The Rossetti Letter (v5) (16 page)

“V
ENETIAN COURTESANS WERE
legendary,” Claire told Gwen after she returned to their hotel room. “Thomas Coryat, an Englishman who visited Venice in 1612, wrote, ‘So infinite are the allurements of these amorous Calypsos that the fame of them hath drawn many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of Christendom.’ It’s estimated that there were approximately ten thousand courtesans in Venice at the time, in a city with a population of only one hundred sixty thousand. That means that one of every eight women was a courtesan of some kind.”

Gwen had evinced little interest in Claire’s adventure of the morning or her tale of the conspiracy until she’d mentioned Alessandra’s profession—and then explained what a courtesan was.

“You’re writing about a prostitute?” Gwen asked. She sat cross-legged on her bed, attired much as she had been the day before, in tight, flared jeans and a 1960s-inspired shirt. This one, at least, covered both abdomen and chest. The contents of her backpack were scattered in front of her: iPod, headphones, tubes of makeup, half-eaten packages of candy, gel pens in assorted colors. She’d been writing in a small, leather-bound journal when Claire walked in, and had quickly snapped the book shut and stuffed it into her backpack. A diary, Claire surmised. Full of a fourteen-year-old’s secrets.

“A courtesan is not exactly a prostitute,” Claire explained.

“But she had sex for money, right?”

“It wasn’t just about sex. Rich families didn’t want their fortunes to be diminished by dividing them among all the children, so they generally allowed only one son to marry. The other sons had few options other than a relationship with a courtesan,” Claire informed her. “And because there weren’t many options for women, either, the men offered financial support. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“So a courtesan would sleep with anybody?” Gwen seemed rather subdued this morning, Claire noticed, and wondered if yesterday’s behavior was typical. Was Gwen completely wild, or was the previous day’s drama just a single, isolated ride on the hormonal roller coaster of adolescence?

“Some weren’t so choosy, but a
cortigiana onestà
—which means ‘honest courtesan,’ or, in a sense, high-class courtesan—tended to have a select group of steady, long-term lovers, each with a designated night of the week. Alessandra was one of these. She was well-educated—more so than most noblewomen, in fact, who often weren’t given much education at all. A
cortigiana onestà
entertained her clients with music, dance, and conversation, and she often married and gave up the courtesan’s life.”

Gwen yawned and stretched. “Where do we get breakfast?” she asked.

The lobby’s pale marble floors and high, white walls seemed to dance with the bright reflections off the canal just outside the hotel’s large picture windows. From the top of the first-floor staircase, the illusion was surreal, as if the lobby were underwater, and they were walking into a dazzling grotto filled with ormolu accents and gilt-edged furniture. Halfway down, Gwen grabbed Claire’s arm. “Oh my god,” she gasped.

The very moment that Claire saw Giancarlo sitting in one of the lobby chairs, absently reading a newspaper, he looked up and saw her, too. She and Gwen descended the last of the steps and walked toward him, and he put the paper aside and stood up. Claire would have felt nervous except that his smile was so warm and welcoming, and the expression in his eyes so unabashedly admiring, that she was instantly put at ease and smiled back. Just as she was about to ask Giancarlo why he was there, he spoke.

“Please forgive me,” he said. “I must leave so suddenly last night that I didn’t have the chance to ask your name.”

“Claire Donovan.”

Gwen nudged her.

“And this is Gwendolyn Fry, my…student.”

“Giancarlo Baldessari,” he said, with a slight bow that managed to convey a sense of formality and irony simultaneously. “It is a pleasure to meet you both. I’m hoping you’re free this evening to join me for dinner at my house.”

There was probably some sort of cocktail “meet and greet” thing at the conference that she should attend, Claire thought, but…

Giancarlo misunderstood her hesitation. “My family will be there, as well.”

Gwen nudged her again, harder this time. “Say yes,” she whispered.

“We would be delighted,” Claire said. All right, so he was a waiter, but when she looked at him, she didn’t care about whether they would have anything in common or not. Giancarlo was so handsome, he made her feel a little woozy. Staring directly into his eyes was like being zapped with a stun gun; it temporarily suspended her power of speech.

“I won’t be able to meet you here in advance, as I would like, but I have a map with the directions marked.” He took a small piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to Claire.

“Thank you. I’m sure we’ll be able to find it.”

“I’m not,” Gwen muttered.

“I’m sorry, but I must leave you now; I’m late for an appointment. I’ve been waiting for some time hoping to see you.” Giancarlo smiled at her again, and she felt her heart skip a beat. “I will see you tonight, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Seven o’clock.
Arrivederci!
”

Claire and Gwen watched as Giancarlo bounded out of the lobby and then waved as he walked by the windows. Claire was suddenly filled with a sense of well-being, and gratitude for all of the surprises life held.

“You are
so
going to get your groove back,” Gwen said.

“Excuse me?”

“Your groove. You know, you’re an older woman, he’s a younger guy, you lost your groove, he’s going to help you get it back.”

“First of all, I’m not old, and he’s not that much younger. Second of all, I have not lost my groove. But if I had, and if I get it back, and how and with whom I get it back is none of your concern.” She turned and walked toward the dining room.

Gwen trotted to catch up with her. “He’s such a hottie.”

“I’m not going to discuss this with you.”

“If he can’t help you get your groove back, no one can.”

“There will be no more groove talk, understood?”

“I can’t believe we’re going to a
library,
” Gwen complained as they passed a group of empty gondole in the small canal outside the Bell’acqua. “I want to go on one of the boats.” She turned to flash a smile at a young gondolier.

“The gondole are very expensive,” Claire said, urging her along to the Piazza.

“It’s my dad’s money.”

“That money is meant for necessary things, not tourist traps.”

“But it looks like fun.”

“We don’t have time for fun today.” Indeed, as yesterday had been a total loss, she was going to have to pack two days’ work into one.

The conference began at eleven, but Claire had already realized that she wouldn’t be able to attend all of the conference events and work on her dissertation, too, not with only six more days in Venice. One was going to have to give way to the other, and making the choice had been easy: her research took precedence. In fact, this morning when she’d perused the schedule (which was merely a hard copy of the no-frills Web page devoted to the conference), she saw only a few lectures that directly pertained to her subject. Andrea Kent’s first talk was in the Ca’ Foscari main hall at three o’clock that afternoon. She’d highlighted it with a yellow marker and ruminated on the strangeness of seeing in print what was very nearly the title of her dissertation—“The Origins of the Spanish Conspiracy of 1618” (A. Kent)—with someone else’s name attached to it.

“Did you know that Armani, Missoni, and Valentino all have stores here?” Gwen asked as they strode past Caffè Florian and caught a glimpse of the three-hundred-year-old café’s bordello red interior.

“How nice for them.” Claire understood that Gwen was talking about fashion designers, even though she was only marginally aware of who they were.

“My mom says that Valentino is the most romantic designer. She loves his clothes. Did you know that practically every designer in the world has a store in Venice? I read it in one of your guide books this morning. Maybe after the library we could go shopping.”

“I have a ton of work to do.”

“I thought teachers didn’t work in the summer.”

“I’m not a teacher yet.”

“Tyler says that in the future no one will actually have to go to work anymore, we’ll just do everything from a Palm Pilot.”

“Who’s Tyler?”

“He’s my, um, friend.”

“Your boyfriend? So he isn’t going to work, is he? Just what is he planning to do with his life?”

“He’s going to be a senator, like his dad.” Gwen looked with longing at a jewelry-store window. “I don’t see why we can’t go shopping. This is supposed to be my trip, too.”

“Yes, an educational trip. That’s what you’re getting.”

“Hold on a minute, I just got out of school. I didn’t come here to actually learn anything.”

“Consider it a bonus.”

“What’s so wrong with doing something fun?”

“I think you had enough fun yesterday to make up for the entire week, don’t you?”

“I don’t remember having any fun.”

“You’ve already forgotten Tattoo Boy and the rum and Cokes?”

“It may have looked like fun to you, but trust me, it wasn’t that great.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m still not having any fun.”

“After the library, we’re going to go sightseeing, okay?”

“And see what?”

Claire pointed ahead. “The Basilica and the Doge’s Palace.”

“We’re going to look at
buildings
?”

“They’re not just buildings.” Claire offered a compromise. “I need to do this today, but tomorrow we can do something that you want to do, okay?”

They passed the Campanile and the entrance to the Biblioteca Marciana came into view. Claire recalled that Cardinal Bessarion, a Greek monk who had devoted himself to the preservation of Greek civilization, founded the library in 1468 when he donated his collection of ancient Greek literature to Venice, which he saw as the heir to Byzantium. Architect Jacopo Sansovino began work on the library in 1537; in 1560, it was opened to the public. Now the Marciana housed nearly one million volumes, including thirteen thousand manuscripts, nearly three thousand incunabula—books printed before 1501—and over twenty-four thousand books from the sixteenth century. The prospect of having this venerable collection at her disposal made Claire pick up her pace with excitement. They walked up a wide staircase framed by a vaulted hall of gilded stucco, which led to an ornate antechamber, its ceiling a mosaic of Renaissance paintings. In the middle of the room, two huge globes on pedestals stood nearly as high as Claire herself.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Gwen asked. “It doesn’t look like a library. There aren’t even any books.”

“I think we have to go back here.” Claire led the way through a set of double doors to the main hall, a cavernous room that opened to a ceiling of skylights, three stories above. Long, solid wood study tables were arranged in two rows in the center; around the perimeter were three floors of arched arcades constructed of gray stone. A wall of windows at the far end yielded views of the lagoon and slanting shafts of dust-mote-speckled sunlight.

A young, blond woman presided over the counter at the back of the hall. As they approached, Claire read the nameplate on the desk: Francesca Luponi.

“Are you the librarian?”

“Yes. May I help you?” Francesca smiled prettily. She was very sleek and stylish, Claire thought; certainly she looked nothing like the librarians at Harvard, who generally favored baggy sweaters in shades of mouse-brown and mushroom, and Birkenstocks paired with woolly socks. Claire handed over her university ID and her list of requested documents and books. Francesca donned a pair of dark-framed glasses and peered at both. Somehow the glasses made her appear even more stylish. Was it because she was Italian that she could pull that off? Claire had worn glasses much like that in high school, before she got contact lenses, and they’d made her look even more nerdy than she already did. Some women had style, she supposed, as did this rather self-assured librarian, as did Meredith. And some women, Claire thought ruefully as she tried to smooth out the wrinkles in her L.L. Bean clearance-catalog skirt, didn’t.

“Ms. Donovan, yes, I remember your e-mail. You’re working on the Spanish Conspiracy, yes?” Her voice had a charming lilt to it. “I’ve already set aside a few items for you,” she said, turning away to the shelves of books and documentary materials behind her. Each stack was tagged with a name. At the top of the small collection Francesca handed her was a thin, cloth-bound volume with a bit of art nouveau decoration on the spine and cover and a gilt title:
Diary of Ettore Battista Fazzini, volume IV, 1615–1618.
Interesting, but she hadn’t requested it. She looked up at the librarian, who anticipated her question.

“Fazzini was a chronicler of the early seventeenth century,” Francesca explained. “Rather like Marino Sanudo in the sixteenth, although not so well-known or so comprehensively published. There are just six volumes of excerpts from Fazzini’s diaries extant. They were first published in Venice in 1785, and then this 1891 English edition, published in London.”