The Di Medici Bride

by Heather Graham

  “A majority, yes. Sophia, of course, receives her pension. And, as I mentioned, there are various trust funds and the like.”

  “You’ll have to remain on the prowl for a di Medici husband then, Christina,” Marcus said blandly, then added, “Excuse me, I believe Tony needs some assistance with the wine.”

  He nodded, stiff and straight, dark and immaculate and as cold as the moon, and joined Tony behind a serving cart.

  Anna wandered over to him. Chris saw his smile flash brilliantly, and she wished she could throw him—bound and gagged—into a canal.

  She turned back to Sal and handed him her wineglass. “Sal, I’ve got a terrible headache. I don’t think I’ll be missed here. I’m going to try to slip upstairs.”

  Very nicely, he lifted her fingertips and kissed her hand. “I will miss you, Christina. But go, get some sleep. I’ll see you soon.”

  She smiled her thanks and made a quick disappearance up the stairs. In her room she quickly pulled off her hat and flowing veil and stripped off the depressing black dress.

  When her own father had died she had worn light purple. Her father had hated black. And her mother had ordered the church filled with white lilies, smiling through her tears to say that James had always told her that death was but a new life, and she must always think of it that way.

  Tiredly, Chris crawled into a white gown, but she couldn’t sleep, so she prowled around her room. She stopped in front of her dresser, puzzled as to why she was staring down at it. Then she realized that she was looking at a single earring—a pearl that dangled on a long loop.

  There was only one earring because she’d lost the other on the day Alfred had died. She had barely thought about it at the time…how could she, when a man had died?

  But now it disturbed her, and as she stared at its mate, she slowly understood why.

  She had lost it the day Alfred had died. But she could remember playing with it absently on the vaporetto that had taken her to the galleries. She’d had it on then.

  And both earrings had bounced against her cheeks when she hurried up the steps. Yet she had realized it was gone just before she walked back to the palazzo with Marcus.

  Dizziness swept over her. There could have been only one place where she might have lost it. In the gem salon, when she had pitched to the floor and rolled.

  Chris caught her breath, suddenly remembering the sheet of paper that had fallen right by the di Medici jewel case. Right where her earring would be. What had been on the paper? Something to do with the blackmail…or the murder?

  She shook her head vehemently. She would love to have the paper, but the earring mattered more. If the cloaked figure got into the jewel salon before she did, her earring would be found. And the wielder of the knife, who had sent Alfred running terrified to his death, would know that she had seen everything.

  She had to get into the salon and find her earring.

  Chris forced herself to lie quietly and tried desperately to figure out how. She couldn’t very well ask for a key.

  She lay there, closing her eyes tightly, trying to visualize the galleries. All she could see in her mind was the skylight and the moonglow reflecting on the di Medici jewels.

  Restlessly she tossed and turned until she realized that the skylight was her only chance. She was a mime, with training in gymnastics. If she was careful she could climb to the roof and descend through the skylight, then find her earring and scurry back up.

  The idea terrified her, but it was her only chance.

  * * *

  By the next morning it seemed that the household was beginning to return to normal. The galleries were still closed, but when Chris came downstairs—as late as possible, in the hope that she would be alone—she learned from Genovese that Marcus and Tony had gone to direct some workmen at the Church of the Little Flower.

  She thanked Genovese, and felt a little unnerved when he hovered near her. She thought that he was about to say something, but Gina came out to the table. Genovese seated her, then left.

  Chris tried to talk to Gina, but Gina wasn’t in the best of moods. Or perhaps she had dropped all pretense of courtesy for the day. She looked at Chris and murmured, “It is surprising how people die when you’re around, isn’t it, Christina?”

  Chris excused herself immediately. She left the house and searched the streets until she found a shop where she could buy some strong cord and a grappling hook.

  * * *

  Chris waited until midnight, feeling all the while that she was an idiot. She was going to dress in dark clothing and break into the di Medici galleries like a sneak thief. It was a truly idiotic plan—it was just that she couldn’t see any other way. She wanted to trust Marcus; she just didn’t dare. She didn’t dare let anyone know that she had been in the galleries the night Alfred Contini had died.

  She wasn’t expecting anyone to be up and around at that hour, but she still planned her exit carefully. The stretchy black outfit she wore could have been street clothing; it was composed of a leotard and knit pants. And her gym slippers could have passed for regular shoes. Her hair was bound at her nape so as not to get in her way, and she carried her rope and grappling hook in what could have passed for a large leather purse.

  But she needn’t have feared for her appearance as she left the palazzo. She didn’t pass a soul when she crept out of the still crepe-decked mansion.

  Once she reached the via Chris felt a real case of nerves coming on. Not only was she going to try to scale walls and avoid the alarm system of the galleries, she was walking through streets that were darkly shadowed and might be plagued by an ordinary mugger.

  Chris grimaced as she hurried along, closely hugging to the walls. It would be just her luck, she decided, to be knocked out cold before she ever reached her real destination, to get into real trouble.

  But if she didn’t go back…

  If the cloaked figure with the lethal knife discovered the earring that was so easily identifiable as hers…

  She started to shiver again, then took a deep breath and gave herself a mental shake. She was on her way; all she had to do was carry through. Get into the gem salon, get out again.

  It would probably make more sense to get out of Venice.

  But she couldn’t leave. Not now. For her father, for Alfred Contini, the truth had to be known. Even if that truth might include Marcus di Medici.

  Chris blocked her mind to all but the task at hand when she reached the square and stared up at the galleries. Even the flagpoles were still draped in black crepe.

  She stared at the columns, but knew she didn’t want to go in by the front. On the side near the water was a workman’s scaffold; she could climb that to the first-floor overhang, scurry up to the skylight, secure the rope on one of the gargoyles facing the canal and lower herself to the floor. Easy?

  So easy that she was shaking again once she had climbed up the scaffolding. She looked below her. The canal was dark; no gondolas were slipping by in the night. She couldn’t hear a sound from the square. Inhaling, then exhaling, Chris stared at the overhang that would take her to the skylight. It wasn’t particularly steep, she assured herself. If she fell, well, she would be one American lost in a Venetian canal. But she wasn’t going to fall. She was going to hold tight to the roof tiles until she reached the skylight.

  Chris began to climb. She felt grit on the tiles and was glad, because it gave her a better hold. She didn’t look down. Inch by inch she edged along, a hand, a foot, a hand, a foot. And then she was there.

  She hurried along the roof, forced herself to slow her pace, and then pulled the bag from her shoulder to secure the rope around a particularly macabre gargoyle—one with its tongue out and twisted—before moving to the skylight. The hinge was stubborn, but there was no lock on it. With a little grunting and maneuvering Chris managed to pull it open. She lowered herself through, wincing as she felt the rope tighten around her body. She had judged things just a little short; her feet dangled about six inches
from the floor.

  She freed herself from the rope and dropped those six inches with a little thud. Just like a cat, she thought, a cat burglar! Oh, don’t! she wailed to herself. Find the paper, find your earring, and get back out!

  It was dark in here again tonight; the only light in the room was from the moon. Chris looked up. With the skylight open she could see the moon itself, still almost a full circle.

  She had landed less than a foot from the case with the di Medici jewels. Starting to feel a little frantic again, she began to crawl around on her hands and knees. The floor felt a little strange, she thought. As if it were made of wood here, instead of marble. But the jewel case sat on a rich throw rug, so it was impossible to see what was beneath. And did it matter? All she needed to do was find the—

  Paper. There it was. It had fallen to the rear. Chris reached for the note. She had to stare at it hard in the moonlight, and then she saw what was written. She didn’t have to know Italian to understand it. Alfred’s name was on it, and an unsigned demand for umpteen million lire.

  Chris couldn’t begin to compute the sum in American dollars; she only knew that it was vast.

  A cloud moved over the moon, blocking some of the light. Chris hurriedly tucked the note into her waistband, then kept crawling around. Here, right here, was where she had been the other night. The earring had to be here.

  And then she saw it, too. Almost directly beneath the case. In the almost complete darkness that shrouded the place now that the moon was covered, Chris could see the gleam of gold. She stretched her fingers far beneath the case.

  And then suddenly she screamed in amazement and terror as the floor opened directly beneath her. She vaguely heard a snap, as if a hinge had given way.

  And then she was falling, rolling, sliding helplessly through what seemed to be an absolutely endless chute, so amazed and totally stunned that she couldn’t even scream again as she desperately tried to stop her wild flight.

  She gasped for breath as the chute began to level off; then she gasped again as even the chute disappeared and she went into a free-fall.

  But not a long one. In total darkness she landed hard on a cold stone floor.

  Shocked, shaken, shivering and trying to regain her breath, Chris closed her eyes while the question of where she could be raged violently through her head. She opened her eyes. Oh, God, was it dark! She closed them again. When she opened them a second time she could make out shapes in the darkness. Boxes, it looked like, with something on top of them. Long rectangular boxes.

  She shivered and swallowed, testing her limbs carefully for breaks or bruises. She seemed to be okay. There was a scuffling noise near her, and she bit her lip, panicking at the thought of rats or snakes or other creatures. She moved, and gave a little scream as something soft and clinging brushed her face.

  Spiderwebs! Chris clawed them from her face with a vengeance, shivering as she wondered what might be crawling through her hair. Then she warned herself that she was about to panic and she closed her eyes, shuddering one last time, and yelling silently at herself that if she was ever going to get out of wherever she was, she was going to have to figure it out first.

  She groped her way to her knees, then crawled up to the nearest box. It wasn’t a box. It was some kind of stone. She ran her hand over the thing on the top, and then paused, another scream forming in her throat.

  The box was a tomb—and the “thing” on top was a sculptured relief of whoever was lying inside.

  All the boxes were tombs. Ancient tombs, carved by stonecutters in centuries long past.

  She had fallen into the family crypt.

  A spider crawled over her hand where it lay on the stone breast of a long-deceased di Medici count. Chris did scream then; she tried to rise, only to bump her head against the low archway of the catacombs.

  And then she thought that she would have a heart attack herself; her blood seemed to congeal, her breath to stop, and her muscles to become paralyzed.

  She heard a long low chuckle from the darkness. From the graveyard of the di Medicis.

  A blinding light flared in her eyes, and a husky male voice murmured, “Buona sera, Christina. What an odd way for a guest to spend her evenings.”

  “Marcus!” Chris screamed, and heedless of anything but the desperate desire to escape the dank aura of death, she hurled herself into his arms.

  He stiffened immediately, holding her from him. “Christina, what are you doing here?”

  “I lost my earring,” she babbled quickly.

  “You lost your earring, so you broke into the gem salon?”

  Oh, God! He doubted her! He was going to force her to stay down here; he sounded so terribly remote, and in the artificial gleam of the flashlight his eyes seemed like blue flames, filled with an implacable fire.

  Marcus…perhaps Marcus couldn’t have murdered his own father. But he did need money. He had been in the square just seconds after Alfred had died. She didn’t want to believe him guilty, but someone in his household was. Why not he? Just because she was a woman who had fallen foolishly in love?

  The way he was looking at her right now…as if he’d gladly crack her over the head with his flashlight and leave her to reside among his ancestors forever after…

  “I swear to you, I lost an earring, nothing more. I wasn’t trying to steal any gems.”

  “Then why didn’t you just ask me to let you into the salon?” he demanded pleasantly.

  “Because, because…” She couldn’t tell him it was because she hadn’t been sure that he hadn’t been the one running around in a cloak and brandishing a razor-edged knife.

  She swallowed quickly, thinking desperately. “Because of Alfred’s death. I—I didn’t want you to open the galleries. You haven’t been particularly talkative lately, you know.” She tried to add a tremor—not difficult—and a great deal of sweet plaintiveness to her voice. Georgianne had once given her a great French philosophy: when all else fails, flirt like hell.

  He didn’t seem at all ready to let her off the hook. He leaned casually against one of the tombs, resting the flashlight on top of it and crossing his arms over his chest.

  “You might have killed yourself, you know,” he told her flatly. But then he smiled, and in the eerie surroundings of the tomb his smile was both disturbing and frightening. She might truly have met a demon among the dead. “But what the hell, if you’re missing one earring, scale a wall and a roof and drop twenty feet from a skylight. No big deal. Especially when you might have just asked.”

  Chris carefully ducked from below the arch and moved closer to him, moistening her lips and trying to avoid staring at the symmetrical rows of ancient sarcophagi. “Marcus, please get me out of here. If I was almost killed anywhere, it was coming down that chute from the trapdoor.”

  He shrugged. “You wouldn’t have been killed.” He smiled again. “The fall down that chute isn’t a lethal one. Scary, and a little bumpy, but certainly not lethal. I pulled the trap.”

  “You!”

  He hiked a brow curiously, still as relaxed as if they were carrying on their conversation at a sunny kitchen table. It was absurd, Chris thought, that he could still appear so absolutely arresting, so dark and fascinating, when she wasn’t at all sure that he didn’t mean to leave her there and when he was telling her that her predicament was his fault.

  “Tell me, if you thought you had a sneak thief in a position to be snared, what would you do? Trapping the thief would seem an intelligent thing to do, don’t you agree?”

  Chris didn’t respond. She forced herself not to back away from him. “What—what are you doing here yourself?”

  He patted the stone relief beneath him. “Visiting Great-Great-Great-Great Uncle Francis?”

  “Marcus!”

  He smiled again, coldly, and picked up the flashlight, throwing its glow to the right. There was an archway there, but it had been bricked in. The di Medici crest was on the bricks.

  “There were a number of deca
des somewhere in the 1500s when my ancestors didn’t have such neat and tidy burials. They were simply laid upon vaults.” He shrugged. “The masons are coming tomorrow to work again, and I must decide what to do about that section of the crypts.”

  “At—at one A.M.?” Chris asked weakly.

  He smiled. “We’re a late-night people.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t believe me? I catch you breaking into the gem salon, and you don’t believe me? Christina, the palazzo is mine. I have a right to be wherever I choose within it.”

  “In the crypt?”

  “It’s my crypt!”

  Chris let out a long breath. He had moved the flashlight again. She could see the full body relief on the stone where he sat. It was a man with carved stone boots, medieval leggings and a thin crown around his curling stone hair. His eyes were closed; his arms were reverently crossed over his chest. His facial structure was very similar to Marcus’s. There was a thin silver spiderweb over his face, stretching to the sword he held against his form.

  She found that she wasn’t breathing very well. “Marcus… could we please get out of here?”

  He paused, staring at her in the strange and macabre light. Then he sighed. “You’re not going to tell me what you were doing, are you, Christina?” he asked her softly. A trembling sensation danced all along her spine at the sound of his voice, echoing slightly.

  “I told you—”

  “Yes, you dressed up all in black and went out scaling the walls. And wound up trapped—by the di Medici jewels.” He stood, and she moved backward slightly, bumping her head against the arch again. He smiled grimly, but made no move to touch her. “You should have continued your pursuit of a di Medici husband. Wives do get the jewels, you know.”

  “Marcus, please.”

  “Ah, yes! Marcus, please! Good thing to say right now, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t even know where I was—or what these…things were.”