In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  My lady grins at her and takes her hand, and I’d wager that even a blind woman could feel the warmth of her smile through the squeeze.

  “But then, then as we were talking and I was telling her what happened last night, I had such a wonderful idea. Oh, Bucino, you will love it. It is perfect. How much money do we have left now? Forty ducats—that was what you said, yes?”

  “I…” But while we may all be best friends now, I will not share the true depth of our humiliation with anyone but ourselves. “I…don’t know.”

  La Draga has read my voice as fast as any look and is on her feet already, withdrawing her hand from my lady’s and pulling her shawl—the same shawl that we gave her when our star was in the ascendant—across her body. “I must go now. I—I am called across the city to see a woman whose baby has not turned.” She bows to my lady, then turns to me. “If you need me, Signor Bucino, then send a message and I will come.”

  My lady is so excited she can barely wait for her to get out the door.

  “So! Forty ducats. Right?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Forty, but—”

  “Plus the nine ducats from the merchant’s purse. The medallion is cheap, I am sure, and his dagger the Jew won’t touch. And what about our book? The Petrarch that Ascanio left behind, with its fancy lock? We’d get something for that, surely? Lord knows we’ve carried it for long enough, and even though it is worn, the gold tooling and silver clasps are the best of Roman printing. The Jew would take that, yes?”

  “I’ve no idea,” I say. “We can’t even open it.”

  “We could break the lock.”

  “But that would ruin part of its value. What are you—”

  “Still, it must be fine enough, yes, if Ascanio was going to build his fortune on it. Even if we got, say, fifteen for it. That would give us sixty-four. I am sure we could do it for sixty-four.”

  “Do what? Fiammetta—what are you talking about?”

  “A boat. I’m talking about a boat of our own. A floating bedroom. Sweet Madonna, I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. It wasn’t until this morning, when I was telling Elena about the thugs on their boat. Don’t you remember—that woman on the first night?”

  The first woman? Of course. How could I forget? The gold curtains, the lazy fingers in her hair, the rush of scent and sex across the water. Even in the exhaustion and fear of our arrival, its exoticism had captured me.

  “It’s a risk, but I swear we could make it work. Those aren’t street whores on those boats. They are special to Venice. My mother always told me that visiting merchants love the romance of them. Only here could a man have such an encounter. And for that reason the best women can charge accordingly. As long as they and their boats are fancy enough.”

  And, my God, some of them are: black-and-gold-trimmed gondolas with dancing red lights and cabins made out like miniature bedchambers, all satins and silks and damask curtains, with their own shiny, dark Saracen boatmen to maneuver them through the night and, no doubt, look the other way when it is called for. Of course I have wondered about them. Who are they? How much, for how long?

  “What about the weather?” I say. “I doubt there’s much romance for a prick caught in a sharp wind on the Grand Canal at this time of year.”

  “I know. The timing is not perfect. But it is getting warmer and there are places where a boat can be sheltered. This way we could get a regular income without destroying our independence. La Draga will help us, and if we’re lucky we might even find ourselves a patron. I know, I know, it is not the kind of business that you and I are used to. But it is not nothing, and you are right. We have to start somewhere. My mother knew women who made good livings with the right clientele. Well?”

  And because I have lived for years with the set of her jaw, and because her new energy is a thousand times more beguiling than her anger or our despair, I know better than to waste my breath on arguments I will not win.

  “Very well. I’ll take the sonnets to the Jew.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I’ve forgotten how much an object of beauty it is. All those months on the road crushed inside my jacket have battered and stained its cover somewhat, but the dye of the leather is still a deep, ripe red, its tooled gold lines and lettering of the finest quality, and its edges saved by their silver filigree bindings and clasps. My lady is right. It is the best that Rome could offer, and in the house of a thriving courtesan it would make for fine entertainment: both for the sport of the lock and for the beauty of the Petrarch sonnets inside it. At least if it goes to the pawnbroker, we can buy the time to earn it back.

  He seems pleased enough to see me again. In the back room on the shelf, there is water and a plate of small, hard biscuits, which I daresay act as his supper, and he offers me one of them. Aware of the privilege, I accept, though it is tasteless and dry and I have trouble swallowing it.

  The book sits on the table between us. He looks but does not touch.

  “It is not the Bible,” I say. “It is a book by Petrarch.”

  “And who is he?”

  “He is—was—a poet and a philosopher.”

  “But a Christian?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the book talks of religion?”

  “Yes. No. Not really. I think it talks more of life and love.”

  “I am sorry. I cannot take it. The law is clear: there is no pawning of Christian objects allowed.”

  “What—my jewels were heathen?”

  He smiles. “The ban is against words. Books. And certain artifacts. Things from churches. Or weapons.”

  “You mean if my rubies had come encrusted in a dagger, you would not have taken them?”

  “No, I would not. I could not. This is not only the law of Venice; it is also the ruling of the rabbinate.”

  “So, what? You would be defiled by such things?”

  “The defilement, I think, is on both sides.”

  “In which case maybe you could take it just for its leather and its silver, for its content will not trouble you. It is locked, and I cannot open it.”

  God knows, I had tried often enough, playing the numbers like throws of the dice, to penetrate its sequence. There were times on the journey, while I was curled inside my bunk in the bowels of the ship, my imagination useless in thickening the wood walls between me and the water, when, if I had had the tools, I would have smashed the lock open just to have another world to enter to take my mind off the one I was in.

  Once my father had taught me how to read, I know he gained much solace from the voraciousness of my appetite. He had wooed my mother with the love sonnets of Petrarch. And because, as a teacher, he thought that what one knew was as important as what one owned, his love of words poured out from him into me. If I had not been still young when he died, I do believe my life might have been different. But while he would be as ashamed of my profession as of my body now, I like to think he might be impressed by how I am able to recite so many philosophical arguments at the more erudite of our carnal gatherings.

  “And what does he say, this Patract?”

  “He talks of beauty and love.”

  “What does he say about them?”

  “Well, they are sonnets, poems about love. But,” I add quickly, thinking I see a frown pass across his face, “he is a philosopher as well as a poet, and he warns of how carnal love between men and women can become a disease, rotting the will and pulling them into madness toward Hell, while love of God transcends the body and frees the soul to start its journey into Heaven.”

  “And Christians agree with this?”

  “Yes.” And I think of my father again, for whom Petrarch was near to a saint. “Though it is more honored in the breach than in the observance.”

  “Which means?”

  “That it is easy to say but hard to do.”

  He sits for a moment with the thought. “But I think God’s laws are not meant to be easy. That is the burden and the challenge. For all of us.”


  I like his seriousness. It feels as if there is curiosity as well as certainty to him. I think how strange it must be to be him. To live in a city and yet not live in it. To be heathen and yet to feel as if you have heathens all around you. To see yourself as chosen while others see you as the Devil’s missionaries, your existence so poisonous that you must be locked inside a ghetto at sunset and even pay the wages of the soldiers who guard your gates. What do they do in there all night? Do they spend their time worshiping? Or do they dance and laugh and tell stories and put their pricks into their wives’ warm holes like everyone else? They might as well have come from the Indies the little I know about them. And maybe they of us…

  He puts out his hand, and his fingers touch the silver edge of the book, then the round, engraved barrel of the lock. After a moment, he pulls it toward him.

  “You say it is as richly made on the inside as well?”

  “The man who did it was Rome’s greatest printer and engraver. The quality of his work was famous all over the city.”

  “And the lock?”

  “Was the idea of his assistant, I think.”

  “A man who worked with metals and cogs.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have seen such things before. There is a mechanism in here, a way that each of these little numbered cogs, if they line up correctly, will snap open.”

  “That much I guessed. But I have never been able to bring them together in the right order.”

  He moves the lamp nearer to him and, fixing his lens to his eye, studies the lock.

  “What do you see?”

  “Small things made bigger, gaps where there was no space before.”

  “Is that the way you tell a fake?”

  “No. With gems it is how the light moves through the stone. There is no fire at the heart of a stone that isn’t true.” He puts down the lens. “You would be surprised at how many ways a thing looks different when your eye can get inside it.”

  “Do you think you could open it?”

  “Perhaps. I will try.”

  “Thank you.” I watch his face as he concentrates on the lock.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  He doesn’t reply, but I take the little shrug as a form of assent.

  “What would you do if you didn’t have to do this?”

  “This?” He stops. “If I didn’t have to do this?” He gestures around the room as if to remind himself where he is. He shakes his head. “If I didn’t have to do this…I would take a ship and go to the place where the greatest stones are found and I would look inside the earth to see where they came from and how they were made.”

  “And would you then dig them up and sell them?”

  “I don’t know.” I can see the question surprises him. “I will tell you when I get there.”

  “How long will you need to open the book?”

  “I close with the second to last bell. Come back then.”

  I maneuver my way off the stool. “If you open the lock, will you look at what’s inside?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, his hand reaching for the lens. “I will tell you when I get there.”

  Outside, the city is changing. While we have been talking of God’s laws and secrets of the earth, a cold fog has come rolling off the sea, pushing through the alleys, sliding over the water, rubbing up against the cold stone. As I walk, the street falls away behind me, the shop’s blue awning lost within seconds. People move like ghosts, their voices disconnected from their bodies; as fast as they loom up, they disappear again. The fog is so dense that, by the time I have crossed toward the Merceria, I can barely see the ground under my feet or tell if the gloom is weather or the beginning of dusk. I weave through streets I know well enough without my eyes until I come to the Campo dei Miracoli.

  While it is a small enough campo it feels now like entering open sea, nothingness all around and the horizon dense and empty as far as the Indies. I have heard about Venice’s fogs from my old man at the well, dark stories of how the mist descends as thick as doubt, so that men can no longer tell where the land ends and the water begins. The next morning, he says, you can always find one or two fellows with bad consciences floating facedown in a canal barely a hundred yards from their homes. Maybe I have lived with a bad conscience for so long now that it is simply a part of me, because, despite my hatred of water, my nerves are more of excitement than of fear, for there is something almost exhilarating in the wildness of it all, as if each step one takes is its own adventure.

  The gray-green marble façade of Santa Maria dei Miracoli emerges from the gloom like some great ice statue, the fog swirling so that it seems almost as if I am still and it is the building that is moving. In the middle, its doors are open, the glow of candlelight warm in the cold haze, and I find myself moving toward them.

  For a moment, as I cross the threshold, it is as if I am still in the mist. Around me the floor and walls are marble too, and the gray-purple light filtering through high windows is cool and hazy. Though I pass this church almost every day on my way to the markets or beyond, I have never been inside. It’s a wellknown axiom among pilgrims to Venice that you can die before you visit every church in this city, and I am always too busy to be curious, especially about chapels too small for professional considerations. But now, with the world stopped around me, I have time to stare.

  There is a newness to this building, you can feel it. Not just the cleanness but the way everything about it feels simple, with none of the incrustations of time that mark so many of the others: no tombs, no scrambling for status with a dozen rival family altars. On the vaulted barrel ceiling, the medallion portraits are so bright that you can almost smell the paint, and on the altar at the end—on which a portrait of Our Lady of the Miracles sits awaiting worship—the marble screen is carved and intricate, like a piece of lace altar cloth. The half statues of saints and the Virgin gaze peacefully down onto the dozen or more people sitting in the pews. Perhaps they too have come out of the gray sea in search of some solidity to hold on to, but the gauzy air and the silence make it feel, if anything, more dislocated, as if this is neither earth nor water but somewhere in between.

  I sit in the back and watch as the church fills up in readiness for evensong, the congregation quiet and somber as if in awe of the weather. Above me, in the balcony built over the doors, I hear the footsteps of the cloistered nuns as they file in from the convent nearby, entering the church unseen by way of an elevated corridor that joins the two buildings. If you listen hard, you can make out sporadic chatter among some of the younger voices, though, as always, they will remain invisible for the service.

  La Draga had not needed to be so tart with me about convent matters, for I am not that ignorant. Even in Rome the nuns of Venice are famous. While every Christian city gives girls to God rather than to husbands to avoid the bankruptcy of too many dowries, Venice’s boast is that she has as many brides of Christ as she has brides of nobles. In this way the state looks pure and the governing families stay rich. However, it is hardly a secret that conscripted armies show less enthusiasm for their work than do volunteers or mercenaries. In Rome, my lady paid various local nuns to embroider her linen, and I passed many an entertaining hour in convent parlors being poked and prodded under my doublet by giggling young nuns in fashionable dress eager to see if the rumors about small men are true while my lady sat exchanging the latest gossip with the rest of them.

  While the government of Venice may be more outwardly committed to virtue, the minds of young women anywhere are not that different when it comes to the boredom of involuntary incarceration. Of this I am certain because it is my business, understanding the ways in which desire overwhelms God’s rules, and though men may be the more inveterate offenders, women are not immune, not even those indentured to God. Indeed, given what I know about the power of the human itch, I would go so far as to say that if I were a poor man in Germany with Luther as my preacher, I might have heard his railings against the failed celibac
y of the church as common sense rather than heresy. Which in turn makes me think again of Petrarch and how his exhortations away from the carnal to the spiritual came more easily to his older self than to the besotted young poet writing his burning love sonnets to a woman called Laura, who, if you believe his descriptions of her, had the same dazzling beauty as my lady. Though with greater modesty.

  I wait till the service is about to begin, then slip away. I cannot hear the Marangona bell here, and it will take me time to get back to the Ghetto in the fog.

  The temperature has dropped with the weather, and I walk as fast as I can to keep my spirits and my blood up. It is like moving through a blanket now, and I can feel the anxiety gnawing at me. If he has been successful and the book is as fine inside as it is out, then I will surely be able to find a collector who will pay, if not a ruby’s worth, at least enough to buy a boatman for a few days. Without it…well, without it is not something I will think about now.

  He is standing at the door of the shop, peering out into the gloom as if he has been waiting. “I am sorry,” I say. “The fog is thick. It takes time to find your way.”

  I thought he might let me in, but he doesn’t move, and his face looks as gray as the mist.

  “I am late. I have to close immediately.”

  “Did you open it?”

  He stares at me, but I still can’t see his eyes. From a table inside, he picks up a parcel wrapped in cloth. “I have written the numbers of the lock on a piece of paper inside,” he says, thrusting it at me, looking around as if he doesn’t want anyone to see us together.

  “Thank you. How much? I mean, what—”

  “You cannot come here again.” And now his voice is angry.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “It is the law that we do not handle the books of Christians.”

  “I know,” I say. “But—”

  “You do not come here again. I will not do business with you.” He is already closing the door. I try to put out a hand to stop him, but he is stronger than I. “This place is closed to you now.”