Courtesan's Lover (13 page)

Gianni grimaced and shook his head. “No. I'll run the errands.”

“Thank you,
caro.
”

“I'll go now then. I won't be long. Don't wait if the meal is ready before I get back.” Gianni smiled at his father and disappeared.

Luca sighed. He stared at the door for several moments, then pinched his spectacles onto his nose, picked up a book, and riffled through it to where a strip of leather was marking the place at which he had abandoned his reading some moments before.

The twins are sitting on the floor in the
sala
. Both little girls look up at me as I say, “Modesto is feeling rather sad at the moment, so I thought you two might like to make him some of those little dolls he showed you once. You could run over and give them to him this morning. It would cheer him a great deal to see you. What do you think?”

“Candle dolls?” Beata asks.

“Yes.” I smile again at the two upturned faces. “Now…remind me how you make them. What do we need?”

“Twigs.”

“Twine.”

“Wool.”

“Candle-wax.”

“Let's find it all, shall we?” And my two little girls begin to scurry around the kitchen; Ilaria sighs irritably as they pull open cupboard doors and ferret in corners. Bella holds onto Ilaria's skirts and jumps up and down, saying, “Can we have candles, Laria, please, can we have candles?”

She ignores the tugs on her clothes and says to me, “Only got the best beeswax, I have, Signora. Do you really want to…”

“I only need one, Ilaria, that will be perfect. Bella, take it will you? Beata, get a bowl and put it in the embers—carefully.” They follow my instructions. I run upstairs and pull a handful of wool from the underside of my mattress, then reach for a bag of leftover dress lengths and pick from it a few scraps of bright silk and linen. As I again enter the kitchen, Beata and Isabella are both squatting in front of the fire, breaking the long beeswax candle into small pieces and sliding each piece off the wick with careful fingers; they put the lumps of wax into an earthenware bowl, which stands among the glowing embers. Ilaria is peeling vegetables and scowling, trying to ignore the irritating disruption to her routine, but on my entrance she turns from her work and wordlessly hands me a short stick wound thickly with twine. I thank her and a brief smile flickers across her face.

“Find some twigs in the log basket, Bella, will you?” I say then, and she crawls across to the basket and begins to search.

“Will these do?”

“Just right.”

Each twin takes a twig. I hand them each a soft tuft of wool, which they tease out into a thread between forefinger and thumb and then wind carefully around one end of their twig to make a tight, round, knobbed ball. Then about two fingers' depth down the twig, they each tie a length of twine so that an end protrudes on each side. Each protruding thread has a knot at the end of it.

“Bella first.”

Isabella squats back down in front of the bowl of now melted wax. Carefully she upends her twig and dips the woollen ball into the wax. She lifts and dips once or twice and then shuffles back.

“Beata?” She does the same.

It takes some half hour and several dippings, but before long both twins have a headlike ball of wax at one end of their twig, and both dolls have a tiny waxen lump on the end of each twine arm, to represent hands. The girls poke eyes into the soft wax with a pin, and then stand their dolls upright in a pot to harden. While they wait they sort through the scraps of fabric I have brought down and choose stuff for each doll's dress. Beata's will be elegant in rose-pink silk, while Bella's creation will be somewhat more sober in deep-crimson linen. A few scraps of lace will complete the picture—Modesto will be most impressed, both girls assure me gleefully.

With my usual lack of finesse, I help the girls cut and stitch, crimp and pinch; and before long both tiny ladies are—as well as we can manage—complete. A little deformed, perhaps, but resplendent none the less.

“Would you like to drop in and give them to Modesto on the way to…Signora Bianca's?” Both girls squeal with delight at the prospect of a visit to their favorite shop, and in a flurry of flustered chattering, they ready themselves for an outing. I—rather more calmly—swing a coat around my shoulders and bid good-bye to a grumpy but relieved Ilaria, who is, I think, very grateful to see us leave, though she does press two dried figs into my hand as we go: one for each girl.

“Why are we going to Signora Bianca's?” Bella asks.

“I have asked her to make me a new dress. She needs to fit it today.”

“Can we watch?”

“Can we see all the cloth?”

“Can we do cutting?”

They both speak at once, both run and jump, back and forth in front of me as I walk. Bianca will find something entrancing for them to do while she fits my dress, I am sure of it; her glittering treasure trove of buttons, ribbons, threads and beads always pleases my two self-centered little voluptuaries, and Bianca is generous and inventive with her wares. I cannot help laughing at their eager faces. Perhaps, if I cannot find husbands for my girls, I will apprentice them to Bianca when they are a little older. They would enjoy the work, I think. It's a thought, anyway.

I smile at them and say, “Yes, I am sure you will do all that. But we'll go to Modesto's house first, and give him the dolls,”

As always, I'm allowing the girls to presume that Modesto owns the house in the Via San Tommaso.

Bella and Beata begin to bicker about who has made the most beautiful doll and which one they think Modesto will prefer, while I see again in my mind the image of my manservant as I saw him a few nights ago, sobbing in my arms. I rage inwardly for him; I could weep at the thought of everything that has been taken from him. Years ago, right at the beginning, I offered—several times—to give him what he has never experienced, but he always refused. I think he was frightened of being seen to fail.

“Here we are!” I say as we round the corner, and the two girls run ahead to knock at the door.

Bella has her hand raised, with Beata right behind her, when they stop dead. “Oh, Mamma…listen!” Beata says in an awed whisper.

The kitchen casement is open wide, and through it is streaming a sound so beautiful that it seems that the whole street must hold its breath to hear it. Pure and clear, and heartrending as a perfect boy's soprano voice, though much bigger and more resonant, I can hear in it all Modesto's years of loss and pain and wisdom and compassion. The hair on my neck prickles. Thinking himself unheard, my manservant pours his lovely voice out into the silence, and we all three stand on my doorstep and listen, entranced, for fully five minutes, hardly daring to breathe. Then Bella whispers, “He sounds like an angel when he sings, doesn't he?”

“I don't think an angel would sound so sad,” Beata says quietly.

“Let's go in and give him your dolls,” I suggest in a whisper. It seems wrong to interrupt, but when I open the door, the singing stops.

***

“Signora.” Modesto smiles to see us all upon his doorstep, but there is a flicker of wariness in his eyes: I think he's still embarrassed at my having seen him in such distress the other night.

“We made something for you, Desto,” Bella says, pulling at his hand as we all go inside; Beata takes his other hand and looks up at him. “We hope you'll like them,” she says.

Modesto crouches on his heels and, with a little curtsy, the girls each pass him their doll. He holds one in each hand, taking his time to examine the handiwork with an air of grave consideration. After a moment or two, he says, “I have never seen such well-made dolls. Did you make them yourselves? Are they really for me?”

“Mamma said you were sad,” Beata says, as they both nod. “She said these would make you feel happier.”

“We did make them, Desto. Just us. But Mamma helped,” Bella says.

Modesto is squatting, thick-thighed on the floor of the hallway. He smiles again. “Mamma was right,” he says, his gaze on mine. “They are a lovely present. Thank you, all of you.”

“We liked your singing, Desto,” Bella says, leaning against him.

He puts down a hand to steady himself, lifts his eyebrows, and shrugs. “Hmm,” he says. “I didn't think anyone was listening. Well. It's not what it was.”

“It was beautiful,
caro
,” I say.

“But we're going to Signora Bianca's now,” Beata says with a meaningful glance at me.

I laugh. “Don't worry, we are going there right away—the new blue dress needs fitting,” I say to Modesto, who nods.

“You are going to this concert of the Signore's then, I take it?”

“It's not a concert—it's a play. A meal and a play, apparently.”

“When?”

“Seventh of next month.”

He frowns and calculates. “That's a Thursday.” Giving me a rather dirty look, he turns to the girls. “Listen you two, before you set off for Signora Bianca's, run down to the kitchen and get the big blue pot down from the lowest shelf. You can take one each of what you'll find in there.”

The girls scrabble to be the first to the stairs to the kitchen.

As soon as they are out of earshot, Modesto turns to me. “The seventh? It's a Thursday. What about Signor di Cicciano? You know what I said the other—”

“He won't mind—he will be just getting back from a trip. To Malta, I think he said—with his privateer friend. And I don't see Vasquez that week at all. He's away with his troops until the Sunday.”

Modesto raises his eyebrows and pushes out his bottom lip.

“I'll tell you more when I get back later,” I say, flicking a glance toward the stairs. The girls are on their way back up, each holding a large and sticky comfit.

With a kiss for each girl, Modesto takes his leave of us and returns to the kitchens, and I take my excitable children the remaining quarter mile to the house of the former whore, now an accomplished seamstress, who I think is probably the closest thing I have to a friend of my own sex in Napoli.

***

“Breathe in,” Bianca says.

I hold my arms in the air and breathe in. Bianca lips a mouthful of pins and mutters grunting instructions through her nose, pushing and pulling me into the position she needs with plump fingers. She pins and tweaks and folds and tucks until the bodice—inside-out at this point—sits snug around my body like a silk skin.

Standing back from me for a moment, Bianca frowns critically at the high, concealing neckline I have requested for this dress. She runs needle-pricked fingertips along the upper edge, takes the remaining pins from her mouth and says, “I don't understand, Francesca. What is this about?” She flicks a glance down to the girls, then drops her voice and mouths the next few words almost silently. “Has whoring finally lost its appeal? Are you planning on going into a nunnery?”

I smile at her and explain. She laughs. Head thrown back, pin-less hand on an ample hip, Bianca laughs aloud and then sighs noisily. She speaks through the sigh, “Oh, dear, I should like to see this,
cara
, I really should—
you
, a demure and retiring widow? How entirely marvelous you'll be—I'll make sure of it. Every inch of flesh that might inflame your poor unsuspecting hosts will be well covered, I promise you. And pearls, you say?”

“Present from Signor di Laviano.”

“And entirely illegal of course.” Her face lights up at the thought.

“Of course.”

“What does illegal mean, Mamma?” Beata says, looking up from her bowlful of glittering glass beads.

“It means…‘beautiful,'
cara
,” Bianca says quickly. “Your mamma will be beautiful when she goes out next month.”

“Mamma's always beautiful.”

“She is indeed.”

Bianca spends another few moments pinning and stitching and then carefully takes the half-made shell from me, leaving me in my chemise. She and the twins return to the front room while I change back into my old dress; I am just fastening the last lace when I hear the shop door open, and a man I cannot see begins speaking to Bianca. I tuck the ends of the laces down between my breasts, wriggle my shoulders until my dress sits comfortably, and then re-emerge to go and find the girls; as I walk, I fiddle with a wisp of hair that has escaped from its braid.

A tall young man is leaning on Bianca's table, pointing with his forefinger at a line written in her ledger. He pushes untidy hair back from his face with the other hand, and I draw in a breath.

It is Gianni.

I step back into the shadow of the passageway with my heart thudding, experiencing again in my mind that moment when he laid his mouth upon my scar and cracked open my defenses. I can feel his fingers on my hipbones again. I press my back against the wall of the corridor and peer sideways at him: I don't want him to see me. My much-loved but loose-mouthed friend Bianca shall not know that I've lain with this boy, nor shall I risk my expression revealing the unnerving disquiet he has begun within me. Her gossip-greedy nature would delight in such a tidbit, and my reputation would surely suffer for her revelations.

As I watch him, Gianni smiles at Bianca; she beams, nodding her agreement with whatever he is saying. She taps her finger smartly on the paper in front of her and he inclines his head.

Beata glances up from her bead-threading, sees Gianni, and stares openly. Bella senses her sister's inattention; she raises her eyes too. He smiles down at the two little figures and my heart jolts—it is a sweet, brotherly smile that has both girls immediately making huge doe-eyes at him, gazing up into his face from beneath long lashes and giggling. Bianca says something I cannot catch and Gianni laughs.

He seems to be protecting his right hand for some reason; he is holding it with the other, and a couple of times he stretches and folds his fingers as though they are paining him. I find that I want to talk to him and am on the point of ignoring my instinctive anxiety, stepping into the light and surprising him, when he straightens, thanks Bianca, and leaves the shop.

“Mamma, you just missed such a nice man. He said we were pretty,” Beata says smugly as I come back through the door.

“And so you are; he was quite right.”

“And I told him you were a pair of naughty little minxes just like your mother,” Bianca says. The girls giggle.