The Stargazer (8 page)

“Ask her.” Ian stood and strutted toward the window, taking care not to knock over Crispin’s precious specimens. He needed to be alone, to think about what he had just learned, not to mention the failure of his plan. That his betrothal was not having the desired effect was clear, and became even clearer when his uncle resumed speaking. Francesco’s voice seemed to be coming to him from a thousand leagues away.

“About the betrothal party, Ian. We were hoping you would talk to the Council about having the sumptuary laws lifted for the occasion. It is only right that Bianca wear the Foscari topaz, and you know it is valued at far more than the measly thousand ducats prescribed by the laws as appropriate for a bride-to-be. Roberto has already seen about the fabric for her dress, and the jewels will be just marvelous, if only—”

“Yes, fine, I will see it is done. “ Ian responded with his back to them, restraining himself to sound civil.

“Wonderful, wonderful.” Francesco plowed ahead enthusiastically. “In that case, we were thinking that we could send to your place in the mountains for one of those delectable wild boar—”

“Don’t forget about the special musical piece we were thinking of,” Roberto reminded him.

“I was getting to that, but first the peacocks for the garden. We were planning to cover them in gold leaf, just the tails of course—” Ian’s patience had reached its limit. “Do whatever you want, spend whatever extravagant sum you need, invite whomever you please, I do not care. I doubt whether I will even be there.” He hoped his tone was brusque enough to remind them there was a door available for their use. It appeared to do the trick, for instead of argument Ian’s ears were greeted with the blissful sound of that apparatus shutting firmly behind them.

His first thought as he stared into the gray day was that Bianca had spoken the truth. Everything from her father’s tools to the gift of old King Henry seemed to be corroborated. But that did not mean that everything she said was the truth. There were still too many unanswered questions and too many unresolved coincidences. Why had she been at the scene of the crime in the first place and why wouldn’t she tell him? Where had she gone last evening? Who was the intruder?

He tried to make himself recall the events of the previous night, from hearing the intruder to his mad dash across the slick rooftops of the city, but his mind kept returning to what had happened after. Bianca’s naked body, warmed by the heat of the fire, filled his memory. He could see her and feel her and smell her again. He heard her voice, her unnameable but alluring tone, as she asked him if he was going to make love to her.
Yes
, he hungered to tell her,
yes, yes, yes
. His senses began to tingle and his body to grow hard, and he found himself wondering if perhaps he shouldn’t seek her out.

“Fool, idiot, madman!” he spoke aloud to himself, halting just in time, before he managed to open the door. What was happening to his mind? What had she done to him? Francesco had called her charming, and indeed she was, like some ancient sorceress bewitching men to their ruin. It wasn’t that conniving, seductive Salva scamp he needed, he told himself, it was a woman. Any woman. The sooner the better. That day. That hour if possible. Moving with a new sense of resolve, Ian stomped out of the library and began barking orders for his gondola to be made ready.

Bianca was staring out the empty hole where the window of her laboratory used to be when she heard the noise. It was so faint she thought she had imagined it, but as it grew louder and more insistent she realized that it was coming from the wall to her right. Just as she was about to step toward it, the whole wall moved in her direction with enough grinding and squeaking of hinges to raise the dead.

A hand appeared around the side.

Then a foot.

And then a handsome blond head.

“Oh, good, I was hoping to catch you in here.” Crispin greeted Bianca jovially, as if his entrance had been anything but extraordinary.

Bianca tried to match his nonchalance, shoving her trembling hands under her arms. “Do all the walls in the house do that?”

“Not
all
of them, no. But many of them do have trick doors and secret passages. This house has more secret compartments and hallways than the entire Doge’s Palace. It seems that when the house was built our ancestors were involved in something shady that required quick escapes and inviolable hiding places. They must have been a more interesting bunch than the lot of us who lives here now.” He crossed to the glassless window and looked out, then turned to regard her. “Of course, you’ve livened things up a bit with your presence.”

“I’m sorry, Your Lordship. I realize that I have caused nothing but inconvenience for everyone since I arrived. I will, of course, pay for the new window and…”

Crispin cut her off mid-sentence. “On the contrary, it has been a pleasure to have you here. It does my heart good to see Ian so animated.”

“Animated? I would describe him as raving. How do you stand it?”

“I would rather see him acting alive like a rabid dog than doing that walking-corpse imitation he has spent the past several years perfecting.”

“Two years?” Bianca asked quietly.

The gaze he turned on her was questioning. “Yes,
ah
, something like that.” He did not know how much his brother’s betrothed knew about the incidents of 1583, but he was certain he did not want to be the one to disclose them. If Ian wanted to keep his secrets, who was he to intervene? And if he did not, it was his own responsibility to disclose them. Besides, Crispin admitted to himself, he wasn’t sure he even knew what had happened all those years ago in that hot desert. His mind raced for another subject to introduce.

“It is not terribly warm in here.”
The weather?
Even to his own ears it sounded pathetic and he wanted to cringe at his lack of wit.

Bianca recognized his feeble evasion for what it was and acquiesced, trying to suppress an untimely chuckle. “Yes, it follows that without the window…” She gestured toward the empty space, through which a light drizzle of rain was now entering. After a pause, she thought of her own conversational sally. If she was not going to unearth Ian’s secrets, she could at least learn those of his house. “Tell me, where does that door go?”

This time Crispin answered with enthusiasm. “To my potting room. Would you like to see it? It’s not much to look at, but I would be honored if you are interested. I know it’s very rude, but I fear I must walk ahead of you.”

She followed him around the back of the wall-door, through a short narrow passage that led to another, more door-sized door. The first thing to impress her when she stepped through it was not the room’s large size or its tidy organization, but its overpowering stench. Indeed, standing in the dark as they were, the only senses available to her were smell and touch, and the odors assailing the first erased any urges she had to exercise the second.

“It takes a while to get used to,” Crispin was fiddling with something as he spoke, “but within a few minutes you will hardly notice the smell.”

A few minutes?
The prospect made Bianca even more queasy than the odor alone. But before she could protest, Crispin had lit a lamp and was holding it above them to illuminate the room. Again, though it was both large and tidy, these were not the characteristics that most struck Bianca. She was fascinated by the expression she now saw on Crispin’s face. His features, similar to Ian’s but softer somehow, were suffused with a look of such pride in his odoriferous workshop that she was swept up in his enthusiasm.

“I am experimenting with different types of soil and nourishment for my plants,” he explained, gesturing toward the large containers of sinister-looking goop that lined the walls. He launched into a detailed explanation of the merits of vegetal versus mineral matter and had just begun a defense of his latest mixture when a man covered in dirt entered through a side door. Without giving them another look, he began assiduously scooping something from a vat near where they stood,

“That is Luca,” Crispin whispered to Bianca. “He pretends to be my employee, but I think I take more orders from him than he does from me. He hates it when I bring visitors up here, especially women, because he is afraid they will distract my attention from the plants.” He turned to address the dirty man. “Luca, you need not worry. She is not interested in me in the slightest,
peccato
. This is Ian’s new betrothed. You should meet her. You might like her.”

Luca looked Bianca up and down pointedly. “Woman,” he said, nodding, as if having had a nasty suspicion confirmed, and turned to leave.

“Don’t take it personally. It is not you he is objecting to…”

Bianca waved his explanation aside. “I have noticed a decided lack of enthusiasm for women in this household.” She had been grateful that, despite her fortune, she had grown up dressing and grooming herself when it became obvious that there were no lady’s maids on the household staff. She wondered if there were any other women in the household at all. “Are all the employees male too?”

Crispin nodded. “It has not always been this way but, well, for the past several—”

“Two,” volunteered Bianca generously.

“—years,” Crispin continued with consternation, “there have been no women living under this roof.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, until with wide-eyed innocence Bianca observed, “It is not terribly warm in here, my lord.” Her lips bore the hint of a smile as she continued, “If it will not upset Master Luca too much, I would love to see your plants. Your collection is quite famous, you know.”

Bianca’s joking raillery and her polite flattery brought Crispin’s good humor back in a flash. He took her arm and ushered her toward the side door through which the dirty figure had disappeared. They passed from the potting shed into a room flooded with light.

Bianca felt herself afloat in a sea of brilliant color. She was surrounded on all sides by benches filled with flowering plants of every hue and shape and size imaginable.

“Santa Helena’s jaws, this is tremendous! There must be a thousand plants in here!”

Behind Bianca, Luca grunted to show what he thought of her estimate.

“Five thousand,” Crispin corrected, shooting his employee a warning glance. “From all over the world. But this is only the first room. There is also the herb room, an orchard, and a room for seedlings and experiments.”

Bianca considered the space she was standing in and realized she had never seen anything like it. The room was larger than her laboratory and, except where it attached to the wall of the palace, was made entirely of glass fastened together by wooden boards. Despite the gray day outside, it was warm and filled with light.

“It was Ian’s idea to make a glass room,” Crispin began when he noticed her interest in the design. “Something like this would not even be thinkable for my estate in England, because glass is so hard to get there. But since Venice has its own glass makers, it was easy here and it allows me to grow plants that otherwise could not exist in this climate.”

Luca gave another grunt and Crispin added with good humor, “I mean, it allows Luca to grow plants. I am only a dilettante.”

“Not but that you have a good touch, that I’ll grant you,
ragazzo mio
.” Luca’s voice was gruff, but his tone was affectionate. He turned his dirt-smeared face to Bianca. “This boy could make flowers sprout from the hindquarters of a dead partridge, be damned if he can’t.”

Bianca’s mind was so taken up with trying to picture this remarkable exercise that she completely overlooked the impropriety of the image. Crispin, on the other hand, blushed furiously.

He spoke quietly through clenched teeth. “Enough, Luca. I told you she is not interested in me. There is no reason to scare her off.”

“Who is trying to scare the hussy off? Not but that I spoke the truth, be damned if I didn’t.”

The laughter that burst from Bianca startled the two men. “I am sure you did no more than justice to His Lordship’s talents, Signore Luca.”

“You’ve got reason, mistress, and I wouldn’t have thought it, what with marrying His Other Lordship. That one’s a crazy one, I tell you. I was giving the plants their last watering of the evening late last night, when I saw him skedaddling naked across the rooftops, be damned if he wasn’t. Now, you ask me, is that how a sane man spends his time? and I tell you, no, s’blood, ’tisn’t.”

Crispin, clearly incredulous, was about to say something, but Bianca spoke first. “Did you see anyone else on the rooftops last night?”

“You mean that other bloke, with the cape. But he wasn’t dashing about all naked for Widow Falentini to see, and Lord knows that woman’s heart isn’t any too good and doesn’t need the sight of naked men to send her on over to the other side.”

“I am sure you are right,” Bianca’s voice was strident, “but did you see the other fellow? Anything about him?”

“And I’m telling you, no, I did not, because he was wearing proper clothes. All I saw was black, black, black and then here comes Ian, naked like the day he was born. I remember that day too. He’s a darned sight better looking now than he was as a babe, damned if he isn’t. Now
ragazzo mio
here, he was a fine-looking child, sunny and cheerful from that first day—”

Luca’s narrative would have been briskly interrupted by Crispin if he had not been preempted by a loud banging at the door at the far end of the room.

“Is Signorina Salva in there?” a voice shouted through the door as Crispin went to open it. “Ah, there you are, mistress; I have run over the entire house looking for you!” Nilo was impervious to the fantastic show of color and form around him as he nimbly navigated the rows of flowers. “You must leave word for me of where you are going! This house is so big, and should anything important come up, as it has, how will I know where to find you?”

Crispin and Luca contemplated the small, chastising figure with surprise, but Bianca was so eager to hear his message that she did not notice his importunate behavior. “What has happened? What is urgent? Was your trip successful then?”