The Girl Behind the Mask (19 page)

‘He has been bothering me all day,’ my teacher laughed. ‘It is like being in the control of another brain.’

‘I am glad to see him so happy,’ I said.

‘Oh, he’s very happy, all right.’

My teacher sat down on the edge of the bed. I raised myself on my elbow to look into his lap. His manhood seemed to twitch in my direction, as though encouraging me to touch him. I ran a gentle finger along its length.

‘Are we . . . can we do what we did yesterday, again?’ I asked.

‘No. What you experienced yesterday was just the beginning. If you will submit to my expertise then I will teach you things about your body that will fill you with delight.’

‘You filled me with delight yesterday,’ I assured him.

‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘There will be more.’

I lay back upon the pillows. Smiling at me all the while, he drew a finger down the centre of my body, making me shiver. Then he slid down the bed so that his face was level with my mound of Venus. I squirmed. His hot breath on my hair was more than a little ticklish.

‘Lay still,’ he instructed. ‘Open your legs.’

I did not question him. But then he moved closer still, putting his face right in my mound, and I felt so full of sensation that I tried to push his face away. I tried to close my legs.

‘I can see you are going to make this difficult,’ he observed. He held my thighs firmly. Still I resisted.

‘Are you going to kiss me there?’ I asked him. I was horrified.

‘I’m going to do more than kiss you,’ he said.

I couldn’t help it. I was suddenly very shy.

‘This is no good,’ he said. ‘If you are going to refuse to accept your pleasure like a good girl, then I shall have to find another way.’

He raised himself up, still holding both my hands, and reached for the scarf I had tied around my hair before I tucked it beneath my brother’s hat.

‘This is for your own good,’ he informed me, as he bound my wrists together and then bound them in turn to one of the bedposts. With my arms thus restrained, I tried to preserve my modesty by pressing my legs together, but my teacher made swift work of pulling them apart.

‘I thought you wanted to know everything?’

‘I do, but . . .’

‘Just close your mouth and listen. A woman’s organs of pleasure are not unlike a man’s,’ he informed me. ‘Feel how when I apply my lips to your tiny bud, it begins to throb and swell just like my manhood. If I lick the tip, like this, then the sensation will only increase in intensity.’

I writhed in my bonds. I wanted him to continue to lick me and at the same time, I simply could not stand his ministrations. I felt a curious sensation throughout my whole body. It was as though someone had held pepper under my nose and my whole body was going to sneeze at it.

‘Please, please,’ I begged him. ‘You must stop. I am afraid I won’t be able to control myself.’

‘I am afraid of exactly the opposite,’ he told me. Then he disappeared between my legs again.

What a feeling! It made me long to take him inside me. I begged him to cure the ticklish intensity with a thrust. But no matter how I begged and struggled, he shook his head and refused me, holding my legs more firmly. There was nothing I could do but lie still.

But I could not be still. I bit my lip and strained against the scarf that held me. As the feeling became more intense, my body bucked upwards. I pressed myself against his mouth. I told him to lick faster. I was entirely wanton. I was possessed.

And then there came the moment when I could control myself no longer. I cried out. Powerful waves of feeling flooded through me. My very insides were undulating. I could hardly breathe. I gasped for air. I wanted only to press harder, harder against him still, though at the same time I begged him to release me. I begged him to stop. And when he wouldn’t answer my pleas, I begged God and the saints to deliver me.

I kept my eyes tightly closed as the feeling exploded. Stars danced behind my eyelids. I felt exhausted and yet entirely renewed. I sank into the bed, with my hands still tied above my head. And then I started laughing. I couldn’t stop myself. There was nothing to laugh at but my body was no longer in the control of my mind. I began to think I had gone mad.

My teacher sat up between my legs and smiled down on me. He untied my hands and I sat up. He wrapped his arms around me.

‘Now, my little goose, tell me how silly you were to try to stop me? Tell me that was not the most delicious sensation you have experienced in your short sweet life. See?’ He made me look towards the mirror. ‘Your eyes are glittering. Your cheeks are perfectly flushed. You have never looked so lovely.’

‘Or felt so well loved,’ I murmured.

He kissed me on the top of my head. ‘Sweet girl.’

‘Now will you tell me your name?’ I asked. ‘Since you have seen parts of me that no other living being has seen since I was last bathed by a nurse.’

My teacher laughed. ‘My first name is Giacomo.’

‘A very common title. And your family name?’

‘I need to know you better before I can tell you that.’

Then, tickling me like a fiend, he rolled me over onto the mattress and bit me on the bottom.

This time I knew the pleasure he had given me could be read all over my face. Every time I thought about the events that took place in his shabby room, I blushed with girlish shame, even as I wanted to laugh out loud at the deliciousness of it all. And he had assured me there was still much more to come. Much better! If I was going to Hell then it would be a wonderful journey.

I made it back into the palazzo without disturbing anyone, despite knocking over a bucket that had been left upon the dock. But I knew I had to be more discreet. I had to try to control my excitement. Lying in bed, I pressed a cold glass against my forehead to calm my passions. But it did no good and the following morning, Maria suggested I’d caught the
scarlatina
!

I have to be more careful, though I have never wanted to be more reckless in my life.

Chapter 27

Soon, my account of losing my virginity began to seem very tame indeed. As did Marco’s! Dear Luciana’s entries in her diary were growing more explicit by the day. Her introduction to oral sex was just the start of it. Within a week, her teacher had persuaded her to let him put a finger in her arse. You can easily guess what came soon after. Had those critics who decided a young girl could not go from losing her virginity to testing the deeper waters of depravity so quickly been but able to read the pages I held in my hand, they would soon have altered their opinion. The pages were a gift to me. I was able to tell Bea without fear of contradiction that her theory about Casanova was wrong. Luciana Giordano was definitely the author of
The Lover’s Lessons
. Some of the passages corresponded exactly with passages in the novel. They used the same phrases.

It was slightly embarrassing, however, to have to paraphrase them for Marco. Though I had shared the story of my virginity, telling him that Luciana was becoming a big fan of anal sex was something else. I felt oddly shy on her behalf. It didn’t help that Marco remained so elusive. He was never in Venice, he claimed, though Silvio had once told me he was ‘always there’ and he had seen me steal the rose. And crazy as it sounds, whenever I was in the library at the Palazzo Donato, I felt that Marco was nearby. What was the real story? I was determined to find out more.

I had been visiting the Donato library every day for more than a month now, and not only had I yet to meet Marco, I still hadn’t seen any more of the palazzo than the dark corridors that led from the front door or the watergate to the secret courtyard and the library beyond. Though in Luciana’s diaries I had plenty to absorb my interest, I could not help but be curious about what lay beyond the one room I was permitted to explore at my leisure.

Of course, I had tried to find more hints to the real Marco on the library shelves, but there weren’t many clues there. As far as I could tell, no books had been added to the library for several decades. At least, no new books. Every tome on the shelves was of academic interest. It might have been a university library. There were no stray paperbacks. No Harold Robbins. Not even a copy of
The Da Vinci Code
. Didn’t everybody have a copy of
The Da Vinci Code
? Marco Donato’s grandfather certainly looked like the kind who might have enjoyed the odd thriller.

But no. There was nothing that suggested the library existed in the twenty-first century. No modern books. No family photographs on the mantelpiece above the fireplace that might have filled in the gaps since 1999. The only thing in the room other than the books and the furniture was that painting of the eighteenth-century lady. Whenever I paused in my reading, I found my eyes drawn to that portrait. The woman therein seemed to gaze back at me. Her smile was every bit as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s. It seemed to challenge me to find out more. Who was she, for a start?

For a short while, I thought she might be Luciana, but she was too old. Luciana had entered a convent as a teenager. Also, the painted woman’s hair was too fair. Luciana had described her own hair as dark. Who was the mysterious blonde?

I got my answer as to the identity of the woman in the portrait a few days later. I’d been tempted for a long while by the thought of what lay further down the corridor, beyond the library. Naturally, I dared not ask for permission to roam but I decided I would stray regardless, using the need to visit a bathroom as an excuse if caught by Silvio.

The next time I was in the library, I waited only a few minutes before I made my escape. Since it was icy on the streets outside, I had worn rubber-soled boots that Silvio made me discard in the hall, so it was easy for me to make my way down the corridor in my socks without making too much noise. I knew exactly where I wanted to go.

The doors I was most intrigued by were at least eighteen feet high, made of heavy well-waxed wood that would not open easily. The centre of each door panel was decorated with a carved monkey’s head remarkably similar to the door-knocker monkey at Ca’ Scimmietta. There was an identical double door on the other side of the corridor. Again, it was decorated with monkeys’ heads. Each of the monkeys’ faces bore a different expression. I wondered what they represented. If they represented anything at all.

Horribly aware of how great a liberty I was taking, I glanced down the long corridor in either direction to make sure I wasn’t being watched. I listened carefully to the silence around me, to make sure it really was silent. I could hear nothing other than my own breathing. I imagined Silvio somewhere on the other side of the house, in the kitchen perhaps, stirring the pot he always claimed he’d left on the stove. Well, I thought, here’s hoping it’s a risotto.

I grasped the handle of the first door firmly and twisted it. I did not expect it to let me pass without protest, but the door opened easily and without the slightest noise. The hinges must have been recently oiled. Though the Donato house had a strange air of desertion, it was clear a great deal of energy still went into its upkeep. As in the library, where there was not a speck of dust to be found, the intricately carved doors were free of dirt and recently polished, scented with good old-fashioned beeswax. It was still more mausoleum or museum than family home, though. I found it hard to imagine Marco relaxing in this room, kicking off his shoes and lying back on the sofa. With the door open, I remained in the corridor, looking in, until I was certain I would not be disturbing anyone.

I knew a little about Venetian architecture. I knew these rooms at the front of the house, overlooking the canal, were the rooms where the family would entertain guests. As such, they were likely to be the most sumptuously decorated rooms of all, while the rest of the house could be quite plain. When I first arrived in Venice, I had been overawed by the four-poster bed in my apartment, but what I saw now made a mockery of those few sticks of furniture in my borrowed flat.

What a beautiful room lay beyond the smiling monkeys! It was dark – the shutters remained closed against the weak February sun – yet in some strange way the room seemed to glow. Such light as did enter the room was reflected in a thousand small ways by the gilded edges of furniture and frames and what appeared to be an enormous mirror. While the rest of the furniture was uncovered, the mirror above the huge stone mantelpiece was shrouded in a pristine white sheet, with a tear that offered just a glimpse of the glass behind. There was another mirror on the opposite wall. That too was covered. How strange, when everything else was exposed.

I tiptoed round the room, looking for more clues as to Marco and his family’s life. Once again, I found no photographs, no stray paperback novels or invitations on the mantelpiece, but there was another painting of the woman depicted in the library portrait. This painting was by a different artist though; I could tell without even looking at the name on the tiny plaque on the frame. I wondered if this was a better likeness. Certainly, the sitter looked more relaxed for this painter. She held a half-closed fan in her right hand. With her other hand, she reached up to hold the tail of a monkey that was sitting on her shoulder. The monkey, in turn, had a paw on top of the woman’s head in a manner that suggested it was not always entirely clear which of them was mistress and which was pet. I looked at the monkey more closely. I wondered if it had been the model for the carved heads on all the doors.