The Silver Devil

The
voice under my window was complaining of the heat.

I
must have been half-asleep when I heard it, for in the moment before my eyes
opened, I thought I was back in my room at the Eagle. The thin, clear sound
rising from the courtyard outside made me forget the stuffy chamber and the
whisperings around my bed; for an instant I was back in the little room over
the inn sign, and the chatter of guests and servants was rising from below like
flies disturbed in summer.

I
lay listening — half-expecting to hear Celia bawl my name — then the tautening
of my body disturbed the child so that it stirred again in my womb, and I
groaned and opened my eyes.

At
once reality came flooding back. It was dark here, despite the sunshine
outside; torches had been burning for hours around the bed, and the heat was
almost unbearable. Lying flat on my back, I could scarcely breathe—no air
penetrated the bed-curtains, and my hair clung to my wet forehead. The
whispering all around me sounded like the mockery of a breeze.

As
the voices below died away, I could sense the eyes watching me, waiting for the
child to come, and I longed for them to leave me alone. The scent of them, musk
and amber and civet to mask the rottenness, was stifling. I closed my eyes to
try to blot them from my mind—to think of anything but their presence and the
unendurable heat....

1605, east coast of Italy,  just north
of the Kingdom of Naples

It
had been as hot as this the summer it began. All Fidena stank. The fetid smell
from the bay, where ships lay beached and their cargoes rotted for want of men
to unload them, mingled with human sweat and filth in the dust-laden air. Flies
and maggots bred, and the wind was sickly with the expectation of plague. Men
lay down in the streets and died, and their neighbors would not touch the
bodies, not even to drag them out of the all-consuming sun.

It
was the sort of heat that breeds discontent in men's minds, that slows a man's
blood and quickens his temper so that the city simmers like a pot close to
boiling. But I had scant leisure then to measure Fidena's temper, for that year
my brother, Antonio, married Celia Danoli and my life began to change.

There
was little love in their marriage; they were as sharp with each other as they
were with me, and they squabbled more like ill-matched business partners than
like husband and wife. Antonio saw only the glory of being landlord of so fine
an inn as the Eagle; Celia saw only the work and the money her labors might
fetch her. They only united in two things—in their greed and in their dislike
of me.

Antonio
had always been ashamed of me. When I was a child, I sensed it long before I
knew why, and Celia loathed me from the instant she set eyes on me. She had
matched beneath her in marrying an innkeeper, and my very existence irked her
like an open sore. She was forever railing at me for my bastardy as though it
were a witting crime; and, like Antonio, she never wearied of telling me how
lucky I was to have been given a home after the way my mother used my foster
father. No drudgery of mine, no humiliation, could ever repay that kindness.
And because all they said held a kernel of truth, I had to bear it in silence.

I
never knew who my father was. At his coming, my mother had been long married to
Battista Guardi, the keeper of an unkempt tavern under the city wall and a man
too fond of his own wares to make a success of selling them. Her life with him
had been a hard one, and I think that when Antonio was born after many
fruitless births and showed every sign of growing up like his father, she
quietly gave up hope of happiness. But however it was, when my father came and
went in a single night and left her carrying a bastard child, nothing would
make her tell his name. Perhaps she never knew it.

Battista
tried all he knew to make her tell—beatings, cursings, even hauling her before
the priest—but she never spoke of it to anyone. She carried me uncomplainingly,
and after I was born she sheltered me as well as she could from the worst of
her husband's animosity.

The
priest had persuaded Battista to shelter the fruits of his wife's sin, and
while I was very young, I thought his black looks were disappointment that I
was not a boy. It was not until my mother died that I heard the word bastard
for the first time.

Antonio
took pains to explain to me, before my mother's funeral was well over, that I
could no longer expect to be treated as a daughter of the house. With brutal
simplicity he told me why I could claim no kinship with the man I called
Father. He himself, he said roughly, was my half-brother and no more; if I did
not want to feel his hand I was not to call him Brother from that hour. If I
were humble and grateful and worked as hard as I could, I might stay on in the
house— otherwise he washed his hands of me.

I
was not ten years old then and had no idea what the words meant—I only knew
that my mother was dead and now I stood to lose the only home I had ever known.
So, sobbing, I agreed to Antonio's terms and set myself to be humble and
grateful.

It
was hard, but not so hard as learning to accept that my very presence was a
shame to my father and brother—or, as I must learn to say, stepfather and
half-brother. I was taught swiftly that I could never expect to be the equal of
those who called themselves legitimate, and that if God hated one sin above all
others, it was that of ingratitude—or so Antonio said. I kept my bargain, amply
respecting the work, and did all I could to keep the squalid inn as clean as my
mother had done. At first Battista paid a woman to cook for us, but as he began
to drink more and the money declined, that task, too, fell to me. There were
nights when I dropped onto my straw pallet so worn out that not even his
drunken snores could wake me.

The
burden of his loathing was the hardest thing of all to bear, and as I grew
older, the injustice of it made me angry and frightened. It seemed at times
that all my life I was to be blamed for something that was not my fault. He
would watch me for hours at a time under scowling brows so that nervousness
made me clumsy, and then the least fault was an excuse for him to use his belt
on me. Once, smarting from an unexpected blow, I demanded to know why he should
hate me so, and if I had not been fleeter footed than he, I think he would have
killed me. My mother had been dead for seven years when Battista broke his neck
in a drunken brawl, and I felt nothing but a great relief when I knew he was
dead.

It
was the next Christmas, when the household came out of mourning, that Antonio
married Celia, the daughter of a prosperous vintner. It was generally held to
be a good match—Celia's shrewish tongue was said to have frightened as many
wooers as were drawn by her rich dowry, but then Antonio was no Adonis, with
his red fleshy face and drunkard's belly. Nevertheless I was amazed. I knew his
taste ran to plump, dark women, like the apothecary's sister in the next
street; Celia was square and sturdy, with a face to turn milk sour and hair
that was a bright, unlikely butter yellow. But he seemed happy enough with his
choice, and I understood why when he told me he had bought the Eagle with her
marriage portion.

The
Eagle stood in the Via Croce in the center of the city, between the marketplace
and the Cathedral of San Domenico, and it was one of the most prosperous
businesses in Fidena. Antonio, I thought, must have been more than willing to
abide the gold of his wife's hair for the sake of the gold in her marriage
chest.

I
never knew what arguments he used to persuade her that I should stay with them,
unless he appealed to her thrift and won her consent with the bait of a servant
who would work without wages; when the bridal couple left the old house and
took possession of the Eagle, I went with them, duly grateful for my good
fortune. But the change which spelled prosperity for the Guardi family fortunes
was to have consequences for me that I did not dream of.

The
changes came thick and fast. Celia's hatred of me was causeless, a thing that
neither of us could help, and she tormented me as a cat will chase a bird, for
no reason. We were barely installed in the Via Croce when the pattern of my
days began to alter.

I
had thought I worked hard in the old house, but now my tasks multiplied past
count. All day I was cleaning and scrubbing, scouring pans amid the stink of
rancid cooking oil, or at work in the stillroom, out of sight of the Eagle's
guests.

At
first I did not realize what was happening. I was so grateful to rest at the
end of the day's labors that I paid no heed to the way the other servants
looked at me, nor did I notice that they seldom spoke to me. It never entered
my thoughts that I did not go among the guests as they did, that I was shut
away from the general world like a leper.

One
morning in spring, I was in the kitchen, polishing Antonio's best platter and
peering curiously at my reflection, bent and wavering in the hammered metal. It
was a vague, pale shadow, with long black hair and queer gray eyes—like and yet
unlike the image I remembered. I could not think what was different until my
gaze dropped and I saw my bare arm next to Celia's at my elbow. My skin had
grown as white as a cloistered nun's.