In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  She and I have not discussed money since the theft of the jewel. Though she has offered my lady help, the fact is we still owe her, not just for the hair but also for various new potions that have moved between them over the last few days, things that pertain to the secret places in a woman’s body, no doubt, and, I suspect, a few tricks to increase a man’s appetite for love, of which my lady knows I disapprove and of which therefore I will be told nothing. While my lady tells me she is content to wait for payment until our fortunes are more recovered, I would prefer to settle with her now. I do not like to be in anyone’s debt, and since my lady’s conquest and the boatload of raucous youngbloods set tongues wagging, La Draga’s continued presence in our house has done nothing to improve our reputation in the neighborhood.

  While many of our neighbors now move to the other side of the campo when they see me coming, my old well man still talks to me, if only to swamp me with “good advice.” His views about La Draga are clear enough. She is, he says, a witch of the womb, and he crosses himself as he uses the words, for anything to do with the fertile, bloody parts of women fills men with suspicion and dread. He says she was born on one of the islands but came to the city when she was young, though it seems her parents died soon after. He tells a story of how, when she was small and still had some sight, she went missing from her home and was found in the piazzetta, near the Pillars of Justice, her hands filled with earth gathered from the cooled pyre on which a sodomite had been burned to death the day before. When she got back, she made a paste from it, along with various herbs and plants, and that very day cured a local woman of the most terrible fits. It is the kind of tale that has already changed hands many times and thus may or may not be true, but it is potent enough that, once known, it cannot be refuted. After that, he said, any women who fell sick in her district didn’t bother with the doctor but always went to her. As much as anything, no doubt, out of fear that those she did not cure she might take to hammering with curses instead. The way he tells it, the more she healed, the more crippled she became, and the clearer her second sight, the blinder her eyes.

  While I am less susceptible than many to the panic that surrounds witches (anyone who has suffered terrible pain will take help wherever he can get it), I have never known a healer who doesn’t pretend more wisdom than she has, and in particular I have seen too many courtesans develop an appetite for love spells to bind men and help them in their work, which—since it creates a dependence in them as well as the men—is in the end no help at all. While it might be churlish to attribute La Draga’s generosity toward us solely to business, the fact is, her kind of help we can live without—certainly if I have anything to do with it.

  She has made her way downstairs and is already out the door and moving steadily down the street by the time I reach her. In a race across the city, I would not pit myself against her, because, while her sight may have gone, she has taught herself to see well enough by the use of her ears. So she knows it is my flat feet following her long before she turns, and I sense the wariness in her face.

  “Bucino?”

  “Yes.”

  She relaxes slightly. “Did I forget something?”

  “I…You left without payment.”

  She gives a little shrug, but her eyes stay fixed on the ground. “I told you before, it can wait.” And she turns again. Even before I attacked her that day, she was as uncomfortable talking to me as I was to her.

  “No,” I say more loudly now. “I would prefer to settle with you now. You have been most kind, but my lady is healed, and we will have no need of you for a while.”

  She puts her head to one side, like a bird listening to a mate’s call. “I think she and I are not finished yet,” she says, her voice like a rustle of wind and a silly little smile on her face.

  “How? How are you not finished? My lady is healed now,” I repeat, and I hear an edge in me. “And we have no need for love spells in this house.”

  “I see.” The smile shifts, and her mouth contorts a little. Close to her now, I am amazed by how much movement there is in her face. But then, she will not know its impact on others. I only learned the power of my full grin from reading it in the mirrors of other people’s faces.

  “Tell me what it is that you have around your neck, Bucino?” Her hand darts out toward me, but even she cannot judge my height in her darkness, and it flaps above my head like a bird in caged panic.

  “How do you know I have anything there?” I snap back, and emboldened by her mistake, I move closer until we are almost touching, so that I look up straight into her eyes, straight into the foul fog of her blindness, and she must feel my breath on her face, because she stiffens, but she still holds her ground.

  “I know because you swore upon it the other day.”

  I remember I did and am angry with myself that I hadn’t realized it. “It is a tooth.”

  “A tooth?”

  “Yes. From one of my father’s dogs. He gave it to me when it died.”

  “And why did he give it to you? As a memory? A decoration? A charm against misfortune?”

  “I…Yes…and why not?”

  “Why not indeed?”

  And she smiles now, that same dreamy smile she used on Aretino, the one that takes over her whole face and makes her skin shine. In the same way that she does not know when her expression is forbidding, she is unaware now when it becomes luminous. While I spend my life holding my fists up against her, there is a peculiar sweetness to her sometimes that threatens to undermine me.

  “Yes, the lady Bianchini is healed in her body. But it has been a long time since she was out in the world. She is nervous. You are busy running all around the town, and so you miss what’s in front of your eyes. What I give her is something to take away the fear. That’s all. If she believes in it, it works. Like your dog’s tooth. You understand? That is what my ‘love spells’ are about. And for this I do not charge anyway. So you can put away your purse.”

  There is nothing to say. I know that she is right and I am wrong. And, though I have been stupid, I am not so stupid that I do not recognize it now.

  A boy is moving toward us on the other side of the street. I recognize him as one of the baker’s assistants who helps with the bread in the early morning on the square. As he draws up to us, he stops, his eyes out on stalks, because, of course, together we are probably the strangest thing that he has ever seen in his life. I offer my largest openmouthed grin to get rid of him, and he pulls away as if I had spat at him. It will be around the commune within minutes: how the witch and the midget were cavorting together in broad daylight. In the telling, it will probably take on the shadow of carnality, for the sins of sex are never far away in idle imaginations, especially when there is deformity involved, and everyone would know that we both work for the whore whose smell pulls boats of panting young men to her doorway in the middle of the night.

  She waits, and when I am still silent, she says, “Tell me, why is it that you don’t like me, Bucino?”

  “What?”

  “We are both servants to her. We care for her. And she for us. Yet we always fight, you and I.”

  “I don’t…not like you. I mean—”

  “Perhaps you still think that I swindled her somehow, that her hair would have grown without me. Or that I am a witch, because people gossip about me as much as they do you. Is that it? Or is it that you don’t like looking at me? Am I really so much uglier than you?”

  Of course I do not know what to say. I, who have an answer for everything, have no answer to this. I feel almost sick, like a child caught out in a lie. Her face is still, and for the moment I’m not sure what she will do. Now, when her hands come out, they do not miss. She touches the great pate of my forehead and it is my turn to freeze. I am amazed by how cool her hands are. She moves her fingers slowly across my face, feeling her way over and into my eye sockets, then over my nose, my mouth, my chin, reading me with her touch. I feel myself shiver, not least because she says nothing but
, once she is finished, simply drops her hands and after a few seconds turns and walks away.

  I watch her until she is across the little bridge and has disappeared into the next alley. I see it all: her limp, the stones under her feet, the deep blue of her gifted woven shawl. Clear as daylight, all of it. But I have no idea what I feel inside. Though I know why I do not like her. It is because in some way she makes me feel smaller than I am.

  “Oh, it is come, Bucino. It is come. Quick…”

  When I reach the room, my lady is up and gathering her cloak excitedly. “The gondola is here. It is waiting outside.”

  I look down from the window. Now that we are rich with promise, we can feel easier about the money spent on one night’s transport. It is a stately craft. Not as sumptuous as the one we might have hired to earn our living, but graceful enough, its polished silver rudder glinting in the fading light, its black-skinned boatman clad like a courtier in red and gold velvet, standing tall in the stern, his single oar resting in its socket. It would have been a long time since this house had welcomed such ostentation, and across the canal, our cockeyed spy is now bent so far out of her window that at any minute she might risk drowning in her own curiosity. Only this time she is not alone. Farther along there are faces appearing from houses everywhere, and by the time we get ourselves downstairs and open the gates onto the canal entrance, the nearby bridge has become a viewing platform, with the baker’s boy and five or six others gathered to gape. I think of my old man, who prides himself on knowing everything, and I almost wish I had warned him in advance so that he, too, could watch us go.

  I brace myself for the taunts. The young Saracen takes my lady’s hand and helps her into the boat. The sun is low across the bridge, and its rosy light sets fire to her scarlet skirts, which sweep around her. She looks up, taking in the audience in a single glance before moving into the cabin and arranging herself on the cushions. I perch myself on the wooden bench as the boatman slides his oar down into the water and maneuvers us away from the dock and out to the main channel.

  “Water whore!”

  “Witchy woman!”

  “Show us what you’re selling.”

  They are boys’ voices still, not yet fully broken, and you can hear the longing welling up through the insults. The boat turns away from them, and as it slides under the window of the old woman, she leans out and hawks up a great gob of spit as if from a slingshot, and it splats onto the wood close to me. I look up and am about to thumb my nose at her toothless face when, with one clean, clear pull of the oar, we are gone, slipping through the water like tailors’ scissors through silk, leaving it all behind us.

  The Saracen knows his water as well as I do the land. He stands, his left foot placed almost on the edge of the boat, his body turning like that of a dancer as he slips us around corners and glides us like a long sigh under a tunnel of low-arched bridges. The daylight is dying fast now, and the gondola sits low in the water, so at first I brace myself to be fearful. But I am too busy in my head for fear. This is the reverse of the journey that we made many months before, now out through the labyrinth of small canals toward the wider water. It all feels so long ago: the summer darkness and the clammy heat, the woman with her smell of musk and her hand pulling the curtain across the cabin as the man reached out for her. My lady sits now where she did, tall and still, head up, neck long, her hands folded into her billowing skirts, aware of her own grace as clearly as if she were staring at herself in a mirror. I want to ask how she feels, to tell her that her beauty has no need of love spells, but mindful of La Draga’s words on how the confidence lies in the belief as much as the draft, I keep my mouth shut. There is a transformation going on between us now anyway: after so long as companions in adversity, we are become professionals again, and a little distance is necessary between the courtesan and her exotic plaything.

  We move out into the Grand Canal as it enters its long, lazy curve toward the Rialto, and a spectacle opens up in front of us. The hubbub of the markets is over now, and the traffic is more sophisticated; small fleets of decorated gondolas with cabins, some open, some closed, carrying people to a hundred different evening rendezvous. To our left, two young women sit wrapped like expensive parcels in veils and shawls, but they duck their heads out of the cabin soon enough to study my lady’s exposed skin and hair. We pass a boatload of distinguished Crows in full regalia, each set of eyes swiveling as they catch sight of her. Behind us the sky is the color of an overripe apricot. On wooden terraces, perched like four-poster beds on the tops of the roofs, young women are pulling in carpets and hangings from the day’s airing and collecting flagpoles of washing, while around them the city’s mass of chimney pots rise up like great pottery wine goblets laid along the table of the skyline, dinner settings for the gods. In the grand houses to either side of the canal, they are lighting up the piano nobile rooms now. Through the open loggias, you can spot servants moving with tapers to wall-mounted candles or round chandeliers, which, once lit, they winch slowly into the air. During our poverty, we have had to make do with the spitting stink of tallow, and I cannot wait to see the world through the flame of beeswax again, for as any courtesan worth her price will tell you, its light flatters even poxy skin into swan softness. Which, I daresay, is why so many of the greatest conquests are planned and conducted at night.

  Aretino’s house is lit already, and there are four richly decorated gondolas moored in the water yard below. The boatman brings us skillfully to dock, and together we lift her skirts to avoid the wet stone and the filth of the entrance hall while he calls up to tell the house we are arrived.

  As we mount the stairs, we can hear voices and laughter coming from above. On the higher landing, Aretino is waiting. My lady rises like a great ship under sail, and he puts out his hand to greet her as I dump great armfuls of silk train behind her. And though he has reason enough to resent us, it is clear that he is pleased to see her, for he has always liked beautiful objects and was never afraid of the smell of adventure. It was one of the things that pulled them together.

  “My dear Fiammetta,” he says loudly, waving his hand like the courtier he will never be. “Your stature is greater than that of the queen of Carthage, and your beauty puts the Venetian sunset to shame. My house is honored to welcome you.”

  “On the contrary, sir, it is my honor to be here,” she declares with equal volume, then sinks to meet his height, for he was never tall, and in her clogs she towers above most men. “Your insults were always more original than your compliments, Pietro.” Her voice is now low and sweet.

  “That’s because you’re not paying for them. I keep the best for retail. So—your dwarf drives a hard bargain, and it seems we are in business together. Though given your nobility of spirit, I trust you won’t mind sharing a little of it with me. There are three men in my house tonight who in their varying ways have enough money to feather both of our nests. It’s not a problem for you if we work on them together, is it?”

  “Not in the least,” she says, her eyes clear for business. “Tell me.”

  “The first is Mario Treviso, one of Venice’s sweetest-smelling merchants, since his fortune comes from soap. He spends his days checking his warehouses and writing atrocious verses, for which he’s in search of a muse, as his wife is spread so fat from a dozen children that the last time she tried to leave the house, they had to winch her down into the boat.”

  “Where does he stand? Is he nobility or citizen?”

  “Citizen, though if money bought nobility, he’d long ago have bribed his way into one of the state’s councils, for he has more cash than many with the right names. Things have changed since you left. Some of the great families are too lazy to go to sea anymore, and their blood runs richer than their coffers. Still, if you don’t mind wealth over breeding, Treviso is an excellent catch. He is as rich as Croesus, and he has an eye for beauty, though he’s deaf as a post when it comes to poetry. He kept a courtesan called Bianca Gravello for a time, but her lovelines
s was surpassed only by her stupidity, and her greed made her crude, so that now he is in need of more delicate handling. He is a dull dog at heart, and I doubt he will cause you any trouble, though you may want for excitement.”

  She smiles. “I have had enough excitement lately to welcome boredom. He sounds perfect. Perhaps I should take him home with me right away.”

  “Oh, no. I have planned a party here, and you will have to work for your living. So. Next is Guy de Ramellet, an emissary from the French court. The French star is waning here, and he comes to makes friends and buy influence. He sees himself as a scholar and a thinker. He is in fact a buffoon, and it is possible that he is infected with the pox—I offer you this tidbit in the spirit of friendship, for he will be eager to get into your bed. However, his king owes me for verses in his favor, and the more pleasure this oaf associates with me, the more he is likely to remind His Majesty of it. Though you do not have to act as my debt collector.”

  “Or you as my pimp,” she says, for they are equals again and enjoying the game. “Though if your wit ever fails you, I daresay Bucino might take you as an apprentice. And the third?”

  “Ah, the third is a strange bird. An infidel, though with a refined palate. It is his manner to observe rather than join in. He is the sultan’s chief merchant here, and his work is to buy whatever luxuries he thinks will entertain his master and ship them back to Suleiman’s court. I’ve made it clear to him that you are not for export.”

  “So what good is he to you? Or do you sell your pen to both sides now to hedge your bets?”

  “Oh, if only I could. They may be heathen, but I tell you, they are better soldiers than most that Christendom produces these days. The latest news on the Rialto is that the sultan’s army is halfway to Hungary and that he has his eye on Vienna. No. I don’t look for his patronage, though I do have other plans for him. Well, ifyou are ready…”