The Stargazer (2 page)

“You might try looking for the actual murder weapon, which certainly was not this gaudy toy.” Bianca concentrated on repressing a sneeze in order to resist the urge to see the effect this news had on him. “Or you could devise a plan to uncover,” she sneezed, “the person willing to go to such expense,” Bianca gestured with the gem-encrusted hilt of the dagger as she sneezed again, “to label you a murderer.”

Ian, whose total was now up to twenty-five, refused to play into her hands by asking her to elaborate her wild claim about the weapon. He also had no doubt that she had a plan ready to implement if he seemed willing. She was cunning and clever, his little sneezing murderess. And even if she was not herself responsible for the murder, the odds were very good that she could lead him to whoever was. With his customary acumen, Ian assessed the situation and saw that Bianca could be very useful to him.

Very useful indeed. In a flash he realized that the murder was only part of it, even the smallest part. He completely lost track of enumerating Bianca’s sneezes as the full force of his brilliant inspiration struck him. Staring at the defiant beauty in front of him, Ian saw the perfect way to put an end to Francesco’s and Roberto’s ceaseless urgings toward matrimony. Indeed, it was in order to escape another such a harangue from his uncles that he had so promptly replied to Isabella’s—or the Salva girl’s or whoever’s—summons that very morning. And now, as if by destiny, he was being offered an opportunity to escape from them for all time. The plan he contrived in those few seconds was, he congratulated himself, gloriously simple and flawless. If he betrothed himself to the dangerous-looking Salva specimen and moved her into his house, he was sure that within three days—four at the most—Francesco and Roberto and the other Arboretti would be begging him to break the engagement and return to his bachelor ways forever. He was already savoring the taste of victory when he spoke.

“As it happens, signorina, I do have a plan.” The corner of Ian’s lip quivered, his version of a smile, as he watched Bianca struggle not to flinch at his intentionally condescending tone. He knew she would agree to his terms only if she were goaded into it, and he was surprised at how much he enjoyed the prospect of this goading. Plus, the madder she was, the worse she would behave and the faster his plan would come to fruition.

Bianca waited for him to continue, sneezing twice in the silence that followed his words. That twitching at the corner of his mouth told her she would find his plan distasteful, whatever it was, but she little expected exactly how bitter it would be. She had decided not to encourage him, yet after what felt like an eternity had passed she heard herself saying, “Ah, I see, my lord, you are indeed as clever as everyone says you are.” She sneezed. “You plan to wait for the body to decompose, so that your problem will literally disappear. ”

Ian ignored her gibe. “My plan is to detain you until you explain exactly what you were doing here and tell me all you know about Isabella. You may do so here, now. Or I will find you quarters, as uncomfortable as possible you can be sure, in the basement prison at the Palace until you are ready to answer. Think of how quickly this sneezing illness of yours will worsen there. Not to mention how your family will react to hearing you have been incarcerated as a murderess.”

Bianca blanched. With her brother gone on another of his last-minute journeys, there would be no one to protect her from the wrath of her aunt and uncle if she besmirched the family name yet again. But if they found out what she had actually been doing at Isabella’s, it might be even worse than if she were accused of murder. She wondered if he could even guess the full force of what he was proposing.

The girl was genuinely conflicted, Ian noted with surprise. Perhaps, he mused, she really was innocent. What if he were persecuting an innocent woman? He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should continue and then remembered that “innocence” and “woman” were fundamental opposites. Even if she were innocent of this crime, he decided, she had undoubtedly committed others, and besides, that mouth of hers had earned her some upset.

When he judged his last words had had enough time to make an impression on her, he continued. “There is, however, one other option, but I fear you will find it even less pleasant than the others.” Ian then added, apparently as an afterthought, “It’s too bad, because it would be very convenient for me. You see, my priority is to get as much information from you as possible. If you were to move into my house, I would be able to question you at my leisure—whenever or wherever I wanted and using whatever means of persuasion I preferred. I am rumored to have a rather fearsome staff.”

There was something decidedly threatening in the way Ian spoke his last words, but Bianca refused to be scared off by him or his reference to the rumors that circulated around him. She was sure that his house contained nothing more terrifying than a morbid butler or a lecherous steward, and impertinent questioning in the home of a count was nothing compared to the horrors of the Venetian prisons. Of course, strictly speaking, it was not proper for a single woman to spend a few days under the same roof as an unmarried nobleman, but it would win her nothing like the infamy she would face having been imprisoned for murder. Her family might even thank her for the valuable social introduction.

Bianca sneezed and then prepared herself to savor the look of surprise on Ian’s face when she agreed to his proposal. “Despite your best efforts to scare me away from it, my lord, I should say that this last option is decidedly the best. I accept it,” she sneezed, heightening the dramatic effect of her final words, “with one condition.”

Ian, disappointingly nonchalant, only managed to raise one eyebrow. “You can scarcely imagine how that surprises me.”

Bianca ignored his sarcastic tone. “I would like to bring Isabella’s body with me to study it for evidence of how she was killed,” she sneezed, “and by whom.”

Ian paused for a moment, thinking, and finally nodded. “Actually, that will work quite well. If I keep our possession of the body a secret, I can circulate a notice that Isabella is missing. This will make my inquiries easier and doubtless more fruitful.” Ian, still lost in thought, was apparently speaking to himself. Bianca thought he might have forgotten about her until a violent fit of sneezing brought his eyes to where she stood.

“Fine,” he said, facing her, “it is settled. I will send my man, Giorgio, with the gondola for you and the body. You will stay here until he arrives.” Ian pulled a beautiful gold box out of his pocket, opened the lid, and glanced at the face. Beneath it, Bianca saw what appeared to be a very small version of the huge clock in Piazza San Marco. She was so absorbed by the intricate work and delicate mechanism that she missed the twitching at the corner of Ian’s mouth as he resumed speaking.

He tried to keep his tone light, pretending the thought had just occurred to him. “Of course, it will be quite unseemly for you to reside under my roof.” Ian leveled his eyes at her.

“My reputation does not concern me,” Bianca retaliated haughtily, crushing his obvious ploy to make her shrink away, then sneezed four times.

“I don’t doubt that at all, signorina, but mine concerns me. No, having you in my house like that won’t do at all.” She had walked right into his trap. Ian lowered his eyes to his watch again as if thinking, but actually to conceal the triumph on his face. He spent a moment reestablishing control of his expression, then moved to the threshold. When he turned to deliver his last horrible words, he already had his hand poised over the doorknob, ready for a clean escape.

“I see there is nothing else for it. I will have to announce our betrothal tonight at the meeting of the Senate.” The sentence was punctuated by the click of the door shutting smoothly behind him.

As she stood staring at the space Ian had just occupied, too bewildered to protest or even sneeze, Bianca could have sworn she heard someone laughing.

The young man followed the Moorish servant across the immense marble ballroom. Even the rich tapestries covering the walls could not keep out the chill of the rainy afternoon, and the visitor huddled deeper into his sable cape. The servant stopped before a massive mahogany door with a family crest emblazoned on it and waited to be admitted. As the door opened, the servant bowed his turbaned head and disappeared, leaving the man alone on the threshold.

“Lucia’s eyes, will this pen not stay sharp?” Bianca glared down at the quill in her hand and then at the half-finished drawing in front of her. She never drew well when she was tired, and the forty-eight straight hours she had spent cloistered with Isabella’s body had left her completely drained. But she was determined to finish before the hazy gray day was plunged again in darkness. Exhausted as she was, she was still excited by the wealth of material she had been able to gather. Not only had she learned much about the crime, but Isabella’s body provided her with the first opportunity to draw the anatomy of a young woman. Her only female corpses before had been the poor old women of Padua who died without enough money for a proper burial. Isabella’s healthy young corpse was a dream come true, from a scientific standpoint.

Her debts to Isabella seemed to mount even after the young courtesan’s death, Bianca mused philosophically. A few more drawings and her book would finally be ready to go to press, revealing the female body accurately for the first time. She could almost sense her triumph as she proved to those stubborn men in Padua that women had their own perfect anatomy and were not just flawed versions of men. Wandering wombs, hah! she thought to herself. She remembered hearing of her father’s debates on the subject with Andrea Vesalius when he was first starting his brilliant career, and she smiled as she imagined her book on a shelf somewhere as a companion to his. A vision of her future stretched invitingly before her—she would teach courses on female anatomy, study the female body and its cycles, do public demonstrations. It would be idyllic, truly. Except for this mockery of a betrothal.

She knew that once announced before the Senate, a betrothal bore the mark of law and was virtually impossible to revoke unless both the people agreed to end it, or one person was shown to be unfit. Had she realized what Ian had actually been proposing all those hours—was it really only hours?—ago, she would never have agreed. Or probably not. Maybe. The Conte d’Aosto had always had a strange effect on her. From her first night out in Venetian society nine months before, he was the only man she always noticed, or at least, she noticed his absence. But that was probably because he was also the only man who never paid any attention to her. He had not even known who she was when they met at Isabella’s, she reminded herself. And now they were betrothed. It was positively idiotic.

As she thought, she worked to reform the nib of her pen. But when the full force of the betrothal hit her—no freedom, no lectures, no book of her own—she missed and cut the quill in half. “S’balls!” she declared, and then looked up to make sure no one overheard her speak such scandalous words. But she was alone. Since her father’s death, it seemed as if she was always alone. But that was just how she liked it…wasn’t it?

Clearly between her wandering mind, broken pen, and lack of rest, she could accomplish no more. With a sigh she stood up and removed her blood-soaked apron. She moved sleepily to open the door, but found it impossible to move. She tried again, twisting the cold knob with all her might, and again nothing happened. She was locked in. A mixture of desperation and indignation overcame her exhaustion, and she began pounding against the heavy door with all her force. Nothing. My God, she thought, he’s left me up here to die with this corpse. Panicked, she went to the far end of the room and, with a running start, hurled herself at the door.

Ian heard her mad pounding from his laboratory. He had expected Bianca Salva to be difficult and even exasperating, but need she be so noisy? He pushed aside the rock-chip he had been looking at under his magnifying lenses and headed toward the other side of the palazzo, where he had given her space for her own laboratory. The noise seemed thankfully to subside as he approached the door and turned the handle.

He was never sure afterward just how he ended up pinned against the far wall of the hallway with Bianca in his arms, but he felt the bruises for more than a week. It had not been an unpleasant sensation, he mused, just unexpected. He vaguely remembered seeing something come flying at him as the door swung open, but how that something was Bianca Salva remained a bit mysterious. They stood entwined together for a few silent seconds before the body next to his began to pull away.

“My lord, how dare you?” Bianca gasped at last, stepping out of the circle of his embrace.

“I beg your pardon, signorina, but I believe it was you who leapt into my arms, not the other way around.” Ian raised one eyebrow sarcastically.

She glared at him as fulsomely as possible. “That is not what I meant,” she said with exasperation. “How dare you lock me in there with that body? I will not be your prisoner!”

“There you are mistaken,
carissima
. You are my prisoner—remember, we are betrothed. That gives me no end of power over you.”

Bianca resisted the urge to slap him, barely. “This betrothal is a mockery, we both know that. What I do not understand is why you proposed it—you wouldn’t possibly have suggested such a thing if you really believed I was guilty. Is it truly so hard to find someone willing to marry you, my lord, that you’ve had to turn to the criminal classes?”

“On the contrary.” Ian matched her sarcastic tone with his own. “I have no more interest in marriage than you do. Hence a murderess is the perfect woman for me—I can dally with her at my leisure, destroy her mind and her reputation, and then turn her to the wolves when I am done. You will recall that a charge of murder is one of the honorable and legitimate reasons for ending a betrothal.” Ian smiled smugly to himself as he waited for Bianca’s next sally. But it did not come. Instead she sighed deeply and her shoulders began to sag. Oh no, he thought to himself, she is going to cry. Ian preferred anything to a crying woman, and was about to say so when Bianca opened her mouth.

“If I were you, my lord,” she said, exhaustion shading every word, “I would try using kindness rather than cruelty on me in your interrogations. It is what I neither expect nor am accustomed to these many days, and it would surely be more effective to catch me off my guard. You might begin by telling me I don’t have to sleep in there,” she gestured wearily toward her laboratory, “with that corpse. Anywhere else, and I promise not to complain when you lock me in.”

Ian warred within himself. Part of him was seized by a sudden urge to cross the rug that separated them and sweep Bianca back into his arms. The other part wanted to turn quickly around and flee from her. Incapable of moving, he stood riveted to the floor, staring at her. She stared back at him, looking deep into his eyes, searching. They faced each other like two statues, until a clock on the floor below began to strike the hour. Soon another in a different part of the palazzo began and before long there were ten, each making a different sound but each harmonizing with the others perfectly. Bianca studied Ian as he listened to the chiming of clocks, struck by his ethereal beauty. She smiled at him and, more remarkable than anything else that had happened to her in the previous three days, he smiled back at her.

“Beautiful,” she whispered in awe.

“Yes they are, aren’t they?” Ian sighed with contentment. “My cousin Miles makes them. He is the finest clockmaker in Italy, I would bet on it, but he only makes them for me.”

She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should tell him that it was his smile and not his clocks that made her heart beat so quickly. “You are very lucky. I should like to meet him.”

Ian moved away from her, suddenly acutely conscious of their dangerous proximity. “Perhaps you will, but certainly not until after we have spoken further about the murder.” His voice had regained its cold, formal edge. As he spoke, he closed the door on the corpse and locked it. He felt her eyes on his face, inquiring, scrutinizing, and led her quickly into the darker part of the corridor. Approaching the stairs down to the main living quarters, he saw that it would be more unnerving than he had anticipated to have this strange Salva woman under his roof. He would have to be as reserved as possible at all times. Reserved and cold. He would not let her manipulate him.

“Until you have told me what I want to know, you will see no one.” He continued speaking as they walked. “Except your chaperons, of course. You may have as much commerce with them as you like, but be warned that they report directly to me.”

“I can scarcely wait to meet these ogres. I suppose you will also have me sleeping in a dungeon?” Confused by Ian’s abrupt change in behavior, Bianca tried to match his chilly formality.

“Of course. Where else would a murderer sleep?” Bianca thought she saw the corner of his mouth twitch again in that dangerous way and decided to stay quiet. They wound down a second staircase and through at least two ballrooms in silence before they stopped at a deep blue door. “This is the suite Francesco and Roberto instructed me to give you. It is not the richest one, but they selected it.”

“Francesco and Roberto?” She looked the question at him.

“The ogres—your chaperons, my uncles. They have their apartments over there.” Ian gestured across the vast central hall toward a set of doors along the other wall. He saw her puzzled expression and imagined what she must be thinking: two chaperons instead of one was unusual; that they were two men made it almost unseemly. He was about to explain how he had chosen them, but he remembered his earlier resolve.

“I couldn’t ask one of my elderly aunts to share a house with a murderess, could I? Nor would I want some proper
gentildonna
with refined sensibilities interfering in my interrogations. No, one woman under my roof is enough.” He spoke the last words with a shudder of distaste.

Bianca thought quietly for a moment. “Rather than protecting me from you, it seems they will be protecting you from me.”

“You are, after all, the dangerous one, aren’t you?” As he spoke the words aloud, a voice inside Ian’s head whispered,
You have no idea how true that is
.

He scowled irritably and threw open the door of Bianca’s dungeon. Finding herself not only not in a dungeon but instead on the threshold of the most magnificent apartment she had ever beheld, Bianca could not contain an exclamation of delight. The walls of the first room were frescoed with women of every age and every country, each in their native costume. There were female warriors in metal armor and Roman women in long gowns, and women naked but for the brightly colored designs painted on their bodies. With difficulty Ian ushered her from the sitting room into the main room of the suite. Surrounded by frescoes depicting ancient goddesses was a large bed hung with deep blue velvet. Bianca was so tired and overwhelmed by the beauty not only of the paintings and furnishings but also of the man beside her that she neglected to consider the impropriety of standing in a bedroom with him. She touched Ian’s arm gently and whispered, “This is the most extraordinary room I have ever seen.” She turned her gaze from the paintings to the man and, seized with a most indecorous urge, kissed him on the cheek.

Ian’s mind reeled between past and present. A woman in his house. A kiss. This room. As Ian looked down at her, Bianca saw his eyes darken into a cold slate gray. She shrank away from him, conscious of having somehow offended.

“That was very improper, Signorina Salva. See that it never happens again.” He turned on his heel and moved toward the door.

“It’s a very bad habit, you know,” Bianca said quietly.

Ian stopped abruptly and turned to face her from the safety of the threshold. “What did you say?”

“Running away like that. Making a grandiose pronouncement and then leaving the room without hearing what anyone else has to say. It’s almost cowardly.”

Bianca felt a surge of rage fill the room. Ian looked at her, anger legible in every contour of his face. When he spoke his voice was dangerously low and cold.

“If I were you, signorina, I would save my wit for tomorrow. You will need every particle of it to keep me from turning you in as a murderess.”