The Visitant: A Venetian Ghost Story (13 page)

“Not young. Twenty-four.”

“Ah then, let me guess: an engagement gone awry? A scandal?” His eyes twinkled when he said it, a tease. It was obvious he didn’t believe it could be that. He could not possibly know how close he came. “Please tell me yes. I like scandalous women.”

“That hardly surprises me,” I said.

“I’ve told you my sad past. Now you must tell me yours.”

“You’ve just said Americans are too forthright.”

“I also said I liked it.”

But there was too much I couldn’t reveal, too much that was knotted with Samuel’s secrets. I was uncertain what I could say that wouldn’t lead to more questions, and so I kept it as simple as I could. “My past is not sad, nor very interesting, I’m afraid. My father trained me to work by his side. He could not leave his patients so precipitously when the Farbers asked him to tend to Samuel. So he sent me.”

“And when you deliver Samuel to his bride, what then? You’ll return to your parents? Or perhaps . . . to a lover?”

His question encompassed everything, didn’t it? Everything I must do, the price I must pay if I could not bring Samuel to heel.

“You
do
have a lover,” he said.

I forced myself to look at him. “I’m to have six months in Europe to spend as I will.”

He raised a disbelieving brow. “A woman alone? What did you do, cara, to make them so eager to destroy you? I would no sooner send my sister abroad alone than I would drown myself.”

“You don’t have a sister, do you? And I won’t be alone. I have a chaperone. My widowed French tutor. She’s to meet me in Paris when this is all over. I’m so looking forward to it. I’ve never been
anywhere
, and I want so to see all the museums and the theater, and music and . . .” I trailed off, hearing the frantic yearning in my voice, realizing too late how much I revealed.

“Everything,” he finished quietly.

“Yes. Yes. I want to see everything.”

“And perhaps
do
everything.” There was something in his voice that made me think of the book beneath my mattress, Samuel’s words about the perfume of my desire. “Before you go back to New York City and marry whoever is waiting for you and live the quiet life you’re destined for.”

I started at his perception.

“It’s not so hard to guess, cara. You’re a pretty, well-bred woman. To not have someone waiting to marry you would be the surprise. And your longing to see the world before you’re caged, that’s obvious too. The only real surprise is that your betrothed would allow you such freedom.”

“I’m hoping he won’t
be
my betrothed in six months,” I said quietly.

“I see. Does he know this?”

“It’s not a love match.”

“Just your parents wishing to find someone to take you off their hands?”

I nodded. Not quite true, but close enough.

“Perhaps I can be of some service to you then. I can show you all the best places.”

It was appealing; too much so. “I told you, I have a chaperone. If I gave her up to go with you, it
would
ruin me.”

He eyed me, a smile playing at his lips. “I have the idea that ruin is your intention, Miss Spira.”

“
Knowledge
is my intention,” I said firmly.

The smile grew. “As you say. I wonder if they’re not the same thing.”

“I cannot allow them to be.” How prim I sounded. Priggish even. I wished I hadn’t said it, and I waited for him to mock me, but he only laughed, and it was so charming, so irresistible, and suddenly I was remembering Samuel’s words about broken hearts and my naïveté, and . . . and . . .
Samuel
.

I had forgotten about him completely.

I gasped. “I’ve been away too long. I must be getting back.”

“And just when things were getting interesting.” Mr. Basilio
rose languidly. “Very well, as you wish. Though I don’t think Samuel
deserves such dedication.”

I went to the door, nearly trembling in my haste, pulling at the handle. The door did not budge.

“Perhaps we’re locked in. That happened to Laura and me once.”

When I turned to look at him, his expression was wistful, tender with memory. He stared out at the roofs checkerboarding the view before us. From somewhere I heard the coo of doves, and it seemed to mirror his mood, which had been teasing only moments before. How quickly he’d changed. His expression pulled at my heart.

“We were here for hours before someone found us,” he went on. “You know, you remind me of her, Miss Spira.”

“No doubt because we have the same color hair,” I said, tugging again at the door.

He looked bemused. “How do you know that?”

“Samuel told me.”

“He mentioned the color of her hair?”

I jerked harder at the door. “This won’t open at all.”

He seemed confused, uncertain.

“Please, Mr. Basilio,” I said.

He blinked, obviously shaking away his thoughts. “It’s only stuck.” He came up beside me, his hand on mine, curling around my fingers so I was trapped between him and the handle. I felt the heat of him at my back. “Last chance. Are you quite certain you wish to return to your patient? Or would you rather stay here and see if there isn’t some kind of
knowledge
to be found?”

I didn’t know whether to be tempted or afraid. Nervously, I shook my head, thinking of Samuel, of what I could not afford to lose. “Please,” I managed.

Nero Basilio’s sigh sent a loosened strand of my hair bouncing against my ear. “Very well.” I felt the flexing in his chest and arm as he pulled the door. It didn’t budge, didn’t budge, and then, suddenly it did, so quickly that I stumbled back, fully into him. He caught me, a settling hand on my shoulder, and I stepped away, skin tingling, and suddenly I wished that I had said
yes, let’s stay. Let’s see what there is to discover
. . . oh, how stupidly dangerous.

The door screamed as he dragged it fully opened. I stepped out, moving quickly to retrace our steps.

“Not so fast. Some of those tiles are loose.”

I stopped short, though it was all I could do not to run. He came up beside me, moving past me. “Follow me,” he said, and together we went down the stairs.

He left me at the third floor. “Ciao, cara.” At the bottom of the next flight, he paused, looking up at me with a grin that turned into an exaggerated grimace before he opened the door. I could not help but laugh.

When he was gone, I opened my own door. I stepped inside and heard a noise, a shuffling, and there was Samuel, coming around the corner of the doorway of the sala, bracing himself on the frame. He took one look at me, and I knew that he’d heard us in the cupola. He knew exactly where I’d been, and when he turned away in disappointment, I hurried after him.

Chapter 15

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke,” I said, following him into the sala.

“It was you who woke me,” he said, which of course I’d known. “What were you doing up there with him?”

“He wanted to show me the view.”

“No doubt.”

“That
was
what he wanted,” I insisted. “He’s proud of it, even as he says he’d like it all to fall into the lagoon.”

“He can thank his aunt that it hasn’t,” Samuel said wearily.

“I don’t think he’s very grateful.”

“No, he wouldn’t be.” Samuel snorted, and then, at my questioning look, “She’s his burden and his curse.”

“She doesn’t like him. I thought I was imagining it, but—”

“I don’t think you are. Nero’s spoken of it before. He thinks she resents him because she’s so beholden to him. Nero’s father made him promise to take care of her. She was always a bit fragile, I take it.”

“Fragile?” I laughed in disbelief. “She’s like steel.”

“Yes, well, perhaps that is the fragility. In any case, Nero’s father also made him promise to keep the art on the piano nobile intact.”

I remembered Mr. Basilio telling me how his father feared their noble name sinking into poverty, and how it had led to suicide. I remembered the flaking gilding, diseased muses. “What has that to do with his aunt?”

“The place is falling apart, but Nero can’t fix anything, because there isn’t the money. To get the money, he’d have to sell something, which he promised his father he’d never do. You see the dilemma? But it seems that, over these last few years, Madame Basilio’s been selling off pieces. A canvas here, a fresco there. If she hadn’t done it, the whole palazzo would be crumbling worse than it is about our ears. They would have starved to death. Nero’s angry with her for making him break his promise, and I think he’s heartbroken too. She’s angry at him for . . . too many things. I don’t know them all. They’re bound together in ways they can’t get free of, which always makes for trouble.”

“Laura’s accident must have made it all so much worse,” I said.

Samuel stiffened and glanced away, a little too quickly, as if he meant to hide something.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He looked at me again, and I noticed the deep lavender shadows beneath his eyes, his pallor that only made the scars on his face more evident. His hair was lank and tangled, unbrushed. I remembered what he’d told me about his dreams trespassing into his waking hours. I remembered my own resolution to help him.

“Did you have nightmares again last night?” I asked.

“They never leave me,” he said.

I said firmly, “Meet me in your bedroom.”

“Oh? That sounds promising. Have you been reading? Do you mean to take me up on my offer?”

I must learn to control my blushing. “Liniment. I think you’re ready for it.”

“So you intend for me to be in excruciating pain.”

“I hope not excruciating.”

Samuel sighed, and I went to my room and gathered the things I needed. When I returned, he stripped off his coat and shirt and flannel vest to reveal the edge of the bruise still lingering on his hip, lying on his stomach on the bed. I rubbed in the burning liniment down either side of his spine. I had gloves on, so I couldn’t feel his skin, but I was acutely aware that he was lean and powerful, and I felt his every gasp, every twitch of his muscle, every dip and valley in his spine. I tried not to think of how it had felt to be trapped in his embrace.

Suddenly I was freezing. Icy fingers touched my neck where it was bared above the collar of my gown and below my chignon. His skin turned blue, then white beneath the pink irritation of the liniment. He was a statue carved from ice beneath my hands, hard and slippery and cold even through the fabric of my gloves. I shivered, drawing away, confused and disoriented, my breath only frost. He was no statue, but a man trapped in ice. Dying, freezing—
No, not dying. Not ice.
I stared at him, blinking, trying to right my vision—for a moment my imagination had been so vivid—until he turned his head and said, “Are you finished?”

Whatever daydream I’d slipped into slipped away. Madame Basilio’s words about ghosts manifesting in cold breezes taunted. I didn’t believe it, of course, but I couldn’t help shivering. The smell of the liniment was dizzying, nauseating. Pungent and piney, sharp and peppery, nearly wiping away the constant, acrid scent of the dyer’s canal. And beneath it all . . . Laura’s scent, that haunting perfume that clung to everything in this room.

I covered him with a blanket and told him to stay still for a time, then left him to put everything away. The vision of him dying in ice had shaken me, the wintry kiss on my neck, that plunging cold . . . I needed a breath of fresh air to clear the stink of the liniment from my head. I needed a moment to gather my thoughts. I went to the sala. The sun had beaten back the clouds of morning, though a line of heavy gray still threatened in the distance. Sunlight shone brightly through the balcony doors, slanting in glowing panes across the floor, sending rippling, dancing shadows and reflections over the ceiling, so it looked in constant motion. But as beautiful as it was, it did nothing to alleviate the uncomfortable, moist chill that breathed from stone and plaster. I unlatched the balcony door, which was nearly as swollen into its frame as that of the cupola. It had to be dragged open. I opened it only enough to ease out onto the stone balcony.

The breeze was cold and laced with the scents of salt and wet stone and the tannic stink of the dyer, along with something rotten. My gaze felt dragged to the canal below. For a moment, I suffered that nauseating rush. The canal was choppy and dark, bobbing with bits of fast-moving flotsam, at one point a broken crate and several drowning, dancing lemons following it like ducklings. Something that looked like a shirt, bloused by the water and the breeze, lost laundry tumbling in the current. A dark, furry dead thing that made me wince.

The glancing of the sun off the white stones of the palazzo across was almost blinding. I gripped the balustrade, the chill of it radiating into the fine bones of my hands as I leaned over. The narrow walk below was hidden by the balcony of the second floor, the railing of which was just visible. From this vantage point, I could not see onto the balcony at all. The water of the canal rippled and sparked, sun glinting on shadow, deeply blue. I found myself mesmerized by it, entranced, staring at the currents and the constantly changing surface, the sun piercing the depths fleetingly and then withdrawing, leaving it mysterious again. So beguiling, beckoning, singing
Come to me. Come and let me take you.
Cajoling.
Come to me now.
I knew this song, and how to answer it. All I must do was lean out just a little bit, like this, loosening my grip, a bit more, off balance, and I would fall into air, into water, plunging below, deep and deep and deep, until all light was gone, all air, nothing but darkness, and it was where I should be, where I wanted to be, to drown, to sleep, all mistakes forgotten, nothing to redeem or remake, oh, how peaceful, how perfect and right, impossible to resist.

A seagull dipped and cawed, so close and loud that I started, feeling as if I’d awakened from a dream. I was on my tiptoes, at the edge of my balance. I clutched the balustrade, and jerked back, disconcerted at the too familiar turn of my thoughts, the past mixing with the present. I stepped to the middle of the balcony, safe again, shaken by memory—my hand on a window latch, snow shining like diamonds, the song in my head. I thought of Laura Basilio falling just as I almost had. What had she been thinking as she leaned to look at water churning a Venetian scarlet? Wrapped and waiting like a pretty package, her life closing in, doors slamming shut, no other choices. But no, that was me. She had only slipped. It had been an accident.

I shuddered and hurried back inside.

I did not go back to Samuel. I went to my room and busied myself emptying the medicines from the case and then putting them back in their careful order, concentrating on the puzzle of it until my mind had settled, and I could put those thoughts back into their own boxes and shut them tightly away.

That night, I was sound asleep when the light woke me. A sudden blaze, blinding and painful, inches from my face. I cried out, covering my eyes with my hand. When I lowered my hand, I saw it was a lamp turned very high, and behind it stood Samuel Farber, bare chested, barefoot, his shaggy hair falling into his face.

I sat up, pulling the blankets with me to cover my nightgown. “Samuel?”

He blinked and stepped back, but his gaze was blank, he was not there. Sleepwalking again, but he’d always kept to his own room before. I didn’t like that he’d found his way to mine. Giulia’s warning to lock my door returned, bringing with it a twinge of panic.

I swallowed my fear and got out of bed slowly, and cautiously, not wishing to alarm him, remembering the seizure that had overtaken him when he’d awakened the last time. As soothingly as I could, I said, “You’re dreaming. Come, let’s get you back to your room.”

He stared down at his hand, opening it, flexing it, as if he’d expected to find something there and was surprised that it was empty. “I don’t want to,” he said in an anguished whisper, not to me, but to someone in his dream.

Gently, I took the lamp from him, my hand at his back, guiding him to the door. “It’s all right. Just a dream.”

I maneuvered him into the hall. The lamplight bounced over the floors, clambered up the walls in swinging reflections, making the cracks in the plaster look wide and gaping and the long, curling shadows of peeling wallpaper drip eerily. “You’ll feel better when you’re back in bed.”

We were nearly to his door. He stopped short, jerking back. “No.”

“
Shhh
. It’s all right.”

His eyes were wild, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the open door of his bedroom. “No. No! I won’t do it!”

“Samuel—”

He wrenched away from me, spinning around, tearing back toward the sala, disappearing around the corner before I knew what he was about. I had not thought he could move so quickly, not with that knee, even in a dream state.

I hurried after him into the sala, the lamplight careening crazily over the walls. The moon was setting, its fading light chased by clouds. Samuel looked like a ghost where he stood at the windowed doors, his skin glowing palely, his hair disappearing into darkness. His breath pulsed in puffs of frost, as did mine. The floor was a sheet of ice beneath my bare feet.
“A whisper in your ear
. . .
a cold breeze where there should be none
 . . .
”

I pushed the thought away. Madame Basilio’s inanities.

“Samuel,” I said, stepping up beside him. “It’s time to go back to bed now.”

He stared blindly out the window. He didn’t seem to hear me.

I touched his arm. “Come along now.”

He turned on me suddenly, grabbing my arms. I dropped the lamp. It crashed to the floor, shattering, shards of glass everywhere, oil scattering, little flames across the stone. Samuel propelled me backward, slipping through the oil. Tiny bits of glass stabbed into my feet. I cried out in pain, “Samuel, please!”

But he didn’t release me. He pushed me against the wall. His gaze searched my face; I didn’t know what he was looking for, but it wasn’t me he saw. He was still in his dream, and he was so close his clouded breath was warm and moist on my face, his mouth inches from mine. If I had not been afraid before, I was now. More so when he brought up his hand, when his fingers lit upon the pulse beat in my throat, a soft, soft touch.

I froze. He smiled, but it was cruel, nothing to reassure. “How fast your little heart is beating,” he said, and there was mockery in his tone, a nasty edge.
“Corexin de conejo.”

It was not his voice, and yet it was.

He said, very softly, “
Mé viscara
,” and then words I could not distinguish; I felt only the malice in his intention.

He gripped my shoulders, pulling me toward him, then slamming me back against the wall. Little bits of plaster crumbled over my shoulders.

“Samuel,” I gasped, no longer trying to wake him slowly, no longer caring about anything but getting free. His grip was so tight, he was so much stronger than he should be. “Samuel, wake up! Wake up!”

He was deaf to me, pushing, shoving, the wall a barrier he could not budge. I don’t think he even saw it. I don’t know what he thought he was doing. And his eyes, what I saw in them terrified me. Ill will, aggression. Anger.

“Let me go!”

I saw behind him a flash of white, the shroud I’d seen before. Stars burst before my eyes, tangling in Samuel’s hair, in the air all around him, scattering as he slammed me back again.

I couldn’t breathe. The air had been sucked away. I was suffocating, and the stars were dancing all around, so beautiful and terrible, spinning and twirling in a mesmerizing rhythm set to the drum of my racing little heart.