At her father’s question, Mirabella stopped fussing with the last curl and simply shoved a pin at it until it stayed put. It wasn’t easy doing her hair using the tiny mirror hanging on the wall above their sink. The mirror in the bathroom she’d used in Paolo’s house was much bigger.
That thought unsettled her, as did all the thoughts she’d had in the past two weeks about the comforts of her prison—the softer sheets and thicker mattress, the luxurious bathroom, the good food. So much more like the home she’d had than the one they left it for.
In Firenze, Mirabella and her father had had a house in a decent part of the city, with two floors and a little courtyard at the back, where her mother, and then Mirabella, had kept bright flowers in clay pots. Two small citron trees had provided the gentle aroma that suffused her childhood memories. In the house, Mirabella had had her own bedroom with a big window overlooking the courtyard, and on the ground floor there had been a kitchen, and a dining room, and a parlor with a piano. The house hadn’t had hot running water, but it had had a bathing room off the courtyard, near the kitchen.
The comfortable home of people with moderate means.
But they’d had to leave Firenze quickly, and they’d left most of those means behind. Their last luxury had been the second-class tickets on the steamer that brought them over.
Here in Little Italy, they’d started out in her uncle’s flat—a small but comfortable apartment with three rooms. Mirabella had considered her fortunes considerably decreased there. And then Uncle Fredo had killed himself. First, though, he’d sold all he could to pay off his debts, and still he’d owed. The landlord had thrown Mirabella and her father out of Fredo’s apartment before they’d had a chance to bury him.
Now they lived in a tiny, decrepit one-room flat with only a single cold water tap and a coal stove for both heating and cooking. In the weedy patch behind their tenement building was a row of reeking privies that served for the handling of personal business.
The only chairs they had were the two matched with the small square table that served as a desk and dining table. Two beds and their steamer trunks made up all the rest of the furniture. They’d strung a clothesline through the room and draped a blanket over it for a modicum of privacy.
Being Don Paolo Romano’s captive, in the lair of the Beast, had been far more comfortable—at least once she’d stopped trying to escape.
She’d been erupting with rage and desperate to be freed, to be away from the Beast and get back to her father. The outrage at her loss of freedom had been so acute that it had blunted the harsh edges of the life they were trying to make in this uncaring new world. The only comparison she’d been aware of at the time was freedom versus captivity.
Now that she’d reclaimed her freedom, and her hatred of Paolo had cooled, the comparison with the don’s apartment made in her mind a hatred for this squalid apartment—and she felt especially sour for the nostalgia for her captivity it left behind.
This was a paltry life indeed if being a prisoner had been more comfortable.
“I’m ready, Pappa,” she said and tied a kerchief around her head. She’d was trying to adopt the style of dress common in this city, but she couldn’t imagine working with her hair uncovered.
Her father was far more adaptable than she had ever been. He had adapted well to the city; he didn’t resent their precipitous decline in fortunes, and he was happy to be able to work. He’d adapted well to the end of her captivity, too, fawning over her for the first day that she’d come home and then returning to normalcy so quickly thereafter Mirabella felt rather slighted, frankly.
Sometimes—she loved her father deeply, but sometimes—she felt a frustration with him keen enough to be anger. It showed poorly of her character, certainly; her father was a truly good man. Yet he cared so much about everyone, it was occasionally difficult to feel that he cared especially for her. His reckless chivalry had destroyed their lives in Italy—a reckless chivalry that had frequently caused difficulties for them well before that crisis. The same reckless chivalry had, apparently, sent him to Paolo to petition for Uncle Fredo, and then repeatedly to beg for mercy for her.
They were acts of a good man, indeed. But each time he’d offered himself in someone else’s place, he risked more than himself. He risked her as well—her grief should he be killed, her upheaval when he failed, sometimes her safety, too.
He was an easy mark. Not for gambling or any other vice, but for his soft heart. It had been known in Firenze the Luciano Montanari was a good ear for a sad story. More than a few times, he’d gone off to help someone, or had offered his own limited wealth to someone, who had no real need, and he was left disadvantaged, and his daughter with him.
Mirabella saw those charlatans coming at a distance. Her eyes had been more jaded than her father’s from the moment they’d opened, but he always said it was best to see the good in people first and the bad only when they showed you.
She thought that an unnecessarily unsteady way to live, which brought misfortunes on them like the one that had them living together in a single room at the top of a building she would swear rocked in the wind.
If only she could have made a living for herself and not been beholden to any man.
But that was not the way the world worked—not the old world, nor the new. She was a young woman. She could work, as her father’s charge or a husband’s, but she could not make a living. No one would rent to a single young woman, for example, except for the rooming houses with pages-long lists of rules regarding their conduct. Convents without crosses, those were.
Or there were the bordellos, too, of course. The only options for young women on their own: some kind of a convent or any kind of a bordello.
Mirabella was neither a virgin nor a whore. Thus, she was tied to the mast of her father’s flimsy ship, waiting for the next time he’d stick his nose out and she would bleed.
But he was dear to her. He was all she had in the world, and she was the same for him.
He opened the door and stepped into the narrow hallway, a dark cavern even on the sunniest day. Mirabella took her heavy woolen shawl from the hook by the door—mid-October in this city was cold already—and pulled the door closed. Her father locked it with his key, and they started down the rickety stairs to the street.
The day after she’d returned to her father, Mirabella had returned to work at the shop. While her father was an artist, someone who created new things, she was only a laborer, one of six women who worked the sewing machines.
Often she wondered what she would do with her life if it was her choice to make—and she’d never discovered an answer. There were things she enjoyed, music chief among them, but nothing she could imagine would create a life of her own.
It was a silly, aimless question, anyway. A woman had little choice in what her life would be. She would be married and a wife and mother. There was no real choice except which man.
And that choice, it seemed, had narrowed considerably since she’d been held captive in the don’s house and then been released unharmed.
She’d first noticed it that first morning back at work. The other seamstresses greeted her, and asked lots of nosy questions about her ordeal, but their eyes had been cool and keen. Judgmental. Naturally contemptuous of gossip and rumormongering, Mirabella had at first ignored them.
But then she’d experienced more of the same on the streets, in the shops, all around the neighborhood. She and her father had been in this country only a matter of weeks, barely more than two months, but her uncle had been a significant presence, and her father had made an impression right away.
So, as it happened, had Mirabella. But not in the way she might have hoped.
She was the talk of the neighborhood. Stabbing the don right out in the open and being taken by his men at once had opened the floodgates of rumor. For the two weeks of her captivity, people in Little Italy had been whispering about her. According to her father, the talk at first was couched in admiring and worri
ed terms—how bold she’d been, how brave, what terrible things must have been befalling her, locked away in the lair of the Beast.
Then she’d been released, without apparent injury at all.
Now people spoke of what she’d traded away for her freedom. And they judged her for their assumption.
She hadn’t lived in this world long enough to know if it were different here than in Italy, but it seemed to be. In Italy, at least within her social position, there was a veneer of purity that young women were expected to maintain, but there was no serious scandal to not actually being pure. Discretion was more important than abstinence. She’d given her virginity away to the boy she’d been with when she was ready to give it away, and she’d been intimate with boys after him. There had been no damage to her reputation, because she was discreet, and so were they.
In America, though she was surrounded by people who’d lived in Italy recently enough for their voice to be shaped by it, more than discretion was expected. Unmarried women were either virgins, or they were whores.
It didn’t matter that Mirabella had not traded sex for freedom with the don. She’d been in his house for two weeks, she’d been freed without harm, and everybody assumed they knew why.
No one seemed to think that it would be perfectly reasonable for her to have made the trade they thought she had—that her life was, in fact, more valuable than her virginity, even if she’d still had it. They’d all simply decided she was a whore.
For her part, she would have traded her body for her freedom; she’d been ready to do it but too stubborn to make the offer herself. But that still didn’t make her a whore.
In fact, she didn’t understand why it should be such a terrible thing for a woman to do, use her body to improve her life. There was precious little a woman had of value to this world; her body seemed to be the only thing anyone cared about. So why not use it to her own advantage, rather than meekly allow a man to use it to his?
Which was precisely what Paolo meant to do. Use her presence on his arm to fit in better with the society snobs he wished to circulate among.
So maybe she was a whore, if to be a whore was to use what you had to improve your life.
Sitting amongst these shrewish women as she worked, walking amongst the stares and whispers as she lived, Mirabella decided she would make all these fools eat their whispers.
Mirabella intended to get something more from the deal than she already had.
She wanted power.
Because Don Romano had paid for it, Campanelli allowed Mirabella and her father to work after closing, into the night, on their own projects—two formal suits for Paolo, and the gowns she’d need to attend his ‘events.’
The first event, in slightly less than two weeks, was neither a dinner party nor a ball. Paolo had read the invitation to her during one of their ‘lessons,’ where she learned English and he learned manners; some of the words had been in another language that neither of them knew.
It turned out to be French. Paolo knew a dark-skinned man from a place called Haiti who spoke French, and he’d asked him when they hadn’t been able to puzzle it out. The term was tableaux vivants, which meant “living paintings,” but that hadn’t really cleared the matter up. Hercule, Paolo’s acquaintance, hadn’t known, either.
Not knowing, or having anyone else to ask, Paolo and Mirabella focused on the lessons, deciding that whatever the people uptown had in store, if they were dressed appropriately and could make small talk and eat elegantly, they’d survive the ordeal.
On this night, Mirabella stood on the platform while her father fussed with the skirt of her gown. He’d designed and cut it, and she’d sewn it, but he didn’t like the lie of the lace overdress. The satin gown was almost complete, except for a few finishing touches. The overdress had to be hand-sewn and was still very much a work in progress.
While her father muttered to himself around the pins in his mouth, Mirabella lifted the loose mass of her hair, puffing it so it approximated the fashion, and studied herself in the mirrors.
The dress was a deep scarlet satin with an empire waist and a fitted bodice with only slender straps over the shoulders. The black lace overdress, accented with jet crystals, provided the required modesty of covered shoulders—but the lace was so sheer the modesty was barely a suggestion.
Her father had designed the dress according to her description of what she wanted—and after several long, sometimes fraught discussions about whether she wouldn’t rather wear something slightly more modest and less attention-drawing.
She had not rather.
“I think a choker—black velvet,” she said, contemplating her bare neck. “Perhaps I can pin Mamma’s cameo to it.”
Her father stood straight behind her. In the mirror she saw him lean back and frown. “The bodice is too low in back, Mira. It shows too much.”
“Of my back. Why is that scandalous?”
“For a lady of that place, perhaps not. But for you?”
Such odd turns her life had taken. Once, she’d lived in comfort and a kind of shabby elegance. Now, she lived in a squalid room in a slum. She worked with her hands all day. There were beggars, adults and orphaned children alike, on the street outside her home and work. Yet a man planned sweep her off every now and then to a faraway place where she’d mingle with women who wore velvets and silks every day.
A man she’d tried to kill. Carrying her off to a place she did not belong.
The front door of the shop opened, and the little bell above it tinkled.
“Mi dispiace,” her father said without looking, then remembered himself and added his stilted, inchoate English, “Forgive, we are closed—oh, Don Romano.”
Mirabella had been fussing with the bodice, preparing her argument for its current configuration, and her back was to the door. At her father’s mention of that name, she dropped her hair, looked up, and saw the don reflected in the mirror.
The lights at the very front of the shop were off, since the shop was closed. He stood in shadow, but almost within the reach of the lights illuminating their work. The effect was as if his edges has been gilded.
He’d recovered well and looked, now, strong and healthy. And more dashing than she’d ever realized.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said to her father in Italian, “But I sent for Mirabella and she wasn’t at home.”
Speaking to his reflection she said, “You want me to look like a lady. That takes work we have to do after the work that buys our bread.”
“In English,” he said and switched to that language as he approached. “This dress is what you’ll wear?”
Mirabella took a moment to translate those words. He was picking up manners more quickly than she’d been picking up English, but it was coming. “Yes. You like?”
Standing behind her and a bit to the side, he lifted his hand and brushed his fingers over the soft lace that draped her shoulder. Mirabella’s eyes fluttered shut—only for a single heartbeat, but the gooseflesh flowing over her arm held longer.
She no longer hated Paolo Romano. What she felt for him now had no definition, but it certainly wasn’t hate. It was wariness but also attraction. Mistrust and interest. Sympathy and contempt. Was there one emotion in any language that contained all those contradictions?
When she opened her eyes, his were waiting to meet them in the mirror. “The color suits you,” he said, softly.
“Suits?” She didn’t know this English word.
“It looks good.”
“Ah. Thank you.”
He acknowledged her thanks with a tip of his head.
Her father stood and watched them. Mirabella saw his confusion in the mirror. Before he could say something that would break the easy quiet in the room, she asked, “You me … you sent for me? You sought me?”
“Yes. I have a meeting away tomorrow and won’t be back in time for our meal. I was hoping we could meet tonight instead, but I see you are busy.”
He’d spoken slowly
, but in English, and most of his words were lost on her. She turned to face him, “You say again?”
His mouth twitched slightly; Mirabella now understood it to be the only kind of smile he’d allow himself. The few true smiles she’d witnessed were aberrations, things he’d lost control of, and therefore loathed. He did not want to smile.
“Tomorrow,” he said, and waited for her to nod that she understood the word. “I have a meeting away.” She worked out the meaning and nodded again. “I wanted you to come tonight instead.” That took longer—the past tense in English was constructed differently from Italian and confusing—but she used what she knew, and what she’d understood him to say already, and thought she got it.
She nodded, and he gestured at her, standing on the platform in a half-made dress. “But I see you are busy.”
In Italian, she asked her father, “Are we done, Pappa?”
He looked to Paolo before he answered. Mirabella could see him struggle to form the right one and knew he wanted to ask her if she’d rather be busy, so she added, “If we are, Don Romano would like to continue our lessons tonight instead of tomorrow.”
Several more seconds passed before her father answered. He, too, knew what people were saying about her, and though he knew she had given away the thing people said was her value long before she’d met the don, and knew as well that she hadn’t given herself to him in that way, he didn’t like her reputation tarnished.
Mirabella didn’t much care about it. She hated the whispers and looks, but they piqued anger in her, not shame. Judgmental hypocrites.
“I have what I need,” he said.
To Paolo, in English, she said, working out the words to tell him she needed to change into her regular clothes. “I … change … my dresses. Five minutes?”
Again, his mouth twitched, and he nodded. Then he offered his hand to help her down from the platform. It was only a few inches high and she didn’t need help, but she took his hand. When she stepped off, he didn’t take a step back, and her body came right up against his.
Il Bestione (The Golden Door Duet Book 2) Page 12