In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  They look so fragile I am almost afraid to touch them. I put the top of my index finger onto my tongue, then press it gently into the convex curve. The little glass shape sticks to my tip, and I lift it carefully, the box beneath in case it should fall. It is so fine, so thin, that it is hard to know how it could have been fashioned. Just as it is hard to know how anyone could make a glass stone glow almost as fiercely as a ruby. I see my face in the mirror with the tiny dish in front of me, and I know that what I am holding on the tip of my finger is her blindness. But how? How would this fit? Directly over her eye? No. That is crazy.

  But only half crazy. Everyone knows glass helps eyesight. The workshops of Murano have saved an army of scholars and illustrators from a miserable old age by making curved lenses that magnify the page. Our old shipbuilding client uses a pair himself, with leather and metal frames that he fixes behind his ears so he can get the glass close to the eye. The closer the better. But this—this is something quite different. This she would have to put somehow inside her eye. And if she did that, what would happen? Would she see the world larger or just mistily, to make her eyes look white? And how could she bear it? It would be torture, to have something resting over your very eyeball. And it was. You could tell that from the irritation it had caused, the redness I had noticed in that single glimpse. I think back to all the times I have seen her. The fact is, she was not always milk blind. There were odd times, like today, when her eyes were simply closed, or hovering half open with no eyeball showing. God knows, you need to see that mad whiteness only once or twice to be convinced. Maybe she uses them only sometimes, precisely because they hurt so much. Of course, I hurt sometimes, and I have learned to bear it. People deal with all kinds of suffering. Walk through the market any day and you will see old men moving like yelping crabs, they have so much pain in their joints. There is always a pain worse than the one you have.

  Yet to subject yourself to it deliberately would take the most extraordinary act of will. Maybe if the prize is big enough…I slip the glass back into the box and close it up, then sit for a moment against the bed, trying to imagine how it would be for her. But the thought undermines me and her smell envelops me again, so that it is harder to resist now, for with the memory of pain comes the pleasure of comfort, the feel of her arms around me, the whispering in my ears, the singing and the soothing.

  But why? Why on earth should she bother to look after me so tenderly if she is only a thief and a fraud? Why, indeed, did she ever bother to come back to us? It is years since the ruby, and she has taken nothing else since. Though we are only one of her clients, we hardly make her fortune: pots of bleaching paste, cures for a few itches and fevers, and maybe a love potion or two, which she knows I will not pay for. Yet she has been loyal to us and, for all my bad temper, spent days and nights at my bedside, saving my spirit as well as my life.

  And for what? She didn’t even ask for payment, left before my lady could offer her anything. When she was holding me in her arms, did her fingers ever sneak under my mattress, just in case? She would have been disappointed. I am cleverer now and have found a safer form of concealment. For this time it is hidden by not being hidden at all. Petrarch’s love sonnets sit on my bookshelves with three or four dozen books looking just like it. There is no one in the house who can read anyway, and if a servant should get as far as picking it off the shelf—in itself impossible, since my door stays locked when I am not in the room and only my lady has a key—they would never be able to break the code.

  As for our crippled, blind healer, well, of course it has never occurred to me…

  But it is occurring now, and the panic of it slices open my gut. Oh, sweet Jesus. No—surely not. I try to make my mind slow down. Step by step. So now there is someone in our house who can read. A thief who has indeed had access to my room, most important, when I am not there. I see myself lying in bed, felled by the fever, unconscious, her sitting through long nights watching over me, her back at right angles to the bookshelf. And this thief is clever enough that, should she find a book with a lock on it, not only would she know instantly that it was something of value but she might even be able to decipher the code.

  The fact is I have no idea if the book is still on my shelves. Though I am careful enough with every item of inventory, the last time I looked was—what?—ten days, maybe two weeks ago, before I was ill. In the time since my recovery, well, I have been too busy and even—oh, how fine is this?—too happy and preoccupied with my new sense of life to bother to check. Though surely, surely, I would have noticed if…

  No. It isn’t possible. She couldn’t have done it.

  Of course it is. Of course she could. Anyone as determined as she could do anything. God damn it, I have been cured of one malady only to fall ill with another. To be coddled and caressed so I could be swindled. Who is the blind one now? It explains everything. Why she was so nervous with me in the campo. Why she left so early that last morning without asking for payment. Why she has not been back since. Of course, why take that risk when she already had something infinitely more valuable in her hands? Without the book, we are nothing. While what we earn may seem rich from the outside, it barely covers the style we have to present to the world in order to go on earning it, and as my lady’s beauty fades, so will our income. Once the walls are stripped and the gifts are pawned, the rent will run out and we will find ourselves in the underworld again; for God knows, there are no charities for old whores, however powerful the men they once seduced. We did not work this hard for this long to contemplate such horrors.

  A locked chest. It might seem like the place to keep your secrets. But then things are never what they seem. I move back into the other room, and this time I put the poker to more effect. But it’s not there. Not behind any of the bottles or the jars, not under the boxes, not in the fireplace, or in the stove, or up the chimney, or in the stuffing of her straw mattress.

  My own destruction tires me. I sit on the bed, staring at the floor, for a second thinking back to the church with its tiny mosaic pieces, like souls forged into patterns for God. Good stone to be buried under. I see the floorboards again. I move the bed and then the chest to check the lines where they meet. It isn’t hard to find when you know what you are looking for. I use the poker to lever up the planks that have obviously been levered before, and a deep, dark hole greets me. I stick my hands down, but my squat arm isn’t long enough to reach the bottom. I lay myself long across the floor and try again. At my fullest stretch, the tops of my fingers come upon something. The rough material of some kind of sack. I hook on to it and start to lift. Ah! It is heavy enough. I move it carefully, carefully, until it clears the hole, then I scramble up and tear at the string around the neck, and when it gives I empty the contents onto the bed.

  But there is no book here. Instead there is only a shower of little bones—animal leftovers, no doubt, for grinding into powder. More witches’ trimmings. I am about to turn away when something makes me look at them more closely. I pick up what is evidently some kind of tiny leg. I know about legs. And arms. In Rome my first employer was a man who was fascinated by dwarves and had a collection of their bones in his house. I think he was waiting for me to die so he could add me to his collection. He showed them to me once, to explain how my deformity worked; how while the bones of my trunk had developed normally, my arms and legs had stayed child-short. While the bones I am holding are far too small and fragile to be from dwarves or even those of the smallest children, one thing is clear. They do not come from animals. And if they are not children’s, that means there is only one kind of human left. These are bones from the bodies of babies; newborn, maybe even smaller.

  What was the word about her on the streets? That she can help a pregnant woman if the child is still in a liquid state. Well, I daresay not all of them were still liquid. Maybe this was her price. That after she had helped dispel them she took them away with her. My mind goes back to another story: of the young girl new to Venice who disappeared, onl
y to be found under the Pillars of Justice collecting the ashes of burned criminals. I had dismissed it as tittle-tattle then, for gossip grows with the number of mouths it passes between. But now I see it differently.

  We are not the only ones, it seems, who have something precious to steal.

  I clamber back out, the bag in my hand. The light is going fast now, and the walkway and the canal are already gloomy. My feet hit the boards with a thud. Somewhere near my ankle an angry yowl cuts into the silence, and a scrawny cat jumps out of the gloom in a spasm of fear, arched and spitting. In my panic I miss my footing and feel myself slipping backward. I grab upward for an iron mooring embedded in the wall, but I am too heavy to hold myself properly and I have to let go of the sack. The cat streaks past me, and the sack slides under its flung paws. I have my balance now, and I make a lunge for it, but I am too late, and I hear it hit the mud beneath with a thick slap. Frantic, I shimmy myself to the edge, only to watch as the black sludge sucks it down.

  There is nothing I can do. I do not have the bones. But I still have the knowledge of them. That will have to do. I crawl back along the planks, but the commotion has stirred someone and I hear the sound of a shutter opening somewhere across the canal and a woman’s voice starts to shriek. God knows what she must think she is seeing in the gathering gloom, but I do not stop to find out. I pull myself to the end and down onto the bridge, where I am too small for her to see, and then I start running toward home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It takes me a long time. While the crowds have thinned in the darkness, the city is rough-edged with people too drunk to care where they are going or whom they trample upon to get there. Some have already tipped from merriment into maudlin, and a few single me out as a desperate confidant, one twisted soul confessing his disability to another. Because I cannot afford to get knifed or pulped now, I am cute when I have to be and rude when they are too drunk to follow. And all the time I am thinking about what is to come.

  My lady is still out when I get home, and the rest of the casa is locked and dark. The servants have been given the day off, and even if they choose not to celebrate, it is not their duty to wait on or up for anyone. My thighs are so weak that my legs tremble as I climb the stairs. My fingers can barely manipulate the key into the lock of my room. Inside, I move too fast, and the candle flickers and almost gutters out. I have to pace myself to the bookshelves. It was on the middle shelf, nine books in, amid a run of volumes with similarly colored leather bindings. Another book, irrelevant to those who cannot read, ordinary enough to those who can. My God, what will I do if I find it now, safe, in place? How much less of a villain does she become if she is only an old thief? Maybe even reformed now…

  But the book is not there.

  Our fortune is gone.

  But where? Where? Surely she cannot have passed it on yet. She may be an expert on jewels, but she would need specialist contacts to move something like this, and even if she went for an easy sell, Venice is on holiday and the printers and bookshops have been closed for days. Which can only mean that she took it with her to Murano. In that bag she was carrying after she met me. Of course! Now it all makes sense. The way she was so nervous with me in the square. What? Was I truly stupid enough to think it might have been affection? What she really had on her mind was the fear that I already suspected her soothing fingers to be those of a thief. God knows, the minute she finished with me, she was out of the house again, the bag on her back. She must have worried that I had followed her because I knew about the book.

  Well, when she walks into her house, she will understand soon enough that I do. So much for my newfound sense of life and companionship.

  I must eventually fall asleep, for the next thing I know Gabriella is shaking me.

  “Signor Bucino? Are you all right?”

  It is morning, and on the table is a tray with food and drink. Mauro is still solicitous for my welfare, and I must look gray with yesterday’s exertions.

  “Bucino?”

  But I am up now, the rest of my life pressing like a thunder sky down upon me. “What time is it? Where is she? The mistress? Is she back?”

  “It’s early. Mauro wants to know if you will go to the market with him. The mistress is home. She came in a few hours ago, in Lord Loredan’s boat. She looked very fine, though her dress was rather spoiled from all the festivities.” Gabriella giggles, for she has a spirit to her that still finds our sins great sport.

  “And now?”

  “Oh, now she is asleep.”

  Not for long.

  When I wake her, she has barely slept, and in the instant before she senses my anxiety, her mind is still filled with the marvels she has lived through: a sea aflame with gold and wealth, a day rich with compliment and the confidence that comes from being inside unassailable power. If this were any other morning, we might sit together and revel in it, for we have worked all our lives for such a moment, and the fall from grace will be unbearable. So I take it slowly, holding back on the book, saving the worst until last. I begin with the first betrayal: the great ruby and her blind eyes. Even this is hard enough for her to believe.

  “No, no. Not La Draga. It can’t have been—”

  “I know how it sounds. But if you had seen her with the child, if you had seen her eyes and the foul glass coverings…I never understood how Meragosa had the skill or the connections or the money to buy such a fine fake jewel alone—for it would have cost something—or the opportunity to make the switch. But if they were in it together…La Draga had all those things. And the Jew’s description of the woman who came to him selling it fits her perfectly.”

  “How long have you known that, Bucino? I mean about the Jew?”

  “Only a few weeks.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I—I was going to tell you, but you were busy…with Foscari, and we were arguing…and—well, it didn’t mean anything then.”

  “You still should have told me.” She shakes her head.

  “But…even if it was her, why has she stayed with us all this time? Why? She’s never taken anything else—and God knows there are enough things of value in this house now.”

  “I know—but—”

  “She’s been more than a friend to us. Both of us. Sweet Jesus, she saved your life, Bucino. I saw her with you. You don’t know what she did. How she cared.” She stops. “What? What is it?”

  “Fiammetta, listen to me. There is more.”

  I have her attention now. Oh, God, how I wish it could end here. Because for all the horror, there is something about this moment: I sitting on the end of her bed, she nest-ripe still from sleep, lying back against the pillows. It is how it used to be between us, in the old days, when I would come to her in the morning to discuss the entertainment of the night before: the character of each client, his potential, his drawbacks. Our partnership was so sweet then, before success and the trappings of formality overcame it. But there is no going back now: even the past is littered with deceit and betrayal.

  “More? What more?” I watch her brace herself. “Tell me.”

  So I do. After a while I can’t look at her, for retelling is reliving when something hurts as much as this. Even before I take the poker to the room in search of the book, she is groaning.

  “Oh my God, no.”

  “It’s all right. It’s all right,” I interject. “The fact that I couldn’t find it doesn’t mean it is sold already.” Which one of us am I trying to reassure? “I think—”

  “No!”

  “I think she’s taken it to Murano. I think it was in the bag she was carrying when I followed her, and if we—”

  “No, Bucino. No!” And now she is across the bed, grabbing at my hands frantically. “Stop! Listen to me.”

  “What?”

  “She—she doesn’t have it. La Draga doesn’t have the book.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “She didn’t take it.”

  “But how—”r />
  “Because I have it. I took it.”

  And of course I hear. She says the words loudly enough. Of course I hear them. “What?” But it still takes time.

  “I took it—oh, my God, oh, sweet Jesus, I took it. The day you got ill. The day you stomped out after our row and didn’t come back until the night. I was so angry with you. Your…arrogance, your righteousness. I took the key and went into the room and went through the bookshelves and found it and took it.”

  “You!”

  Her words spread like a bloodstain across the sheets between us. The book is not stolen. We were robbed and betrayed once. But now I find we have betrayed each other. La Draga took our jewel, but my lady took our fortune. I am the one groaning now.

  “Bucino. It’s not what you think—I wasn’t taking it for myself.” She is breathless now. She stops, hesitates. “I…I took it to show Vittorio.”

  “Vittorio!” His name spews out of me like vomit. “You took it for Vittorio!” And now my voice is a howl, that of an animal cornered and skewered in the night. My God, here I am drowning in deceit, my world pulled down around my head, and still he pokes his puppy snout through the rubble to mock me.

  “I know. I know…I know we said we would never do that. And it’s all right. Because he didn’t see it. Are you listening to me, Bucino? I took it, but in the end I never showed it to him. Because that was the night when you wouldn’t let him in. Remember?”

  Oh yes, I remember. How could I not, for already I am back there again, caught in the fire of my mad pain and her fury?

  “Bucino.” In contrast, her own voice is soft now. Almost tender. “Bucino. Look at me. Please. If it hadn’t been for your illness, I would have put it back. I would have put it back and you would never have known. Because it’s over. What happened between him and me is past. Your illness brought me to my senses. You know that, yes?” She stops. “I never intended to hurt you. But at the time…oh, sweet Jesus…how do I say it? At the time, well, it had never happened to me before. Ah! Look—you know this…you know how it has been for me. How it has always been. How I have spent my whole life being with men who wanted it more than I did. That’s what we’ve lived on—men’s lust. Since I was fourteen years old I’ve watched men drowning in it, driven mad with it, furious for it, even unmanned because of it. And I have never come close to knowing it myself. I mean…maybe once with Pietro when I was young I felt something, but it was my heart rather than my body and my mother had him out of the house the minute she spotted it, and the feeling got lost in my anger toward him. And after him there was just an army of others in between.”