Courtesan's Lover Page 13

  “That squalid old pigsty? What on earth were you doing in a place like that?” Michele raised an eyebrow and said nothing. His eyes remained fixed on Francesca’s nipples.

  Francesca noticed the direction of his gaze and turned her shoulders away from him. She said, “Oh, Michele, no—don’t even think about starting again. I’m tired, my mouth is all stretched and sore, and my poor tette already feel as if they’ve been attacked by a particularly overzealous baker.”

  “Baker?”

  “Dough.” Francesca mimed kneading, then cupped her hands protectively around her breasts and smiled at him. “Poor things. They’re all bruised.” She turned back toward him and stroked his cheek with her hand. “And anyway, caro, I doubt you have money enough for a second attempt so soon.”

  Michele’s smile vanished. He reached across and caught Francesca’s wrist, twisted her arm around so that she gasped, overbalanced, and fell backward, back onto the pillows. Kneeling up, he leaned over her and took her other wrist, pressing both her hands back onto the bed. “Listen,” he said softly. “If I wanted a ‘second attempt,’ I’d have one, bitch, whatever the expense. Do you understand?”

  “Get off me, Michele,” Francesca breathed.

  “When I’m ready.” Still holding her arms down, Michele bent and took one of her nipples into his mouth.

  “Get off!” she said through clenched teeth. He could feel her wrists twisting under his hands, and she squirmed around, trying to kick him. He sucked hard, once, feeling the soft flesh press up onto the roof of his mouth, and then, almost in a single movement, he let go of her arms, moved back from her, stood, and reached toward where his shirt lay across a small carved chair.

  “Get out of my house, Michele!” Francesca’s voice was no more than a hiss. She had a hand pressed against her breast.

  “Don’t worry, cara, I’m going. I’ll see you on Thursday,” he said, pulling on his doublet.

  “I don’t know that I want to see you again that soon now,” Francesca said, glaring at him.

  “Maybe not, but you will be happy enough to see my money, I’m sure.”

  “I’m thinking of raising my prices.”

  Michele grinned. Stamping his heel down into his second boot, he said, “Let me know how much I owe you next time,” snatched up his coat from the cross-framed chair, and strode across the room.

  He turned at the door to see Francesca sprawled on her stomach across the bed, snatching up one of her shoes from the floor. She scrambled up to sitting and flung the shoe hard at him. Michele raised an arm to ward off the blow; the shoe caught him across the wrist and fell to the ground. He bent to pick it up.

  “I’ll bring this back on Thursday,” he said. He waved the shoe at Francesca.

  “Vaffanculo!”

  Michele blew her a kiss as he pushed past the eunuch, who was on his feet just outside the bedchamber door. He ran down the stairs and made his own way out into the street, throwing the shoe up into the air and catching it as he walked.

  He was almost home before he remembered the knife.

  Twelve

  “It came from your father this morning, Signore.”

  Michele pulled the front door shut and took the letter from his servant. The shadows of both men slid up the walls of his cramped entrance hall as the single candle flame shivered in the resultant draught.

  Michele frowned at the paper and then glanced across to see his servant smothering a yawn; for a moment, the boy’s face lengthened and distorted, his eyes watering. He blinked a few times and rubbed his face surreptitiously with his fingers, looking suddenly much younger than his twenty-odd years.

  Michele flapped a hand by way of dismissal; Franco bowed briefly and left the room, rubbing his eyes again. Cracking the seal, Michele opened the letter and held it up to the candlelight. His eyes flicked across the contents, then he swore, screwed the paper into a tight ball and threw it across the hallway. “Cazzo! Same pile of merda as the last one,” he muttered. “And the one before and the one before that. When is the bloody man going to stop asking?”

  He pulled off his boots and kicked them irritably to one side of the room, flung his coat across a small chair, and took the stairs three at a time on his way up to his bedchamber.

  A fire had been lit; its flickering flames distorted the black shadows of the crimson-hung bed, the wall hangings and two large Moorish shields which hung one on each side of the window.

  “More than twenty years,” Michele said aloud as he unfastened the knot at the neck of his doublet. He was breathing fast, as though he had been running. “Might he not—even unwillingly, the blinkered bastard!—have resigned himself to the fact that his younger son has never, ever had one single fucking iota of interest in the damned priesthood!” He smacked hard at the carved wooden bedpost with the flat of his palm. His hand stung.

  ***

  “Why were you not at Mass this morning, Michele?” His father’s face is dark with anger and Michele can see the big hands starting to curl into fists. “It was noticed, Michele, it was noticed. Monsignor Rossi was expecting you—asked me if you were unwell…”

  Michele shrugs. He will not tell his father the truth—that every time he steps into a church now, the prospect of ordination rises up like a spectre from the dust of the floor of the nave; it seeps from the shadows of the transept, constricting his breathing and deafening him as it wraps itself silently around his head like the mercy hood of an executioner. Even the smell of candle-wax has now begun to make him feel nauseous simply by association.

  And then—an image of the baker’s daughter. On her back, bent-kneed, she smiles, hitching flour-whitened skirts up into a bolster around her waist with eager fingers, framing her invitation to him. Her breasts push forward. Her mouth is wet and her eyes promise uninhibited entertainment. Michele’s hands slide up the insides of her thighs, his fingers dark against the creamy skin. Her legs crook wide.

  His cock swells as he remembers.

  “I said why? Michele?” His father will not be ignored.

  “I…I was tired.” He stares at the ground, unable to think of a better reply. The baker’s daughter’s nipples look like cherries and they taste of yeast, and the black threat of celibacy looms as an infinite, shrivelling incarceration in a mold-stained cell.

  “We all have our place in life, Michele. At some point we must all shoulder the responsibilities meted out to us by God. And God has called you most specifically. A second son’s privilege, Michele. We cannot afford to defer responsibility because of…of something as pitiful as fatigue. Antonio has already begun to—”

  At the mention of his elder brother, Michele stops listening entirely. The soft skin on the baker’s daughter’s thighs is slick with sweat as she wraps her legs around his waist and her roughened heels catch on his back. He no longer hears his father.

  ***

  As Michele threw his doublet down across the chest at the foot of his bed, a branch shifted in the fireplace and collapsed, throwing a walnut-sized knot of burning wood out onto the rug. Reaching forward, he caught it between thumb and forefinger and flipped it back into the grate. He wiped his fingers on his breeches and straightened, crossed the room, and picked up a dark-red glass decanter from where it stood on the deep window ledge. Held it up to the firelight to see how full it was. Pouring the contents into a large goblet, he raised it to his lips, emptied the glass without taking a breath, then refilled the glass.

  “A second son’s privilege,” he said softly.

  Suddenly aware that his bladder was full, he opened the door to the tiny privy that jutted out from the farthest corner of his bedchamber and aimed down through the hole in the seat; the liquid pattered softly into the ash pile below.

  ***

  Antonio frowns at the papers laid out in front of him and then gazes up at his father, rigid-bac
ked with respectful attention. Michele sits on the floor in front of the fire, scratching behind the ears of a mangy wolfhound and trying to ignore his sister.

  “Will you play something with me, Michele?”

  He shakes his head, trying to hear what his father and Antonio are discussing. He has not been invited to join them at the table.

  Caterina pulls at his sleeve. “Will you play Zara, or Pluck the Owl? Please?”

  “I will need you to come with me on the twenty-seventh, Antonio, because it’s really time that you met Signor da Maiano and his daughter. He was most insistent about progressing the betrothal. It is about time you—”

  “Please, Micco…”

  Michele’s voice comes out much louder than he had intended. He smacks her hand away from his arm and, in his irritation, he forgets for a moment that his father is in the room. “Oh—stai zitto, Caterina! Leave me alone! You know I hate bloody ‘Fuck the Owl’!”

  Caterina gasps at his profanity and his father turns around. He says coldly, “Go to your room, Michele, if you cannot behave like a civilized human being. Caterina, go and find your mother.”

  The little girl begins to cry, and Michele walks past her and leaves the sala without a word. The dog scrambles to its feet and follows him, its nails click-clicking on the wooden floor.

  ***

  Michele stretched, then stripped off breeches, hose, and shirt and threw them, too, across the chest at the end of his bed. He sat on the edge of his mattress; stared at the fat little flames now licking lazily around the embers; rubbed without enthusiasm or interest at his crotch. The heat pushed out from the fireplace against his feet and shins. His eyelids were stiff and his mouth felt dry and sour.

  He must, he presumed, have been a consistently deep source of disappointment to his father since early childhood. Countless scoldings, numberless beatings, an almost constant atmosphere of thunderous disapproval—when, when, when, Michele? When are you ever—ever—going to show any sign of fulfilling family expectations? Think about Antonio…Antonio tackles his adult responsibilities with admirable application, and…

  Michele turned away from the fire, swung his legs onto the bed, and lay back on his pillows. Smug bastard, Antonio—not even the imagination to commit the most unimpressive minor indiscretion. Michele pictured his brother—a head shorter than he, dark, softly fleshy—and tried to imagine something he had never seen: Antonio intoxicated. A soft puff of a laugh pushed its way down his nose. He tried to picture Antonio’s ample buttocks bouncing above a splay-limbed whore; attempted to see in his mind his brother’s normally humorless face cracked wide with laughter at a vulgar joke. And then, despite his anger, Michele grinned as he thought of an unlikely scenario: Antonio in the master’s cabin on the , trying to engage the taciturn in polite conversation, innocently unaware of the beady little sailor’s…unorthodox method of earning his gold. Charming ship, Signore, charming. Fast, I imagine? Yes, I should think it keeps you one step ahead of many of the other merchants. Have you done well this year, Signore? Tell me—exactly what is it you trade in? Michele laughed aloud at the thought.

  He lay awake for an hour or more, curled on his side, blankets hunched over his shoulders, watching the fire slowly die, with gritty eyes that, despite their heavy lassitude, refused to close. He finally slid into sleep as the first soft line of pinkish light appeared along the horizon, Francesca’s dark-red silk shoe held loosely in the fingers of one hand.

  Book of Encounters

  I cannot see Vasquez now without imagining him fingering his way beneath that poor girl’s habit. Every time he lays hands on me, I think of her. What was she like? Had she wanted to lie with him? Or did he coerce her into her sin? Perhaps she was afraid of him. I wonder what has happened to her. And the child. Were they cast out into the street as soiled goods, or have the sisters taken pity on them?

  ***

  There was an interesting moment yesterday evening. After our rut, Vasquez disappeared off to the room where his close-stool is kept, as he often does, and he didn’t come back for some time. This is not unusual for him—his digestion can be problematical, it seems, which I suppose is not surprising considering the amount he eats and the speed at which he always eats it. He was out of the room for longer than usual yesterday; I became bored waiting for him, and decided I would start dressing.

  I wanted to go home.

  Now, Vasquez had taken his clothes off after me, on this occasion—he often does, as he likes to watch me undress—so his breeches and doublet were all piled on top of my things. I picked up his breeches, wanting to move them off my skirt, and as I did so, a piece of paper fell out of a pocket. It was folded over and over, and had clearly been crumpled and smoothed out at one time. I recognized it at once. It was that letter. The missive that had so angered Vasquez the other day—I’m quite certain of it.

  Of course, with a quick glance at the door, not wanting to be discovered openly reading his private papers, I immediately flattened it out and started to try to decipher it. Most irritatingly, it was in Spanish—I could only understand a few words. It was signed “Alfàn,” though and had an official-looking seal at the bottom broken, but still attached.

  Oh, I so badly wanted to bring the letter home with me—I could have asked Filippo to translate it—but I didn’t dare. If its contents had so angered Vasquez the other day, then finding it gone might provoke him to violence! And, of course, I would be the obvious suspect.

  I thought it might be entertaining to sow a seed of doubt in Vasquez’s mind, though, so I smoothed the letter out flat and tucked it under the pile of clothes. I was dressed and ready to leave before he arrived back from his close-stool, and saw myself out.

  ***

  Now he’ll just have to wonder whether or not I’ve read it, and if I have, whether or not I’ve understood what I’ve seen.

  Thirteen

  Modesto stood at the end of the Signora’s bed, with his weight heavily on one foot. He squinted against the morning sun, which, now he had fully opened the shutters, was pouring in through the casement and effectively bleaching out the color of everything in the room. Dust motes seethed in the brightness.

  Francesca sat at her table, somewhat disheveled, in her wrap, her cheeks rather flushed and her hair unkempt. Her fingers were ink-stained—he was pleased to see that she had been writing. His earnest recommendation—right from the very beginning of their time together in Napoli—that she record everything she said and did with every patron, had seemed to have been forgotten by her over the past weeks, but she had committed something to paper this morning, at any rate, whatever it was.

  “So,” he said, “how was our Maestre de Campo yesterday?”

  “I’ve just been writing it all down. You can read it if you want.” Francesca stretched, winging her elbows up on either side of her head, her fingers in her hair. She yawned. Closing her eyes, and rolling her neck and shoulders, she said, “Caro, is Lorenzo here? I’m starving.”

  “Mmm, the fat old bastard’s in the kitchen, busy making you something he says will be delicious.”

  Francesca flashed him a smile. “Don’t be so horrible. I’ll just run downstairs and see what he has for me, and then I’ll go back to the girls. I promised them I’d be back by midday. Could you bear to tidy up in here a little?”

  Modesto watched her go

  On the Signora’s table was a painted wooden box, its brightly patterned lid propped open, the key protruding from the lock. Two vellum-bound books lay inside the box, one on top of the other. Modesto picked up the top one. The words Book of Encounters were inscribed across the front cover in Francesca’s hand. He let it fall open, the spine resting in the palm of his hand. He read quickly through the most recent pages, and then riffled back to the beginning of the book.

  ***

  God, I ache all over! Michele never seems to know when to stop
…I’ve no conception of where his endless energy comes from. I do wonder sometimes about him: about his early life. He never talks about himself, but he often seems to have this big, dark anger, burning away like a smoldering furnace, somewhere inaccessible. Somewhere I don’t think I have ever reached. There are moments when Michele frightens me. I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s like a blankness. An emptiness. There’s a kind of nothingness that sometimes flickers across his eyes…as though, just for that moment, he is entirely unaware of what he is doing. Or what he might do next. I don’t think I like him very much. So many times I have said to myself that I should finish with him…but I never do. Maybe it’s this sense of danger. Maybe it’s the money. Perhaps I actually like dancing thoughtlessly around the crumbling edges of potential disaster. I’ve done it before, after all. Or perhaps it’s just that his wild, unthinking, explosive abandonment is…is intoxicating and, like some pathetic inebriate, I’ll keep on and on returning to something I know might well destroy me.

  ***

  Modesto shivered. He pictured Signor di Cicciano’s disdainful arrogance and felt a familiar wash of antipathy push up through him like a ripple of nausea.

  He closed the book, put it back down on the table, and reached back down to the painted box. Inside, beside the second notebook was a small ivory-handled mirror and, very much to Modesto’s surprise, an intricately tooled dagger, its blade a damascened blue steel. He picked it up, weighed it in his palm, then tested the needle point against a fingertip. He frowned at it. The handle of this knife was unlike anything he had seen—instead of the usual protruding pommel, it rose straight up, no wider than the blade, ending in two round, angled “ears” of delicately worked silver. It was, Modesto observed with a cold lurch of distaste, slim, beautiful, and quite obviously lethal. He wondered why on earth, with her history, Francesca would want such a thing anywhere near her.