Andrea Barbarigo tried to send a glare of revenge in my direction, the challenge of a duel, but Sofia Baffo was out of his view now and the words failed him as they had me earlier. And old Barbarigo jerked his son around by the collar to march him to the door and gave him no chance.
This was fortunate because tears stung my own eyes as I watched Baffo’s daughter exit. Even a mask did not seem disguise enough for me at this point.
So the seraglio was wiped from everybody’s mind like sewage from the canals in a high tide. Columbine, for once, did not make good her escape. For all that, my Foscari kin came up to thank me afterward and declared that, the honor of their house intact, we could all live happily ever after.
I had made the great lords of Venice take notice of me. Why was I then so miserable?
“Business,” I shrugged at Uncle Jacopo’s congratulations as we followed old Piero’s bouncing torchlight home.
Would that those congratulations were as easy to shrug off as the continuing rain. My uncle sensed my mood and was careful to say no more.
Halfway home, I discovered I still held the fig. It had lost its brass-plated appearance and grown close to mush with the heat and pressure of my hand during the evening’s conclusion. On the off chance that the sickness in my stomach might be hunger, and to empty my hand, I ate it. I remembered only after the fact how the crunch of that fruit’s seeds always set my teeth on edge. The fig turned my stomach sticky and spread the ache to my hands and face besides.
“Saint Sebastian’s Day,” my uncle murmured. “It won’t be our easiest sailing.”
The ache spread across my shoulders with the comradely fling of his arm.
“Well, she is a willful and headstrong girl,” he murmured. As if that were any consolation.
V
“A willful and headstrong girl.”
I murmured the words aloud as I stood on the deck of the anchored Santa Lucia. I gazed pensively over the Venetian Basin with the spur of Santa Elena to starboard. The gray-green hills around Mestre draped the forward horizon and the city’s bustle. The colors everywhere were bleached, pastel, like scraps of life, lost at sea and drifted to shore. The day was so clear that even the foothills of the Dolomite Alps were visible. My eyes teared at the sight, for they were the source of the stiff, cold wind that numbed the nose to Venice’s usual slightly foul smell of swamp and sea. The wind set Saint Mark’s ubiquitous banners popping. Just like fireworks, I thought, were the explosions of the banners’ red and gold against the mountains’ blue haze.
The wind brought no ice; there would be good sailing this Saint Sebastian’s Day.
Off port was the island of my namesake, San Giorgio. There was talk of building a grand, new church for the holy monks sequestered there. I remembered the chill, the thrill of processions toward the old church: every tiny boat in the Republic lit with lamps that bounced off the black of Christmas Eve waters. As a child, I had thought the holy season somehow special for me alone because San Giorgio was my saint. I still got the feeling, looking toward the island, of heaven’s special favor.
I blushed at the rapid beating of my own heart. “A willful and headstrong girl.”
A high, piercing laugh jarred the thoughts I’d imagined I was keeping to myself. “Oh, I see.”
“I’m sorry, Husayn.” I did not see what the man who’d just joined me did.
“The sea,” he replied. “She is a willful and headstrong girl. I misunderstood for a moment because in my language ‘sea’ is a he. We Arabs see him sometimes as a little boy, playing, sometimes as a sleeping giant, sometimes as a youth, pining for love. Sometimes, Allah have mercy, the sea is a madman in his fury. I was just thinking how like the coils of a serpent the waters of the Basin look today, shimmering beneath us as the tide slithers landward to its height. So you see, I would not understand at once when you likened ‘him’ to a willful, headstrong girl.”
He continued: “But now I comprehend your comparison, and it is a beautiful one, my friend. I can see your girl, too, shimmering in silks and jewels and—rather brazen, no? Were I her father, I would pack her into the harem at once. Who knows? Perhaps this serpent I see slithering over the Basin is a she-serpent, painted and shameless, a temptress.”
I joined Husayn’s smile and, because I enjoyed the poetry of his voice so much, I did not bother to correct him in the object of it. Husayn had been a friend of our family since before my father died. I remember bouncing on his knee and rejoicing in the lumps of Turkish sugar wrapped up in multicolored squares of silk he used to bring me when I was but a child. If my uncle had become a father to me since I’d been orphaned, Husayn had moved into the position of godparent, an interesting role for an infidel.
But of course it was not the sea that had caught my interest at all, and the distraction irritated me. The sea had always been like a mother’s arms to me, surely Husayn realized that. I trusted it implicitly, even when it was rough.
It was Baffo’s daughter I did not trust.
My uncle had made Madonna Baffo my particular charge. I had been watching for her since dawn—and all the previous afternoon while I saw to the boarding of an infinite number of trunks and crates labeled BAFFO-CORFU. Crate after crate pulleyed up over the low center of the Santa Lucia that balanced between the sharp, high sweep of prow and the broad elevation of
