Isolde curtseyed modestly and shot a hidden laughing glance at Luca. ‘Of course,’ she said.
The five of them set out in the gondola. Freize would accompany them and wait with the other servants in the servants’ room. The gondola would moor at the quay beside the house, bring back Ishraq and Isolde from their visit, and then go out again for Luca and Brother Peter. The men thought they would be out till late, perhaps past midnight.
The men were wearing the hoods of their capes over their heads, and dark plain masks over their eyes. Isolde could see only Luca’s smiling lips as he looked at her strange beauty. She had a dark blue cape with a dark blue hood pulled over her fair hair. She wore a mask which covered her forehead, eyes and nose, so that her dark blue eyes gleamed at him through the slits of the mask. Blue feathers sprouted from the side of the mask and curled like a high question mark around her head. She looked exotic and strange and lovely. Beside her, Ishraq in black was like a beautiful sleek shadow, only her mouth showing below a black mask which was shaped like a dark moon and starred with silver.
Luca leaned towards Isolde and whispered to her, his mouth against her ear. ‘I have never in my life seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said.
Isolde, quite entranced, turned and smiled at him, her dark eyes gleamed through the slits in the mask.
‘Meet me,’ Luca whispered to her. ‘Meet me tonight. As soon as we can get away from this party.’
He felt, rather than heard her swift gasp of shock and knew he had gone too far, stepped too close. He waited for her refusal, for a moment he was afraid that she would be offended. But then she leaned her head a little towards him and breathed, rather than whispered her reply.
‘I will.’
The city was in carnival mood, every window overlooking the Grand Canal bright with candlelight and every dark canal and quayside busy with bobbing gondolas.
Sometimes they glimpsed a couple entwined in the double seat of a gondola, their hoods drawn forward to hide their kisses, their hidden hands seeking to touch. In some, a pair of lovers had gone into the cabin of the gondola and closed the doorway, leaving the gondolier to idle in the stern, keeping the ship steady in the water as the clandestine candlelight shone through the slats of the door and windows. Brother Peter turned his head away and crossed himself to prevent the infection of sin.
On the quayside, as their gondola approached the palace, they could see a huge crowd, beautifully dressed in the extraordinary costumes. Men dressed as monsters and angels, women in silks of every colour towering high as they stood on the chopines that were the mark of a fashionable lady. Some of them were dressed so brightly, and stood so proudly, that it was clear, even to the young travellers, that the women were showing themselves off for sale. They were the famous Venetian courtesans, and it would cost a man a small fortune to spend a night with any one of them, traded like everything else in this merchants’ city.
Everywhere people were mingling, talking, flirting behind their masks, sometimes pushing their masks on top of their heads to expose their lips for a stolen kiss, sometimes turning away into a quiet garden or a darkened doorway. Isolde glimpsed the smiling face of a woman as a man took her hand and led her into the shadows. At the quayside she saw a man lightly step from one rocking boat into another, laughing like a child on stepping stones, invited by the wave of a silver glove.
It was irresistibly exciting. Every gondola burned a torch at the stern, or carried a swinging lantern at the prow, and the young women could see that men and women were making assignations on the water, and then their gondolas would slip away together to the darker side canals, where they would drift side by side so that the women could flirt behind their painted fans, and the men make extravagant promises.
On the white stone quayside the wooden chopines clattered like castanets as if they were inviting men to come and dance. Bursts of music came from one doorway and another and they could hear the bright laughter of men and women. Isolde exchanged one longing glance with Luca as if she wished that the two of them could go somewhere alone together at once, and dance and laugh and kiss.
‘Isolde,’ Ishraq whispered a warning to her. ‘Your mask doesn’t hide what you are thinking. You look as if you are ready to sin like a Venetian.’
A ready flush rose from Isolde’s neck to her cheeks. ‘Ishraq,’ she said quietly. ‘I have to kiss him again. I think I will die if I don’t kiss him.’
Ishraq could not restrain a shocked giggle. ‘Really? But you said . . .’
The great watergate to the palace stood open, the bright torches reflected in the glassy waters of the canal as the gondolas queued to enter the palace and leave the guests on the red carpet which stretched extravagantly, to the brink of the lapping dark water.
‘It is like a strange other world,’ Isolde marvelled. ‘So much wealth and so much beauty.’
‘So much sin!’ Brother Peter mourned quietly.
At last it was their turn and their gondola slid through the archway and drew up to the palace steps. Brightly costumed servants stepped forwards to steady the craft, but before they could get out, Isolde glanced back to the canal and saw a gondola with four beautiful women hesitate at the water entrance behind them, the women exquisitely painted and rouged, and wearing high headdresses and exotic masks. One of them waved a lazy hand to Luca and called out the name of her house. ‘On the Grand Canal,’ she said. ‘Come at midnight when you leave here!’
‘Sin all around us,’ Brother Peter said, shaking his head in horror.
‘I know what I said about never kissing a man before marriage!’ Isolde whispered fervently to Ishraq, as she rose to her feet and pulled her hood forwards. ‘But that was weeks ago, it was before we pretended to be married. And then he kissed me, so I know what it’s like now, and besides it’s carnival, and everyone, everywhere we go is courting and making love.
‘Don’t you see it?’ she urged her friend. ‘Don’t you feel it? It’s as if the very air is caressing the skin of my neck, is touching my lips. Don’t you feel it? I can hardly breathe for desire.’
Isolde stepped out of the gondola and stood at the water’s edge. Ishraq was helped on shore and took her hand and held it tightly as they waited for the two men to disembark. ‘Isolde, what are you going to do?’
Isolde’s dark blue eyes glittered like sapphires through the dark blue of her mask. ‘Will you help me?’
‘Of course! Always! But not to a disaster. Shouldn’t I be holding you back?’
‘No,’ Isolde said. ‘Not any more.’
‘We’ll follow you as you go in,’ Brother Peter said, getting out of the gondola and gesturing that the two young women should lead the way up the stairs to the inside of the palace. Isolde, as if recalled to the proper behaviour for a young woman of a noble family, tightened the tie on her mask and went up the marble steps into the brightly lit house.
They were expected, and at once a lady-in-waiting took the two young women up the sweeping stairs to the upper floor where the lady of the house was entertaining her friends. Menservants greeted Luca and Brother Peter and took their capes and hats, leaving them in their dark masks, and showed them up to the first floor. Freize, always at his happiest when he was heading towards dinner, stepped into the servants’ hall at the canal side.
As she climbed the stairs, Isolde looked back and saw Luca swallowed up by the crowd of young men, and heard the rattle of dice and a cheer as someone won a small fortune at cards, and a ripple of laughter from the courtesans who would entertain the men, while the ladies had to go up to the next floor.
‘Greetings, how pleasant to meet you.’ The lady of the house, Lady Carintha, came forward and took their hands. She was an elegant woman, dressed in dark blue, almost the match of Isolde’s gown, except that hers plunged low at the front and almost slid off her broad shoulders in an open invitation. Her shining gold hair was piled up on the top of her head, in a swirl of blue silk, except for three ringlets which fell over her creamy naked s
houlders. Her eyes, a calculating blue, scanned the two young women and her rouged mouth smiled without warmth.
‘You can take your masks off now we are indoors and among friends.’ She exclaimed at their beauty. ‘Oh my dears! How you are going to break hearts in this wicked city of ours! One of you so very fair and one so very dark, no man could resist the two of you. Most of them will want both of you together!’
She drew them forwards and introduced them to other ladies, who were drinking wine from brightly coloured glasses and eating small sweet pastries. ‘Some wine?’ She pressed a couple of glasses on them. ‘But I daresay I should not praise your looks, for you will have heard it all before. You will have dozens of lovers already, you must tell me all about them.’
‘Not at all,’ Isolde said, flushing.
The lady laughed and patted her cheek. ‘Only a matter of time for both of you, only a matter of moments, I swear it. Indeed! Why not tonight? I can’t believe how beautiful you are, and you match so well together. You must always go around together, you are each a perfect foil for the other.’ She turned to Ishraq. ‘You must have a lover, I am sure! Someone who prefers brunettes?’
Ishraq shook her head, not at all flattered by the woman’s cloying warmth. ‘No. We have been brought up very carefully. I have no husband.’
‘Someone else’s husband then?’ someone suggested, prompting laughter from all the ladies.
‘My lady’s brother is very strict,’ Ishraq said, hiding her irritation behind a polite smile. ‘We go out very little.’
‘The older brother, yes! You can see it clearly. No one would invite him for an affair of the heart. But the other brother, the younger one, Luca Vero, now he cannot be so very virtuous? Surely? Don’t disappoint me! He is truly a man that turns heads! No one as tempting as that could be monkish.’
Someone else laughed and agreed. ‘Turns heads! I’d turn down the sheets!’
‘We were looking out of the window at him! We are so jealous of Carintha having him for a neighbour,’ one of the ladies told Ishraq, squeezing her elbow. ‘We’ve all laid bets on her taking her own gondola and serenading him! She would, you know. She’s quite shameless! If she sets her heart on him, she’ll have him!’
They laughed, again, as Ishraq silently detached herself from the stranger’s hold.
‘You’d open your front door for me, wouldn’t you?’ Lady Carintha asked, putting her hand on Isolde’s arm. ‘Open the door and let me run up the stairs to your brother’s room?’
Isolde gave a little shiver, but did not shake off the unwelcome caress. ‘I am sorry. I would not be allowed,’ she said shortly.
‘Then he’ll have to give me a key himself!’ Her ladyship smiled and turned to take a glass of wine. Ishraq saw Isolde grit her teeth, and tweaked her sleeve to remind her to be polite to her hostess.
‘Make sure you tell him that I shall visit,’ Lady Carintha turned back and whispered to both girls. ‘I am absolutely serious. I had one look at him and I knew who would be my lover for this Carnevale. Good Lord, I might not be able to give him up for Lent!’
Isolde made a little exclamation and tore herself away from Lady Carintha’s touch. Her ladyship hardly noticed.
‘I’ve never failed,’ she went on to one of her friends, ignoring Isolde’s half-turned back. ‘I’ve never failed to capture a young man once I’ve set my heart on him. Do you think he is a virgin? That would be too delicious! I shall be as innocent as him! You know I think I could tremble. D’you know, I think I could gasp?’
‘Surely he can’t be!’
‘Not with looks like that!’
‘Someone must have beaten you to it, Carintha!’
‘This is unbearable!’ Isolde exclaimed in an undertone to Ishraq.
‘Be patient,’ she replied. ‘We only have to stay for an hour. And have you seen her earrings?’
‘What about them?’ Isolde said crossly.
‘Half English nobles,’ Ishraq pointed out. ‘Drilled for the clasp.’
There was gambling for the ladies in this salon too, and conversation, though there was little to talk about but fashion and love affairs. Isolde drew Ishraq away from the spiteful women and towards the gambling tables. There were musicians playing in one corner and half a dozen women dancing listlessly together.
‘I am afraid that I have no money,’ Ishraq confessed to Carintha, who followed them, sipping greedily from her wine glass. ‘I didn’t think to bring any. Though I changed some money only a few days ago. I bought English gold nobles, I changed all that I had into English nobles. Do you think that was wise?’
‘Oh! aren’t they divine? They’re all I use now,’ Carintha replied. ‘As clean as if someone had washed them for me. Have you seen my earrings?’
‘She just remarked on them,’ Isolde said.
‘Aren’t they lovely?’ Lady Carintha turned her head one way and another so that they could see. In her ears, dangling from gold pins, were two half noble coins. ‘I’m having a necklace made of them too. I shall start a fashion. Everyone will want them.’
‘They are such pretty coins. Are they minted in Venice?’ Ishraq wondered aloud, watching the play at the table and not looking at Carintha at all.
‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘They are English, through and through. My husband trades in them. They come from the English treasure house at Bordeaux. When they lost Bordeaux last year the French captured their treasury, all the wealth of John of Bedford, the Regent of France. And now they need nobles so badly in England that they are buying them back again. They have no gold at all, poor things. My husband works with all the English merchants and they are buying up nobles by the thousand and sending them home to England.’ She laughed. ‘And every day, the poor dears have to pay more gold for their own coins because now everyone wants them!’
A woman went past her and flicked Carintha’s earring, making it dance. ‘Delightful,’ she said. ‘Amusing.’
‘And where does your husband get the English nobles from?’ Isolde asked lightly. ‘Since the English themselves don’t have enough?’
‘Oh, the most amusing Jewish banker,’ Lady Carintha volunteered. ‘You would not think, to look at him, that he had a penny to rub, one against the other. But he supplies my husband with English nobles, and so I get my pretty earrings!’
‘Convenient,’ Ishraq remarked.
‘But as for you two lovely girls,’ Lady Carintha went on to Ishraq, ‘it doesn’t matter that you have no money with you. You can borrow from me and repay me next week. I shall be your banker. I should think that your credit is good enough! We all hear that the handsome young man has a ship coming in from Russia any day now! And your young lady is a great heiress, is she not?’
‘Unimaginably so,’ Ishraq said, honest at last. ‘You could not imagine her fortune. Not even I can truly describe it.’
The party for the ladies broke up at about ten o’clock, and they left by the outer staircase while the party for the gentlemen was still, noisily, in full swing on the first floor. Clearly – as the women rouged their lips and tied masks on their faces and slipped away in their gondolas – many of them were going on to other parties or to assignations. Lady Carintha was going to join the men who were still gambling. She winked at her friend and Isolde heard her whisper Luca’s name.
‘But we have to go home,’ Ishraq remarked resentfully as Freize helped her into the gondola. ‘When all the world is free to walk around and do as they please.’
‘Let’s get the gondola to drop us on the quay and walk about,’ Isolde suggested quietly. ‘Nobody will know who we are, since we have our masks and our capes, and Brother Peter is not at home to know what time we get in.’
‘Oh yes!’ Ishraq exclaimed, and turned and told the gondolier to let them get out at the steps in the side canal, they would enter through the side door. The gondolier’s smile and Freize’s silent nod told them at once that neither man believed for a moment that the women were going straight into the house; b
ut it was carnival time and anything was allowed, even for wealthy young ladies. The gondolier set them down where they asked, and then pushed off with Freize still aboard, to go back to wait for Brother Peter and Luca to emerge from the gambling party.
Arm in arm, the girls sauntered around the streets revelling in their sense of freedom, in walking along the shadowy quays with the silk of their gowns swishing around their ankles, their masks hiding their faces, knowing that they looked strange and exotic and beautiful in this strange and beautiful city.
Almost every doorway stood open and there were lights and parties inside. Every so often someone called to them and invited them to come in and take some wine, come in and dance. Laughingly, Isolde refused and they walked on, loving the sense of excitement and adventure.
‘What a horrible woman Lady Carintha is,’ Isolde remarked as they turned their steps homeward again.
‘Because she said that she wanted Luca, and asked you to let her into his room?’ Ishraq teased. ‘She thinks you’re his sister, she was not to know that you . . .’
‘That I – what?’ Isolde asked, coming to a standstill.
Ishraq was not at all intimidated. ‘That you would be so offended at the thought of taking her to him.’
‘I was offended. Anyone would be offended. She’s old enough to be his mother. Ugh, with those ridiculous coins in her ears!’
‘It’s not because of her age or her appearance. Besides, she’s not more than thirty. You were upset that she wants to take him as her lover because you want him for yourself!’
For a moment she thought that her friend would take offence, for Isolde had stopped still, and then she suddenly admitted: ‘It’s true! I can’t pretend to you or to myself any longer! I want him so much it’s like a fever! I can think of nothing else but what it would be like if he were to hold me, if he were to touch me, if he were to kiss me. I know I am mad to think like this. But I can’t think of anything else. He asked me to meet him, and I didn’t answer, but I was longing to say “yes”.’
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