Behind the Mask

by Linda Winstead Jones

  “Are you capable of telling the truth?” he asked, his voice as icy as the night air.

  She took a step closer to him and lowered her voice. “I do love you.” She didn’t think she had to tell him that she was innocent of all the charges against her. Not Giovanni. If anyone in this world knew her, truly knew her, it was Giovanni Valentino. I love you should be enough. One look at his face and she realized it wasn’t nearly enough. “I knew you would see me differently if you found out who I really am. I knew you wouldn’t—”

  “No explanations are necessary, Lady Graystone,” Giovanni interrupted briskly. “If you needed such a service all you had to do was ask. There was no reason for your elaborate charade.”

  “There was no charade.”

  “Of course not, my little lady’s companion. But let me ask you.” He took a step closer, a slow and menacing step that brought him so near that she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. His body protected her from a sudden gust of wind, his cloak whipped around them both. “Are you not afraid that I will tell your secret? Are you not afraid that I will march back into this palazzo and announce to the world that yesterday the widow Lady Graystone was a virgin?”

  She swallowed hard. “No,” she whispered. “I trust you.”

  He should understand how hard it was for her to say those words. Didn’t he know that she had never trusted a man before? Not with her heart, her body, or her secrets. If only he would lean down and kiss her, just once, everything would be right again. She prayed for a kiss. A simple, trusting kiss.

  Giovanni hovered above her, all around her, but there was no kiss forthcoming. “A foolish mistake, such trust, and you are not a foolish woman,” he said in a low, menacing voice. “In fact, you are very shrewd, Lady Graystone. You surely knew I would take one look at your beautiful face and lovely figure and think with my body instead of my brain.” He gave her a slow, sickening smile. “Well, our affair was sweet while it lasted.” He flicked his tongue suggestively at her, and then he stepped quickly past, taking care not to brush against her.

  His words were meant to enrage or injure her, she knew, but she felt only sadness as she watched him walk away.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said, her own heart breaking with every word. I only wanted to love you.

  “You didn’t hurt me,” Giovanni said abruptly, striding to the water steps. He didn’t even glance in her direction. “I got what I wanted out of this arrangement. I got my painting and that is all that matters. But you will have to find someone else to entertain you in the final days of Carnevale, Lady Graystone. I have had my fill of lying English ladies.” He ripped off his mask and flung it into the canal. “I feel sure you will not mind, as I have served my purpose and am surely no longer necessary.”

  He jumped into a gondola, spat instructions in rapid Italian to the gondolier, and lowered himself to sit alone in the passenger seat.

  “Giovanni,” she called softly, just once. He didn’t look back, and a moment later the fog swallowed him completely.

  Audrey arrived at the Palazzo Celesti much earlier than usual. All she wanted was to crawl into bed and cry until she didn’t feel so terrible, to cry until she stopped hurting, to cry until she didn’t hear the betrayal and rage in Giovanni’s voice anymore.

  It wasn’t too much to wish for solitude when her heart was breaking, but she wasn’t to be allowed that small luxury. Norton was awaiting her.

  “Audrey, darling,” he said, not a full minute after she’d come through the front entrance. “You look...” He raked his eyes up and down, his gaze lingering on her disheveled loose hair, her heaving chest, her cold face. She carried the gold mask in her hand. “Well, you look ravishing as always, but I can’t believe you went out without your cloak. You’ll catch your death.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she asked emotionlessly.

  “Good heavens.” He came toward her quickly, arms offered as if for some kind of comfort. “What makes you say such a thing?”

  She managed to skirt him. “I left my cloak behind. Sophia will fetch it tomorrow.”

  “I’m not particularly worried about your cloak,” he said, false concern in his whine. “But I am quite worried about you, dear Audrey. You’re not yourself.”

  She didn’t know what it meant to be herself, not anymore. Maybe she never had. She stopped on the bottom step and turned to face him. “Norton, would you please refrain from calling me Audrey dear and darling Audrey. It positively turns my stomach,” she said, her voice and her pose aloof.

  He lifted his eyebrows, surprised. “But you are dear to me.” He came closer, his dull brown eyes lifted in supplication. “It is my greatest wish that one day I will be as dear to you.”

  Audrey steeled herself. Nothing mattered anymore, not the truth, not the lies. All that mattered at this moment was getting this odious man out of her life, at any cost.

  “I despise you,” she said coldly. “You are lazy, unpleasant, repulsive, and without a single redeeming quality that I have been able to find. The only thing dear to you is my substantial portion of your uncle’s fortune.” She made herself smile. “You will never have it. I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on this earth.” She took a deep breath. “You think my fortune is rightfully yours? Well, let me tell you, I earned every quid,” she seethed inside. “Being your uncle’s wife for three days cost me my innocence, perhaps my very soul.”

  His surprise quickly turned to anger. “You got the better end of the bargain, dear Audrey. Those three days cost Uncle Harry his life.”

  She laughed, a hysterical bark of laughter that rang through the vast palazzo. “You’re beginning to believe your own lies, Norton.” Her laughter died. “Lies that cost me whatever I might have made of my life, lies that made it impossible for me to live again, to truly trust another human being.”

  She turned her back on him and began to walk slowly up the stairs. “Get out of my house, Norton. If you’re still here when I rise in the morning, I’ll have Fiorello toss you into the canal.”

  Minutes after Audrey entered her room, Sophia arrived to help her out of her costume. The wide wonder in the maid’s eyes told Audrey that the girl saw... something. Pain, anger, agony. Sophia was silent throughout the entire process, until Audrey was ready for bed and the maid was making her way from the room. She uttered a soft buona notte.

  “Sophia,” Audrey called before the door had completely closed.

  The maid stuck her head back in. “Yes, Lady Graystone?”

  “Please inform Fiorello that if Mr. Graystone is still here in the morning I want him escorted from the palazzo.”

  Sophia smiled widely. “Yes, Lady Graystone. It will be my pleasure to relay that message.”

  Audrey could almost smile back. “I see you don’t like Norton any more than I do.”

  Sophia whispered conspiratorially, as if they were friends instead of mistress and servant. “He pinched my bottom and tried to grab my breasts, and then he pretended it was an accident. Cretino.”

  “I’m sorry,” Audrey said softly, compelled to apologize for her loathsome nephew by marriage. “He should never have treated you with such disrespect.”

  Sophia shrugged her shoulders and smiled wider. “Oh, I have had my bottom pinched and my breasts fondled before. Never quite so clumsily,” she said, her voice cheery.

  Audrey could not take the transgression so lightly. “He had no right.”

  Sophia’s smile faded. “Do not look so sad, my lady,” she said softly. “Perhaps tomorrow all will be well again.”

  “I don’t think so,” Audrey whispered as Sophia closed the door. She doused the candles and crawled into a big bed thick with blankets, protection against a cold Venice winter night.

  She tried to make herself small beneath the covers, tried to melt into the mattress and disappear. It was the truth, what she’d said to Norton; she’d earned her fortune, paying with a piece of her soul, with her hope and her innocence. />
  Her father had sold her to Sir Harry Graystone. For how much, she didn’t know. In truth, she didn’t want to know. What price does a man place on his daughter? What kind of man would sell a young, frightened girl to a lecherous old man looking for the children his previous three wives... all dead... had been unable to give him?

  She’d been just past her nineteenth birthday, and Sir Harry Graystone had been looking forward to his seventy-first year.

  Graystone had been seeking more than heirs from her, she knew that too well. On her wedding night she’d tried to hide beneath the covers just as she did tonight, huddling, trying to make herself small. When he’d come to her, soft and round, short and wrinkled, smelling of whiskey and wearing a ridiculous bright red dressing gown, she’d told him she was ill, had allowed him to believe she was suffering terribly from her monthly flow.

  He’d been angry, but even so she’d assumed he would leave her and wait for another night.

  He hadn’t. Half-drunk, he’d sat on the side of her bed and poked at her with stubby, wrinkled fingers. He’d run that ancient hand over her neck, unbuttoned her nightdress so he could slip his hand inside and pinch her breasts. He’d told her, while he pinched and squeezed until tears came to her eyes, what he was going to do to her on the many nights to come.

  He’d leaned over her, his mouth close to hers as he whispered vile, terrible things, impossible things she’d never heard of. Sometimes she still remembered the smell that had assaulted her at that moment, a sour, nauseating odor that she was sometimes sure would never leave her memory, no matter how hard she wished it.

  When he’d opened his dressing gown to reveal his soft, wrinkled body, she’d been horrified. He’d wrapped his fingers around his soft manhood and showed her how to stroke it, and when she’d refused he’d grabbed her hand and placed it where he wished, and with his hand over hers he’d guided her movements, growing harder with each stroke, talking breathlessly about how he was going to poke her, how he was going to plow her. She’d been repulsed by the feel of him in her hand, by the way he pinched and slapped at her, and most of all by the very thought of taking this man into her body, night after night after night.

  Beneath the warm blankets, sheltered in her fine Venetian palace, Audrey now huddled, chilled to the bone. The second night had been much like the first, both encounters leaving her with bruises on her breasts and her wrists. But on the third night, the man had decided he’d waited long enough.

  He’d come to her room naked, a distasteful sight even by soft candlelight. Standing beside her bed, he’d stripped back her coverlet and pushed her nightdress roughly to her waist. She’d known then, in a moment of sheer panic, that he was going to do to her everything he’d promised. He proved she was right by grabbing her ankles and spreading her legs wide before climbing heavily atop her.

  She remembered every second of that horrid night. He’d squeezed her breasts till silent tears ran down her cheeks, and when she’d finally sobbed aloud he’d told her to shut up, that performing her wifely function wouldn’t be all that bad.

  She’d known he was wrong. He was going to hurt her, again and again, and in that instant she only wanted to die.

  Yet before Sir Harry Graystone could fulfill his decadent promises, he’d collapsed heavily atop her, his breathing ragged, his whispered “help me” so faint she could barely make out the words.

  How long had she screamed? It had seemed like hours. Even though she could barely breathe, she’d done her best to scream for help. No matter how she’d tried, she couldn’t force the fat, dying man off of her. He’d fought for breath, but seemed as incapable of moving off of her as she was of pushing him aside.

  Trapped beneath a dying man who weighed well more than twice as much as she, she’d cried and screamed hysterically until someone had finally come. She’d suspected the servants had heard her all along. Perhaps they were accustomed to screams and sobs coming from their master’s bed.

  The red-faced valet had rescued her, rolling the rotund Graystone off her body so she could breathe deep again and scramble out of that cursed bed. The valet had even turned his back while she righted her nightdress.

  By the time the physician had arrived, Graystone was dead. They’d said it was his heart, which had surprised Audrey. She hadn’t suspected for a moment that her husband even had one.

  And she was supposed to mourn this man, to cry because he was dead? No wonder everyone believed she’d killed him. Perhaps her sheer relief had shown at the funeral and in the days after.

  When the memories came, they were hard to shake. Tonight she tried to replace the memory of those three nights by closing her eyes and remembering what it had been like to have Giovanni love her. To have him hold her close and tell her how he loved her, to feel his body above and within her own.

  Her heart rate slowed, and the old, too-clear memories faded. For an instant all was well, and then she remembered how Giovanni had looked at her when she’d last seen him. Hurt, angry. Worst of all, at this moment, it was the only image of him she could recall.

  10

  Audrey listened to Pamela and tried to give proper thoughtfulness to her friend’s problems. The girl had arrived at her piazza in a state. Her parents had arranged her marriage and no one knew better than Audrey what hell that could be. She could truly understand her friend’s concern. Still, try as she might to give Pamela the attention she deserved, her mind wandered.

  St. Mark’s Square was bustling this afternoon, with tourists and vendors, ladies and well-dressed gentlemen and Venetian patriots who sat at the outdoor tables of Florian’s Cafe, as she and Pamela did, enjoying fine hot coffee and lively conversation on this cold afternoon.

  Many of the people who passed were obviously tired, having celebrated until dawn. Audrey should have been well rested, since last night she’d stayed at home. She’d spent all of yesterday in bed, pleading a headache. Last night, she’d taken dinner in her room and retired soon after, trying unsuccessfully to find peace in sleep.

  She glanced over Pamela’s shoulder, hoping to spy a familiar head of curling dark hair. Ah, if she did see Giovanni here he would most likely be searching out another subject, a new model. He was hurt, but he wouldn’t grieve for her. He suffered from wounded pride, not a broken heart. He’d recover.

  She didn’t think she ever would. How could she return to London and the gossip that always followed her? How could she continue to live so alone when she now knew what it felt like to love and be loved?

  No one would ever believe that the Black Widow longed for love most of all, that she had a heart that could be so easily broken.

  She tried to return her attention to Pamela’s discourse on her own trials. What kind of a friend was she to tune out her old school chum? To do little more than pretend to listen while she sat here and felt sorry for herself? Not a very good one. Pamela deserved better. Isabel and Pamela and Zeika had made Miss Greenaway’s more than tolerable; they’d made it home.

  “Good afternoon, ladies.” The familiar whine made Audrey’s skin crawl.

  “Norton,” she said, not a hint of warmth in her voice as she turned her head to look at him. “What do you want?”

  He turned his gaze on a suddenly silent Pamela. “If you’ll excuse us,” he said, offering Audrey his arm, “I need a moment alone with my dear Aunt Audrey.”

  Audrey did not take his arm. “I’m sure Pamela can hear whatever it is you have to say.” Perhaps he wanted to beg her to allow him to return to the Palazzo Celesti, or more likely, he wanted to borrow money. Norton was an expert at groveling.

  But he pinned his muddy gaze on her face and smirked. “Dear Audrey,” he said softly. “I don’t think you want your friend to hear this.”

  With a sigh she excused herself, promising to return in a few minutes. She couldn’t be done with this chore soon enough.

  When they were well away from the café, lost in the crowd, Norton smiled. “I have asked you twice to marry me,” he said bright
ly.

  “And I have refused,” she said coolly. “What can I say to make it clear that I will never be your wife?”

  He continued to smile. She didn’t like it. They strolled side by side, but it soon became clear that Norton walked with uncustomary purpose, leading her. They rounded a corner and the red marble lions came into view. “Lovely little square,” he said, gesturing grandly. “Interesting lions. Have you noticed that the Venetians seem to be obsessed with lions?” He stopped and studied the statues that guarded the steps to the raised square. “That one is really quite magnificent,” he said, gesturing lazily.”Why, the only thing that would make it more becoming would be a naked woman standing before it.”

  Her heart leapt to her throat. Coincidence. “What an unusual and inappropriate thought,” she said calmly.

  Norton took a deep breath as if he savored the cold air. “I have the painting, Audrey. Why, it’s quite shocking, another scandal for Lady Graystone.”

  Her vision swam, for a moment. Her knees went weak. “He sold it to you,” she said, wondering why she was surprised.

  “Of course he sold it to me,” Norton said. “The man seemed to be glad to be rid of it, and glad to have the coins I pressed into his palm.” He leaned over, closer to her, and lowered his voice. “He seemed rather relieved to be quit of it, to tell the truth. Tell me, Audrey, did your love affair end badly?”

  She refused to look at him. “What do you want?”

  “Marry me and it’s yours. Refuse me again and I’ll unveil the painting tomorrow midnight, at the final masquerade ball at the Palazzo Bottini.”

  She felt betrayed, as if Giovanni had turned against her all over again. “I can’t marry you,” she whispered. “I won’t.”

  “It’s not as if I care for you,” he said pettily. “You can have all the lovers you want, all the hot-blooded Venetian artists your black heart desires. I only care about the money and properties you took from my poor uncle.”

  She took a deep breath of her own. Apparently Giovanni had not told him that she’d been a virgin when she’d come to Venice. Norton would’ve thrown the fact in her face by now, if he knew. Knowing that Giovanni cared for her enough not to destroy her completely gave her some strength.