by C. E. Murphy
“Canopies gather dust, and the only thing more foolish than a naked man is a naked man sneezing his skull off.”
“Oh,” Belinda said, drawn into surprise, “no. A naked man in naught but stockings is worse yet.”
The woman’s laughter rang out once more, and she put a hand out. “Ana. You’re not one of the usual bunch.”
“Rosa,” Belinda said. Ana’s grasp was as solid as a man’s, slender bones in her hand full of strength and conviction. “And no, I’m not.”
“Would you like to be?”
Belinda looked down at the patient boy in the gondola, waiting for her, and thought of the contact somewhere farther down the canal who expected her. “Yes,” she said. If only for a little while.
“It is not among my assets,” Belinda insisted over a cup—another cup, but she had lost count of how many anothers she’d had—of small beer. Ana waggled her head and her finger in tandem, dismissing Belinda’s protest as the women gathered around their elbows giggled and prodded at one another. Sunset had long since come and gone. Fish pasties baked in a good light dough had been ordered, demolished, ordered anew, and demolished again. The group of boisterous women had altered somewhat over the hours, but its core, made up of Belinda and a now entirely drunken Ana, remained the same.
“Your assets are quite clear. That—” Ana was interrupted by the vocal rise and fall around her, as happily drunken women cried “Oooh!” and pushed Belinda to her feet, examining her assets. Belinda waved her beer over their heads, shaking her hips in a fruitless attempt to loosen their hands. “Lovely,” an outrageously coifed redhead proclaimed, and another girl sniffed. “Her tits are too small.”
“We haven’t all got docks big enough to tie a gondola to, Bernice.” Ana mocked tossing a rope toward the girl, who sniffed again and subsided as Ana turned back to Belinda with a sniff of her own. “She’s only jealous of your throat. Long and lovely, that. Aristocratic, or meant for hanging.”
“Thank you,” Belinda said drily. “Dangerous thoughts, Lady Ana.” More dangerous than the courtesan could know, and to be headed off as readily as possible. Belinda edged back toward her seat, trying to reclaim it.
“Not a bit of that.” The woman seated behind her lifted her feet to plant them against Belinda’s bottom and keep her away from the chair. “You owe us a song.”
“My voice,” Belinda protested again, “is not chief among my assets.” The woman behind her straightened her legs, sending Belinda stumbling up onto her toes. Ana stood up and grabbed her wrist, climbing onto the table and tugging Belinda with her.
“That’s not the point.” She clutched Belinda’s waist as they both swayed dangerously on the tabletop. Belinda leaned on Ana and squinted at her own feet, alarmingly distant.
“Was the table this crooked before?” she asked in a low voice. Ana snorted laughter.
“You haven’t spilled a beer tonight, have you? There’s a terrible puddle at the end of the table. A drunk man built these.” She nodded, exaggerated, and slung an arm out, lifting her voice into a bellow. “Hey! You there! Me and Rosie, we’re going to sing you a song!”
Three-quarters of the bar’s patrons turned expectantly. Belinda elbowed Ana’s ribs. “Hold your tongue! I told you, I can’t sing!”
“So what’ll it be then? Do you know ‘Era Nato Poveretto’?”
“God,” Belinda said, “barely. Born poor?” she brazened, then caught her breath, searching for another song. “‘C’è La Luna.’ Will it do?”
“Well enough,” Ana said with a firm nod.
Belinda drew in a deep breath, gave Ana one dismayed look, and began to sing.
“My God,” Ana gasped at the break between verses, “you’d best be able to fuck like a dream, with a voice like that.”
“I told you,” Belinda snapped. Ana snagged her arm through Belinda’s as they began the second verse, starting a jig that made Belinda’s voice even hoarser with breathlessness. In counterpoint, Ana’s voice rose and strengthened, until she was carrying the whole melody and Belinda only croaked out a word or two when she caught her breath. The crowd’s cries blurred from jeers into shouts of approval.
A hand clasped around her ankle, making her stumble. She looked down to find a cheerily drunken man beaming toothily up at her. “Give us another one, bonnie Rosie,” he begged. “Your voice makes my wife’s sound like a golden harp, and God knows I need something to take away the edge!”
Belinda shook him off with a kick that missed clipping his temple by a scant inch or two. Then she found laughter bubbling up inside her chest, pressing against her breastbone, and after a moment she let it free. Her singing voice might shame a crowing cock, but her laugh was bright and warm.
“Oh, so that’s how you do it,” Ana said with a knowledgeable and approving nod. Belinda leered at her, flung her own head back, and began to sing the raunchiest song she knew.
Howls of approving laughter roared up to the rafters, while stomping feet shook the floor as the pub patrons kept time. She couldn’t, perhaps, sing, but she could keep a beat, and now she was caught up by it, consequences be damned. As if sensing her abandonment, even the men who had shouted her down earlier courted her for more now. Torches twitched with exuberance, hopping in their nests and sending puffs of black smoke up to the ceiling. Ana grabbed her arm again and Belinda swung her around the table, slipping in spilled beer. The aroma splashed upward, hops mixing with wood smoke in a rich thick scent that made one part of her mind sleepy even as she reveled in the raw country life of it. Her circumstances allowed her few opportunities for unconstrained play, and her temperament fewer yet. It was a chance, rare in a lifetime of duty, to forget who and what she was, and why. Most of all, why. Belinda drank it in, letting the raucous music she made settle all the way down to her bones, where it might leave an impression. A memory for another time, when she would not be able to allow herself the freedom she had tonight.
Stolen freedom. The thought flickered through her mind and she banished it again. The coin from the bridge was a common signal from her father’s men. That it had this time been happenstance leading to rough decadence was…not her fault would be too strong. Belinda had chosen her path for tonight, chosen to deliberately misinterpret and forget. Her voice broke on a high note and she laughed with everyone else, dropping into a deeper register to try the remainder of the verse.
Her corsets pressed into her ribs too tightly in the thick air; her throat felt constricted, though her gown was fashioned with neither collar nor hat-ribbon wrapped around her neck. Her hair had been up earlier in the day. Now it tumbled around her shoulders and down her back, sticking with sweat. If she took too shallow a breath she could smell herself, and so she breathed more deeply, drowning out her own sharpness with the woody scent of spilled beer. The dress would be forever in the cleaning, peacock blue fabric stained not just with sweat but with beer and the invading scent of the wood smoke. Belinda wondered if she could procure a sausage, and spill its grease on herself, just to irretrievably mar the gown.
Calling out, midsong, for a sausage, was an error in judgment. More than one man leapt to his feet, scrambling to undo his trousers, while others cupped their codpieces and swore it was all real. Ana laughed so hard she wept, and Belinda’s dance ended as she leaned on the courtesan, gasping back laughter herself.
In the stillness brought upon by laughter, emotion swept through Belinda like fire. Not her own: that she recognized, even as rare as tonight’s outburst was. No. It came from somewhere else—everywhere else, as burning and uncomfortable as the sickness she’d felt while standing in the dawn watching Dmitri ride away. It ate at her, feeling larger than she was, reaching inside her so it could claw its way out.
From Ana, her nose all but buried in Belinda’s bosom as she tried to keep her feet while she laughed. Beneath the laughter there were tears, forced back by the night’s gaiety. They were buried deep within her, tearing her soul apart. It was only through outrageousness that the dark-haire
d courtesan was able to keep them at bay.
From the man who’d grabbed her ankle, a fierce and abiding lust, not for the women dancing above him, but for the harpy-voiced wife he’d left at home. He would go back to her soon, trusting she’d be as happy to make a nest for his prick as he was to find one.
From the courtesans surrounding the table upon which Belinda and Ana danced came a pragmatic and determined approach to beauty, youth, and brains. As a unit, they stood together rather than apart simply because there were so few of them, and they needed what sisterhood they could get. Jealousies, petty and profound, were put aside for the few hours of shared companionship that had no guinea price on it.
And from the pub at large: desire and laughter, pleasure and pain. It rolled over Belinda in waves, tickling her in secret places, and discomfort broke as if rising emotion found welcome in the most private parts of her being. She gasped with it, knotting one hand in Ana’s hair. Ana, still mirthful, lifted her head: she knew that tightness in Belinda’s grasp as well as Belinda herself did, a precursor to violence and passion. They met gazes, both aware of their bodies crushed together, both aware of the hard straight lines of corsets that pressed against curves better explored in a more secluded room. Ana’s lips parted and she wet them. Belinda felt her own mouth curve in an avaricious grin. Like a shock wave, those closest to them felt it, the sudden pound of desire that had, for one rare and sweet moment, nothing to do with commerce.
Then rage crashed through Belinda’s belly, smashing need before its strength. She fell back; she saw Ana’s eyes shutter, disappointment hidden away inside an instant. She wanted to speak, to explain, but the fury that beat its way through her only brought a film of blood to her lip as she bit into it. She fell back another step, staggering under the onslaught of unfamiliar anger, and caught the edge of the table with her heel. Her arms pinwheeled as she toppled, knowing she couldn’t catch herself, hoping her new acquaintances might. Knowing, too, that they would not: she had slighted one of theirs, pink-cheeked Ana who had already gone back to dancing as if nothing had passed between her and Belinda.
Strong hands, big hands, clasped her around the waist, and the tang of fury ballooned in her so strongly that blackness swept up through her vision, and silence fell.
She did not want to waken.
She did not want to waken for a host of reasons, the first and least comfortable being that someone was carrying her, rudely, over his shoulder. Her nose smacked against the small of his back and she forced herself to let her arms dangle, instead of searching for the small dagger nested beneath her corset. Even if she could snatch it before she was noticed—unlikely—there was the second reason not to. The second reason she didn’t want to awaken: she knew who carried her, and his anger would be great.
The third reason she would have preferred the oblivion of unconsciousness was that dangling like this, the uncounted number of beers she’d partaken of were eager to spill on the cobblestones. Belinda coughed and choked, then twisted as she heaved, trying to get away, less for worry of the man’s clothes than to alleviate her own discomfort. He swore and dumped her on her hands and knees, holding on by her waist, while she cramped and vomited more liquid than she thought she’d drunk. Bright orange bits of carrot and chunks of half-digested meat mixed in with the runny bile. Belinda groaned, pushing up to her knees and wiping a hand across her mouth. Her captor swore again and grabbed her wrist, hauling her to her feet. She’d barely caught her balance before he flung a short door open and shoved her through it, in front of him. She tripped, stumbling to catch herself, and he caught her upper arm, hauling her around and throwing her against the wall. Belinda hit hard enough to lose her breath, and stood with her head turned, eyes downcast as she panted for air.
“Are you mad? Are you eager for the ruin of us all? I’ve been waiting since noon, girl!”
“Father,” Belinda said in a low voice. She didn’t want to look at him yet, to see the dark eyebrows beetled down in anger. She didn’t want the moment of surprise she always felt when she saw how well the years had treated him: she could imagine, without looking, the well-trimmed dark hair with no more grey at the temples than he had borne when she was a child. The dark eyes that would now be clouded with fury, with a crow’s nest of wrinkles around them that seemed to have more to do with eternity than age. If he held as well for another few years as he had the last ten, Belinda would appear to be his sister, not his daughter at all. She had faith that he would, for all that he was already old, nearly forty-five. His still-youthful appearance helped keep him dear to Lorraine, who wore more cosmetics now than she had in earlier years, re-creating the blush of youth. If her darling Robert aged so little, certainly she, too, must be clinging to a more tender age than a loyal populace could believe.
“Have you no answer? Look at me, girl!”
Belinda lifted her chin and her gaze, meeting Robert’s eyes. “How did you find me?” she wondered, feeling as though the question came from a distant place inside her. Robert snorted and caught her arm again, pushing her up the stone steps that began barely a yard inside the door.
“The gondola boy, not that I needed him.”
Damn! The force of the curse startled Belinda, making her clench her hands in her skirts. She ought to have paid the child off, sent him on his way instead of telling him to linger an hour and wait on her return. “How long did he wait before going to you?”
“Until the dinner bells rang,” Robert spat. Belinda allowed herself a faintly curved smile, well-hidden from the man who followed her up the stairs. At least the boy had allowed her a few hours of freedom, instead of leaving the moment her back was turned. By dinner she and Ana were well away from the canal where Belinda had left the boy, stretching Robert’s search out that much longer. She should have expected that the child would find the man who’d paid him, but hope and naïveté had won out. It had been a badly played hand.
“Someone threw a coin.” Belinda offered the words as explanation, not excuse. There was no point in making excuses, not with Robert. Another man might be seduced out of his anger, but her father held as stubbornly to outrage as another man might to money. “I thought it was my sign, and only too late realised I was mistaken.” Robert’s hand moved past her head, pushing open a door at the head of the stairs. Fire’s heat swept over Belinda. She lifted a hand against it, protecting her face as she stepped into the room.
It was well-appointed, if not extravagant. A fire burned higher than necessary for a summer night, throwing warm and wavering shadows about the room. It brought out the gold in a brocaded armchair a few feet from it; the rug that lay between chair and fire had burns from embers popping free and sizzling there. A footstool to match the chair sat opposite it. Belinda glanced around for another chair and found one lacking: it would be she who sat on the footstool, and Robert in the fine upholstered chair. Her mouth twisted a little, memories of childhood spoiling coming back to her, and she sighed as she gathered her skirts and went to the footstool.
She passed the bed, the only other piece of furniture worth noting in the room. It was a renter’s room, without a kitchen or visiting area. Windows looked over a canal, but nearly every window in Aria Magli did; a room without a canal view could be far more dear than those with. The surfeit of noise from traffic that never ceased, day or night, was sometimes worth the cost. Belinda smoothed her skirts over her thighs as she sat, watching Robert move through the fire-cast shadows.
There was something in warm orange light that brought depth out in his handsome, craggy features. All the things she had remembered before looking at him were still true: he was aged enough to be sober and trustworthy, young enough to be playful and charming, but in firelight he looked dangerous as well. And he was—more dangerous than most anticipated. Lorraine’s court granted him a measure of power, because he was beloved to the queen, but few of them regarded him as personally ambitious or worthy of note. Only his oft-discussed romantic liaison with Lorraine made him interesting.
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Belinda knew better. Her father was Lorraine’s secret spymaster, and had been for as long as she herself had lived, maybe longer. Cortes, a showier man, thin and clipped and rude, was Robert’s disguise: he held the title Controller of Intelligence, and had a network that extended from nobles to playwrights and into the common populace. Behind Cortes’s shadow, Robert worked, answering threats to Her Majesty in a brutal, efficient manner that could never be traced back to the queen or even her notorious spymaster. And of those secret spies, Belinda was the best-hidden of all.
“You know Sandalia,” Robert said abruptly, coming out of shadow to take his seat by the fire. Belinda lifted her eyebrows a telling fraction, mildly offended by the question even though she understood it as rhetoric.
“Rodrigo’s sister, who sits as regent in Gallin,” she answered, keeping her tone patient. This, too, harkened to childhood ritual, Robert testing and quizzing her on whatever sprang to his mind. Things she ought to have studied, and usually had. Belinda had not been caught out by his unexpected questions since her fifteenth birthday, and had no intention of letting Robert take the upper hand in their little game now. She went on, voice lilting as if she lectured a child.
“Wed and widowed twice before she was eighteen, Sandalia and her son, Javier, stand heir to three thrones: Lanyarch, left to her by Charles, who, by the by, would have been Lorraine’s heir should he have lived and should she never marry. Then there’s Gallin’s throne by way of her second husband, and finally Essandia’s, should her brother, Rodrigo, produce no heir.” Javier would have to be a strong leader indeed, when Rodrigo passed on, to hold the thrones of Essandia and Gallin both, much less add Lanyarch to the mix. If he managed, it would be through the strength of those religious ties, and a fair amount of luck besides. Luck arranged, perhaps, by Sandalia de Costa. “I do not,” Belinda added, “know her personally.”