Courtesan's Lover (27 page)

When Luca arrives the next morning, the sun is already high and the sky is a cloudless blue; in the bright light of the street outside, Luca's shadow lies pooled around his feet like an inky puddle. He smiles at me as I step back to let him into the house, and the sight of that smile instantly has my heart thudding up into my throat. Feeling rather sick, I search his face for any trace of accusation or anger, but see none—Gianni cannot yet have spilled out my secrets. A pulse of relief balloons inside my head—I have at least one more day with him.

He takes my hand as he comes into my front room, leans toward me, and kisses my mouth. It is a brief, chaste kiss, quite unlike the barely contained insistence of last night, but his grip on my fingers is tighter than politeness dictates, and I see yesterday's longing still bright in his eyes. I know that the fire which ignited within both of us then is still burning as fiercely in Luca's belly as it is in mine.

“Come up to the
sala
for a moment, Luca,” I say, feeling the words push their way up and around the suffocating pulse-beat. “I'm not quite ready.”

“Oh, dear…am I too early?” he says as we climb to the upper floor.

I lay a hand on his arm. “No, no—I have just been helping the girls with their lessons, and everything has taken rather longer than I thought it would. It's my fault—you're not too early at all.”

Beata and Isabella look up from their hornbooks, quills in their hands, and stare at Luca as he follows me into the
sala.

“May I see what you've been doing?” he asks the twins politely.

Both girls nod, their faces rather solemn. Luca crosses the room and crouches down between where they are both sitting at the table; he carefully examines first one, then the other girl's work. This morning they have been copying the alphabet in both Gothic and Latin letterings into their hornbooks.

“Well, I'm very impressed,” he says, standing again and smiling at them. “You're both considerably more accomplished than either of my naughty boys were at the same age.”

They both peer up at him and smile shyly.

“Hmm,” I say, looking at the three of them together with an uncomfortable knot of affection, longing, guilt, and fear tightening itself in my chest. Hoping I sound less confused than I feel, I say, with as much of a smile as I can manage, “Yes, well, practicing their letters is the lesson they always seem to enjoy the most. They have something
quite
different to do while we are out, though, haven't you, girls? Something about which they are generally
much
less enthusiastic…”

Beata and Bella giggle.

I widen my eyes at them and nod toward the big basket under the window. They both put their pens back into the ink pot, then they scramble down from their chairs, grab their hornbooks, and run over to the basket; each girl puts her hornbook into it, and each brings out a round, wooden tapestry frame. These are stretched across with linen and are in the process of being—I was going to say “embroidered” with colored wools, but in truth the word “disfigured” would be more accurate. This is not my daughters' most accomplished activity; though, being one in which any lady is supposed to be easily proficient, I'm determined that they will improve. They glance down at the frames, realize they each hold the other's work, and exchange them, pulling a face at each other as they do so. They come back to sit back down in their chairs.

“Come on then. Let's get you started, and then Ilaria can help you with your stitching while Signor della Rovere and I go out for a short while.”

Luca sits in a chair on the opposite side of the table and watches as I thread their needles, knot their wool, and then start each girl on the next section of her masterpiece. I have to admit that I am hardly more gifted in this art than are the girls—but then, not ever having been much of a lady, I suppose, dexterity with a needle has not often been expected of me. Cobbling together a couple of little twig dolls is one thing. Careful stitchery is quite another. My fingers feel clumsy and awkward as I see Luca watching my every move, and several times I fumble the needle as I struggle to begin stitching. I think of the beautiful tapestries in Luca's upper room, worked by his late wife, and my face burns at the thought of my incompetence.

I imagine a pretty woman bent over her embroidery, her needle flickering in the light from a handful of candles as she stitches with the steady speed of the truly accomplished; Luca watches her from the other side of the fireplace, wearing an expression of fond admiration.

I feel, in the face of this image, entirely inept.

I may, until a few days ago, have been increasingly widely considered as highly skilled in my own profession—but of course I now no longer wish to admit to such dissolute expertise. I realize, with a cold drench of shame, how very much my sense of my own worth has been bound up in nothing more than my awareness of men's admiration for my body. As the well-born widow that Luca presumes me to be, I know that I should have been accomplished at a variety of domestic skills for years, but, now, trying to sew under Luca's steady gaze, I feel shamefully useless, and I wonder briefly if I have ever actually been any good at
anything
other than fucking.

***

At Bianca's workshop this morning the shutters have been pushed back, and the sun is slicing the place in two; a thick shaft of yellow light, seething with dancing dust, lies diagonally across the room, gilding everything it touches. The long back wall is lined with deep shelves, stacked with bolts of cloth: linens and velvets, silks, lawns, and damasks. Those that lie in the path of the sun now gleam bright as gems, while others lie more somber in the shadows. The polished wooden window seat on which Bianca sits to stitch glows golden, and the almost-finished russet doublet upon which she must have been working just before we arrived gleams in the light like hot embers.

Bianca stands behind her long, scrubbed table, one plump hand shading her eyes. She is smiling—her other hand fingers a long length of a green figured velvet, which lies piled in loose folds in front of her.

“Signore, what a pleasure to see you again so soon!” Bianca says, beaming at Luca. By the merest twitch of a half-glance which she flicks toward me, I understand that she received and read last night's note.

Luca, who is holding my hand, grips my fingers and smiles back at Bianca. “Signora Zigolo, I'm just as pleased to see you. I have a new commission for you. Can I introduce Signora Marrone?”

Bianca bobs a nod toward me, smiling broadly.

“I'd like the Signora to choose cloth for a new dress.”

Bianca strokes the figured velvet. “Do you have anything particular in mind…Signora?” she says, her eyes dancing.

I can imagine the bubbling laughter she is concealing; subterfuge like this is something I know she will be relishing. I can just imagine her thinking of the sumptuous beaded silks, and the gorgeous, gold-stamped, Genovese velvets she has turned into dresses for me in the past; the shifts she has made me in lawn so fine it is almost entirely transparent. We have sat together in this very room and delighted in planning garments to shock, dresses to thrill, underclothes to delight, and I have of course often enjoyed recounting stories of all the licentious acts I have committed, dressed in Bianca's beautiful creations.

She, as a former whore, has always found my tales diverting and amusing.

I can hear my stories and Bianca's laughter as if they float like cackling imps in the very air around me, and I can hardly believe Luca is not hearing them too. I look across at him, half-expecting to see a worried frown puckering his brows, but he is smiling at me. His smile is so trusting and happy—he makes me feel shamefully traitorous.

But, despite my doubts, I reach forward and run the green velvet through my fingers. “This is very beautiful,” I say truthfully. It is a rich leaf-green and feels like the softest peach skin. “Would you be able to make me something with this—or perhaps you have others like it?”

Bianca says, “I only received the velvet from the wharves this morning…er…Signora.”

For a heart-stopping moment, she seems on the point of addressing me as she usually does—as “
cara
”—but, thank God, she manages to swallow down the potentially catastrophic familiarity.

“I'm afraid I don't have many other velvets just at present, but…now, you might like this…I've a very pretty rose-pink damask, sent down from Florence a couple of weeks ago…” Bianca winds the green velvet back onto the bolt and puts it on its shelf. She then reaches up and pulls down this damask; the heavy bolt lands with a soft thud and she shakes it out across her table, running it lovingly through her fingers. It is really exquisite: thick and soft with a muted sheen. I rub it between my finger and thumb; it is smooth and cool and whispers beneath my hand, and I know I have found what I want.

“Oh, that's gorgeous,” I say. “It's beautiful. Luca, would you be happy if I chose this one?”

Luca takes my hand again. “I'd be delighted with whatever you chose. But, since you ask—yes, I think that's particularly lovely.”

“Very well, the rose damask it is!” says Bianca, beaming at both Luca and me. “Come on, Signora, into the back room now, and I'll take your measurements.” She points toward the little back room in which I have so often stood for fittings, and Luca crosses the room to sit down on Bianca's work bench.

“I'll wait for you here,” he says.

I go before Bianca into the back room. Turning round and leaning her ample weight on the door, bumping it closed with her behind, she says in a hissed whisper, her eyes positively bulging with curiosity, “
Cazzo!
Francesca, you outrageous, scheming little strumpet! How in the name of heaven did you manage this one?”

Filippo felt winded. He sat down heavily on one of the cross-frame chairs in Francesca's front room, and stared, open-mouthed, at the black-eyed manservant. A high-pitched whine of panic began somewhere in his head: how was he going to survive this? What would he do? Without his hours here each week, he wondered if his chronic frustrations might drive him, at best, to ill-advised folly, at worst, perhaps even to madness. He rubbed his fingers backward and forward along the arm of the chair until the wood began to feel hot.

“Can I see her?” he said.

The manservant eyed him inscrutably. “You have to know that her mind is irrevocably made up, Signore,” he said. “She's said she wants to talk to you, but she's told me to tell you not to expect any sort of change of heart.”

“Can I see her now?”

A nod. “She'll be down shortly.”

Filippo felt a jolt in his chest; he had presumed he would be shown up to Francesca's chamber to talk to her. Her chamber…with her bed in it.

The manservant left the room and Filippo stayed in the chair. He felt quite numb. As he sat thus swaddled in unthinking insensibility, he realized that his groin was aching. He had arrived here some ten minutes before, more than ready for his eagerly anticipated hours of wanton indulgence; the familiar need for relief had been thick in his throat and swollen in his breeches, and he had smiled cheerfully and unsuspectingly at Francesca's eunuch as he had been shown in off the street. But, instead of taking him upstairs, the eunuch had sat him down in here and…and…poleaxed him.

He was now, he realized, in physical pain.

Filippo heard voices on the stairs. She was coming down. He stood up.

The door opened.

Francesca was wearing a dress he had seen her wear once before—a tight-fitting, dark-green one; thin black lacings fastened the bodice across the front like a ladder, with a wide stripe of her shift showing beneath. These were new laces, he supposed miserably; she had let him cut the old, gold ones clean through, with scissors, on that previous occasion, rather than have him take the time to unfasten them properly. As though she couldn't bear to wait. Something uncomfortable shifted in his belly at this thought.

As Filippo looked at her now, though, it struck him that, although she was wearing the familiar dress and her hair was braided much as it usually was, something about her was different. He could not quite work out why.

“Filippo…” Francesca said. Her mouth lifted in a tight, wary smile.

He could feel again the texture of that gold lacing between the blades of the scissors. Remembered the sound of it snapping; saw again the edges of the bodice springing apart as the tension was so suddenly released. He swallowed awkwardly.

“Filippo, I'm so sorry,” Francesca said.

He wondered if he would be able to speak at all. After a moment, he managed to say, “Why?”

“I'm not planning to tell anyone else the truth, but I know I have to tell you.”

Why did she have to? Was he somehow special to her, in a way that her other patrons were not? His heart lifted a fraction.

And then plummeted as she said, “Because you introduced me. He's your friend. You have to know the truth.”

Filippo frowned. What was this? Who was she talking about?

“I'm in love with Luca.”

A long pause. The words hung suspended in the air between them.

“And…” She hesitated. Bit her lip. Breathed in a long breath. “And I believe he cares for me.”

“Does he know? Know about…” He trailed off, jerking his head upward in the direction of the bedchamber.

She shook her head slowly. “He fully believes me to be your cousin.”

Filippo could feel himself sagging, like a punctured bladder. His shoulders drooped, his face felt heavy; it seemed as though his insides were all shifting downward; they might even fall right out of him, he thought: they might soon be no more than a glistening pile of abandoned entrails, a greyish-purple heap, stinking, and buzzing with flies.

And then a horrible, sickening sense of its all being his own doing swept through him, hollowing out a cold space in his head as it went.

If.

If.

If.

If he had not invited Francesca to that play—if he had just gone alone, as he had done before, as he could so easily have done this time—Francesca would not have met Luca. If she had not met Luca, she would—at this moment—be upstairs with him, unlacing her clothes and preparing herself to entertain him.

He supposed that God must be punishing him at last for his years of selfish and self-indulgent infidelity.

Francesca now crossed the room and held both Filippo's hands in hers. Up close, he saw that her eyes were wide with entreaty and—unexpectedly—with fear. Her voice quivered as she said, “I have to ask you, Filippo—no, not ask…
beg
. Please, please,
please
…I'm
begging
you—keep my secrets.” She paused, then said, “It wasn't ever going to be possible to hide this from you. Oh, God! I am going to have to ask you to lie for me—for who knows how long. You're Luca's friend, Filippo—if things turn out well for Luca and me, we'll no doubt meet in times to come, you and your wife, and Luca and me. With one unguarded sentence in the wrong company, you could destroy any future Luca and I might ever have together. Any time I ever see you, Filippo, I'll be waiting and watching, trying my best to smother my fear of what I know you could do. I know that. But I know too that you're a good man. A kind man, and—”

There were bright tears in her eyes.

And he realized what it was about her that was different. Her assuredness—her brazen, libidinous, energetic assuredness—was quite gone.

The courtesan was dead.

A vivid sense of a loss of opportunity clanged in the newly emptied space in Filippo's head, and a slightly nauseous lurch of anger rose and fell in his throat. But then, much to his surprise, shoving their way past his aching groin, past his wretched, frustrated disappointment and the stabbing of his fears for the future, came striding a pair of unexpected emotions: sympathy and compassion. He put his arms around Francesca in a way he had never done before: in tenderness. Holding her against his chest for a moment, he said softly onto the top of her head, “What sort of man do you imagine I am, Francesca? What can you think of me? Do you really think that—out of pique, or spite, or a desire for revenge, or whatever it is—I would ever deliberately spoil your chances of real happiness?”

Francesca pulled back from him, stared up into his face for a moment and then began to cry.

***

Filippo was glad that Maria was asleep when he arrived home. He had stayed only a matter of another few minutes at Francesca's—it had still been light when he had left her house—but, not feeling robust enough to face his wife, he had wandered through the city and down to the sea, where he had sat on a low wall, staring out over the water until well after dark.

He intended to spend that night—as he often did—in the smallest of the three bedchambers. The bed in here was narrow and the mattress was thin. He usually pretended to curse the lack of comfort, although he knew in his heart that in fact he rather relished the aggrieved sense of martyrdom it offered him; it had always been a way of sweetening the sourness of his guilt. A sense of shame at his infidelity was something which had hung around him like a bad smell ever since he had first been introduced to Francesca, but as he lay on the lumpy bed and thought about it now, he realized that, over the years, the increasing familiarity with the routine of his Wednesday visits had somehow given his licentious disloyalty an air of artificial respectability.

Now it was over, though, he wondered in hindsight if it had actually just been rather grubby.

Filippo had always tried to convince himself that his arrangements with Francesca provided the least disloyal solution to the intransigent problems of his and Maria's marriage: it might be that Francesca asked for payment for her favors, but he had never quite been able to see her as a whore. She was more like a
friend
, he had always told himself, a friend who understood his needs and his difficulties; a friend who was happy to offer him a solution to his frustrations without hurting Maria. It was not, after all, as though they had been lovers. Francesca had never even made a pretense of loving him—he was sure of it, and glad of it. He had never loved her—not the way he knew he loved Maria. He and Francesca had never coupled other than as a commercial transaction, and now he was grateful for that, too. He had been astounded by her beauty; frantically aroused and joyously liberated by her flamboyant lack of inhibition; he had been comforted by her consistent refusal to judge him. But though his body might have been all but possessed by her, he knew now that this beautiful woman had never truly reached his heart. This was, he supposed, why he had never felt that he had betrayed his wife.

Now the thought of Maria sent a knife through his guts as he sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes.

He pictured her lying asleep in the next room, entirely unaware as usual of where he had been and what he had been doing. He imagined her sleeping face and wished—with a racking feeling of longing—that he could just open the door to her chamber, climb into bed with her, and tell her…everything. He realized, as he imagined the scenario, what a relief it would be to unburden himself.

***

Maria, however, was not asleep and she was certainly not unaware of where Filippo had been. She was sitting up in her bed, a wrap around her shoulders, writing in her vellum-bound notebook, and the words she was writing were sending a thin, wire-like thrill of arousal down through her insides.

***

If
you
can't say it or do it, just think it and write it,
the woman in the crimson dress had said that day, amongst other, more intimate, advice.
Whatever
it
is, and however guilty you might feel committing it to paper—just write it. Nobody need ever see it, unless you choose to show them…and you'll find that writing can be the most extraordinary release.

She had bought a notebook that very day and had determined to write as soon as she had retired to bed. Book, quill, and ink at the ready, propped up against her pillows, she had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, and, with a breath-held sense of fear, heart thudding as if she were about to excise a festering wound on her own leg, she had nipped the end of her tongue between her teeth and stared at the first blank page in her new book. The words she wanted to write had hung in her head, shouting out their robust refusal to leave her pen, and she had pressed herself back against her pillows in suffocating desperation, her loaded quill trembling in her fingers, tilting her chin high to hold back scalding tears.

She had stared at the paper, transfixed by its blankness, and the tip of the quill had hovered above it, pulsing minutely with her heartbeat. She had placed the nib on the page. One tear had spilled over, slid down her cheek, and dripped onto the paper. Slowly and painfully, she had scratched a short sentence.

I
think
my
husband
is
fucking
another
woman.

That one forbidden word had shrieked inside her head, shocking her with its bald vulgarity, and for a moment she had not been able to breathe.

And then the dam had burst. She had started to write, had written for over an hour, staining her hands with ink, freckling with black her night shift and the bedcovers around her, cramping her fingers as she penned a minute description of the activities in which she presumed Filippo had been indulging during his hours of absence, week after week. Her long-fettered imagination had crept out through its newly opened door and, blinking in the unaccustomed light, had begun to explore the many acutely painful possibilities that it found right outside. She had resolutely begun peering into forbidden rooms full of sounds and sights that sent shards of shame, like fragments of broken glass, deep into her guts, and, much to her surprise, but just as the crimson-clad woman had predicted, the sense of release was profound.

Perhaps
, she had written, as the thought had occurred to her,
shame
is
only
powerful
when
it
is
locked
away
—
like a frustrated guard dog, which, tethered night and day, finds that its snarling ferocity builds in intensity, simply because it has no means of release
. Maria imagined this dog, set free to run through the hills, galloping on and on until physical exhaustion finally brought it down, all aggression vanished; she pictured its heaving sides, its lolling tongue, imagined its exhilaration and its sense of freedom.
He
will
sleep
where
he
falls,
she wrote,
there
on
the
sun-baked earth, savoring the novelty of an exhaustion borne of physical release rather than that of pent-up frustration.

“I have to let it out,” she had said aloud. “Everything I have locked away. I have to let it out. I have to let it race up into the hills and run itself to exhaustion.”

And so she had ranked in her mind a gallery of images—collecting them from all the forbidden rooms she had just discovered, and displaying them as though along the length of a long wall. They were images that she knew from experience would evoke the usual churning, smothering feelings of shame as soon as she saw them, but rather than avert her eyes, as she always did, she would, she had decided, make herself walk along the display; she would force herself to examine each one, until she had confronted them all.