The Rossetti Letter (v5) (33 page)

“It’s the funniest thing,” he went on, “Claire happens to be working on the Spanish Conspiracy, too…”

No, he hadn’t noticed at all. Gabriella’s eyes gleamed with proprietary fervor and a smoldering animosity. Thanks very much, Andrew, Claire thought. Good thing she was leaving tomorrow and wouldn’t see either of them again; she suspected that the receiving end of Gabriella’s wrath was a very dangerous place to be.

“I
DON’T SEE
why you’re so worried,” said Gwen as she and Claire hurried across the Piazza.

“A few years in prison is a pretty good reason to be worried.” A flock of pigeons turned in the air above them, and a flurry of argent wings glinted in the sunlight. They’d gotten a late start this morning, and the Piazza was already filling with tourists. They had only about five minutes in which to switch the diaries at the Marciana
,
if they were going to get to Ca’ Foscari in time for Andrew Kent’s lecture.

“Why didn’t you come over to Stefania’s yesterday and get it?”

“By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. The library was already closed—officially, anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to put it back.”

“I think a judge would understand that it was just a funny accident.”

“What did you do yesterday, study for the bar? I hate to contradict you, but I don’t think judges are swayed by ‘funny.’ Although,” Claire said, smiling slyly, “it occurs to me that if you took the fall for me, I could probably beat the rap.”

“Huh?”

“You’re a minor, so they couldn’t put you in prison. They’d probably just garnish your allowance for the next twenty or thirty years. You’d do that for me, right?”

Gwen snorted. “I beg to differ.”

Claire grabbed the handle to the
Marciana
’s front door and pulled, but it didn’t budge. It was locked, she discovered after a few more unsuccessful tugs. For the first time, Claire noticed a gold plaque on the wall near the door, with an engraved list of the library’s hours on it: it didn’t open until eleven on Saturdays. Claire stifled an urge to speak loudly in Greek and Latin.

“We’re going to have to come back later,” she said.

“But my diary!” Gwen protested.

“No one is going to read it,” Claire assured her. “No one is even going to touch it. But we can’t wait here for the library to open or I’ll miss the entire lecture.”

Ca’ Foscari’s grand salon was packed; every seat had been taken by the time Claire and Gwen arrived, and people stood around the periphery of the room. They found a space near the front, to the right of the stage. Not far away, Maurizio, Gabriella, and Andrew Kent stood closely together, conferring in low voices. He’d looked at Claire only once, when she’d first walked up to the front and settled against the wall, but hadn’t smiled or acknowledged her. It was probably just as well, she thought, with Gabriella standing right there. She wondered if he’d had time to pull his notes together and write his lecture, or perhaps he was confident enough to speak extemporaneously. Would he use what they’d discovered yesterday, or would he stick to the research he’d done before? She realized that she felt a bit nervous for him; there were an awful lot of people here. That the lecture was starting late only added to the general feeling of anticipation.

Claire occupied herself by looking around for Giancarlo. They’d spoken by phone the night before, after she and Gwen had gotten back to the hotel. As soon as Claire had left the Baldessaris’, she’d known that she wasn’t up for another evening out. Happily, Giancarlo had understood her desire for a quick dinner, a leisurely bath, and a long night of sleep. They had agreed to meet here, at Ca’ Foscari. She and Gwen didn’t have to leave for the airport until five, so there was plenty of time for lunch and sightseeing. She was wondering how she would explain a quick but necessary trip to the Marciana as Maurizio Baldessari walked onto the stage.

“Welcome everyone to Andrew Kent’s second lecture on the Spanish Conspiracy against Venice,” he said, “or, after Tuesday’s lecture, what might hereafter be known as the Venetian Conspiracy against the Spanish.” Gentle laughter rose from the audience. “He has quite a bit of material to cover, so he tells me, and has asked me in the interest of brevity to dispense with the formal introduction. So without further ado, Andrew Kent.”

Andrew stepped up to the podium and thanked the applauding audience. “On Tuesday I finished my lecture with a quote from Shaw: ‘History, sir, will tell lies, as usual,’” he began. “But of course it’s not history per se that tells lies, it’s people who tell lies. When we try to piece together the truth of an event such as the Spanish Conspiracy from four hundred years on, it’s helpful to remember that the patina of time does not make the written word any more reliable. Even more so than usually, we must not take everything we read at face value.

“Reading between the lines, finding the motivations and reasons behind the bits of printed matter we have left to us requires skills we don’t often think about as research skills, precisely, although we use them all the time to a greater or lesser degree: hunch, intuition, even imagination.

“Researching the Spanish Conspiracy has put these skills to the test, but only in the past week have they been rewarded. These latest discoveries are going to upset a few apple carts, one of which is my own. Was it a Spanish conspiracy or a Venetian conspiracy? The answer to that question is more complicated than I had thought. But as it turns out, I’m not the person most qualified to explain it.”

Andrew turned away from the microphone and looked at Claire. Along with everyone else, she waited for Andrew to continue speaking; instead, he beckoned for her to come up on stage.

Claire shook her head vigorously. Andrew looked at her quizzically, and summoned her on stage once more. The people in the audience, curious and restless, murmured and craned their necks to peer in Claire’s direction. Everyone was beginning to realize that something strange was going on. Wasn’t Andrew Kent giving this lecture?

“One moment, please,” Andrew said, then strode across the stage, down the steps, and over to Claire. By the time he reached her, the room was buzzing with whispers. Gabriella looked on with surprise and thinly disguised hatred.

“Come up to the stage with me,” he said calmly. “I’ll introduce you, then you can give the lecture, all right?”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“I thought you wanted to be a professor. You’ll be lecturing all the time.”

“That may be true, but the first time I spoke in public, I fainted.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Completely. I passed out.”

“So you’re a little gun-shy, are you? Well, that won’t do at all. I’m sure you’ve heard about getting back on the horse and all that.”

“Yes, but—”

“All you have to do is tell the story just like you told it to me last night. I promise you, you’re not going to faint.”

“How do you know?”

“You’ll have to trust me on this. If you forget something, just look at me and I’ll prompt you.” His gaze was calm and encouraging.

If she could give a lecture to such a large crowd, she reasoned, facing Hilliard would be a breeze. She nodded her assent and handed her tote bag to Gwen. She followed Andrew across the floor, her palms damp, her mouth suddenly as dry as if she’d swallowed sand.

As the two of them stepped up to the stage, the murmuring in the room swelled and seemed to combine with the buzzing in her head. She watched as Andrew returned to the podium and introduced her, but didn’t comprehend a thing until he turned toward her, smiling, and then she sensed the sound of applause, as if from a great distance. It was as if it were all happening in a slow-moving dream, the kind of dream from which you awoke with your heart beating wildly, and struggling for air.

Claire stepped up to the podium, the audience a rustling, blurred mass in front of her. She gripped the edges of the stand to steady herself, then looked to the right of the stage: Giancarlo was there, standing with Maurizio, Andrew, and Gwen. He smiled warmly as he caught her eye, but Claire couldn’t look at him for long; he just made her feel more nervous. Gabriella, standing next to him, didn’t appear angry anymore; instead, she seemed her usual self-satisfied self, her arms folded across her chest and a complacent, even pleased look on her face. She’s sure I’m going to embarrass myself, Claire thought. In fact, she’s counting on it. Well, she decided, she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

Claire turned to the audience in front of her. One hundred faces looked back, quiet, expectant. She moved her mouth closer to the microphone and felt the strange sensation of her lips brushing its perforated surface, smelled its tangy metallic scent.

“The Rossetti Letter—,” she said, and her voice resounded around the room, startling her with its volume. Her head jerked back momentarily; then she regained her composure and began again.

“The Rossetti Letter lies at the center of the Spanish Conspiracy,” she said. “For four hundred years, it’s been considered a cornerstone of the case against the Spaniards in the conspiracy of 1618; recently, however”—she glanced in Andrew Kent’s direction—“this assumption has been challenged. Did Alessandra Rossetti write it to expose the Spanish Conspiracy or to create the Spanish Conspiracy? The following account should answer that question.”

3 March 1618

A
LESSANDRA TURNED AWAY
from the hanged man and slipped into the courtyard of the Doge’s Palace. She walked slowly around the perimeter, keeping to the shadows near the walls. As she moved away from the Piazza, the torches lighting the courtyard grew scarce, and the sounds of Carnival faded to an indistinct but steady roar that echoed faintly inside the stone quadrant.

Set into the wall at shoulder height in the courtyard’s far corner, the bronze plaque of the
bocca di leone
shone dully in the dim, flickering light. Its relief depicted not a lion’s but a man’s face captured in a grotesque grimace, his eyes wild with pain, his mouth a black chasm. She ran her fingers over the engraved words below it and read the inscription:
For secret indictments against those who commit crimes, or collude to hide their income.

She reached into her purse for the letter. Where would it go, she wondered, once she fed it to this gluttonous orifice? Far below in the bowels of the palace, was there a man seated in a frigid cell who waited for communiqués such as this to fall into his lap? More likely her letter would fall into a locked box, and would not be collected until morning.

She turned the letter over and brushed her thumb across the raised wax seal. She knew she had no choice but to drop it into the lion’s mouth; if she did not, La Celestia’s murderer might never be brought to justice, and the possible consequences to Venice were too terrible: the sacking and pillage of the city, hundreds dead, the Republic under the rule of the Spanish king. Half the populace of Venice would be considered heretics, and she would be among them: a burning pyre would be her end.

And yet she hesitated. What would happen to the viscount? The fearsome prophecy of the hanged man resounded in her ears:
If you deliver that letter, here is the fate of another.
But surely he would not be harmed by her disclosures; she wasn’t even certain that he was involved in Bedmar’s plot. Yet she could not deny the terrible feeling that if she dropped the letter in the lion’s mouth, she was sealing Antonio’s destiny as well as her own. The consequences of her letter would, in one way or another, divide them forever.

All at once the letter was plucked from her fingers and a man’s hand covered her mouth. It happened so quickly she had no time to gasp with surprise. Her attacker wrestled her arms behind her back, gripping her wrists in one strong hand. He then took his hand away from her mouth, but the relief she felt was fleeting, for instantly the steely point of a knife pressed sharply against her ribs.

“This is aimed at your heart,” he said. “If you cry out, you will be dead within seconds.”

They traveled far from the city center, snaking through the labyrinthine canals of Cannaregio, journeying into the secret, sordid neighborhoods of Venice, where the darkness grew ever darker and each canal shabbier and more sinister than the last. A place where the groups of armed citizens who patrolled the city streets during Carnival refused to go, and gangs of cutpurses hid beneath bridges. Menacing shadows crept alongside them as they cautiously progressed through the ever more turbid waterways.

He’d bound her wrists with rope as soon as she was seated in the gondola. He sat next to her on the cushioned bench, his arm in a relaxed curve behind her, but his hand still gripped the sharp blade with which he had threatened her. His face was covered, like her own, by a Carnival mask. Of course she knew who he was, and had known, from the moment she heard his voice in her ear. Her second impression was equally certain:
He means to kill me.

He hadn’t said a word throughout the entire journey. Alessandra was silent, too. She did her utmost to remain calm and take stock of her situation and turned to look at the gondolier standing behind them. He was one of the marquis’s
bravi,
of course, surly, squat, and bald, with a grisly scar in the place where his left eye should have been. She judged that he was shorter than herself, but he appeared as though he were chiseled out of stone. With every stroke of the oar, his arms seemed to swell to twice their normal size. A former galley slave, Alessandra guessed. No chance she’d be able to defend herself against one of these men, much less two. She couldn’t throw herself over the side, either, not with her wrists bound, not while wearing this heavy costume. She’d drown before she could swim away. She glanced down at the dark, viscous water of the scum-covered canal. If it was her fate to drown, at least let it be in the lagoon, she thought, not here.

She didn’t know if it was stupidity or pride that kept her from begging for her life; perhaps it was both. Half her mind held foolishly to the belief that her captor intended her no harm, that there was some other purpose in this scheme; the other half, the rational half, knew that he was capable of murder. But was he capable of killing her? If that were true, then she would not, could not, give him the pleasure of seeing her beg for her life. She would rather die.

“Here,” he finally uttered, pointing to a crumbling archway. They glided through the portal and into the low-ceilinged ground floor of a small, decrepit house. He took a lantern from under the gondola seat, lit it with a wick from the lantern on the bow, then yanked Alessandra to her feet.

He pulled her from the boat and across a stone floor, then up a flight of stairs. The door at the top was weathered and warped, and he opened it with a violent shove. Gripping her by the arm with one hand, carrying the lantern with the other, he guided her through it and along a narrow corridor until they came to what looked to be the main room, dark and shabby though it was.

The few sticks of furniture were covered in dust and the heavy window coverings were moth holed and moldy. It was clear that no one lived there; possibly no one else had entered in years. If he left her body there, Alessandra thought, chances were that by the time she was found, there’d be nothing remaining but bones.

He set the lantern down and took off his mask. Then he reached out and lifted Alessandra’s mask from her face and pulled it over her head. For a moment he said nothing, just leaned against the table in a relaxed manner and turned her mask over in his hands. She was instantly aware of his confident strength, his restrained power. He acted nonchalant even though he was not, she realized; if she made a move toward him, or if anyone burst through that door, he would be on his feet, sword in hand, before she could blink. When he looked back at her, she felt the full bore of his black eyes.

“I am sent to kill you,” Antonio said. “But I expect you know that by now.”

“Yes.” She met his steady gaze with her own, unwilling to show her fear. “You were sent by Bedmar?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill La Celestia, or did the marquis do it himself?”

“I know nothing of this. Who is La Celestia?”

“A friend of mine, another courtesan. I found her only hours ago with her throat cut.”

“I’m afraid I cannot help you on that score. I only know that the marquis wishes you dead.”

“Doesn’t he have the nerve to do it himself?”

“I believe he thinks your murder may incriminate him. Too many are aware that he is your lover. He has gone from the city, just to put a fair distance between himself and your disappearance.”

“So you volunteered for the job?”

“Not exactly, but my skills in this sphere are highly regarded.”

“And how do you plan to do it?”

“To kill you?” Antonio looked amazed at her forthrightness, then confused. “Would you not prefer to plead for your life instead?”

“I will not give you that satisfaction.”

“I have known men twice your size who had not half your courage,” he said with a little smile.

“You should count yourself among them, since you prey on those weaker than yourself.”

The smile left his face. He moved behind her and began untying her wrists.

“We have very little time,” he said. “You must take off your clothes.”

“Killing me isn’t enough? You mean to humiliate me as well?”

Antonio picked up the lantern. “We have very little time,” he repeated, more urgently. He walked a few paces farther into the room and swung the lantern around. Alessandra gasped when she saw what it illuminated.

On a low couch was a woman clad only in her undergarments. Even before she saw the bruises that ringed her throat, Alessandra knew that she was dead. Except for the dried spittle that flaked at the corners of her mouth, the woman resembled a life-size doll, with long ringlets of gold hair and wide blue eyes that were fixed in an everlasting stare. Her fair complexion bore patches of vivid paint, the unnaturally rosy cheeks and rouged lips of a prostitute. Her dress was draped across her feet.

“Take off your clothes and put on that dress, then help me dress her in your costume. Already she grows as stiff as a plank.”

“Did you kill her?” Alessandra asked.

“I purchased her from the morgue.” His voice was low but contained a banked anger. “If everyone else in the world, including that cretin downstairs, wants to believe me capable of murdering defenseless women, so be it, but I would not have you think so.”

“But she was murdered.”

“Not by me. She was found in a doorway not far from here, I believe. Don’t look so shocked, it’s more common than you think. There are ten thousand whores in Venice—surely you’ve noticed that not all of them live as well as you do.” He regarded her impatiently. “You must hurry.”

She stripped off her costume and put on the dress. It was tattered and dirty, but the fit was close enough when she laced it tight. Alessandra held her costume out to him. He didn’t take it; instead, he lifted the dead woman by the shoulders and nodded to Alessandra to slip it on over her head. They threaded her arms through the sleeves, then rolled her onto her side to pull the costume underneath her and over her legs. Alessandra placed her mask over the dead woman’s face.

“Is she supposed to be me? Don’t you think someone will notice when they take off the mask?”

“The gondolier’s the only one we have to convince, and he hasn’t seen your face.”

“Isn’t he going to ask why you brought me here—why you didn’t just slit my throat out in the lagoon?”

“I told him I’d taken a fancy to you.”

“Why go to all this trouble just for him?”

“He’ll report back to Bedmar, that’s why. That reminds me—your jewels. I’m afraid you’ll have to give those up, too.” Alessandra took off her pearl earrings. “Do you think the marquis will recognize these?” Antonio asked.

“He might.”

“Good. I’ll make sure he gets them,” he said as he attached them to the dead woman’s ears.

“If you meant to spare me, why did you stick a knife in my ribs and frighten me half to death?”

“I needed you to come with me without making a fuss. There may have been others watching in the Piazza.”

“You could have told me.”

“There was no time for a discussion. There isn’t time now, either. I’m going to take her down to the gondola. Wait at least five minutes before you leave.” He withdrew the dagger from his belt. “It’s little protection, but here’s my knife. I’ve arranged for a link boy to light your way to an inn not far from here. He’s waiting for you in the
campo.
”

“To an inn?”

“I don’t think it’s safe for you to go home.”

“I’ve no money with me.”

“Everything’s been paid for. You must leave the city as soon as you can. Do not tarry; the marquis is at his villa on
terraferma
for the next few days, and you must not be here when he returns. Do you have somewhere to go?”

“Yes.” Alessandra looked at the dead whore. “What are you going to do with her?”

“Take her out to the lagoon.” He said no more, but he did not have to, for Alessandra knew the rest: bags of rocks would be tied to her hands and feet, and she would not be seen again.

“Why are you doing this? Saving my life, I mean.”

His eyes flicked over her and quickly looked away. “You saved mine once,” he said simply.

He felt a sense of obligation, then, and nothing more. Alessandra didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and for a moment she felt as if she might do both at once. With the dead woman in his arms, Antonio turned away and walked out the door. Alessandra felt a sharp, burning pain in her chest, as if he had plunged the knife in after all.

With its wood-paneled walls and brass fixtures, Alessandra’s room at the Cannaregio inn reminded her of the captain’s quarters of her father’s lost ship. It wasn’t elegant, but it was clean and cozy, with a well-kept fire and an arrangement of simple furnishings: a four-poster bed tucked under the eaves and a small dining table near the hearth. She looked around with approval as she sat down at the writing desk, then gazed out the window to the canal three stories below.

I am safe,
Alessandra wrote in a note for Nico and Bianca,
but we must leave Venice at once. Pack a chest with my traveling things and one for the two of you. Convey them here to the inn as soon as you are able. Bring the keys to Giovanna’s house in San Polo, where we will stay until we arrange passage out of the city.