Venice

by Lynne Connolly

  “What is this place?”

  He didn’t stop his caresses. “It’s an old palazzo that’s seen better days. From the outside it’s unremarkable enough, but the view is lovely—” He broke off and I turned my head to see him looking at me, smiling. It was clear he didn’t mean the view over the Grand Canal. “It was owned by some grandee who came to a sticky end a hundred years ago after a meteoric rise and a great fall, the kind Italians seem to specialise in.”

  “The only Italian I’m really familiar with is Machiavelli. Ian and I read The Prince together one rainy summer years ago.” I let my mind slip back to that time when I was still hopeful, still eager to appear at the local assemblies, sure someone would want me. My quiet, scholarly brother introduced me to things other than fashion. I had reason to be grateful to him as I’d now married a man with an agile, intelligent mind.

  “A name to conjure with,” he said now. “Machiavelli worked for Cesare Borgia, who was the pattern for many a petty prince of the time. A Pope’s son, no less.”

  I turned over so I could look at him properly. “You’re joking! How can a Pope have a son?”

  “The same way anybody else has one, my sweet.” He smiled at my naïveté. “Roderic Borgia was the first Pope to acknowledge them as his children, though many had paraded their nieces and nephews in front of the Papal court before him.”

  “I suppose Ian thought I was too delicate to be given such information,” I said, smiling. “His sense of chivalry must be greater than I thought. I shall have to rely on you to tell me the scandals attached to the classics, won’t I?”

  He gave a short laugh. “You should ask Gervase. He knows far more than I do. He used study and research as his crutch when his lover left him languishing in Rome.”

  “Poor Gervase.” I thought of Richard’s brother, how he’d been forced to give up the man he loved for the sake of society and convention. I understood so much more since I’d fallen so hard for Richard. Unlike ours, Gervase’s love story had no happy ending.

  Richard shrugged. “He seems to have done well enough since.”

  I wasn’t shocked at his seeming callousness. I knew much of the story, and guessed some of the rest. Gervase had run off with his male lover, a respectable married man, thus outraging society’s morals and its territorial imperatives in one go. The lover had been persuaded to return after six months, but Gervase had spent the next eleven years abroad, eventually returning from India so wealthy that people would forgive him anything.

  Richard had been forced to face the consequences at home, and only Gervase and I really knew how much that experience had damaged him. He had faced it, become cold and uncaring, a strong citadel, until I had stormed the ramparts I wasn’t even aware of, seeing only him and my need of him, not knowing enough of his history then to know what I had done.

  “Have you heard from Gervase about the shooting—and the explosion?” I asked Richard now, this being the first time I had thought of it since yesterday.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. He’ll let us know the moment Thompson’s turns anything up, but either he’s not been successful yet or the information is still on the road.”

  “I saw the explosion—or at least the aftermath.” His hands stopped their rhythmical caresses and he stared seriously at me. “I was on the packet that left that morning. The yacht exploded, Richard, it didn’t catch fire and it was no accident. Only then did I appreciate the precautions you were making us take, and only then I was glad of it.”

  He stared at me, his eyes bleak, then touched my cheek. “It must have shocked you.” I nodded. “I saw nothing. I went the other way, took passage that night, so I was in France by the time it happened.”

  “You haven’t told me about your journey,” I reminded him.

  “There’s nothing to tell, really. I’ve taken it before, although the sea passage was different, but I was soon on the usual road again. I travelled mainly on horseback, and I took public transport when I tired or when I took to the water. I kept travelling as much as I could to get here first, and make sure everything was in order. I made enquiries with people I could trust, left messages and made sure you weren’t followed.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I had people watching as you passed. They would have killed anyone suspicious if they felt the need. I was taking no chances with you, my sweet life.”

  I was startled at his ruthlessness on my behalf. I realised at that point he was quite capable of killing the Ravens if they became dangerous to us. I knew I meant as much to him as he did to me, and I wondered if I would kill for him. Reluctantly, I realised I might very well do so.

  “I would have been safer staying in Devonshire and marrying Tom Skerrit after he confessed his passion for me, wouldn’t I?”

  He lifted his brows and I realised I had inadvertently let out Tom’s secret. I was at once sorry for it. “I didn’t mean to tell you about Tom. You won’t tell him you know, will you?”

  He touched my shoulder in a gentle caress. “I knew already. I saw the way he looked at you sometimes, when he thought no one was watching. When did he tell you? Was it when you were captured?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I thought it was just the appalling mess we found ourselves in, but it’s not so. He said he realised he loved me when I went to Yorkshire, and he missed me more than he thought he would.”

  Richard stared at my midriff, lost in thought. “I see. So I’m fortunate he didn’t realise before?”

  I took his hand. “A marriage with Tom would have been suitable, far more than one to Steven Drury. Before I met you, I’d have been happy to accept him, for friendship’s sake, but when I saw you I knew what I wanted. Or at least, when I saw you after the accident, when you were hurt and you needed help. Before that, you seemed remote, someone almost inhuman.”

  He gazed at me, through me as if he wasn’t seeing me, his expression unfathomable. “I wanted it that way. I cut myself off from the world but the first time I saw you everything changed. I had reconciled myself to a life without love but with as much power as I could draw to myself. Julia was part of that, you know.”

  “How so?”

  “I knew she could never touch me emotionally. I didn’t know she had any kind of feelings for me, other than triumph. I never wanted this, you know; you’ve disrupted my life completely.” He looked at my face and seemed to come back to me. The glow returned to his eyes.

  I smiled at him, glad I’d disrupted such a sad life, glad I’d had the courage to accept his word, to let him see how much I wanted him. He had so much to offer it would have been a tragedy to put all that aside.

  I put my hand up. He caught it and carried it to his lips, his gaze never leaving mine. “I still don’t understand what it was about me. No, don’t pay me any extravagant compliments, but look at it from the outside. I was a daughter of the gentry, overlooked by my peers, no style, in deepest black after the first week I met you. I never understood why you should look at me. Lizzie is far more beautiful than me, and Julia Cartwright too, everything a fashionable lady should be. I’ll never stop thanking God that you chose me, but I’ll never understand why.” It was the truth, and a measure of my trust in him that I chose to tell him the secrets my pride had kept close for so many years.

  He kept hold of my hand and gave me truth for truth. “I flirted with marriage for years. I chose the most dazzling debutantes, encouraging them and then abandoning them. They called me dangerous, but I was looking for something I didn’t understand. The first time I saw you, I knew. Do you remember?”

  I remembered his cold, blue stare, the incredulous glance from Gervase as he recognised what his brother had just felt. “I thought you were looking at Lizzie.”

  “I never noticed her. Most unlike me,” he said smiling. “It was always you, and I knew if I didn’t have you I was doomed. I suddenly understood what I would be missing in a loveless life.”

  “So you’re not here with Julia, but with me.”

 
He sat completely still, all his attention on my face. “I would never have brought Julia here.” He grinned and his mood lightened. “She would have made me sell it and buy something more appropriate to her station.”

  “I like it.”

  “You’ve only seen the drawing room and the bedroom,” he said smiling.

  “That’s all I need to see.” I reached my hands up and pulled him down to kiss me and love me again.

  I was becoming more adventurous in my loving, feeling more secure. I knew he was a connoisseur of the art, but he was letting me find my own way and become more confident in what I did. Comfortably lying on a bed in the afternoon with a man, both of us naked would have been beyond my understanding a year ago. Being able to initiate the act of love would have been completely foreign to me, but with Richard, it felt so natural.

  He seemed to enjoy my enthusiasm, my desire to explore, and this time he took my hand, showed me what to do to please him, and I accepted it gladly—touched him and felt his shaft harden beneath my hand.

  He kissed me. “Do you remember when you showed me your poor bruised body, I promised to kiss every bruise away? Well I couldn’t do it then, but I think I can remember where most of the marks were.”

  I swear he kissed every inch of me, lingering at my breasts, and coming to a halt at the most intimate part of my body. His close examination left me with no blushes, but moaning with the need for his touch. He made me wait before he touched, explored, kissed, with a lavishness I had never known before. He sent me to heights I would never have imagined existed before I knew him until there was only one thing I wanted. I squirmed under him restlessly, but he wouldn’t let me go, holding my hips firmly so he could plunder me and drive me insane with wanting him.

  He murmured, “Sweet as honey,” and then he came inside me.

  With one powerful twist of his body, he turned us so I was on top. Pushing against the bed, I sat up, delighting in the control he had just given me and the sight of his beautiful body under me. He waited for me with a smile curving his mouth. When I moved, I heard him catch his breath in a responsive “Ah!” I laughed, joy and bliss combined.

  It was my turn to give pleasure, but I received as much as I gave. I rode him, as he’d shown me, but my riding skills were improving all the time and I added a few variations he didn’t expect until I had him groaning my name. He tried to turn under me, but I didn’t want to surrender my control, so I planted my knees firmly on either side of his body, and carried on. I urged us both on, felt his hands on my breasts, on my waist, losing their careful elegance in favour of fumbling urgency.

  He drew up his knees so I could lean back against them, and then pulled me by my hips hard on to him. I cried out in exultation. Then I found I couldn’t think any more, so I let him take over. He sat up to take me in his arms and drove us both on to satisfaction.

  We sank on to the bed, wet with sweat, exhausted by passion, and lay there for a long time, twined around each other.

  “My God, my God,” he whispered, laughing a little. “Have you been taking lessons?”

  “It just seemed right.”

  He kissed my shoulder. “Oh, it was right. If I hadn’t taken your virginity myself, I would swear you were born to it.”

  I don’t think he would have said that if he’d been cogent. I sat up starkly. “Whore’s tricks?”

  He sighed. “Better than that. You’re a very fast study, my love.” He opened his eyes and looked at me with an expression that made me catch my breath, serious and open. I knew then that he’d never opened his soul like that to anyone before. “Never judge yourself by the narrow standards of others. What we do together here is our business, nobody else’s. Never, never doubt what we have just done is anything but love. Never let yourself be restricted by thoughts of what society would have you do, what it would accept or condemn. Please promise me that.”

  “Yes, I promise,” I whispered.

  “I love you,” he went on, cerulean eyes intent on mine. “I would love you if you hated making love. That you don’t is a joy almost beyond bearing.” He pulled me back into his embrace and I went gladly, so we lay quiet for a while, enjoying the glow that comes after love.

  “Do you know how special you are?” Richard murmured.

  “Only to you.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  I turned my head so I could see his face “More than enough my love. In truth I don’t know what’s happening to me, but I have to let it go on, to see what comes next.”

  “Probably me. I couldn’t have waited for you all these weeks, had I known any of this.” He drew me close and kissed me. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said primly. I propped myself up on one elbow. “Do you think I would make a good whore?”

  “I beg your pardon?” He was truly astonished, his brown eyebrows arching almost to where his hair tumbled over his forehead in golden disorder.

  “Well, I wondered recently what a hundred-pound-a-night whore would have to do to earn it. It can hardly be what we’ve just done, that was too wonderful to be bought, so what do they do?”

  He laughed, loud and long. “Such a mixture! Innocence and wantonness!” He drew me back down. “Hundred-pound whores are efficient, beautiful at least in their bodies, and clean. And fashionable. If a man can say that he’s had, say, Kitty Fisher, it gives him certain kudos amongst his contemporaries. What we just did doesn’t compare in any way.”

  “You won’t tell anyone I said that?”

  He smoothed the hair back off my cheek in a gentle, proprietorial gesture. “Who would I tell? This is our marriage bed, as secret as the confessional. This can’t be for anyone else.”

  “I know. I suppose I’m just a—well, overwhelmed is the nearest I can get to it.”

  He laughed and kissed me. “I have to admit it. So am I.”

  Chapter Eight

  I DIDN’T SEE ANY MORE of the apartment for another day, nor did I wish to. I would willingly have stayed there with him for much longer, but time passed and the world would eventually catch up with us.

  The next day Richard took me on a tour around the apartment. It took up one story of the old palazzo, the first floor, the one that would once have held the state apartments. Other people occupied the rest of the building. We shared the kitchens with the other occupants, and our floor contained our personal servant’s quarters and our rooms. There was the drawing room I had already seen, a dining room, another bedroom, a smaller reception room, and then he opened the door on to a room, which, he said, was for me.

  I clapped my hands together in childlike delight when I saw the lovely harpsichord set by the window. I could look outside as I played, but the instrument was set so the sunshine wouldn’t dazzle me. It was a pretty thing, inlaid with musical instruments depicted in marquetry, joined together with bows and knots of ribbon in green olivewood. He’d had it tuned the way I preferred, in the new style, and he watched as I lifted the lid, sat down and ran my hands over the keys.

  He sat on a small sofa where he could watch me, and I played a little piece, one I knew well, to see how it played. The tone was lovely, fine and pure.

  I found some sheet music and I played for him. I didn’t play for anyone except myself as a rule, but Richard loved music and so I played for my husband, for my love. I don’t know how long I played because I always lost time when I concentrated like that, and Richard didn’t interrupt me at all, content to sit back and listen. I must have played for some time because when I stopped the sun had moved across the sky and hunger gnawed at my stomach.

  I put down the lid of the harpsichord, sat back, and for the first time, I looked out of the window. I caught my breath in wonder.

  I hadn’t realised how beautiful Venice could be. The old buildings on the other side of the Canal glowed in tones of honey and terracotta, highlighted with flashes of white stone, dark marks at the base where the water lapped at high tide. The pure gold of the sun bathed it all in a glow the like o
f which I had never seen before.

  I lost myself until I felt my husband’s hands on my shoulders. I put up my hand to cover one of his. The blue-grey water of the Canal glinted with white when the gondolas passed, never calm, always mobile. “I didn’t know it was this lovely.”

  He said nothing, but watched the scene in front of us with me. Then he took my hand and drew me to my feet. “Come.”

  I hadn’t noticed the window of this room was full length, or that it opened on to a balcony outside. I was self conscious in just the dressing gown, but it was a substantial garment, and I pulled it closer around me as he took me outside.

  The broad balcony outside ran the length of the building, and as he opened the window, Richard let all the sounds of Venice in. The shouts of the boatmen, the sound of the everlasting water, all came up to greet us when we went outside, but no one noticed us, of little importance in that stunning scene. I leaned on the wall at the front of our balcony and watched the activity below.

  “It used to be a lot livelier than this,” Richard commented, “but Venice has lost a lot of its trade in recent years to Trieste and Leghorn.”

  I watched a gondolier negotiate the Canal. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,”

  “There is nothing else quite like this. The people here are different to most other Italians, their patois is different, and nowhere else I know of has this feeling in the air.”

  “I love it. Why can’t we live here, stay here forever, forget everything else?” I turned to him, smiling, and he watched me through eyes narrowed against the sun, the expression on his face, in his eyes, full of love and contentment.

  “The way you put it, it almost sounds possible.”

  “Why not?” I knew as well as he did we had to go back sometime, but the conceit seemed to amuse him. “What if we had been killed, or pretended that we were—permanently? I never wanted to be a viscountess, I just wanted you. I have a feeling life as Mrs. Locke would be exactly what I wanted.”