Valour and Vanity (38 page)

The nuns gasped, and Jane popped her vision back from the ether. Vincent had disappeared.

A girl shrieked, voice echoing from nowhere. In the next moment, her husband reemerged from the
Sphère
with Lucia held under his good arm. She kicked and struggled in his grasp. His face was grave. “You were right, Muse.”

Sister Maria Agnes dropped her bowl of polenta. “Lucia?”

“Let go! He’s hurting me!” She thrashed, catching Vincent in the shin with her heel.

He grunted and hauled her over to the nuns. “Would someone mind…?”

Sister Aquinata stood and walked over, her face going dark with anger. She took both of the girl’s wrists in one of her large baker’s hands and pulled her out of Vincent’s grasp. “I am going to owe the Abbess penance for this, I suspect, but—does anyone have some rope?”

“Always.” Signor Zancani set his steak down, revealing a very black eye, and pulled a bundle of thick twine out of his pocket.

One of the other sisters took the twine and helped bind Lucia’s wrists and ankles. The girl fought them until Sister Aquinata shook her and said, “You do
not
want me to spank you.”

The Abbess looked ill. “I would ask if you were certain, but it seems clear that it is true.”

“We were not certain.” Jane had wanted to be wrong, but as she and Vincent had lain awake each night, talking through their plans, it kept bothering her brain that Gallo had known which of the swindlers Vincent had seen. Nothing in their conversation with him had indicated which one it had been, and given that all four of the men were on Murano at the time, it could have been any of them.

“The only way for Gallo to have known which of the swindlers Vincent had seen was for someone to have run there from the convent to tell him. We had worried that it was Sister Maria Agnes.”

“Because I am foreign…” The colour of her skin was left unspoken, but she tucked her hands into her sleeves.

Jane refuted that firmly. “Because you were there when Vincent told me. But Lucia was there as well.”

Jane stood and walked over to the girl.

If Jane ignored the pigtails and the girlish clothing, Lucia’s face was older than she first appeared. “You were on the ship, were you not? As a passenger?”

The young woman spat at her. The globule landed harmlessly on the floor between them. Jane shook her head and wove a bubble of silence around the girl, inverting it so that Lucia could not hear them, but they could hear her. Then Jane passed another bubble around her so that she sat in darkness. It was, perhaps, cruel to deprive her of her senses, but Jane was not inclined to be generous in that moment. There were yet things to discuss and she did not want to chance the girl carrying any further tales.

The nuns sat, stunned into silence. Jane turned back to the Abbess and spread her hands. “I am sorry. I thought that it was better to not include you in the full plan than to ask you to lie to her on our behalf.”

“I see.” The Abbess removed her spectacles and polished them on her black scapular. “If you were one of my charges, I would ask you to do some Hail Marys.”

“I would be happy to do whatever you think fit.” In previous years, Jane could not have imagined being so willing to participate in Catholic rites, but nothing seemed more appropriate to her now.

“And the rest of the plan? There were no troubles?” Signor Zancani put the steak back over his eye. “With obvious exceptions, of course.”

Vincent nodded, rubbing the back of his head. “Reasonably so. But you have not told us about what happened to you.”

“Yes. Why did you return with Coppa?” Jane asked.

“I was late to meet him and could not convince him to come into the ‘office,’ so I did my best to slow our return.”

“Come now, man. You cannot tease us like that.” Lord Byron pulled the blankets a little tighter. “What delayed you in the first place?”

The puppet player’s eyes twinkled. “The thing I least expected. An admirer stopped me. Loved puppets. Wanted to know when my next show was.”

“Could you not put him off?” Lord Byron asked.

“He was six. No. I could not.”

“No harm was done.” Vincent came to Jane and took her hand. “We accomplished everything we needed to.”

Sister Maria Agnes sighed. “I am only sorry that you had to destroy Sir David’s journal. Though that was
very
dramatic and exciting, and I suppose completely necessary.”

With a smile, Jane undid the tie at the neck of her habit and reached into her bodice. From within her stays, she extracted Vincent’s real journal. “It was a fake. The second fake, truly.” Seeing the look of confusion in the nuns’ faces, Jane continued. “Sister Franceschina’s work was excellent, but we were afraid it would not be convincing. In case it was not, we had the journal she had made for our practise sessions.”

“The one you dropped getting into the gondola?” Lord Byron asked.

“Exactly so. We had already doused it in water in advance, so I needed Spada to
see
it go into the water so that the damage was explicable, and so that he would stop chasing me. I tried to drop it at the palazzo and missed the water. The bridge was to be a last resort.”

“It worked beautifully,” Lord Byron said. “I could see it from where I was. It truly looked as though you had fallen into the water, even though I knew about
that
part of the plan.”

A thought occurred to Jane. “What happened to Denaro? I saw you engage with him.”

“A couple of
polizia
heard the shots being fired, saw the collision, and arrested him.” The poet grinned. “I pointed out that he had also assailed a nun, which did not seem to please them. Which reminds me that we no longer have any reason to avoid taking care of your accounts.”

Vincent compressed his lips and winked at Jane. She smiled, slowly. “Thank you. But it turns out that we no longer require assistance in that regard.”

*   *   *

Jane and Vincent left
the nuns to deal with Lucia, trusting their instincts on what to do with the young woman more than those of Murano’s civil authorities. Lord Byron headed back to his apartments, where he planned to give notice and move to different lodgings. He invited them to come stay with him when they were finished with their obligations in Murano.

They went to the closet room across from the palazzo where they had spent the past week watching the swindlers. Signor Zancani had followed them as far as his puppet booth, which was still set up in the gallery facing the palazzo. He said his good nights there and began to take the booth down. It was too cold in the season to expect much traffic, and he had been invited to winter with Lord Byron in Venice.

For what Jane hoped would be the last time, they climbed the stairs to the small room and settled down to watch the palazzo. The real General Germain should be arriving there shortly to meet Spada. If Lord Byron was correct in his estimation of the French officer’s state after the distraction arranged by the poet, he would have quite the bad head from an excess of wine. Vincent pulled up a chair in front of the window and held out his arm to invite Jane to sit on his lap.

“I will not hurt you?”

“Not so long as you stay on my right side.”

She settled gingerly nevertheless, but took great comfort from the warm solidity of his form. “I am glad that I did not know the wound was real, or I should never have been able to leave the room.”

“Mm.” Vincent leaned his head against hers and inhaled deeply. “Have you thought about what we are going to tell your parents?”

Jane shuddered. “I am half hoping that we can beat my letter to Vienna, but I know that is unlikely.”

“I will join you in hoping that—there he is.” Vincent straightened in his chair.

Jane turned to the window and felt the absence of his body against hers as a line of cool down her side. In some ways, it was like watching Vincent walk into the palazzo again, except that this officer travelled with a small complement of soldiers. His aide knocked on the door.

After a few minutes, he knocked again, pounding so hard that they could hear it across the street even without glamour. The door cracked open, but not so far that they could see who answered the door. The Frenchman gesticulated with some passion. The door began to close, but the aide shoved his booted foot in it, and the officers forced their way inside.

Vincent set Jane gently to the side and stood. He leaned against the window, reaching for the
bouclé torsadée.

She put her hand on his arm. “Shall I?”

“We can have this argument every day, Muse, but I would rather not.” The words were irritable, but not his tone, which was buoyed by a laugh that seemed aimed at himself more than her. “Shall we trade off, so neither is fatigued?”

“What? Share a burden?” She moved in front of him. Given their comparative heights, that worked best for an operating position in their collaborations.

“Shocking.” He murmured and slid his arms around her so that they could both hold the same line. Together they began to feed the line, carrying sound from the palazzo.

Staccato footsteps marched into the parlour. Cloth rustled as someone stood suddenly.

“General Germain, we did not look for you to arrive this evening,” Spada said. “May I offer you something to drink.”

“Yes, thank you.” The French officer sat heavily in a chair. “I was delayed, for which I apologize.”

“It is no trouble at all.” Limping footsteps, interwoven with the sound of a cane. “I only regret that we may have to delay our exhibition.”

“Is that so?” Cloth rustled again, and the officer humphed. “Why is that?”

“We keep the
Verres
in our strong room, but our glamourist is ill, and I cannot open it without him.” Glass clinked and a liquid burbled into a glass.

“I find that disappointing.”

“As well you should.” Spada limped across the room. “I also find it disappointing, but I hope that tomorrow he will be improved.”

“What is the matter, if I might inquire? Ah—thank you.” Glasses clinked again. “To your health.”

“He hit his head and is suffering from the effects of a concussion.”

Vincent snorted. Jane could almost feel his smile through her back, or perhaps that was her own clandestine glee at the justness of Bastone’s injury.

“I am sorry to hear that.” He set the glass down on the wooden side table. “And the papers we gave you? What did you find in those?”

“It is very complicated, of course, but they have been useful.”

“Messieurs, vous commencez à chercher!”

The men in the room began to move about. Wood slid upon wood as drawers opened and closed. Cabinets clicked open, then shut.

“Is there something I can help your officers find?” Spada’s voice had a slight strained edge.

“Tell me more about the
Verres
. How many do you have?”

“Seven. But not all of them work.”

Papers rustled. Wood scraped across stone as something heavy was moved. Then footsteps, quick against the marble floor. Paper hushed as a page was unfolded. The French officer growled and tapped the page. “Have you an explanation for this, Signor?”

Spada limped closer. Paper rattled as if his hand shook. “This is not mine.”

“It is addressed to you, and seems to be a response to a letter offering to sell the
Verres
to Lombardy-Venetia.”

“And yet I have never seen it.”

“Have you seen
this
?” Another page brushed against cloth, then unfolded. “No, no … I do not want to chance it becoming damaged. This is your handwriting, is it not?”

“No.”

“Odd. The hand looks like the other letters you wrote to me. I thought the part in which you said—where is it? Ah, here—‘The
Verres
do not work. Our glamourist believes that the Vincents’ theory is erroneous on several points, but Bastone has a plan to trick the fat old Frenchman into thinking that they do’ was particularly interesting.” The paper was folded and put away. “It is very unfortunate that your glamourist is unwell. What a coincidence with our arrival, no? And what about our deposit? The gold we gave you to do this work?”

Spada gave a strangled sigh. “The Vincents. They broke in today and—”

“A glamourist and his wife? Not even a true military glamourist, no matter what tricks he might have, but an artist. Please. I find it far easier to believe that a swindler who was hired to learn a certain technique may have decided that it was easier to defraud his employer.”

“I can promise you, nothing was easy about this job.”

Other footsteps interrupted him. The French officer turned through pages in a book and grunted. “The pages of Vincent’s journal that you reference in your letter … I find it curious that you knew that a
Verre Obscurcie
was impossible to make and yet you continued to request funds.” He then spoke in French too rapid for Jane to follow, but it resulted in a flurry of movement in the parlour. For a moment, Spada appeared in the window, backing away. The sounds of a tussle followed, with an impact of flesh and a short grunt.

The men marched out of the parlour, leaving nothing but silence in their wake.

Jane and Vincent stopped feeding the line as though they were one person. Vincent folded his hands around Jane’s and wrapped her in an embrace. “Does that sound as though Germain now believes that the
Verres
do not work?”

“I hope so.” She sighed, feeling the last of her tension leave her body. “Those letters appeared to be persuasive.”

Vincent kissed her on the cheek. “Spada should never have left me alone in the palazzo.”

Jane turned her head to the side to kiss her husband. In so doing, she almost missed the front door of the palazzo opening.

Spada was marched out, his hands bound behind him. The French soldiers had Coppa and Bastone bound as well, though it looked as if Bastone was having trouble standing. The French officer strode down the street in front of them, with the fake journal of Vincent’s tucked under his arm.

It was a beautiful sight. She sighed back against Vincent, revelling in the beat of his heart. “Do you feel uneasy about keeping his money?”