The Girl Behind the Mask (23 page)

Her full name was Catherine Adams. ‘Kat’ was the nickname she more usually used. She was in Steven’s tutor group. She was only nineteen years old. She had an exemplary academic record and was clearly going to be something of a star. But for now, she was in awe of Steven and was willing to follow wherever he led her. I wondered whether she had been amused by the idea of seducing his partner or whether, like me, she had done it only because she wanted to please him. I felt sick as I remembered how similarly young and naïve I had once been. How naïve I still was.

I closed my laptop and started packing. By the time Steven came back from his office that evening, I was gone.

Did I expect Steven to try to save our relationship? Of course that’s what I hoped for. In the time I had left in London, however, he didn’t attempt to find me and talk things through again, though I’d left a note on the kitchen table telling him where I would be. I declined to go out with my friend to drown my sorrows because I was hoping that Steven might come round. He didn’t. And instead of leaning on my friend over a bottle of wine and some chocolate dessert like I was supposed to, I tortured myself with the idea that Steven had gone straight to his Kitty Kat. Now I wasn’t standing in his way, the fling could become something more serious.

I can’t tell you how much worse it is to be replaced by a younger model when you know exactly what it is your lover sees in his new girl. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her luscious red mouth. I heard her infectious loud laugh. I saw her domed white breasts peeking over the top of her shiny leather basque. I even began to wonder if Steven had bought that basque for her, from the same place he bought that hateful beaded G-string for me. The events of our night in the sex club were on constant replay in my mind.

When my friend asked what had gone wrong, I told her that the break-up had been coming for a long time. I didn’t want to tell anyone the truth. And now I was trying to soothe my broken heart with an email flirtation that would probably never be anything more. Why did that bother me so much? Why did it hurt me that Marco didn’t want to meet in person, when Steven had betrayed me far more spectacularly?

Maybe Nick was right and I was more vulnerable than I cared to admit. I was nowhere near ready to forget about the girl behind the mask.

Chapter 34

10th April, 1753

How I looked forward to nightfall! After a month, I had my routine well-practised. The moment Maria left my room, I crept from my bed and pulled out the boys’ clothes, which Maria thought had gone in a bundle to the church.

The prostitutes from the
Carampane
greeted me like an old friend, no longer bothering to ask whether I wanted to feel their tits. Instead, they asked me when they could expect to see me give my first sermon. My teacher had told them I was studying to be a priest.

‘Such a waste!’ one of them sighed.

‘The best-looking ones are always that way,’ said her friend.

I had my own key to the monkey house now and would often let myself in to find my teacher already at his desk. He would tell me about developments in the city’s politics, about business deals and wars brewing on the farthest reaches of the city’s jurisdiction. He showed me his accounts and explained to me the concept of interest. There are ways of making money even if you don’t have something to sell.

Then we read together. We read history and philosophy but I still enjoyed poetry best. Veronica Franco was my favourite, of course. I soon knew her poetry by heart.

I decided that Veronica Franco’s life was far from unhappy. She wrote so beautifully of passion. How could she have written so wonderfully had she not experienced true love’s highs and lows? And while the plague may have taken her corporeal body, she had left behind her a body of work that would live for ever. As I read the poems out loud and watched my teacher drift into a reverie, wasn’t Veronica in some way living through me? Still charming. Still disarming. I felt I had many reasons to be grateful to Veronica. I wished I might have spent time with her.

Sometimes it struck me that to be born rich could be a misfortune. To be born wealthy is to spend your life under observation. Had I, like Veronica, come from nowhere, no one would have cared about the ‘seemliness’ of my actions. I would have been able to move freely about the city. I would have been able to laugh when I wanted, love where I wanted, learn whatever I cared to. My life could have truly become my own creation.

I wanted to be able to be like Veronica Franco. She was bold and she was challenging and she was loved. In the bedroom at least.

‘That’s the paradox of men,’ my teacher explained. ‘We all admire a woman like Veronica Franco. We all long for her to pay us just the slightest bit of attention. But do we want our wives and daughters to model themselves on her ways? Absolutely not. Veronica Franco was a rare creature.’

I wanted to be a rare creature too.

25th April, 1753

The Festa di San Marco was one of the rare occasions of the year when I was allowed to don anything remotely resembling finery and join my father on his boat. The Doge would be making an offering at the Basilica followed by a fine regatta and our family must be represented.

From the discreet comfort of our boat, I watched the other people on the lagoon. Not far from us, an enormous gondola was moored. The people on board seemed to be having a wonderful time. A small orchestra serenaded them while they lolled on velvet cushions and laughed. While my father was watching the ceremony, I made a study of that gondola. There were five people on board but only one of them was a woman. A single woman entertaining four men! Who was she? How was she able to flaunt herself in such a free and unfettered way?

Maria caught me staring. ‘A courtesan,’ she spat. ‘Surrounding herself with her lovers. It’s a disgrace.’

‘Oh. I thought the men must be her brothers. How do you know she’s a courtesan?’

‘Tchuh,’ Maria turned away from the spectacle. As if she could answer a question like that while we floated on the lagoon with my father within earshot!

Of course, I continued to watch the courtesan whenever Maria’s attention was elsewhere. Which it often was, because her priest had rowed into sight with his choirboys. Poor pious Maria was trying desperately hard not to stare at him. Meanwhile, I tried to imagine the conversation on the courtesan’s boat. The four men I claimed to have taken for her brothers were taking it in turns to amuse the mysterious woman, while she indulged them with the occasional laugh that rang out across the lagoon as clearly as a bell. The men all looked well born. They were dressed in the kind of fashions favoured by my brother. The courtesan – well, she was in an altogether different class. Though I would not have said she was beneath her companions. Not a bit of it.

The courtesan was luminous. She was like the heroine of a love poem. It was more than her sumptuous clothing, which was as fine as any I had ever seen. It was the elegance of her gestures and the music of her laughter. It was in her daring. Out on the lagoon in broad daylight with four men. And a monkey. Oh, when I saw the monkey, how I longed to turn to Maria and ask if I had imagined the little creature. Then it hopped up from the courtesan’s lap to sit on her shoulder. She held its tail to keep it there while the young men passed the animal morsels of fruit to keep it amused. I had never seen a monkey before except in pictures.

I could not tear my eyes away from the courtesan and her pet. There was no sight more interesting to me than the way she indulged those four men on her boat and the manner in which they fell over themselves like circus clowns to amuse her. I wanted that power. I wanted to know how she had it.

I was sure that, at one point, the courtesan looked back at me. A smile played across her lips. It was a smile that told me she was very happy indeed with the way she was living and dared me to suggest otherwise. I looked down at my hands. Then, when I was sure neither Maria nor my father was looking, I lifted my face towards the courtesan and smiled right back at her.

That very same afternoon, Maria accompanied me to the Chapel of the Mendicanti to hear the choir give a concert of new works by their choirmaster. Such a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Those girls certainly had angelic voices, as befitted their mythical status as God’s divine human instruments. But how much more interesting I found the curious creatures now I knew they were not so pure as they would have us believe. My teacher had told me a most interesting story. To help raise money for their lavish convent, the young ladies of the Mendicanti choir occasionally gave concerts at the houses of their most generous benefactors.

‘And after they’ve finished singing,’ my teacher went on, ‘a couple of them can usually be persuaded to give a private demonstration of their proficiency in playing a pipe.’

By ‘pipe’ he meant ‘penis’, of course. I did not believe it but he swears it is true. He said my naivety about such matters made me far more innocent than most convent girls he’s known.

‘They haven’t ended up in a convent because they believe in serving God. They ended up there because they were orphaned or impoverished. They are every bit as red-blooded and keen to know more about the world as you are. And they live in hope that they will demonstrate such ability, a smitten admirer will marry them out of their misery.’

So, while Maria professed to be transported by the miraculous nature of their music, I studied the girls in the brief moment when they crossed the transept in an attempt to guess which ones were best on the wind instruments.

‘Oh, to be able to sing that well,’ I said to Maria as we filed out into the sunshine.

‘To be able to sing that well takes immaculate purity of heart and soul,’ Maria sighed.

Well, my soul was well and truly blackened. Every night I could, I spent with my lover. I no longer even cared if my father was in the house. I would escape and see my teacher or die.

Some nights, we spent very little time on formal teachings. Our discussions on such matters were curtailed to the length of time it took for me to get out of my shirt and boots. The hard chairs remained unoccupied as we jumped straight into the bed and I continued my education in matters far more interesting than Sophocles. Suffice to say, I could play the pipe as well as the good girls at the house of the Mendicanti.

Oh, how delicious were the hours we spent together. I thought I would need nothing more than my teacher’s company in that sparsely furnished room to be happy for the rest of my life, but a few nights after the Festa di San Marco he surprised me by telling me we were going out. He was taking me to the Ridotto, the gambling house.

Chapter 35

Another day in the library. The pieces of the jigsaw were coming together quickly now. Having read about Luciana’s visit to the Festa di San Marco, I wondered if the woman who held the monkey in the painting at the Palazzo Donato was the same woman Luciana described as a courtesan. Then I spent the morning reading a passage in which Luciana described her first experience of giving a blowjob and her teacher’s attempts to turn her into an expert. It corresponded exactly with a passage in
The Lover’s Lessons.
When I had finished translating the passage, I sat for a long while gazing out of the library window at nothing in particular, until my mind inevitably drifted towards my own love life. I thought about Steven and Kat, and then Marco.

I was still emailing or direct-messaging Marco every day, though he continued to dodge my request to meet to talk about the diaries face to face. He claimed that business kept him away from the palazzo and me. And yet he still seemed to have time to respond to my messages. I had tried to find out a little more by casually observing to Silvio, ‘Signor Donato must be a very busy man.’ He gave his usual head-tossing nod and carried on polishing a banister.

I sensed there was little point in asking him where Marco’s office was. A couple of times, I thought about sneaking upstairs to see if Marco had a desk in the house, but I could think of no plausible excuse were I to be found straying so far from the library, and the potential for embarrassment kept me on the ground floor. I had to content myself with browsing the stacks, hoping that perhaps a love letter might drop out of the pages of one of the books.

Marco’s elusiveness was beginning to feel like a personal insult, but still I continued to write to him. The only difference was that perhaps I was a little less open than I had been if he ever asked a personal question. However, that was to change.

One Thursday afternoon, I sent Marco my latest transcript. I’d translated a passage in which Luciana described a narrow escape on her way to her lover’s house. She’d crossed paths with her brother on the Rialto Bridge. The adrenaline engendered by such a close shave had made the sex she had with her teacher that night better than ever. They’d wrestled with each other for hours on end, going through their entire sexual repertoire until Luciana’s teacher collapsed exhausted – midway through taking her up the backside – and told Luciana she would have to look for a younger man if she was going to be so voracious.

Luciana wasn’t the only one feeling voracious. I’d felt distinctly turned on as I read about her latest adventures. So much so that I felt self-conscious as I left the library after reading them. But as I had been doing ever since I started visiting the Donato library, I transcribed Luciana’s diary faithfully and without abridgement. I wrote in the attached email to Marco, ‘I feel a little embarrassed sending you such a dirty document. The shy bluestocking in me is slightly appalled. But you asked to know absolutely everything.’