The Rossetti Letter (v5)

by Phillips, Christi

  “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.”

  The Devil

  3 March 1618

  ALESSANDRA 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 capab
le 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 smal
l 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.

  She dusted the paper and sealed it, then stood to ring for the servant. As she crossed the room, she realized that she was weak from exhaustion. How long had it been since she’d slept? As soon as the valet had carried off her missive, she sank down on the bed and closed her eyes, but the visions that arose in her mind kept her awake. The leering grimace of the bocca di leone, the nightmarish sight of La Celestia’s brutalized body, the marquis as she’d last seen him: a sleeping giant who would rise and seek his revenge. Would she be safe from him now? Would Antonio’s ruse work, or was it only a matter of hours before Bedmar found her?

  Her thoughts kept turning back to Antonio, to his strange and indifferent behavior, the contradictory nature of his actions. He’d saved her life—for the moment, at least—yet seemed to resent doing so. She thought of his stiff-necked manner earlier and felt that unfamiliar ache inside her breast again.

  A persistent knock woke her from troubled dreams. Alessandra cracked the door open. In the hallway, a servant girl bobbed her head and curtsied. “You have a visitor, miss.”

  Antonio’s pale countenance appeared in the shadows behind her. Alessandra opened the door wider to let him in. “You seem surprised to see me,” he said as he stepped into the room.

  She shut the door behind him, pausing before facing him, afraid that her emotion was too evident in her eyes. She had longed to see him again, so much so that she hadn’t allowed herself to hope. But now that he was here, she felt something other than the happiness she had expected, something more complicated and less clear. “I thought you’d be away as soon as your unpleasant work was done,” she said.