned on the front.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Meredith, pulling her sleek, dark hair into a ponytail and securing it with a barrette. “I went home to change and on the way back I ran into Connie Sherwood. I had to talk to her, of course, because she’s my boss’s wife, but she’s simply infuriating. She’s always gossiping, but she doesn’t understand how to make it interesting.”

“You might be grateful for that if she starts gossiping about you.”

“Listen to this. She said, ‘Did you hear that Deirdre Fry shot her ex-husband in the foot on the eleventh hole of the Back Bay Golf Course?’”

“That’s what I call a handicap.”

“Apparently it was an incredible scene—paramedics and police and the whole golf course shut down for hours.”

“Why did she shoot her ex-husband?”

“That’s what I asked. And Connie just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know. Don’t all women want to shoot their ex-husbands at one time or another?’”

“Good point. But why in the foot? Why on the Back Bay Golf Course? Why on the eleventh hole?”

“My questions exactly, but she had absolutely nothing more to add. She’s exasperating. I’m a twentieth-century creature—I like a little psychological insight with my gossip, even if it’s superficial. What’s the point of dishing if you can’t pick apart someone’s psyche?”

“Who is Deirdre Fry, by the way?” Claire asked. Along with Meredith’s job as assistant dean came an immense social circle that included her colleagues, their spouses, important (meaning generous) supporters of the school, hundreds of Forsythe alumni, and the current crop of four hundred students, their parents, and (more often than not) stepparents.

“She’s the mother of one of the students, a freshman,” Meredith replied as they walked onto the track and began jogging. “Wealthy, and a notorious clotheshorse. Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been decked out in the most amazing designer outfits. Apparently the owners of the golf course weren’t too happy that she wore a pair of stiletto-heeled Manolo Blahniks as she was stalking her ex—she left tiny divots all over the fairway.”

“And the ex?”

“Some big investment banker in Boston. Richer than God.”

Claire told her about the events at the historical society the day before. “I don’t understand what happened. One moment I was talking, and the next I was on the floor with ten of Harriot’s most illustrious citizens staring down at me. What if I faint every time I try to give a lecture? Or during my oral exam?”

“I agree it’s not an auspicious beginning, but I’m sure you’ll do better next time.”

“I couldn’t do any worse.”

“Exactly. You’ve got nowhere to go but up. Besides the dramatic finish, what was the reaction to your lecture?”

“‘Underwhelmed’ is the polite word for it. The frustrating thing is that I see the Spanish Conspiracy just as if it were a story, but when I talk about it, it doesn’t come across that way. Later, when I looked at my notes, I realized that I was just reciting facts and dates and footnotes. It’s amazing I didn’t put them all to sleep.”

“Isn’t that what a dissertation is—facts and dates and footnotes?”

“I suppose so, but I want it to be more compelling than that. Anyway, that isn’t the worst part. Another historian is writing a book on the Spanish Conspiracy. A Cambridge professor, no less.”

“Cambridge?”

“Cambridge, England, not Boston. Trinity College.” Claire paused for a minute to retie a shoelace and Meredith jogged in place. “You know how few jobs there are for historians. I thought if my dissertation was really good, and original, I could get a teaching position. If a book on the same subject is published before my paper’s completed, that isn’t going to happen. I drove up to Harvard this morning and met with Hilliard, and according to him it’s nothing less than a disaster. He said the only way to succeed is to write something original, and as soon as that book comes out, my dissertation’s going to be as original as mud.”

“When’s the book coming out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you can finish your dissertation before it’s published.”

“That’s what Hilliard said. This professor’s going to be speaking at a conference in Venice soon, and Hilliard advised me to go and find out everything I can. Keep abreast of the competition and all that. Although he wasn’t quite clear as to whether I should befriend her or push her into a canal.”

“I don’t know about that, but I think he’s right about going to Venice.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“What about that grant?”

“I won’t know until August, and even if I do get it, the money’s not available until September.”

“There must be a way.” Meredith stopped by the water fountain at the north end of the track, bent down for a brief drink, then straightened. “It doesn’t seem right that you’ve been writing about Venice for at least two years and you haven’t even been there. Not to mention”—she paused for a few more mouthfuls of water—“there are Italian men in Venice.”

“You don’t say?”

Claire began running again, and Meredith trotted to catch up.

“Hordes of them, all gorgeous. You must see this to believe.”

“I believe you already.”

“But you can’t understand what I mean when I say ‘Italian men’ without actually experiencing it. Didn’t I tell you about the two weeks I spent in Rome?”

“Sure, but that was years ago.”

“I don’t think anything’s changed. They’re the most fabulous flirts on the planet. You read Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria.
An Italian literally wrote the book on seduction. They make you feel like a woman.”

“I already feel like a woman.”

“Like a goddess, then.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I’m not kidding. Why do you think that almost every man I’ve dated since then has had an
o
at the end of his name?”

That was true. Claire could recall, in Meredith’s past, a Riccardo, a Pietro, and an Enrico.

“Although,” Meredith continued, “once they’re transplanted to the U.S., something bad happens. Perhaps they spoil on the flight over. But while they’re in Italy, they’re amazing. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but it has something to do with the way they look at you. American men think they can seduce women by being cool and distant, and they couldn’t be more wrong. If American men knew what Italian men seem to know from birth, we would all be having sex all the time. Which reminds me—”

“I don’t want to discuss it.”

“You haven’t had a date in what, two years?”

“Of course I have. A couple, anyway.”

“I don’t remember any.”

“Sure you do.” It took Claire a moment to remember them herself. “There was the guy who wore those weird orange pants.” Her brow furrowed as she tried to recall his name, and couldn’t. “He drove a Jeep Cherokee. And don’t forget Jungle Boy.”

“The one who spent six months in the Venezuelan jungle eating rats and snakes?”

“It wasn’t a lifestyle choice, he was some sort of special forces guy in the army.”

“Claire, don’t you think it’s time?”

An attractive man smiled and waved as he jogged past them in the opposite direction. Meredith smiled and waved in return.

“Time for what?” Claire said.

“To get out there again.”

“Out where?”

“You know what I mean. To start dating again. Look at you—you’re gorgeous. Didn’t you see how that guy was checking you out? You’ve never looked better in your life and you’ve just shut yourself away.”

“I haven’t shut myself away.”

“Two dates in two years?”

“Okay, so my love life hasn’t been very exciting since…since…”

They passed the four-hundred-meter marker for the fourth time and stopped. Claire doubled over and put her hands on her knees, breathing heavily.

“Why don’t you just say it?” Meredith gasped.

“Say what?”

“Since my husband left me on the day of my mother’s funeral.” She took a few deep breaths before continuing. “Look, Claire, I’m not trying to hurt you. I just think it would do you good to say it out loud sometimes. Whenever you start feeling sentimental about Michael, for instance. It would help you move on.”

“At the moment,” Claire said, “I need to move on to the hardware store.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it…”

“The kitchen sink’s leaking again, and I’ve got to replace the curvy part of the pipe.”

“The curvy part? Is that the technical name for it?”

“It is as far as I’m concerned.”

“When did you get so handy around the house?”

“When plumbers started charging seventy-five dollars an hour.”

A cloud passed overhead, blocking the sun and shadowing most of the track. A humid breeze rose off the ocean and chilled Claire’s perspiring skin. She picked up her sweatshirt from where she’d dropped it on the grass and pulled it over her head. Did she really feel like a woman? she wondered as she and Meredith crossed the field. At the moment, she felt elated, calm, and sweaty, but not exactly feminine. What precisely did it mean to feel like a woman? The concept seemed to belong to her past, as something she dimly remembered that no longer had relevance.

C
LAIRE SCOOTED OUT
from under the kitchen sink and stood up. It was almost dark, and a sky full of woolly gray clouds cast a deepening chiaroscuro twilight into the room, softly illuminating the white-tile counters, a few unwashed dishes, and the wallpaper that was beginning to curl at the edges. Like everything else in the house it was showing its age. She’d get around to replacing it after her dissertation was finished—that and about a million other things.

When Claire’s mother Emily bought the house, Claire had agreed that it was charming, in a cottage sort of way, but after living there for two years she’d become unhappily familiar with its every idiosyncrasy. There wasn’t a true right angle anywhere, and it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the corners. Not that you could if you wanted to. Claire had moved her belongings in without moving her mother’s out, and the result was a cozy—some would say messy—jumble of furniture and knickknacks and way too many books.

The clutter helped to fill up a house that had felt empty ever since Emily died. Her mother was only fifty-four when she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Claire had been in the doctoral program at Columbia University in New York, and she’d taken a leave of absence from her studies to look after Emily following the first surgery. As her mother’s disease progressed, what began as a three-month hiatus from school turned into two years. Two years of hospitals, of surgeries, of chemotherapy and its debilitating aftermath, of watching her mother become frail and listless and in constant pain. Two years during which she and her husband, Michael, spent many nights apart. Claire had worn his favorite sweater, the brown one with the light tan stripes, when she slept in the tiny bed in her mother’s guest room, just so she could have the scent of him surrounding her.

Ex-husband, Claire reminded herself. Most of the time she didn’t allow herself to feel sentimental, but every once in a while—seeing a young couple holding hands on the commons, a swaddled baby in a stroller—she was painfully aware of everything she’d lost.

They had fallen in love six years ago, soon after being accepted into their respective Ph.D. programs: Claire in European history, Michael in ancient history—the Greeks and the Romans. She cringed to think of it now but, in a move highly uncharacteristic for her, she’d gotten his attention by “accidentally” dropping her books at his feet. Not only had Claire never done anything so obvious before, she had acted in defiance of an intuitive voice she heard the moment she first saw him:
He’s too good looking to be trusted.
She’d ignored that voice through a whirlwind courtship, a wedding less than a year later, and three years of marriage. After all, what other man had ever understood her passion for the past, her overwhelming desire to bury her nose in books? Old, arcane books, at that. Michael was the first boyfriend she’d had who didn’t accuse her of being “out of touch”: his interests were even more obscure than her own. But the things that had brought them together hadn’t been enough to keep them together, not with the strain of her mother’s illness and their repeated separations.

Three months after her mother died, Claire transferred from Columbia to Harvard and resumed work on her dissertation. Soon she’d fallen into a routine: once or twice a month she went up to the university and spent a day in the library, but more often she worked in the guest room that she’d turned into a home office. She seldom bothered to change out of her favorite flannel pajamas and rarely left her office except to make a cup of tea or a quick sandwich that later she couldn’t recall making or eating. Her dissertation filled her thoughts so completely that sometimes it was a shock, at the end of the day, to find herself returned to her mundane, uneventful, twenty-first–century existence.

Claire supposed Meredith had a point; she had sort of shut herself away, she thought as she rummaged in the fridge for something approximating dinner. But only because it was so important to finish her dissertation as soon as she possibly could. Her mother’s illness had set her back more than two years—two years during which her peers had gone on to get degrees and jobs. Michael already had a prestigious position as an assistant professor of classics at Columbia.

With an avocado and tomato sandwich in hand, she went into her office and sat down at her desk. She glanced at the nearest bookshelf, filled with reference books and the two previous volumes on the Spanish Conspiracy. Both had been written in the late seventeenth century. Except for some scholarly papers published in Italy and Spain, the Spanish Conspiracy had not been explored in depth for a few hundred years. Until now, she thought ruefully. What would happen if Andrea Kent published before she did? Perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised her that someone else was writing about her chosen subject. After all, the Spanish Conspiracy was one of the more exciting episodes in Venetian history, full of intrigue, espionage, and murder.

In 1617, the duke of Ossuna, the Spanish viceroy who ruled Naples, and the marquis of Bedmar, the Spanish ambassador to Venice, concocted a scheme to violently overthrow the Venetian Senate and make the Venetian Republic a dependency of Spain. Their attack was planned for Ascension Day 1618—the day when all of Venice would be celebrating the Serenissima’s marriage to the sea. They intended no less than the complete sacking and pillage of Venice. One source credited Bedmar with charging his band of soldiers to “cut off the limbs of those senators who resist.” Those who didn’t resist would be held for ransom. The considerable loot and ransom money would be divvied up among the conspirators, a group of mercenaries that included French corsairs, English privateers, and the Spanish viscount of Utrillo-Navarre, Antonio Perez, a notorious assassin in the service of the duke of Ossuna.

Known for his recklessness and dissipated habits, Ossuna began a campaign of hostility toward Venice after assuming the viceroyalty of Naples in 1616. He built a squadron of galleys that attacked Venetian ships in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but apparently these spoils were not enough for him. Soon he set his sights on Venice itself, and found in the Spanish ambassador a willing accomplice.

The marquis of Bedmar was an intriguing figure; every source Claire came across revealed a new, often contradictory, facet to his character. His reports to the Spanish king were sharply observant and laced with an acerbic wit; he was described as “cultivated and charming in society,” but also as “one of the most potent and dangerous spirits Spain ever produced.” Like Ossuna, he was implacably dedicated to the conquest of Venice. They were matched in ruthlessness only by their adversary, the Venetian senator Girolamo Silvia, who was equally determined to thwart the Spanish threat.

But Claire was most captivated by a person who, in previous chronicles of the conspiracy, had been relegated to a footnote. Alessandra Rossetti was a young courtesan who wrote a secret letter to the Great Council exposing the plot. Known as the Rossetti Letter, it was mentioned in most accounts of the Spanish Conspiracy, but was never fully examined, as Alessandra’s role had remained a mystery. No one knew how Alessandra had learned of the conspiracy; with the exception of the Rossetti Letter, there was no documentary evidence linking her to it.

Claire hadn’t found any evidence, either, but she believed it existed somewhere—most likely in Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana, which she hadn’t yet been able to visit. She suspected that past historians had overlooked it simply because they didn’t consider it important enough. They’d written about Ossuna, Bedmar, and Silvia at length, but Alessandra’s life and contribution to history were largely ignored. A few had even stated that the Rossetti Letter was incidental, that the Spanish Conspiracy would have been discovered without it, but Claire thought they were missing the point. As soon as she’d learned of the young courtesan, her imagination had been captured. Who was this woman? How did she become involved? No previous historian had looked at the conspiracy from Alessandra’s point of view, had placed her at the center of events, had given her adequate credit for helping to maintain the Venetian Republic’s independence. Claire thought of Alessandra as a sort of Italian Joan of Arc, and she harbored a secret hope that her dissertation would elevate the courtesan to a more prominent place in history.

If Andrea Kent doesn’t beat me to the punch, she thought as she brushed the last crumbs of her sandwich from her lap. That the Cambridge professor was a woman was especially worrisome; there was a greater possibility that she, too, would write about the conspiracy from Alessandra’s viewpoint, making Claire’s dissertation completely redundant. Her only hope was that Andrea Kent was having as much trouble finding information on Alessandra Rossetti as she was.

Two years and countless hours of research, and still Claire’s knowledge of the courtesan was sketchy, full of holes that she could fill only with question marks. In general, even the most illustrious Venetians of the time did not leave behind numerous records, documents or other accounts of their personal lives—and women, generally, left behind fewer than men. By researching wills, tax declarations, and an odd collection of personal correspondence, Claire had been able to piece together a biography of sorts. She took out her notes and looked them over once more.

With the deaths of Salvatore and Jacopo, Alessandra was left alone at the age of seventeen. The only honorable options for a woman of her station—a Venetian citizen, from a well-to-do merchant’s family—were marriage or the convent, but Alessandra didn’t choose either. The mystery of why she didn’t marry was easy enough to solve; when the sea claimed her father and brother, it also took her family’s fortune, including her dowry. As for the convent, Venetian girls rarely chose it of their own accord. Claire was fairly certain that Alessandra had entered into a close relationship with a man named Lorenzo Liberti, her father’s business associate and the executor of Salvatore’s diminished estate. Claire had come across a letter by Liberti in which he’d written that Alessandra had “bewitched” him, not only with her beauty but with her agile mind. Barely a year after their liaison had begun, Liberti was stricken with cholera and died.

Not long after Liberti’s death, Alessandra became a courtesan. By some accounts, she was one of the most sought after women in Venice. It must have been a momentous time for her; less than twelve months later, in March 1618, Alessandra wrote the letter exposing the Spanish Conspiracy.

And then she disappeared.

The Rossetti Letter was the last known document written by Alessandra Rossetti, even, from what Claire had found, the last document that referred to her. So far she hadn’t been able to discover Alessandra’s fate. Had the letter placed her in danger? Had she died during the bloodbath that followed the revelation of the Spaniards’ plot? If she’d managed to escape with her life, why couldn’t Claire find any mention of her after March 1618?

Claire set her notes on her desk and sighed. Sometimes she worried that she’d never find the answers to the questions that preoccupied her: How did Alessandra learn of the Spanish Conspiracy? And what had happened to her after the conspiracy was revealed?