The Stargazer: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book One

by Michele Jaffe

  “Nel mezzo del camin della nostra vita…” Before he reached the end of the first line, he heard Valdo shouting.

  “I hear you. I see you. Perfectly, clearly. This is amazing.”

  Ian concurred when he had his turn at the tube. He studied the ingenious system, making mental notes so he could duplicate it at home.

  “What I don’t understand is how you knew about it. You know, I spent all my free time here and never had any suspicion of such a thing.” Valdo was speaking from the parlor to Ian in the bedroom.

  “It is long story, and I would rather not explain it until I have everything figured out.”

  The large man was now too in awe of Ian’s cognitive powers to press him, willingly abiding by the adage that geniuses must be given space to work. Though he did not understand what it had to do with restoring his Isa to him, Valdo was sure that the listening tube was an important clue. He was still congratulating the count on the find when the two men left together a little later. He had given up on Isabella for the night, but his adventure with Ian had left him slightly less dejected than usual.

  Ian declined Valdo’s offer to ferry him home, hoping the slight drizzle and the walk would ease the pain in his back and help clear his head. The existence of the listening tube validated, at least partially, Bianca’s theory about the murder. That was hardly surprising if she herself was the murderer, though it was not clear why she would willingly spell out her motive. Perhaps she figured that if she suggested it, Ian would never believe her, since he always assumed she was lying. That had to be it, she was counting on him taking it as a lie. Obviously Enzo had to die because he could have confirmed it as true.

  And yet he could not rid himself of a nagging feeling of doubt. Unwilling though he was to admit it, part of him, a large part, could still not believe Bianca capable of such horrible deeds. He cursed himself again, this time for his softness, for being taken in by her feminine wiles, for letting his heart beat faster when she spoke his name, and even faster when she said…when she said she loved him. Even if it was not part of a plot to weaken him, he knew that words said in the heat of passion carried little weight. So he was a fool to be thinking about it, about her, at all. Reason told him it was more likely now than ever that she was a cunning murderer. She had even admitted today, before witnesses, that she wanted to kill him.

  Come now, the voice in his head said, she did not really mean it and she was roundly provoked. Ian shook his head like a lion shooing off a bothersome fly, trying to dislodge the annoying voice that was growing increasingly familiar. He noted for the first time that this new voice seemed to have replaced Mora’s abusive critiques, and he wondered if he was not happier, or at least less confused, before the switch. Mora had never instructed him to trust a murderer. Only maybe a murderer, the voice said. Ian growled at it.

  By the time he got home, the voice had convinced him that he owed Bianca an apology. Not for his repeated accusations of murder, those would stand, but for some of his more personal attacks. His sense of honor told him he had been needlessly provocative to her. Besides, it would be easier for her to reveal herself to him if they were on speaking terms. Most minor of all was his ongoing curiosity about whether her attractions had yet abated. That day in the library he had not felt anything in her presence, which he took as an auspicious development.

  To lose no time in commencing his test, or his apology, Ian went directly to Bianca’s room. He anticipated seeing her there as she had been the night before, peacefully stretched out and inviting. He would apologize quickly, she would accept, then he would climb into bed for the test. He sighed a manly sigh, admitting that he would have to force himself to perform if he wanted to regain her trust, and reminded himself of his patriotic duties.

  But his efforts were wasted, because Bianca was not there. Nor was she in the adjacent sitting room. Nor the library. Nor even the dining room, small dining room, blue reception room, green reception room, gold reception room, wood reception room, meeting room, sewing room, Ian’s room, Roberto and Francesco’s rooms, Crispin’s rooms, any of the ballrooms, servants’ rooms, storage rooms, or kitchens. Ian was desperate, terrified that she had left him. Or, rather, escaped. If she was going to escape, he surmised, she would do it by boat because it would be too easy to trace her traversing the deserted streets of Venice on foot. Before sounding a general alarm or rousing the household, he counted the gondolas. They were all there.

  Finding her was suddenly the most important thing, indeed the only thing, that mattered. He took the stairs four at a time and then thundered down the hall toward her laboratory. Ian flung the door open with so much force that he ripped it off its hinges. He would gladly have had a hundred hinges replaced for the sight that greeted him when he stepped into the room.

  She was there on a stool before the gaping space that had once been a window. She had taken one of the large woolen rugs that covered the floor and draped it around herself for warmth. When Ian burst in, she turned, though not with surprise, since nothing could surprise her anymore.

  The rain had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear. In the silvery moonlight her face looked ethereal, like that of a mountain nymph or a particularly sensual Madonna. Ian tried to suppress these romantic thoughts by sternly reminding himself of his two-pronged mission, and approached her.

  Bianca had turned back to her contemplation of the sky. She had nothing to say to Ian, or nothing she should say. Seated on that stool for nearly two hours, she had been trying to sort through the complicated emotions that were coursing through her. She had begun by trying to focus on her ineffectual investigation, running her mind over everything she knew, hoping for a crack, but her brain had other plans and had returned again and again to Ian.

  “I came to apologize.” His voice at her ear broke through her thoughts, and Bianca found that she did still possess the capacity to be surprised. “I said some things today that were not strictly necessary.”

  Bianca did not want to face him because she did not want him to see the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. “Thank you, my lord.” Her voice sounded small, then got stronger as her mouth asked of its own accord, “Why did you say them, then?”

  Ian, shook his head and responded to her profile. “I don’t know. When I am with you, sometimes, I find I get,” he cleared his throat, stalling as he sought the right phrase, “carried away.”

  Bianca suddenly had the urge to laugh but stifled it. She turned to face him. “I think it is because someone hurt you once, and now you want to hurt someone.”

  Ian’s eyes grew hard. “An interesting theory, carissima.”

  “I think it was a woman.”

  Ian’s whole body stiffened. The right thing to do was to storm out of the room in anger, slamming the door and punishing her for bringing it up. But the door was broken. And curiously, Ian did not want to leave.

  Instead, he changed the subject. “What are you doing up here? It is freezing.”

  Bianca was still studying him. “Looking at the stars. Or actually, looking for my father’s star.”

  Ian was skeptical. “What do you mean? Is it different from other stars?”

  “It is indistinguishable, except when he gives me the sign. He will notice me watching for him and something will happen, it will flicker or get bigger or something.”

  “Have you observed this phenomenon before?”

  “No. That is just it. I have been looking since he died and I have never found it.” Ian noticed that there was a slight tremor in her voice. “I know he would not forget about me, would not abandon me, but still, it would be nice to see it. It would make it easier to keep believing in him. And not to feel alone.”

  Ian considered sweeping her into his arms and telling her she was not alone. He thought about kissing her gently and filling her with his warmth. He contemplated promising to protect her and care fo
r her. The idea of explaining to her how utterly unforgettable she was crossed his mind.

  He opened his mouth to speak. “From everything I have read about them, it seems unlikely that stars are actually the souls of the dead.”

  With alarm Ian saw that Bianca’s lower lip had begun to quiver, and he knew what that meant. He racked his brain, trying to decide what Crispin would do in this situation, realized that Crispin would never be in this situation, and then rushed on, saying the first things that occurred to him. “What I mean is, perhaps you are looking in the wrong place. Perhaps your father has been giving you signs every day, many of them, but because they were unexpected, you did not notice them.”

  Her lip had almost completely stopped quivering, and she was regarding him with an expression he did not recognize. It made him ecstatic. And nervous.

  “But of course, I could be wrong. If you really are interested in stars, I have a machine in my laboratory that makes them look closer. Maybe that would help you see your father.”

  Bianca’s mind was dizzy from trying to follow Ian’s twisted reasoning, but the invitation to see his laboratory required no thought at all. She had been itchy with curiosity about it since her first day in the house, but had been too respectful of its sanctity to enter without an invitation. Plus, she had heard stories about unfortunate servingmen who, lost in the sinewy corridors of the house, had accidentally found themselves in Ian’s laboratory confronted by anything from a machine pitching rocks at them to a poisonous snake. One man’s eyebrows had never grown back after a brief encounter with a new type of oil that initially appeared too harmless to wash off but later, when he was lighting the kitchen fire, turned out to be highly flammable.

  She nodded her acceptance of his invitation. Still wrapped in the rug, she followed Ian to the big door at the end of the hall. He used a key to open it, a precaution undertaken after the eyebrow incident, and proudly ushered her into the largest room she had ever been in. At least that was the illusion put forward by the mirrors that covered all four walls. Turning around she saw a staggering number of Biancas reflected on every wall from every angle. She was so disoriented that she bumped into the two big workbenches filling the middle of the room. One of them was heaped with books and on the other, there were several strange-looking machines, or rather, one strange-looking machine in several sizes. As Bianca was taking all of this in, wide-eyed, Ian lit and distributed a handful of tapers.

  “What do these do?” She pointed at the machines on the worktable.

  “Those make things seem bigger than they are. If you put a rock under one of them, for example, you would see not only its surface texture, but almost the particles that make up the texture.”

  “That could be immensely useful in my work.” Bianca’s eyes were bright with excitement and Ian was reluctant to dull it.

  “These are just prototypes, and not very good ones. It is all still in the experimental stages. In time, though, I hope to develop one that will allow me to see through things and know what is beneath the surface of everything.”

  Bianca looked closely at Ian. What would she not give to be able to turn such a machine on him, to see under his surface and probe his secrets.

  She was regarding him in the way that made him both delighted and nervous again, so Ian tried to distract her. “But we did not come to talk about those machines. We came to look through this one.” Ian extended his arm and pointed to a large device that looked disappointingly like a tube.

  “This is the machine that makes the stars look closer?” Bianca was incredulous as she studied it. “How does it see the stars? There are no windows on any of these walls.”

  Ian began pulling on a heavy cord against one wall. At first Bianca noticed nothing, but gradually the light in the room changed. She was puzzled until she looked up and saw that where the ceiling should have been there were now thousands and thousands of stars. Her first thought was that Ian had somehow made the roof disappear, but then she understood what had really happened. The rope Ian had been tugging on controlled a very large cover that had masked the true ceiling, which was made entirely of glass. The effect was marvelous and Bianca could not keep herself from gaping.

  They exchanged no words while Ian worked in deep concentration to set up the telescope. He fastened the long tube into an elaborate stand, which held it steady while directing it up toward the sky. Using a pole, Ian pushed open one of the panels of the roof as if it were a window, so that the view through the machine would be clear and uninterrupted by the glass. Then he looked through the eyepiece, jiggled some knobs, twisted some screws, moved a stool into place to give her added height, and beckoned Bianca over.

  It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing, but when she did, she cried out in delight.

  “This is a magical machine! I can see everything, so close I feel like I could touch it! Did you make it? How does it work?”

  She could not see it, but Ian was beaming. “I will explain it to you one day, but not tonight, it would take too long. It works on the same principle as the tube at Isabella’s house.”

  Bianca turned her face sharply toward his, and he quickly erased his smile. “What? What at Isabella’s house?”

  “The listening tube you sent me there to find. The one she eavesdropped on conversations with.”

  “There was one? It was there? And you found it?” Bianca was thrilled to have her hypothesis confirmed, even more thrilled that Ian had taken it seriously despite his professed skepticism.

  “Oh, yes, I was there tonight. It was just as you said it would be.”

  “Then certainly you must see that I am innocent! And that is why you apologized!”

  “I apologized because I had overspoken. The tube does nothing to prove your innocence. If anything, your knowledge of it could be taken as strong proof of your guilt.” Ian’s voice was neutral but he was berating himself for having introduced the subject.

  “But I did not know about it. I merely suggested it as a possibility. How was I to know if there was a listening device in the floorboards or behind the vanity?”

  “Ha! You did know. You just named exactly where it was.”

  “By Santa Regina’s knuckles, I just named the obvious places. I am sure they were the first places you looked too. Besides, why would I tell you about it if I were the murderer? Why would I spell out a potential motive to you?”

  Ian nodded and expounded his reasoning more as if he were talking to a collaborator than his chief suspect. “I thought of that too, but then I saw a possible reason. You were counting on me to take what you said as a lie, because I almost always do. But this time I was too clever for you.”

  “Too clever for yourself actually,” there was no malice in her voice but something more like disappointment, “for that is the most absurd idea I have ever heard. What could have inspired me to do that? Why would I have mentioned it at all? It seems like an awfully large risk to take for no reason.”

  “The reason is clear: to force me to broaden my list of suspects. It might have worked if Enzo had not been killed too, but that made it obvi—”

  Ian stopped talking because Bianca’s lips were on his. It had been an impulse, and she acted on it, and was delighted by the results. For one thing, it had made him cease his insufferable accusations.

  “Can’t we save that for the morning?” she whispered up to him when their lips parted. “I was so enjoying being with you, can’t we forget about all of that until tomorrow?” Seated on the tall stool, her head even with Ian’s, she was looking directly into his eyes.

  Ian was not sure when he had lost control of the situation, but it was extremely obvious that he would not need a battery of tests to find out if he was still attracted to her. It felt as if every particle of his body was responding to her unexpected touch. Some part of him said it was unwise to let their conversation be side
tracked that way, but he realized that Bianca had a point, there would be plenty of time the next day for confrontation, and right then it was more important to make love to her. His body happily concurred.

  Their heads moved together for another kiss, this one slow, deep, sensual. Bianca was touching his cheek, running her hand through his hair, making soft little designs with her fingers on his neck. For a long time they stayed that way, touching gently and just kissing, but Ian’s growing arousal soon overtook his willpower. He lifted her from the stool and carried her in his arms to the emptier worktable, carefully setting her down atop the rug she had been wearing for warmth. He undid the lacings at the neck of her nightgown and pushed the garment down over her shoulders.

  For a moment the sight of her, naked, waiting, excited, in the middle of his laboratory rendered him unable to move. But her impatient fingers working hard on his leggings soon brought him back to himself, and he assisted her by shedding his shirt. She watched in the mirror behind them as her hands moved over his back, fascinated by the view she now had, by being able to touch and see at the same time. She shuddered with a new kind of arousal as she watched Ian take her nipple in his mouth, watched his tongue moving lightly along it. Abruptly, she drew away from him, suddenly self-conscious.

  When she spoke, it was in a voice full of self-doubt. “Today, in the library, you said I was perverted. Am I?”

  Ian now realized that his apology had been wildly inadequate. “No, carissima, you are not. You are simply very open.” The unsure, pained expression that lingered on Bianca’s face was like a dagger to him. How could he have been so nasty earlier that day? he asked himself. What cruel impulse had made him want to throw her wonderful, infectious sensuality in her face? Although he would scarcely admit it consciously, he had been afraid that afternoon, afraid that she really was guilty, afraid he would have to give her up, and he had hurled his fear at her like a weapon, lashing out at her and punishing her for making him feel again. Was there anything he could do to remedy the effect of his words? The prospect of having ruined the most exciting partner he had ever encountered, even if she was possibly some sort of dangerous criminal, was dismal, especially given his increasing arousal. Quick action was needed.