The Stargazer: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book One

by Michele Jaffe

  “Tie them up along the wall so they cannot escape,” she ordered the leader of the new giants. “But don’t hurt them. I want them to be able to hear me when I speak.”

  “Since you are obviously planning to kill us,” Ian addressed Mora almost with impatience as one of the new guards attached the irons to his hands, “why don’t you just go ahead with it instead of boring us first?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? But of course not, the great Ian Foscari is too preoccupied with his own thoughts, too selfish to pay attention to other people’s needs.” Mora addressed him in the tone of a strict mother. “If I had simply wanted to kill you, I would have done it hours ago, years ago even, instead of delaying my journey. No, I have many other tortures in store for you before you die. Merely putting you to death is not part of my plan.”

  “I wish it were,” Ian said frankly, knowing he had nothing to lose. “Anything would be better than having to listen to your deranged chatter. Every moment you delay your departure increases your danger.”

  Mora spoke sincerely, as if putting his fears to rest. “Your concern for my welfare moves me, but a slight delay will be well worth my while, I assure you.”

  While she was speaking, the giant had hung Ian and Crispin above the ground, their manacled hands suspended by a chain from one of the iron rings in the wall usually used to hold torches. The position might have been less comfortable, Ian reasoned, though he could not actually imagine how as the sharp pains moved from his shoulders to his wrists. Maybe if the torches had also been in place, heating the metal links of the chains and dripping hot wax on his head… He had been in the middle of thinking of other potential tortures, trying to drown out Mora’s demented words, when something caught his ear.

  She had returned her attention to Angelo, whom she was now addressing conspiratorially. “Shall we explain what we have prepared for your cousin? Don’t you think it will make the wait so much more exciting for them, to hear the clock ticking and think about her?” Her eyes were hooded as she ran her tongue over her lips on the word “exciting.” Angelo could only nod with expectation.

  “What have you done to Bianca?” Ian demanded, suddenly unaware that he had arms, let alone arms that were being stretched like pieces of wet felt.

  Mora drew two fingers along the sweep of Angelo’s shoulders. “It is not what I have done. It is what you have done. Or will do, to be more precise. You see, in exactly two and a half hours, when the clock in Piazza San Marco strikes twelve, the east wing of the Doge’s Palace will explode, and it will be your fault. You know the wing I mean, the one where Veronese has just been retouching paintings, the one where the notaries live, the one which contains—”

  “The prisons!” Crispin interrupted her. “Dio mio, she will kill Bianca!”

  Mora nodded and turned her gaze toward where he was suspended next to Ian. “Yes, exactly. Why were you always so much quicker to catch on than your brother?” She focused again on Ian. “But actually that is just the beginning. Shortly thereafter you, Ian, and the rest of your dear Arboretti will be denounced as traitors. Your arms negotiations with the Turks, culminating in a plot to blow up the Doge’s Palace, will be revealed.” She paused here, shaking her head back and forth with a short sigh. “But in your normal bumbling way, you will have missed and blown up only one corner, leaving plenty of barrels of your trademark gunpowder with the Arboretti name painted on them lying about. Your reputation, like your little slut, will go up in smoke. Should you try to get there to stop it, despite your bonds, your presence at the explosion will only confirm your guilt. As will a secret denunciation to be submitted tomorrow. The whole plan will go like clockwork. Clock-work indeed!” She smiled a half smile at Angelo as if they shared a private joke. Then she took a deep breath and resumed, her air distraught. “My only sadness is that I won’t be able to see what delightful tortures the Senate dreams up for traitors of your rank and station.”

  Ian shuddered. It was a brilliant plan. Absent or present, his guilt would be manifest. And Bianca would be dead. “You seem to have this very well thought out,” Ian said through clenched teeth.

  “You of all people should know how thorough I am.” Her thick black eyelashes raked him up and down. “It is a perfect plan, isn’t it?”

  The question had been directed at Ian, but it was Crispin who spoke first, his voice tight with impatience. How could Ian sit or, rather, hang there making small talk with a maniacal murderess when all their lives hung in the balance? “Why are you doing this?” Crispin demanded brusquely. “Why are you punishing Bianca? What has she done to you? What have any of us done?”

  Mora regarded him, wide-eyed with disbelief. “You dare to ask me that? What have you done?” Her hands left Angelo’s body and fluttered angrily toward the brothers, her gaze pinning Ian. “I gave up everything I had for him, lost everything I valued most. Tell him, Ian, how I waited upon you. Tell him how I fulfilled your every wish, attended to your every need.”

  “That is not exactly how I recollect our arrangement,” Ian began dryly but was cut off.

  “Listen to his selfishness and ingratitude. After all I endured from you! I sacrificed everything for you, my own happiness, the best years of my youth, even my one true love, and what did I get in return? Nothing.”

  “By my calculations,” Ian computed, “you actually received about a million gold ducats, not to mention business tips worth twice that, as well as the house you live in now, your two custom gondolas, a dozen or more gowns, the string of rubies you are wearing, the matching earrings—”

  Morgana sneered at his accounting, then made a wide arc with her hand. “What is all of that without true love? After years of deluding myself that you would grow to be a better man, a man capable of the love I deserved, I saw our relationship had to end. I tried to break things off amicably, but you would not let me.”

  “That is strange, I thought it was I who tried to break things off because I did not love you.”

  “You always were good at spinning little tales to bolster yourself, weren’t you, Ian?” Morgana interrupted him, then continued speaking before he had time to respond. “You pretended it was you who wanted to end the affair, but anyone could see the truth. Selfish and heedless of others, you were blind to what was going on around you, blind to my love for another and his deep, pure passion for me. I begged for release but you refused. Finally, I could no longer live in the prison of your affections. And yet, being kindhearted, I could not bear the thought of causing you pain. I wanted to spare you the agony of discovering, too late, how much you needed me, and the anguish of seeing me happy with someone else.”

  “I assure you, you need not have concerned yourself,” Ian interjected, but Mora was too entranced by her narrative to take any notice.

  “And then I saw the way, the way to free you from the dangerous passion you had for me. As my parting gift to you, I sent someone to Sicily to make sure you would never come back to Venice and have to see me in the arms of another.”

  “What do you mean? Are you saying you sent someone to assassinate me?”

  “Such an ugly word for my act of kindness. I was only trying to spare you, so I could lead my life without always having to worry about you and the misery I was inflicting on you. I went out of my way and spent piles of money to hire the most noted man in the profession, because I wanted to see that it was done properly. But even when I had only your welfare at heart, you could not let me have my way unfettered. Instead of you, they killed him, my beloved Christian, while you remained on the sidelines unharmed. Ungrateful of my kindness, you practically helped my paid assassins to butcher the man I loved.”

  Ian’s face, already registering shock at her narrative, showed complete disbelief at the mention of Christian’s name. “Christian?” he spluttered.

  “Yes, Christian. He and I were in love, true love. Something you could never underst
and.”

  It took a moment for the pieces to slip into place. “Then you planned that? You were responsible for our attack…” Through the stinging of the chains that were boring into his wrists, he suddenly saw it all so clearly. For the first time everything that had happened in Sicily—the reluctance of the bandits to hurt him, his waking up unscathed in Messina—everything made sense. What did not make sense were the wounds he had allowed Mora to inflict upon him, wounds for which he had punished those around him.

  He had known that Mora was selfish, had suspected that she was amoral, but he had failed to see how completely ruthless she could be. For her the poles of right and wrong were defined by what pleased and displeased her, what met with her wishes and what opposed them. Ian was staggered by how destructive this single-minded ruthlessness could be, and by how effectively he had allowed it to destroy his life and his happiness. But not any longer, he promised himself. Assuming he got out of there alive.

  When Mora’s voice penetrated his thoughts, it had a new tone. No longer the wronged innocent, she now spoke as the victorious conqueress harvesting the fruits of her labors. “You ruined all my plans two years ago, Ian Foscari, but you shall not do it again. You have tried repeatedly to destroy my life, and now, finally, I will destroy yours. It would have been simpler if that inconvenient whore of yours had not picked up the dagger that I’d had her brother commission in order to frame you for murder,” she paused considering, “but I find I like this outcome even better. It is more dramatic, and much more exciting. And I have had the passing pleasure of watching you suffer, to make up for all the suffering you caused me.” She turned to the two guards who had shackled and suspended the brothers. “Are the locks sturdy? Did you see to it that they won’t escape?” The giants each went over to inspect their captives, one of them enduring a halfhearted kick in the groin from Crispin without even twitching, and confirmed that the brothers were in no danger of liberating themselves.

  “You three,” Mora motioned to the smaller of the five giant guards, “take Jenö and Roric back to my brother’s house and stay with them. I will take you two to help the oarsmen row through the storm,” she turned to Angelo, her hand now pressing hard against his codpiece, “and you, my little angel, to entertain me all the way to Zante.”

  The brothers were still trapped, suspended from the wall of the room with no possible means of escape in sight, when the clock struck ten.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The voice was too filled with emotion to be Ian’s and too high to be Crispin’s, but its message was unmistakable.

  “Help!” Tristan, Miles, and Sebastian heard through the door of the library. “Help! Help! Someone come quickly!”

  Nilo’s race up the stairs ended at Tristan’s chest, which he smacked into hard enough to knock the air out of both of them. He stepped back, blinked twice, and then yelled, “Help!” again at the top of his lungs.

  “We will, we will, but you’ll have to tell us how.” Miles kneeled before the boy. “Shhh, it is all right.”

  “No, it’s not all right!” The boy spoke loudly, sending droplets of rain flying from his hair as he vehemently shook his head. “No, no, no! She is going to explode Signorina Salva, and the others are tied up, and there are giants and—”

  “Why don’t we move in here.” Tristan put a soothing hand on Nilo’s shoulder and propelled him toward the library and into a chair. “Sit down and take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”

  “There’s no time for sitting, don’t you see?” Nilo moved his huge eyes from one face to the next. “We must go there now, before the clock strikes twelve.”

  “Go where? To do what?” Sebastian asked.

  Realizing that there was nothing for it but to explain, Nilo took a deep breath, concentrated for a moment, then began. “Master Ian and Master Crispin went to that woman’s house, the woman who came late to the party, the one everybody says is a witch.”

  “Morgana da Gigio?” Tristan put in skeptically.

  “Yes, her.” Nilo nodded. “They went there because that man, Signore Angelo, was there, and they tried to take him, but then the giants came and grabbed them from behind, and then—”

  “Giants?” It was Miles’s turn to sound incredulous.

  “They looked like giants. Anyway, there was a fight, and I couldn’t see what was happening, but then the lady, Signora da Gigio, ordered that they be chained up, and then she told them what she had done to my mistress.” He paused to take a breath, his melancholy eyes looking even more miserable than usual, and his chin quivering. “She said that when the clock in the piazza strikes twelve, the prison is going to explode and everyone will think you did it and you will all be traitors and there is nothing you can do to stop it. But you must stop it, you must! You have to! You can’t let my mistress die!”

  Sebastian scowled at the boy. “Did Ian and Crispin take you with them?”

  Nilo bit his lip. “No. I followed them, without them knowing it. I hid in the gondola, then I followed them up. I was afraid…” He hesitated, trying to pick the best way to say it. He tried again, “I didn’t think,” then blurted out, “After what he did today at the trial, I did not trust His Lordship to save my mistress. I thought maybe he was trying to hurt her, and I wanted to be sure. So I followed him.” Color rose in his cheeks and he began to speak faster. “I was wrong about that, but anyway, it was a good thing I was there because now you can save her. You must go at once!”

  Giorgio, who had heard Nilo’s shouts from Marina’s room below stairs, came bounding into the library demanding, “What’s wrong? What is going on?”

  “Nilo has just given us some disturbing news,” Sebastian told Giorgio, then returned his keen blue eyes to the boy. “You say that Ian and Crispin are tied up?”

  “Chained up, yes, but that is not the important part.” Nilo, caught between despair and frustration, was gesturing wildly with his hands. “The important part is that you have to save Signorina Salva!”

  “We will do our best,” Tristan said in a soothing and even voice, “but we need to know more. I have heard your mistress talk about your incredible memory. Do you think you could remember everything Morgana said.”

  Giorgio had moved behind the boy and put an avuncular hand on his shoulder. “Just try your best, Nilo. Whatever you can remember.”

  Nilo creased his forehead and squinted his eyes, as he had seen adults do when trying to remember something, then recited Morgana’s entire description, word for word.

  He had never had such an attentive audience before, and he was almost sorry that the retelling had to end, until he remembered there was work to be done.

  “It sounds like she’s loaded that wing of the palace with our gunpowder,” Sebastian concluded. “But she must have left someone there to ignite it. If we can just find where they are standing and—”

  “Not necessarily,” Miles broke in, brushing the hair from his forehead, his tone excited. “Let me see if I have this right.” He turned to Nilo. “She said, ‘The whole plan will go like clockwork,’ and then repeated, ‘Clock-work indeed!’?”

  The boy’s expression was puzzled. “She did,” he conceded, “but that was just a joke. The important part is where she said that—”

  Miles cut him off as well. “I think it was more than that. I have heard of people attaching fuses to clocks, so that when the clock strikes a certain time the fuse gets lit and causes an explosion. The fuse is almost impossible to detect, and it’s foolproof because no one need be in the vicinity to ignite it. I believe it’s more common in the Ottoman Empire than here.” He looked over at Sebastian, who nodded slowly. “I suspect that using her Ottoman connections, Mora has somehow connected a fuse to the clock in San Marco and rigged it so it will light when the clock strikes twelve.”

  “Then all we have to do is disconnect it!” Tristan declared with
enthusiasm.

  “Magari! If only it were that simple!” Miles threw up his hands. “Connecting a fuse to a clock and also to a container of explosives the hundred-lengths distance to the east wing of the Palace is a very sophisticated undertaking. It requires a mechanism as complicated as a clock, and far more precise. Disconnecting the whole thing would take even the man who constructed it hours. It might take me days. Not to mention that one wrong move could ignite the fuse and explode the whole thing early.”

  “Fantastic.” Sebastian’s tone was sharper than he meant it to be, and he softened it slightly as he went on. “What you are saying, then, is that it is completely impossible to disconnect it. But you can do it, can’t you?”

  Miles was the only one of the Arboretti to underestimate his skills. He paused, his face a study of concentration, then sighed. “I can try. I’ve never actually seen a mechanism like this. I have only read about it in letters and travel accounts. But I would be willing to try it.”

  Knowing Miles’s talents, Sebastian knew that meant the situation was not completely hopeless—only almost completely hopeless. “You and I will go to San Marco—”

  “No, I will go alone,” Miles interjected, his voice deep and serious. “It is very dangerous. Practically like putting yourself at the center of an explosion. If I make a single mistake, the explosion will happen instantaneously. I don’t want to be responsible for risking anyone’s life but my own.”

  Sebastian’s tone was equally serious. “It’s my decision to go, and I have made it, so technically I am risking my own life. Don’t bother trying to talk me out of it. You can’t expect to perform miracles on your own all the time.” He went on, his tone slightly lighter. “Besides, why should you get to have all the excitement?”