“The clothes—see!” She spun on the illusionary floor. “They’re a perfect fit.”
They were an awkward fit, actually, cut for a larger, male figure that went in where hers went out. The foppish hat disguised the most glorious of her features—her hair—and the padded codpiece was truly ridiculous, slipping from side to side as it did. But I couldn’t criticize anything into which she chose to put that body.
“Madonna—” was all I could think of to say. Perhaps I was calling on heaven.
“Just a minute. I must have a look at how the other half lives now, as this brief masquerade allows.”
She swept past me and I followed, enraptured by her dance.
“Hmm, the food’s much the same,” she declared, giving it only a passing glance. “Although you do have better drink. And we have daintily painted little pots behind our curtain. I suppose I should have a difficult time hitting the Grand Canal from here—” She mused, peering over the stonework railing into the night with an unnerving display of hips and thighs below the doublet.
“Well, come, my love,” she concluded.
She dropped the curtain before the balcony again and danced back to me, sweeping a fig from the sideboard as she passed. She presented the fruit to me with a bat of eyelashes in the holes of her mask and then she slipped her arm through mine.
I had known the scrub of gold lace. The touch of Sofia’s bare skin was molten.
“Come, Andrea. Don’t keep me guessing any longer. How are we to make our escape?”
And just in the moment when I realized she was mistaking me for someone else, that someone else joined us in the room.
“Sofia!”
The arm resting on mine grew rigid and cold.
Andrea Barbarigo threw off the mask and conical hat that so closely resembled mine. “You found the clothes in the lobby all right, I see,” he said stiffly.
“I—I did,” Baffo’s daughter replied.
“And they suit you?”
“They—they’ll do just fine for the purpose. But—but you didn’t get my note?”
“Note? What note?”
Her hand vacated mine altogether and through Harlequin’s parti-panes her eyes flashed with anger like sequins.
“Come, Sofia. The gondola waits at the rear entrance. We haven’t a moment to lose to make good our escape. As I live, you shall not marry that Corfiot. Or anyone else”— there was a sharp glance in my direction—”but me.”
“Yes, Andrea. I belong only to you.”
Her hand touched his arm with her uncommon desire for possession and in that moment Andrea Barbarigo burned to life. I knew the feeling. Duel him, duel him! came to my mind, but the necessary words of challenge got lost in my confusion, my hurt, and the accompanying feelings of worthlessness.
The fire remained with my opponent and he shot these words at me with a look that cut through the black of his mask. “You breathe a word about this to anyone, and I will personally see that your name finds its way into a lion’s mouth.”
A lion’s mouth! Now unabashed terror was added to my confusion and hurt. Lions’ mouths were dark shadows to the votives in Venice’s alleyways. I had not looked at them on our walk that evening because they were hidden by shadows, but also because I knew they were likely to induce nightmares. Hollow-eyed carvings with open mouths discretely placed throughout the city, the lions’ mouths invited anonymous naming of enemies to the Republic. The furtively slipped accusations went to the secret Councils of the Ten, who investigated each with the full gravity of bell, book, and candle: the serenity of the Republic was not to be trifled with. A man might never even know of what he was accused before he vanished—like a slip of parchment into the mouth of a lion in a dark, damp alley. Why, the elder Barbarigo was one of the Ten. His son might only drop a quiet word over dinner—
Two pairs of rapid clicks fell into step with one another across the floor of marble illusion. Thunderous applause to an Apollo encore covered the sound to all but my ears.
The instant Sofia Baffo was out of my sight, my head cleared as if I’d been doused with cold water. Andrea Barbarigo wasn’t going to drop my name to his father over dinner. He was eloping with Governor Baffo’s daughter. He’d be fortunate if his father ever allowed him in his sight again. As for the lion’s mouth—I was in a mask. Barbarigo wouldn’t recognize me on the torturer’s rack. He didn’t even know my name. And what is more, Baffo’s daughter didn’t either. There was no indication that she equated me with the messenger in the convent garden that afternoon.
“Ways around society’s constraints.” The words came so strongly to my lips I thought I must be recalling some old sailor’s saw. It took me a moment to remember my companion of earlier that evening in gold lace and moiré.
What else could I do? What any opium eater would do who saw the source of his drug drying up. I ran to the lobby, to the first man in livery I found, tugged on his scarlet sleeve and pointed to the escaping pair, muttering a few choice words about “elopement” and “dishonor on the Foscari household.”
Suddenly, there was scarlet livery everywhere, like the plague of blood in ancient Egypt. The theater emptied like Goshen, only with less unified direction. Perhaps they were the plague of hopping frogs instead.
The nun shrieked in a poor mimicry of the castrato and had to be given smelling salts. Old Barbarigo fluffed up behind his beard like a thunderstorm. I caught a glimpse of burgundy and wanted to learn something more from the moiré mask about “society’s constraints.” But gold lace slinked away under the confusion into the dark night as if I’d betrayed her as well.
The young lovers were bundled off quickly
