Courtesan's Lover (21 page)

“You were superb!” Filippo cries as we leave the building and stand in the darkened street. “Quite superb—even
I
believed you to be the virtuous widow! You are a wonder, Francesca. Indeed, you played your part with
far
more skill than any of those idiots up on that stage!”

I do not know what to say. My mind is in pieces. I want to go home.

“Come on then—
cugina
—let's get back quickly. I want to get all these modest and entirely inappropriate garments off you as quickly as possible so that I can…well…so that I can thank you properly.” He chuckles. “I shall find us a carriage.”

I freeze. Oh, dear God. I can't do it.

“Filippo…I—”

“What,
cara,
what is it?”

“Please, I really do not think I can do any more tonight. I…I…” I am struggling to avoid blurting out the fact that even the thought of fucking with Filippo tonight is now so abhorrent to me that I think I might weep.

“Francesca?”

“My foot is horribly painful, and I really am very tired. Please, Filippo, I just need to sleep.”

“You sound like Maria,” he says, and his voice is suddenly cold.

“Don't be like that, Lippo. Please, I really just don't feel well.” I am struggling to contain my distress, but despite my best efforts, my voice cracks and the tears I cannot prevent begin to spill over.

Filippo is shocked. In a more sympathetic voice he says, “Oh, Francesca, I'm sorry. Oh, dear, you are looking pale. This isn't like you, I do hope it isn't anything you've eaten. What a dreadful shame after this lovely evening. I'll call for a carriage and take you back to the Via San Tommaso.”

***

“No, Filippo, please don't come in. I can put myself to bed. I just want to sleep. Thank you. And thank you for this evening—thank you very much for taking me.”

“Well…if you're certain…” He looks doubtful. “I am not sure that I should leave you alone…”

“I'm not alone. Modesto is here, and Lorenzo will arrive in the morning.”
Oh, God, Filippo, please just go!
“I shall be well looked after if I need anything.”

At last he leaves and I close the door behind him. I push the bolts home and lean up against the wood, my forehead and both palms pressed hard onto the cool oak. After a moment, I slide down the door until I am sitting on the floor in a wide puddle of crumpled blue damask; I put my face into my hands and begin to weep.

Once I start to cry I cannot stop.

A door opens upstairs. I continue to sob into my sodden palms.

“Dear God, Signora! What's happened to you?” Modesto crouches at my side and takes my wrists. He tries to pull my hands from my face, but I press them in harder, and the next sob sounds more like a howl.

“Who's done this to you? Has somebody hurt you? Was it di Laviano? If that bloody man has laid even a finger on you, I'll kill him.”

He puts heavy arms around me and pulls me in close to him. With eyes still screwed shut, I grip fistfuls of Modesto's shirt and press myself against the warm, damp, sweat-smelling linen. I cry until I am exhausted. My chest heaves as I gulp ragged breaths. I feel Modesto's fingers smoothing my hair away from my face and as my sobs begin to fade, I look up at him.

“What the hell has happened? Why are you crying like this? You never cry. I've never seen you like this. What's gone wrong?”

I tell him.

In halting gasps I explain what has happened.

He says nothing until I have finished, but watches me steadily with troubled eyes.

“…and I know I can't do it any more, Modesto. I can't let any of them even touch me again. Oh, God—I want this man so much.” I bend forward until my head is between my bent knees, clutch handfuls of my hair and pull until my scalp hurts. My voice comes now as a sort of muffled scream, smothered in my skirts. “Oh, God, even supposing that he has any feelings for me at all, what will he do when he finds out that this apparently decorous widow he seems pleased to have met is nothing better than a filthy whore? What am I going to do? Oh, Modesto…tell me what to do.” I press my fingers over my mouth.

A cold draught slides like a blade under the lower edge of my front door.

Modesto watches me for a full minute without speaking, and I gulp down several more shuddering breaths as I wait for him to say something.

“What does he think of you, this man?”

“I don't know.” My voice sounds muffled, coming out from behind my hands. “I think I saw a regard for me, in his eyes—well, a regard for the woman he thinks I am—and he was most attentive to me all evening, but…oh, dear…I'm so confused now, I begin to doubt my own mind.”

Modesto tucks another lock of hair behind my ear, saying, “Just sleep on it, Signora. See how you feel in the morning, when you're not so tired. Nobody's visiting tomorrow, so you can rest properly. See what you think about this man then. Before you make any big decisions.”

Oh, God—he thinks this is just a whim—that it'll pass. I have to make him understand. “Modesto, I'm serious,” I say, and my voice cracks. “What's just happened is like nothing I've ever known before. It sounds completely ridiculous, but right now, I feel as if I might die without Luca.”

After a pause, Modesto says, “Well, could you not just take him on as a patron, might that not be a possibility? You could have him as often as you like, then—well, as often as he could afford, I suppose.”

“No! Never!” This comes out as something close to a shriek. “I couldn't!”

Modesto holds his hands up, leaning back from me, clearly surprised by the vehemence of my response. I stare at him, my eyes stinging, my face puffy and hot, and a long silence stretches out between us. The tailends of my last few sobs catch in my throat. Then Modesto says slowly, “I suppose if you are serious, you could sell the house.”

“What?”

“Sell it. Sell this house, sell the furniture, paintings—sell all of it. Well—perhaps keep the jewels for the future. You never know, do you? Put the money away safely with everything else you have saved so far, and stop whoring. Become the virtuous widow you've just pretended to be.”

I stare at him.

“Well,” he says, raising an eyebrow at me. “If you say you cannot contemplate continuing to fuck for a living—if you really mean it—then there's no reason to keep this place, is there? That's all you do here, is it not?”

I nod.

“Let's be practical, Signora. You maintain this house and its contents solely to provide you with an opulent establishment in which to sell—to carefully chosen gentlemen—privileged access to your extraordinary body.”

I wince.

“Don't be coy. It doesn't suit you. It is how you've lived for years, and as I see it, you are seriously considering destroying everything you have worked for, simply because you think you have lost your heart to a man you know would never set foot inside a den of iniquity such as this one. You cannot have him as a whore—because you know, instinctively, that he would never lie with a whore—so you need to find some other way of capturing him.”

The tears begin again. “You make it sound sordid and horrible, Modesto.”

“I don't mean to. I just want to make you face reality. Make sure you are quite certain about what you want to do before you do it. Because if you sell the house, give it all up, there'll be no coming back.” He pauses. “If you stop everything and sell up, and then discover he doesn't want you after all, I cannot imagine you will be able to find your way back to where you are now—even if you wanted to start again. Word gets about in this business, as you well know. Your patrons won't return once they've left. And you might not want to hear this, but you're not young enough anymore to start again from the bottom, somewhere else. And I doubt you'd want to return to the streets.”

There is a long pause.

“I know I have to stop, Modesto.”

He stares at me, his expression unreadable. I have to try to make him understand, though I'm not sure I understand it myself. Hesitating, feeling my breath catch in my throat, I look down at my fingers and manage to say, “I think it all started the evening I met Gianni.”

Something shifts in Modesto's expression but he says nothing.

“He…made me start to see things differently. He was so tender and diffident, and…well…then something happened…he did something that made me wish that…” I try to explain, but tears are thickening my voice, and I don't think Modesto can properly hear what I am saying. I clear my throat and wipe my nose on the back of my hand. “It's all seemed so pointless since then. Everything. As if it's just a stupid game. And there's something else—I didn't tell you. The other day, when I hurt my foot—this woman helped me up from where I'd fallen, and she walked back to Santa Lucia with me, holding me up. Oh, Modesto, she had worked out that I'm a whore, and it shocked her, but she still helped me.”

Modesto remains silent.

“Then tonight,” I say, more quietly than ever. “When I saw him—Luca—it was like an earthquake. Something shifted. Something enormous. I don't know why…but the world just feels different. I can't go on like I have done.”

Modesto's gaze is steady and searching. He seems to be thinking hard for a moment, and then he says quietly, “Very well. We'll sell the house, then.” He lays a hand on my cheek and wipes some of the wetness away with his thumb.

“What if Luca discovers the truth?”

“That is a risk you will have to take. You might change your ways, but you cannot make your past completely disappear.”

A horrible thought lances through my head. “Oh, God!”

“What?”

“Filippo, and Michele and Vasquez, and—what am I to say to them?”

Modesto pauses, frowning. “Let me think about that one. Feign illness for a couple of weeks. Give yourself some time. Go back to Santa Lucia, and be ‘unwell' for a week or two. Don't leave the house more than you have to. In the meantime, I'll try to find a lawyer who can help us value this place and shift it for us.”

“I don't know what I would do without you…” I say, clutching Modesto's hand.

His face is suddenly stiff and expressionless.

“What is it?”

“You say you cannot do without me. Without this house, though, maybe you won't need me any longer…”

“Oh, Modesto.” I throw my arms around his neck. “I can't imagine managing without you. You'll have to come and work for me at Santa Lucia.”

“You already have two servants there.”

I sit back. “Well, I shall dismiss them, then. I don't like either of them very much anyway. Ilaria is always grumpy and irritable and Sebastiano drinks too much.”

Modesto snorts softly.

“I want both you and Lorenzo.”

A raised eyebrow.

“You don't have to talk to him. Often.”

An irritable sigh. “I suppose that fat old lump of cold dripping can cook—I'll give him that.”

“He is a genius.”

“As I say, he can cook.”

A thought strikes me. I say slowly, “But what about you? Shall you be happy still to work for me under new conditions—as manservant to a sober widow—knowing me as you do?”

I speak seriously, and Modesto continues to look steadily at me but then his mouth suddenly twitches and he begins to laugh. His laughter shakes his heavy shoulders. Despite my tearing anxiety, his mirth infects me and within moments the two of us are helplessly convulsed. He puts his arms around me and we sit on the floor in my hallway and laugh until we ache. I say, through gasping breaths, “Why are we laughing? What's funny?”

He sighs deeply and says, “Oh, just the thought of me becoming the decorous servant of a virtuous, well-behaved widow, and trying to forget about all the time I've spent over these last years rubbing soothing oils into the smacked and smarting arse of that same ‘widow.'” He smiles at me. “Trying to forget how often I've gazed in speechless admiration at your beautiful breasts as you have acted the strumpet with such consummate skill and how many times I've stood there watching you parading yourself stark naked before your panting admirers like bloody Aphrodite herself. C
azzo!
It won't be easy to give up such intimacy, Signora. Perhaps not so easy for you, either, though you might not think so just at this moment.”

I am shocked at this sudden outpouring. “Oh, Modesto. If…if you would rather not…” I hesitate.

“No,” he says, suddenly serious. “I would
not
rather not. I suppose I will simply have to accustom myself to…to sobriety. And distance. And so will you. Don't imagine for a moment that many women of good families would allow the sort of intimacy between mistress and servant that you have positively encouraged, Signora. Much will have to change, if your new identity is to be credible for an instant.”

“I know. I do understand. None of this is going to be easy. But I have to do it, Modesto. I know I have to stop whoring. I know it sounds mad, but I can't face rutting for money ever again. Because of him—this man. Luca. I just know it. If it happens that he doesn't want me, or won't have me, or can't have me, then I'll just have to find another way to survive—but I won't fuck for a fee again. Not ever. Please,
caro
, just find me a lawyer. I'll tell Sebastiano and Ilaria tomorrow.”

Relief makes me feel quite weak.

***

When Lorenzo arrives for work the next morning, Modesto, on my instructions, brings him upstairs to my chamber, where I am sitting curled in my favorite chair, dressed in my wrap. My eyes are puffed and gritty, and my mouth feels like a dried-out sponge after so much weeping. I am sure I must look quite dreadful. I have not dared confront my reflection, but Lorenzo's startled intake of breath when he sees me confirms my suspicions.