The Stargazer: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book One

by Michele Jaffe

  Even in the best of weather, Ian recalled from the protected enclosure of the cabin, the trip from Mora’s palace to the main square took almost half an hour, but this day it was interminable. If only his arms, newly freed by Tristan’s magic from the restrictive iron jewelry Mora had so thoughtfully provided, didn’t ache quite so much, and if only his legs did not throb, he would get out and face the storm himself. Instead, he had to be content with sitting and muttering impatiently.

  They were nearing the bacino in front of San Marco when they heard the first gong of the clock.

  “Was that…?” Crispin started to ask, but let the question hang in the air when he saw the grim expression on Ian’s face. The pulses of the three men and the boy in the gondola began to race.

  They had just passed the point of Dorsoduro and come into sight of the Doge’s Palace when the second gong came.

  “Tell them to hurry,” Nilo pleaded to everyone and no one in particular.

  As the boatmen struggled to turn the gondola in toward the boat landing, the third gong arrived.

  “Does this mean that Miles…?” Tristan ventured without a hint of playfulness, but left off and lapsed into silence.

  The clock rang four.

  Ian’s throat was dry and his heart was pounding. Everywhere he had previously felt pain, he now felt expectation.

  He had just decided to jump in and swim for shore when the boat pulled up alongside a mooring. One of the gondoliers threw out a rope to secure it to the post. It caught by the slimmest possible margin, and he moved to tighten it.

  Just then, the fifth gong resounded across the square.

  The wind whipped up from the outer lagoon, and the gondola bucked against the posts. With a snap, the mooring rope broke in two, sending the gondola spinning back into the basin.

  The sixth gong sounded.

  Ian could wait no longer. Ignoring the protests of Crispin and Tristan, he climbed out of the cabin of the boat and leapt into the churning water.

  When he brought his head up for air, he heard the seventh gong.

  The water was freezing. He had to fight against the downward pull of the current, which was doing its best to drag him to the bottom of the basin. Breathing hard, he forced first one arm, then the other, to pull him through the freezing water, and propel him toward the shore.

  The clock struck for the eighth time.

  He hauled himself up, panting and sopping wet, onto the marble boat landing in front of the ducal palace. Without even turning to check the progress of the boat, he stood and lumbered toward the clock tower.

  The ninth gong struck.

  He was only vaguely aware that he was probably moving toward his death. His only coherent thought was that he had to stop the clock from ringing, and it did not matter if he had to use his entire body to do it. He had to stop the clock and then save Bianca. He would not be happy until he had her in his arms again. Heedless of the rain and the chilling wind, he ran ahead toward his goal.

  He heard the tenth gong as he finally reached the clock.

  From behind him came the sound of voices, but Ian neither paused nor turned to look toward them. He found the door open, still banging in the wind, and ascended the stairs.

  The eleventh gong was so loud that it seemed to come from within his head. He was momentarily so stunned by the noise and the reverberations that he did not immediately perceive Miles and Sebastian hanging perilously from two of the large gears of the clock.

  “Stop this thing!” he ordered them fiercely. “You must stop it! Stop it!”

  Stop-it-stop-it-stop-it. His words reverberated around the stone room. Stop-it-stop-it-stop.

  When the reverberations stopped, there was silence. Miles held his breath. Sebastian said a Turkish prayer he thought he had forgotten. Ian clenched his jaw.

  The silence continued. And continued.

  “I think,” Miles began, his voice low and unsteady, “I think we stopped it.”

  Sebastian made a sound that was something between laughter and weeping as Ian helped him step across to the narrow platform. Miles had also been restored to safety when Tristan bounded through the door.

  “You did it!” he announced triumphantly, moving aside so Crispin and Nilo could crowd in. “The Palace is still there!”

  “I can’t quite believe it,” Miles said, his voice still shaky. “I can’t believe it’s over.”

  “It’s not over,” Ian corrected him. “Not yet. We still have to get Bianca. I am not leaving here tonight without her.”

  “Come on, Ian,” Crispin moved toward his brother. “She is safe for the night. Tomorrow we’ll go to the judges, and—”

  “No! I will not leave her. I will not leave her anywhere that Mora can get to her. God alone knows what that witch had planned for her if this failed. With or without you, I am going to get her.”

  “Me too!” Nilo joined in. “I won’t leave without her either.”

  The other Arboretti exchanged pained looks.

  “What are we waiting for, then?” Tristan asked, attempting to affect a jaunty tone. “Let’s go break her out of prison.”

  “Just what I suggested in the first place,” Ian pointed out perversely as he led the way out of the clock and across the piazza toward the entrance to the Doge’s Palace. The sentinel on duty that night poked his head out of the guard shack, where Ian could see a small fire blazing.

  “Halt!” he shouted to the bedraggled pack as they rushed up. “State your business.”

  Ian was momentarily surprised when Tristan pushed him aside and began addressing the guard quickly and firmly, like one accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed. “Sergeant, we just heard bandits entering the clock tower. How many of you are on duty here tonight?”

  “Four,” the sentinel responded promptly, pleased to have been mistaken for a solider of higher rank.

  “You must take them all and pursue these bandits. They are in the tower now. Go at once.”

  Tristan had no sooner spoken than the sentinel called together his peers and told them what had happened. He hurried the others on, then returned to address Tristan. “You all stay right here and wait for us to return.”

  “Of course,” Tristan answered solemnly. “Might we use your fire?”

  The sentinel considered for a moment, then nodded and ran off to follow his fellows across the piazza. The Arboretti ducked into the guard shack just long enough to ensure that the sentinels could no longer see them, then made haste toward the wing containing the prisons.

  There was another guard posted there, this one larger, older, and smarter-looking than the first. Ian glanced at Tristan, who shrugged and shook his head. “This one is all yours,” Tristan offered helpfully, and stepped back to join Crispin, Miles, Sebastian, and Nilo.

  Ian marched right up to the guard and announced himself. “I am Ian Foscari. I must see one of the prisoners. Right now.”

  The guard, who was busily excavating his dinner from one of his rotting teeth, slowly raised his eyes. He gave Ian an appraising look from his sopping leggings and boots to his grimly determined jaw. “Can’t,” he said finally.

  “I am afraid I do not understand. I cannot see the prisons?” Ian asked in a voice that suggested the guard might be speaking an Outer Mongolian dialect.

  The guard, who had found a particularly enticing nugget in his tooth, nodded.

  “Why not?” Ian demanded with feeling.

  “Closed.”

  “Well, open them!”

  “Can’t,” the guard said laconically, crossing his arms on his chest.

  “I think Tristan’s approach worked better,” Crispin said from behind his brother.

  “What do you propose?” Ian turned toward Crispin, his eyes blazing.

  “We could try a variation of
the method we used on Mora’s giants,” Crispin offered. “They seemed to respond well to that.”

  While they were speaking, all six of them moved closer to the guard. He stood stock-still, arms crossed over his chest, feigning nonchalance, but his eyes began to shift nervously.

  “If you gentlemen are planning to harm me, I ought to warn you that there is an entire stable of guards in that warming house over there.” He pointed a nervous finger toward the now empty guard shack.

  “I doubt it,” Tristan said coolly, not halting his approach. The guard found himself surrounded by a half-circle of very tall men and one small boy. He was about to protest, this time more loudly, when Sebastian brought the side of his hand down against the back of the man’s head, knocking him completely unconscious in one blow.

  “Very neat!” Miles said with admiration. “You’ll have to teach me how to do that some time.”

  “Just after you teach me how to stop unstoppable clocks,” Sebastian shot back as Tristan rifled through the unconscious guard’s pockets. In a moment he stood up holding two keys and handed them to Ian.

  “Those should do it. Why don’t you and Crispin go get her, while the rest of us stay up here to make sure those guards aren’t too bored.”

  Ian and Crispin made straight for the staircase behind the guard’s stool and went down. There were intermittent torches lighting their descent, but the darkness was still almost impenetrable. When they had taken no more than twenty steps, they heard and then saw the water lapping against the side of the staircase. Undaunted, they continued their descent, wading deeper and deeper into the cold water.

  “This place is flooded,” Crispin stated needlessly to Ian’s back. “I am not sure,” he continued, seeing that Ian had not halted, “that we can go much farther.”

  “Um, Ian—” Crispin ventured again.

  “The gate must be just down here,” Ian shouted back with manic optimism as he rounded a corner. The water was now up to his collarbone, exactly the point the top of Bianca’s head came to on his chest, he remembered. The recollection brought a lump to his throat, which got larger with each further step down he took.

  Two more steps brought the water to his ears. A third had it almost over his head. It was not until he was completely submerged that he reached the iron entrance door to the prison. Crispin was right. It was completely flooded, filled with water from the floor to the ceiling.

  His mind suddenly became very calm and very rational. There was no way anyone could be alive down there, it told him. All that effort to get the keys from the guard had been a waste, he thought calmly. It was too bad, it reported, but Bianca was most assuredly dead.

  Chapter Thirty

  Ian turned around and ascended the stairs. Crispin was waiting for him halfway up, at the landing before the turn, his heart beating with dread.

  “Well?” he asked as his brother neared, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “Bianca did not know how to swim,” Ian said calmly as he brushed by Crispin and continued his ascent. “I believe she is dead.”

  Crispin watched with shocked horror as his brother proceeded on like an ultraefficient machine. Had he really heard him correctly? Did he really say that Bianca was dead?

  “Ian!” he shouted, following up the stairs. “Ian! What did you just say?”

  Ian paused at the top of the stairs and waited for Crispin to catch up to him. “I said that Bianca did not know how to swim and is most assuredly dead.”

  Ian ignored Nilo’s small cry and the questions of the other Arboretti, proceeding instead with frightening coldness toward the reviving guard. He pulled the man up by the collar of his cape and shook him until his eyes opened and he began making noises.

  “What happened to the prisoners who were in the basement cells?” he demanded.

  The guard looked confusedly up at the soaking wet man gripping him by the neck, then remembered what had happened.

  “I’ll see that you are charged with molesting the duke’s guards, I will,” he spluttered. “I’ll see you tried and hung! You’ll regret this, you—”

  Ian interrupted the man’s babbling, his voice even and hard as the blade of a dagger. “What happened to the prisoners in the basement cells?”

  “Nothing,” the guard responded, looking quizzically at the man above him. “They’re down there just as they ought to be, ain’t they? Hey, Signore Gianni, or whatever you said your name was, d’ you think you could let loose on my neck a little?”

  Ian ignored him. “They were not moved? No one evacuated them?”

  “An’ why would we do that?” the guard asked, suddenly surly.

  “The cells are flooded. The water is almost up the staircase. No one could be alive down there.”

  “Look, Signore Gianni, those prisoners were going to die soon anyway. Let’s put it that the water has just saved the executioner a trip from his bed. Let’s put it that way, shall we?”

  “Are you saying,” Ian asked, tightening his hold on the man’s cloak and lifting him from the ground, “that the prisoners were just left to die in the flood?”

  “This isn’t so funny anymore, Signore Gianni.”

  “My name is not Gianni. Answer my question.”

  “You put it about right.” The blood was draining quickly from the guard’s face. “They were just left there. If they died or not, that’s up to them and the Deity, ain’t it?”

  Ian let go of the man’s cloak and let him fall to the ground. He turned, marched past his cousins and Nilo, and out into the piazza.

  Pulling his soaking wet cape around him, Ian made for the boat landing where the gondoliers had finally managed to tie up the gondola. Roused by his approach, the boatmen were already in position by the time he reached the gondola and gave them the order for home. They had just pulled away from the dock when Crispin arrived and, with a running leap, jumped on.

  “Are you all right?” he asked his brother lamely when he entered the cabin, panting from the exertion of catching up with him. As soon as the question was out of his mouth, he was sorry he had asked.

  Ian pressed his lips together tightly and answered, in a voice that lacked even a semblance of emotion, “Of course. I am always fine.”

  Crispin shuddered. Ian’s tone was dead enough, but his expression was even worse. Crispin would have given anything to see the slightest flicker of animation in his slate gray eyes.

  “You can’t pretend she didn’t matter to you,” he began, hoping to at least antagonize Ian.

  “I have said nothing like that.” Ian’s expression did not change, his tone did not waver.

  “I think you were in love with her,” Crispin continued boldly, willing to try anything to coax an emotion out of his brother.

  “I think you are right,” Ian replied in a voice that made it seem doubtful he even possessed a heart.

  Crispin’s jaw hung open, stunned by his brother’s admission. “You mean, you admit it? You agree?”

  Ian’s brows went up but his tone did not change. “Why shouldn’t I? You are right.”

  “But, just like that? You sit there like some sort of talking statue coolly admitting that the woman you loved is dead?”

  “I am sorry if my behavior is displeasing to you.”

  “It’s not that it’s displeasing,” Crispin fumbled to explain. “It’s just that it’s, well, incredible.”

  “Ah,” Ian replied, hoping that the single syllable conveyed enough understanding to make the conversation be over. He suddenly felt weary, very, very weary, as if his entire body were twice as heavy as normal. The wind had died down and the storm had reverted to a light rain that made a soothing noise against the cabin of the gondola. Perhaps if he just closed his eyes for a moment, just let himself slide into the sleep that beckoned so welcomingly.

 
Suddenly, the day became sunny and warm. Ian alighted from the gondola, not as expected, at his boat landing, but instead in the grassy park of a friend’s summer villa. At first he heard only the rustle of the leaves and saw no one, but soon the sounds of a pastoral melody wafted to him on the summer breeze. He followed it and found himself in a shady clearing, with a stream running on one side and soft, grassy benches all around. In the center, on a velvet blanket, lay Bianca. She had no clothes on but was completely covered with flowers, like some sort of woodland nymph come to life. As he admired her, she smiled at him and called his name.

  “Come, Ian, come here,” she said warmly, extending one of her slim, graceful arms toward him.

  “But you are dead,” he blurted, without realizing what he was saying.

  She laughed and shook her head, the light of the sun catching magically on her fiery mane. “No, no. Not me. Come, Ian. I am here.”

  Ian’s body filled with warmth when he understood what she was saying. She was not dead at all, she had been waiting for him in this idyllic spot the whole time. He smiled and started toward her, his heart filled with happiness.

  “Come on, Ian,” she said again, her voice somehow deeper, more urgent, and less pleasant.

  “Come on.” Crispin was shaking him harder. “We are here. We’re home.”

  Ian awoke with a start. He turned his head about confusedly and blinked. “I was…dreaming?” he asked his brother, still dazed.

  “I guess so.” Crispin looked concerned. “You were only asleep for a few minutes. The gondoliers made good time.”

  “I was dreaming,” Ian repeated, this time to himself. “It was only a dream.”

  With horror he discovered that all the emotions he thought he had left at the foot of the prison stairs had only been in hiding. Without warning, they welled up within him, spilling throughout his body and leaving him with a feeling of despair more acute than anything he had ever experienced. He needed to be alone. Immediately.

  “I will be in the library if anyone needs me,” he told Crispin in a voice that wavered, then added, “Please see to it that they do not.”