The Rossetti Letter (v5) (25 page)

Work was the answer. Work was always the answer.

G
WEN LEANED OVER
the rail of the vaporetto and drew in a deep breath of fresh, sea-scented air. She felt excited for no particular reason, in anticipation of exactly what she wasn’t sure. It was sort of like everything—the rumble of the boat, the ocean spray that misted her face, the sight of Venice receding in the distance and the warm, bright morning sun that promised a day filled with possibility—contained in this one moment held all the best moments of all the best summer days she’d ever known.

“That’s the Lido,” said Stefania, pointing to the approaching shore. She had short, tousled hair and a cute, wide-eyed face, and she looked as vibrant as the morning, in a white cotton blouse and a pair of yellow capri pants. She glanced up and smiled, and Gwen noticed the smattering of freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose.

The crowd on the vaporetto pressed forward as the boat docked. Stefania and Gwen were first off, Gwen following closely as her new friend walked briskly along the road that paralleled the water. They turned right onto the Gran Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, the Lido’s main street, which led from the lagoon to the seashore, and soon they were seated on a couple of springy red seats at the back of a bus, peering out the windows at the tree-lined boulevard and the luxurious storefronts.

The beach stretched on for miles in a beautiful, unobstructed arc and was lined with two rows of blue-striped canvas cabanas. Stefania led her along the golden sand to the Hotel Des Bains.

“These beaches are supposed to be for hotel guests, but my uncle is one of the managers here, so I get—how do you say?—a preference,” Stefania said as she paid for a cabana rental. “Anyway, this is where my friends and I like to meet.”

They changed into their bathing suits and spread their towels on the sand. Stefania’s tiny, bright orange bikini glowed against her olive-toned skin. Gwen felt a twinge of envy at her figure. Stefania was a bit flat-chested perhaps, but she was slender, and had skin that tanned instead of burned. Gwen felt like a large, colorless blob next to her. She took a bottle of sunblock from her backpack and began slathering it on her legs; her skin was so pale in the bright sunlight that it seemed to have a faint blue tinge to it. The black bathing suit didn’t help much. She’d bought it last year during the height of her Goth craze and now it was too tight—she was practically bursting out of it—and against her white body it made her look like one of the Undead.

This morning she’d promised herself that she’d spend the whole day being her new, improved, super-cool mysterious self, no more geeky Gwen, and three minutes in a bathing suit had eroded her resolve and every bit of poise she had mustered. I’ll probably manage to do something stupid, Gwen thought darkly. Like trip as I walk along the sand, or drown when I try to swim.

Stefania shaded her eyes and gave Gwen a wise, appraising stare. “You know what you look like?” she asked.

Sure, Vampira, Gwen thought.

“Like a Hollywood starlet. Like one of those bombshells from the fifties who used to come for the film festival.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you’re very glamorous. Your long hair, your porcelain complexion—and you have the body of a woman,” she added with genuine admiration. “You must have many boyfriends in America, yes?”

Gwen almost told the truth, but her more worldly alter ego moved tantalizingly within reach. “Just a couple,” she said, trying to make it sound like there were tons of guys just dying to take her out.

“Only a couple? I don’t believe you.”

She could see that Stefania was sincere. It suddenly didn’t seem very nice to pretend to be someone she wasn’t, someone more sophisticated and cool.

“Where I’m from, guys don’t seem to like girls who look like me,” Gwen confessed. “I’m too…sort of plump. They like girls like you—skinny model types.”

“Maybe we should change countries,” Stefania said. “I get teased all the time because I have no curves. People say, ‘Who wants a girl who looks like a boy?’ All of my friends are going to worship you. They will think you are a goddess; even better, an American goddess.”

“Really?”

“Wait and see. It’s still early, but my friends—Giovanni, Pietro, Marco—will be here later. You can take your pick of any one of them. Except for Marco—Marco is for me,” she said with a conspiratorial smile. “But I can tell you about the others. I know everything about them—I mean
everything.
”

Gwen settled herself in the warm sand, closer to Stefania. She took in the vista before her: the expanse of golden sand just beginning to fill with beachgoers; the shimmering blue ocean and the limitless blue sky; the rhythmic, percolating sound of the waves breaking then dissipating along the shore; the sparkle and shine of her silver navel ring and her purple-polished toenails. She sighed. She hadn’t felt this happy in weeks.

Francesco was the boy in the red bathing suit who’d said he was a boxer and had flexed his muscles for her inspection; Giovanni and Giuseppe, two brothers who looked almost identical but were a year apart, had insisted on setting up a huge beach umbrella so that Gwen would be protected from the sun; Pietro, scrawny but cute, was a bit of a clown, quick-witted and full of jokes; Lorenzo didn’t speak much English, but gazed at her with soulful eyes. Gwen looked at the boys gathered in a half circle at her feet, under the umbrella’s shade, and hoped that she’d finally gotten all their names straight. One of the boys—she wasn’t sure which one—had provided her with the low beach chair upon which she sat. Anyone passing by (anyone with a rather fanciful imagination) might have thought the scene resembled that of a young queen surrounded by courtiers; and, fanciful though it was, courtiers were no more eager for a queen’s favor than Stefania’s friends were for Gwen’s.

“How do you say ‘nose’?” Gwen pointed to her nose. Their impromptu Italian lesson—Gwen the sole student with five teachers—had already covered the sights surrounding them: beach, ocean, sky.

“Naso,”
they all replied.

“Naso,”
Gwen repeated. “How do you say…‘lips’?”

“Labbra,”
they said in unison.

“And how do you say…‘kiss’?”

“Bacio,”
they said, smiling and laughing. Pietro sprang to his feet. “I will demonstrate!”

“Pietro, behave,” Stefania called. She and Marco were lying under an adjoining umbrella, face-to-face. They talked in low but excited voices, as if they were old friends who had been apart for ages, although Stefania had said that she’d seen him only two days before. Gwen could see that they were crazy about each other. Stefania hadn’t exactly said so, but Gwen got the impression that her parents weren’t quite so fond of Marco as she was. She wondered why; he seemed perfectly nice.

Pietro briskly saluted Stefania and plopped back down in the sand while the others laughed. They looked to Gwen for her next request. She thought about saying something like “love” or “sex” then decided against it. Although it didn’t seem to matter what she said or did. Stefania had already told her that they all liked her; she just had to decide which one of them she liked.

They were all cute in their own sort of way but, like most boys her age, they seemed younger than herself. Not that she was complaining. They were still boys, and they were Italian, and they spoke with really cute accents, and they acted as if they’d never met an American girl before. Like Stefania had said, they seemed to think she was a starlet or a goddess or something. Boys at home would never bring a girl an umbrella or a chair, wouldn’t say, right to her face like Pietro had the moment they met, that she was beautiful! Boys at home, Gwen thought, wouldn’t be this nice even if you
paid
them.

Even though she had tried, Gwen couldn’t stop thinking about Tyler. Tyler Daniels,
the
hottest guy at Forsythe. She’d had a crush on him for months. A few weeks ago, right before finals, she and some friends snuck out of their dorm after midnight and walked to the harbor. A group of boys, including Tyler, had been there, too. Somehow she’d been different that night—like, grown up, sort of. Everybody had seen Tyler flirting with her—and then he’d kissed her, really kissed her, in the shadows of the boathouse. She’d let him touch her boob, just over her shirt of course. He’d wanted to go further and there’d been a bit of wrestling, but that was normal, wasn’t it? Tyler had said he thought she had a great body, and that he didn’t like stupid anorexic girls. For two days, she was as happy as she ever remembered being. Then she’d seen him holding hands with Tiffany Havermeyer. Tiffany Havermeyer was so skinny, her arms looked like two twigs. Tiffany Havermeyer was probably anorexic
and
bulimic. But Tyler hadn’t even looked at Gwen after that. It was horrible—everyone knew that they had made out, and then he just dumped her. One of Gwen’s friends told her that Tyler had said that Gwen was too young and not experienced enough.

Too young! She wasn’t too young—she was going to be fifteen in two weeks. The real problem was that she didn’t have enough experience. If she wanted to kiss someone—and possibly more—she was going to have to choose one of the Italian boys.

Stefania declared that it was time for lunch. A great deal of excited Italian conversation followed (to Gwen it seemed that people were always excited when they spoke Italian), and Stefania explained that the boys were arguing about who was going to buy lunch for her. Stefania put an end to it by telling them that they would all buy lunch for her. Marco was also on his feet—obviously he was going to the café, too; this lunch ritual seemed to be routine.

What a wonderful country this was, where boys wanted to do nice things for girls. Maybe she could stay here forever and live with Stefania and her family, Gwen thought, as the boys, all of them except for Pietro, trudged off down the beach.

“Why are you still here?” Stefania demanded.

Pietro fell on his knees before Gwen and held his clasped hands to his heart. “I don’t have so much money,” he said, “and I am not a muscle man like Francesco, but you must love me the most because I have great personal charm.” He batted his eyes comically.

“You are as charming as a snake,” Stefania replied, “and you have plenty of money. Go to the café with the others. We want to be alone.” When he had gone, she turned to Gwen. “Remember what I told you about Pietro. He seems harmless, but he isn’t. My friend Carmela went to the movies with him and he was like an octopus—you know, with many hands.”

“Ciao, Stefania.” An older boy in black bathing trunks walked up to them, stopping just outside the umbrella’s shade. He looked tall and deeply tanned against the bright sky. His dark hair fell into his eyes, and as he brushed it aside, Gwen saw the bulge of his biceps and the ripple of muscles across his abdomen and chest. Drop-dead
gorgeous
her best friend, Shannon, would’ve said. Gwen felt her breath catch in her throat. He kind of nodded in her direction, and in Italian asked Stefania a question that Gwen guessed meant “Who’s your friend?” Then, while Stefania was talking, he looked back at her and their eyes met.

Gwen thought later that it was like everything stopped. Like the waves stopped breaking and the wind stopped blowing, like the children stopped running on the beach and laughing and splashing in the water. Like all the sound stopped, except for the sound of her heart beating. All she could remember of that moment was the sight of his face, and her heart pounding in her ears.

She barely heard Stefania say, “This is my cousin, Nicolo,” barely heard Stefania mention her name, but, sort of like it was all happening in slow motion, she saw Nicolo’s lips part and his mouth open to speak to her.

“Ciao,” was all he said, but it was enough.

S
OMETHING ABOUT IT
was odd. After a couple of painstaking hours, Claire had completed her translation of the Rossetti Letter. She read the pages of her notebook a second time, hoping that another careful perusal would reveal exactly what was bothering her.

Claire had seen a few excerpts, but she had never read the Rossetti Letter in its entirety before, and the overall tone was different than she had expected. It seemed rather matter-of-fact, not like a letter written in panic or haste. If Alessandra Rossetti had been involved with the conspirators in some way, wouldn’t she have been in danger? How was it possible that she could be so self-assured, so unafraid?

Unless—a dark, unpleasant thought came to her—unless there was some merit to Andrew Kent’s theory that Alessandra had helped the Venetians frame the Spaniards.

Claire could see how the Rossetti Letter might have inspired that conclusion. It didn’t seem like a missive composed in fear and delivered through the secret auspices of the
bocca di leone.
And there was something else, too, that she knew was wrong, but as soon as the idea was about to coalesce into something solid, it vanished just as quickly.

So—Alessandra as Mata Hari, not Joan of Arc? No. Claire refused to believe it. She opened the large, morocco-bound
Minutes of the Great Council, March 1618,
and ran her finger along the daily entries: March fourth, March fifth, March sixth. There it was.
Signorina A. Rossetti bocca di leone Palazzo Ducale.

What else could this mean except that she had delivered a letter to the
bocca di leone
? That seemed clear enough, but what happened after? And why did Alessandra seem to disappear once the conspiracy came to an end? It seemed that the Rossetti Letter was destined to raise unanswered questions, the most persistent being, how did she learn of the conspiracy? It was assumed that she had ties to one or more of the conspirators named in the letter, but no evidence of a connection between her and any of these men had ever been found. Nor was there proof of a link between her and the Spanish ambassador, or the duke of Ossuna. And that phrase, “Letters exchanged…” How did she know about that?

Claire turned back to Bedmar’s
Relazioni.
She’d already confirmed the accuracy of the quotations she’d used in her dissertation, but now she wondered if there might be a mention of Bedmar’s correspondence with Ossuna in his reports to the king. It was worth a look, anyway.

She skimmed a report detailing recent appointments to the Great Council, and one about the Doge’s failing health and the most likely candidates for his successor, then read Bedmar’s portrayals of other diplomats in Venice. He went on at length about the English ambassador (“Sir Henry Wotton is at heart a heretic who hopes to persuade Venice to adopt his impious beliefs and has at his embassy both books and men to support him in this aim”). There were tidbits about Venetian customs, with an emphasis on recent crimes and the punishments meted out by the state, and some rather more tedious accounts of the management of the Spanish embassy and its expenses. Following that were a few reports of events he had attended, detailing social customs and conversations he’d had with people he’d met. Exhaustive, almost, but no mention of Ossuna anywhere. Claire began skimming faster, pausing only when her eye was caught by a familiar name.

“…a midnight party and a sumptuous feast, again at Ca’ Aragona.” Ca’ Aragona—where had she seen that before? In Fazzini, she remembered, in his anecdote about the courtesan La Celestia. So Bedmar was an intimate of this courtesan. She checked the date of Bedmar’s report: June 10, 1617, and made a note to look up the date in the account by Fazzini about the debut of the new
cortigiana onestà.
What if they were writing about the same event? Claire’s mind whirled. Lorenzo Liberti had died in the spring of 1617, and Alessandra had become a courtesan soon after. Could it be possible that she was the courtesan whose debut was made that night? That she was La Sirena? If she was, and if Claire could place Bedmar in the same place at the same time as Alessandra, it would help make her case for her version of the Spanish Conspiracy.

Claire almost laughed out loud. Numerous historians before her had tried to establish a relationship between Alessandra Rossetti and the Spanish ambassador, without success. If it was that easy, she reasoned, surely it would have been done already. She leaned back in her chair and massaged her temples as footsteps sounded at the other end of the reading room. They stopped in front of the librarian’s desk and a familiar voice began speaking.

Andrew Kent’s English accent was evident even when he spoke Italian. His voice was very deep, Claire realized. She wouldn’t have thought, looking at him, that he had such a low-pitched voice. But even from across the room, even when he was talking softly, she could feel it resonate in her solar plexus, in the same spot where she would feel the vibrations of a bass drum.

With a sideways glance, Claire looked over at the library counter as Andrew Kent picked up his books, then walked to an empty table near the center of the room. He sat down, took a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket, opened Alessandra’s other diary, and started reading, without any additional preparation. He didn’t have any reference books with him; apparently he didn’t need an Italian dictionary.

She sensed that he wasn’t going to give up that diary too easily, in spite of Francesca’s belief in the efficacy of feminine persuasion. Honestly, though, he didn’t look as if he was all that receptive to feminine persuasion. Of course, he seemed to like Gabriella, but what man wouldn’t? She was beautiful, intelligent, successful, and if last night was any indication, she flattered him almost incessantly. From his point of view, that would be pretty hard to dislike, Claire admitted. That Gabriella was also self-absorbed and vain was no doubt a minor issue, considering the whole package. Men would forgive a lot worse in a woman who was so beautiful. The real question was, what did Gabriella see in Andrew Kent?

Claire was in a good position to study the professor without being observed, and he seemed too engrossed in his work to notice much of anything, anyway. His hair was a little too unkempt to be considered stylish. His glasses sat askew on his face, courtesy of a broken earpiece that was precariously stuck back on with a thick wrapping of Scotch tape. He was wearing that unfortunate blue shirt/brown pants combo again. Granted, Claire was focusing on the least attractive things about him, but it was pretty evident that Andrew Kent was not exactly a romantic fantasy man. Why was Gabriella acting like she’d just caught the biggest trout in the stream?

Maybe he was obscenely rich. Maybe he was a titled aristocrat, like Gabriella—maybe Andrew Kent was really Sir Andrew or Lord Muckety-Muck, with a big country estate and an entire village of domestic servants. That would appeal to a countess, wouldn’t it?

Claire looked at Alessandra’s diary, filled with page after page of four-hundred-year-old Italian script, which would take more time to translate than she had left in Venice. The task before her suddenly seemed overwhelming. She couldn’t concentrate anymore, not with Andrew Kent in the room. Perhaps it was time to go out and do some of the things she’d thought about that morning: she decided on a gelato and a boat ride along the Grand Canal. Better to forget about her adversary for a while. Hadn’t she made up her mind to avoid him, anyway? Except that she needed to find out about his book, and find a way to persuade him to give up that diary. She wondered what Francesca would do.

Probably not this, she thought, as she walked to the library counter by the least conspicuous route, left her books with an assistant, and escaped from the Marciana before Andrew Kent could realize she was there.

Womanly wiles. Good lord.