The Stargazer (31 page)

The boulder settled on his stomach, and Ian sat forward again, suddenly drained of energy. He reached for the grappa bottle but Francesco moved it out of his grasp, giving him such a threatening look that Ian did not dare stretch toward it. Then he sighed and his eyes moved to Crispin.

“You accuse me of keeping secrets, painful secrets, and you claim that they hurt others. I can only suppose you mean secrets about Bianca. Very well, I will spill them all, and you can draw your own conclusions.” Crispin wanted to protest that there were older, harder secrets that he was keeping, but Ian was speaking as if in an impenetrable daze.

“I betrothed myself to Bianca Salva because I thought she was a murderess.” With that as prelude, Ian knew that he would have all their eyes upon him. “Having received an urgent summons to the house of Isabella Bellocchio, I went, entered, and ascended to the woman’s apartments. There I found Bianca standing over the stabbed body of Isabella, brandishing,” he paused while he fished in the drawer of his desk for a moment and brought out the garish dagger, “this. As you can see, it has the Foscari arms on it. Like anyone confronted with a woman, a corpse, and a weapon, I assumed that she had murdered Isabella, and I accused her. She, like the stubborn, muleheaded female that she is, denied it.”

His eyes moved to where Francesco and Roberto were standing together. “You had been pressuring me to marry, arguing that comfortable companionship would help quiet the demons that tormented me and other such nonsense. Looking at that woman, covered with blood, I saw the opportunity to teach both her and you a lesson. Betrothing myself to her publicly and irrevocably was completely without risk, I concluded, because she would soon be put to death as a murderer, and sharing a house with her would undoubtedly stop your lectures about the necessity of taking a wife.”

Ian’s eyes left his uncles and moved across the faces of his cousins. When he spoke his voice was tight. He had to bite the words to get them out. “Because she needed something to do while she waited to be condemned to death, I allowed her to undertake a sham investigation into the murder of Isabella Bellocchio. I gave her until midday today,” he stopped and consulted his watch, “a little over an hour ago, to produce the real murderer. If I am not mistaken, it was almost exactly that hour when her sentence was read. It would appear, therefore, that she behaved quite punctually.”

Francesco was horrified by what he heard. “You mean to say, you were just using her to get at us for caring about you? You hurt her this way because you were upset with us? Dear God, I cannot bear the thought of it.” Roberto gripped him by the arm, to support him, and was going to pull up a chair, but Francesco balked. “I don’t want to hear any more. Please let us leave.” Roberto acquiesced, pausing only to glare fiercely at Ian before moving to the threshold of the room.

There was silence until the door closed behind the two men. “That is foul,” Miles declared then with emotion before Ian could speak, if he had been planning to. “I suppose you figured that since she was a murderer, she had no right to little things like honesty or, worse yet, happiness.”

Ian’s only response was to reach for the now unguarded grappa decanter. He was pleased to see that they were finally coming to understand what a monster he was.

“What evidence do you really have that she committed the murder?” Tristan challenged.

“More than I have that she did not.” Ian’s renewed assault on the grappa bottle had been successful, and he now sat back in his chair sipping at his glass, not offering any to his visitors.

Sebastian moved a chair up next to Crispin and sat down, wanting to be at hand in case Crispin’s appetite for strangling was suddenly awakened. “You were still there today when she mentioned some drawings. What were they? Were they really stolen?”

Ian studied the bottom of his glass. “Yes, they were really stolen.” He sighed, and looked up at his cousin. “I had Giorgio move Isabella’s body into one of the vacant rooms on the top floor and told Bianca she could dissect it or do whatever perverse thing she pleased with it. Apparently, her tastes ran toward drawing. She cut the girl open and drew her organs and her bones and things. The pictures were still in the laboratory after the body was removed, and the night the prowler broke in, he took them.”

“If the court had the drawings, then what Bianca said is correct, that whoever stole them must have denounced her. Or are you saying she organized the whole thing herself?” Tristan was incredulous.

Ian pushed back his chair and stood. He had told them everything but he could not listen to any more rational arguments, nor did he need to hear his secret doubts articulated by others.

“Unless, afraid that she might produce proof of her innocence and you would have to marry her and be happy, you denounced her yourself.” Crispin stood and was meeting Ian’s gaze, the slate gray in his eyes exactly matching that in his brother’s. “Yes, I am sure that is what happened. She threatened to become inconvenient to you and you got rid of her.
Bastard
!”

At last. At last it had happened. At last even Crispin had given up on him. Ian had often wondered what had taken his brother so long. A strange sense of calm suffused his body. Without bothering to either confirm or deny the accusation, Ian moved past him to the door, shutting it quietly behind him.

Returning five hours later, Giorgio was informed by every member of the household staff that Ian was desperately seeking him. If he waited, he knew he would lose his nerve, so Giorgio went in search of Ian as soon as he heard, without even changing his wet boots. After checking in all the likely places, he finally found his master in his laboratory. Ian was sitting on a stool, strangely placed before a mirror, intensely scrutinizing nothing. When Giorgio entered, he did not turn around, but made a sign of greeting in the mirror and beckoned him over.

“I am glad you have returned.” Ian spoke to Giorgio’s reflection in a voice so completely without emotion that even “glad” sounded like an overstatement.

“Of course. I should never have left like that, for such a long time, without leaving word,” Giorgio conceded.

Ian continued to speak into the mirror. “No, you shouldn’t have, but I understand why you did. It makes perfect sense.”

“It does?” Giorgio scanned the reflection of his master’s face, looking for a hint of sarcasm or irony—or even emotion—but found none.

“Yes. Completely. You did the right thing.”

“I did?” Giorgio was too perplexed to question Ian’s intonation. “You really mean that? I thought you would be furious with me.”

“How could I be? There are times when a man becomes bewitched by a woman…” Ian waved a hand in the air as his voice trailed off.

“There are? I mean, yes, there are. But I did not think you would understand so easily.” Giorgio looked closely at the mirror, as if he suspected it might be distorting the conversation or at least Ian’s mind.

“I must admit that at first I did not. I was actually very angry. But then I thought about it and I saw how correctly you acted. And how selflessly.”

Giorgio was not sure that he had acted completely without self-interest, but who was he to quarrel with his master. “Thank you.”

“You know, you took a grave risk.” Ian pointed a finger at him in the mirror. “I might have been furious with you. You could have lost your place here. I considered letting you go.”

“I know, but it was a risk I had to take. The way I saw it, there was nothing else I could do. The situation called for desperate measures. You seemed to be getting more comfortable with the idea of marriage, and it looked to me like in time you would become accustomed to and even happy about having her around.”

Ian glared at himself and his weakness, so clearly evident to everyone but him. “I am a fool, Giorgio. I am lucky I have you. Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself.”

“Only where women are concerned,” Giorgio stated without hesitation.

Ian sighed deeply and admitted his servant was right. But he did not think he himself was entirely blameworthy. “I am sure you will agree that she is a very remarkable woman,” Ian stated rather than asked.

The pleasure Giorgio felt hearing his master describe her that way far outweighed his surprise. “I concur completely. ‘Remarkable’ is exactly the right word for her—if I may take the liberty of saying so.”

“Of course you may. After all, you were the one who got her in the end.” Ian turned from the mirror and reached for a half-empty bottle of grappa sitting on one of the worktables. “I think that deserves a drink.” He filled the one glass, took a sip, then held it out to Giorgio to do likewise.

Giorgio had been so overwhelmed by Ian’s easy acceptance of his action that he had not bothered to wonder how, when he had purposely told no one, his master had come to know about it. As the liquor burned down his throat, it finally occurred to Giorgio that this might be the right time to inquire.

“May I ask how you found out?” He set the glass down, still half full.

Ian raised it to his lips and drank down the remaining contents in one swallow. “That was easy. I just guessed. It seemed so obvious once I stopped to think it through.”

“Then she did not tell you?” Giorgio took a sip from the replenished glass.

“She?” Ian scowled at his servant.

“Your betrothed, Signorina Salva.” Giorgio was holding the glass out to Ian, who looked, suddenly, desperately in need of a drink.

Ian wondered if perhaps one or both of them had not already imbibed too much grappa. “Bianca? Tell me? How would she know?”

“I think she suspected.” Giorgio grinned slightly as he remembered the scene Bianca had burst in on. “She saw us together once, and I think it must have been fairly obvious.”

“She knew that you denounced her?” Ian was incredulous.

“Denounced her? Why would I denounce Signorina Salva?” Giorgio reached for the grappa bottle and held it up. “How much of this stuff have you drunk?”

“Not enough, apparently.” Ian scowled for a moment, reached out for the bottle, withdrew his hand, scowled some more, then looked at Giorgio. “Then you did not denounce Bianca?”

“No, why would I denounce her? I think she is innocent.”

“Will you swear to it?” Ian’s voice was suddenly deadly serious.

“S’blood, my lord, you have my word.” Giorgio put his hand over his heart. “I swear that I did not denounce Signorina Salva.”

Instead of lessening, Ian’s scowl only deepened. “Then what the devil were we just talking about?”

Giorgio took care to move the grappa bottle out of Ian’s reach, newly apprehensive about his master’s reaction to his announcement. “My getting married.”

“Married?”

“Married.”

“Married?”

Giorgio made a quick inspection of Ian’s head to ensure his ears were still in place. “Yes, M-A-R-R-I-E-D. Married. To Marina, Signorina Salva’s maid. When Signorina Salva was denounced, I was worried that you would make Marina leave, so I took her out this afternoon and asked her to marry me.”

Ian’s reaction was not at all what Giorgio had expected. “That is all? You are getting married? That is all we were talking about?”

Giorgio was almost hurt by Ian’s casual attitude to this major change in his servant’s life. “That is all I was talking about,” he said indignantly. “I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what was going through
your
head.”

Ian was shaking the just mentioned body part slowly. “Nor would I, Giorgio, nor would I. The right thigh indeed! I think I lost my wits for a time. But they are back now, and we haven’t a second to lose. We must devise a way to rescue Bianca from the Doge’s prison.”

Giorgio regarded his master with keen skepticism. “Oh, certainly. This is fine evidence of your wits coming back. You know that prison is famous, or rather infamous, for being impossible to escape from. It’s said to be the most impregnable prison in Christendom.”

“Then we’ll just have to be devious, won’t we?” There was a gleam in Ian’s eye that made Giorgio shudder.

Indeed, his skepticism turned to alarm when, before his very eyes, Ian’s face assumed the aspect of a man who whistles and chuckles and explodes hunting lodges. “What a fine idea, my lord.” Giorgio assessed the situation and saw that he would need reinforcements. “Why don’t we include the rest of the Arboretti in our scheme? Certainly we could use their help too.”

Ian’s frightening zealousness did not waver, but it became slightly subdued. “You are probably right. Tristan’s skills with locks will be indispensable. I suppose it is inescapable that we shall have to share the glory with them.”

“Glory?” Giorgio echoed. “The glory of being banned from Venice when the Senate hears that we have helped a criminal break out of prison?”

“Come on, Giorgio. Don’t be so inflexible. People might mistake you for a block of stone.” Ian pushed past his sorely abused servant and out the door.

“Mistake
me
for a block of stone?” Giorgio asked the empty room, before turning to follow his master. He wouldn’t want to miss out on his own share of the glory.

“Are you thinking about adding it to your collection?” Crispin asked, observing his extensive study of the object. “If you offer me a fair price for it, I’ll undertake negotiations with Ian.”

“Tristan, I suggest you consider Crispin’s offer,” Sebastian counseled. “I think it would look perfect displayed just under your Michelangelo.”

Tristan pushed the dagger aside. “Thank you both for your consideration of my collection, but I am not planning to extend it from contemporary painting to other,
um
, objects. Besides, this eyesore is the only clue we have to guide us.”

“That and the fact that Ian was summoned to the scene,” Sebastian interjected. “Obviously someone wanted him to find the body or, rather, wanted to find him with the body and this self-identifying dagger. Someone who took the time to replace the actual murder weapon with this toy solely to direct suspicion at Ian. So the question we need to answer is who would want to frame Ian for murder?”

“We would have a much shorter list if we asked instead who
wouldn’t
want to frame Ian for a murder.” They all knew Crispin was only half joking. “I for one have considered it plenty of times.”

Miles, who had been deep in thought the whole time, pushed a stray lock of hair off his forehead and spoke up. “Perhaps we are going about this all wrong. As Crispin pointed out, Ian would win no popularity contest, so we could spend days examining all the possible people who bear him a grudge.”

Sebastian interrupted him. “Are you suggesting that the decision to frame him for the crime might have been made merely out of spite rather than to satisfy some personal craving for revenge.”

“Yes, exactly,” Miles resumed. “Which means that we might be better off devoting our energies to the question of why anyone would want to kill Isabella Bellocchio. You two knew her best.” He turned to Tristan and Crispin. “Do you have any ideas?”

Crispin shook his head. Tristan looked pensive for a moment, then spoke. “The only thing that comes to mind is the rumor Bianca told us about. Remember? That Isabella was going to marry a nobleman?”

“If what Ian told Crispin is correct, Bianca made that rumor up just to scare all those men into meeting her at Tullia’s,” Sebastian objected.

“No.” Crispin, fired by his memory, rose in his seat. “No, that can’t be. A few days before Bianca told us about it, Ian called me into the library to ask me in front of her if I was planning to marry Isabella Bellocchio. That means that they both believed the rumor, at least enough to badger me with it. You should have seen them.” He shook his head, recalling the less than amicable atmosphere in the room. “Anyway, I think we can be fairly confident that she did not make it up.”

Miles spoke to Tristan. “Are you suggesting that Isabella’s fiancé killed her? Why would someone who loved her enough to risk being ostracized by his class decide to kill her?”

“Maybe he was mentally unsteady. Look at Ian,” Tristan offered in his standard wry tone. “One moment he’s draping Bianca with the family jewels, the next moment he is denouncing her for murder.”

“So what we are looking for,” Sebastian summarized, “is someone who resembles Ian—”

Tristan pointed to the dagger. “—But dislikes him in an ugly way.”

“That’s it!” Miles hit the table with his palm. “The dagger. If we find out who commissioned the dagger, I bet we will find out who the murderer is.”

Tristan pointed to the clock behind his cousin, the clock Miles himself had made. “Unless all your work with timepieces has taught you some way to stop the hours from passing, I think that method is too slow. It is now almost five o’clock. If we are to get any evidence we’ll need to have it by this time tomorrow and there are probably five hundred goldsmiths in Venice alone. Not to mention those in Mestre, Firenze, Pisa, Milano, Napoli—” He gestured the infinitude of places with his hand.

“Well, then, what do you propose? What can we do?” Miles asked, slumping back into his chair.

“I should say that’s obvious.” Ian’s voice from the doorway startled all of them, but not as much as the look on his face when he entered the room. “We must break into the prison and free her.”

“‘Obvious,’” Sebastian repeated tentatively after Ian, his blue eyes showing confusion. “I am not sure I am familiar with that use of the word.”

“Don’t put on any of your linguistic airs,” Ian said with surprising good nature. “You know damn well what I mean. Crispin and Miles will create a diversion while Tristan undoes the locks and you and I disable the guards. The way I see it, we’ll be in and out in less than half an hour.”

“Have you ever visited the cells in the basement of the Doge’s Palace?” Tristan, who had passed some time in one years back, regarded Ian skeptically and spoke slowly, as to one who is not mentally sound.

“No, but you know your way around them, don’t you?”

Tristan looked imploringly at Giorgio, who returned his look with a shrug, but Tristan was saved by Crispin from the agony of explaining that the prisons were a maze of unassailable locked doors.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to free Bianca by merely withdrawing your denunciation?” Crispin’s voice was cold, but color was rising in his cheeks. “Or are you too proud to do that, too stubborn to admit you made a mistake?”

Ian shook his head at his brother piteously. “Come on, Crispin. I did not denounce Bianca. What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

Crispin’s mouth opened to answer the question, but Sebastian shot his cousin a look that cautioned silence and spoke in his stead. “Even if you did not denounce Bianca, you still think she is guilty.”

“Thought,” Ian corrected him. “I thought so until a few moments ago. But I am past that now.”

“How do we know you won’t be past thinking she is innocent in a few minutes?” Miles challenged.

“There is no question of her innocence. I have proof of it.”

“Proof?” the others asked in unison.

Ian nodded. “Not enough to produce before a court, but enough to satisfy me. That is why we must break her out of prison. There is really no time to lose.”

It was Giorgio’s turn to look imploringly at Tristan. Tristan sighed, turned to Ian, and said simply, “That is out of the question.”

For a moment Ian just blinked at him. Then he moved to a chair and sat. “It really is impossible? You aren’t just saying that to get back at me?”

“Whatever my present feelings toward you may be,” Tristan eyed him, “my primary concern is to save the life of an innocent and much abused woman. If I thought there were any chance that we could break her out of the basement cells, I would already have tried.”

“Then we will have to use our heads to have the denunciation withdrawn.” Ian grimaced. “And if my deductions are correct, the only way to do that is to find the murderer.”

Heavy silence fell over the room until Miles decided to pursue his earlier theory. “Have you any idea who commissioned that dagger?”

Ian nodded. “Yes, Giorgio found the man who made it. But it won’t help at all. It was ordered by Bianca’s brother.”

Miles sank back into his chair, his theory crushed to bits. “No! That could not be any worse.”

“I can’t really see it, but is it possible that Giovanni Salva is the murderer?” Giorgio looked around the table at the cousins.

Sebastian and Tristan slowly shook their heads. Giovanni Salva was too preening and conceited to be a favorite with any of them, but they couldn’t see him as a murderer.

“I guess you can never tell just by looking at someone whether they are a murderer.” Tristan conceded after a long silence. “Take Bianca, for example—”

A growl from the end of the table interrupted Tristan. He would have gone on over Ian’s bestial protest, but he could not compete with the excited voice that followed it. “It wasn’t Giovanni. It could not have been.” Ian stood and began to pace the room. “Whoever killed Isabella also killed Enzo, her manservant.” He continued despite the questioning looks of his cousins. “And Giovanni certainly could not have done that, because he was not in Venice when it happened. I had that confirmed by our agent in Trieste.”

In any other circumstances they would have showered him with questions and probed his conclusion about Giovanni’s innocence, but they hadn’t time. When Miles spoke, his voice was heavy with despair, his poetic soul stung to the core by his impotence to help a lady in distress. “Then we are back where we started, with the entire blond patriciate as our suspects, limited only by the dual requirement that the person be a friend of Giovanni Salva’s and an enemy of Ian’s.”

The others nodded grimly, each calculating how much that reduced the pool. “That brings it from about three hundred to only a hundred men,” Crispin began, trying to sound relieved, “since Giovanni Salva has so few friends.” The unspoken but understood fact that all those men could have harbored grudges against the Conte d’Aosto was completely lost on the pacing Ian.

He continued walking back and forth across the room, every now and then emitting a sigh or a snort, and occasionally a grunt. None of them could be sure if he was listening to their conversation, until suddenly he stopped short, declared, “We are idiots,” pulled another chair up to the table, and sat.

“There are nowhere near a hundred possibilities,” he announced grimly, disgusted with himself for not seeing it earlier. “In fact, there are only four.”

“Who?” Miles demanded, asking the question for all of them.

“That’s the difficulty. I’ve no idea.” All eyes were on Ian as he continued. “Bianca invited six men to her friendly gathering at Tullia’s house and declared that one of them was the murderer. That alone would mean nothing if one of them had not shot at her, because only a cornered man would take the risk of shooting her in such a public manner. God alone knows how, but in some way she managed to shorten the list to those names. Two of them, Crispin and Valdo Valdone, we can ignore not only because I doubt if either of them would murder but also because they were not there to do the shooting. Although I did not get to ask her about it, I am fairly sure that she only included them to guarantee that I would be present, or at least interested in the proceedings. That leaves only four others.”

“Four others who were masked,” Crispin said grimly.

“Do you have any idea who they were?” Miles spoke to Ian, who just shook his head.

“What about Tullia? The gathering was held at her house.” Sebastian’s hopeful suggestion perked them all up.

“She might know,” Ian allowed, “but she certainly would not tell me. My lack of partisanship for Bianca seems to have earned me a whole new string of enemies.”

“Oh, good,” Crispin said in a voice that had nothing good in it. “Let’s hope no more than half of them have homicidal instincts.”

“One of the rest of us could call on her.” Sebastian spoke over Crispin. “We may not be clients of hers, but if the concern she showed for Bianca today before the trial is any indication, I am sure she would be willing to do all she could to help her.”

Giorgio, who had been leaning against a wall in the back, cleared his throat. “There might be a faster way, though I doubt it will be easier. Bianca trusted Marina’s nephew, Nilo, with most of her correspondence. Perhaps she had him—”

“Yes!” The memory of Tuesday night seized Ian in a flash. “You are absolutely correct, Giorgio, she must have had Nilo make the deliveries. I’m sure he will remember the names. Bring him at once.”

Giorgio was shaking his head. “I will try but I can’t promise anything. I think you might need to add him to your list of enemies. He is convinced that you betrayed Bianca.”

“Damn it, this is no time to humor a young boy’s fantasy, Giorgio. Use your influence over him. You’re going to be his uncle, after all.”

“Uncle?” Crispin repeated, and Giorgio blushed furiously.

“Yes, Giorgio has decided to yoke himself to that woman with the baby named Cosimo,” Ian explained.

“I think his name is Caesar,” Crispin hazarded, but Ian, too busy glaring at Giorgio to make him gone, did not hear.

When Giorgio had left, Sebastian spoke. “I agree that it is a fine thing to have reduced our pool of suspects, but realistically we are no better off than before. We still don’t know who the murderer is, or even what drove him to murder.”

Ian frowned for a moment, then let out a groan. “We do know the motive, at least I do. Bianca figured it out days ago, but at the time I discredited it. She guessed that Isabella had overheard some compromising information and was using it to blackmail someone into marrying her. I told her she was drawing conclusions from coincidences,” Ian admitted, grimacing at himself as he remembered his haughty tone, “but now it seems she was right.”

“What kind of information did Bianca say she had?” Miles queried.

“She did not know precisely. She just guessed that Isabella had been listening in on some clandestine meetings which Enzo told us were being regularly held at her house.”

Tristan was shaking his head. “I can’t see Isabella sneaking around, listening at key holes. That was not her style.”

“No, indeed, it was much more devilish than that,” Ian explained quickly. “There is a listening tube in her room that goes directly into the room below where the meetings were held. It is fashioned so that you can see as well as hear. Through that she would not have missed a single word or facial expression.”

“That still doesn’t tell us anything about what she heard,” Miles said.

“No, but perhaps with the names we—” Sebastian was cut off by the sounds of a scuffle outside the door. Rising to investigate, the Arboretti were confronted with a sight that at any other time would have been comedic. Giorgio had his arms extended, pulling with all his manly might on Nilo, who had planted himself like a hundred-year cypress tree in the middle of the floor and refused to budge. As the Arboretti emerged from the room, he could be heard reiterating his strong objections to moving.

“I heard how he did not even wait to hear her sentence read and did not even look at her. I heard how he laughed in the middle of her speech and then left because he had a headache. And how he met in secret with the Senate today to make sure they would convict my mistress and then paid the judges twelve hundred ducats to find her guilty just in case that didn’t work. I will not talk to him. He is a traitor. I hate him, and I don’t care who knows.” His eyes flashed defiantly over the Arboretti as he spoke this last sentence.