“Guess,” she said, and took a sip of wine.
“Very well.” I thought for a moment. “You want to make your aunt jealous.”
She giggled. “No.”
“You want to hurt me. Get at me for some offense committed”—I blushed as I thought of the offense she could hold against me, of the burn of her arm on mine in Foscari’s hall, then struggled to recover myself—”committed unwittingly, I vow—and so you pursue my man.”
“You flatter yourself, Signor Veniero.”
A point for her. “Very well. Someone else on board?”
She shook her head.
“It’s not anyone on board. But it is someone. You do want to hurt someone. Who is it?”
“My father.”
“Your father?”
“Of course. And that stupid peasant I’m supposed to marry. Signor Veniero, you are a simpleton.”
“But I don’t understand. How can your dalliance on board ship affect someone who is not even here to see it?”
“Easily.” She sat back in the chair with a self-assured look that told me she expected to win the game with what she would say next. “I expect your dear Piero to give me a child. What fun I shall have when I present my husband with his heir—a little blackamoor.”
She began to laugh heartily at the joke and its doubtless effect on the listener outside the door. But she stopped short when I joined her mirth. I roared helplessly until the tears rolled down my cheeks. She sat glaring at me with her fist clenched angrily about the stem of her goblet. What finally stopped my laughter in a series of heavy gasps was that very look. By God, she was lovely with that mixture of scorn yet puzzlement in her eyes! Though I was certain now I would win our little contest, I somehow felt myself in serious jeopardy. I was sobered, but fortunately still in a sporting humor.
“Come here, Madonna. I want to show you something.”
From the lap desk on my bunk I took out a fresh piece of paper, dipped my pen in ink and wrote:
Madonna, can you read this?
With a wicked glance toward the door that would keep our writing in confidence, she snatched the pen from me and scribbled, Yes.
There was silence in the cabin save for the creaking of the hull beneath us and the scratching of the pen in my hand as I wrote, Madonna. My uncle’s man cannot make you pregnant. He is a eunuch.
“What’s that?” she snapped aloud.
I resisted another laugh and replaced it by a smile of fatherly indulgence at her innocence. A eunuch, I wrote, is like the castrato who sang at the Foscaris’ last Saturday night. Or were you too busy running off with Andrea Barbarigo to notice? A eunuch is a man who has had his male parts cut off so as to make him impotent. Among the Turks, where my uncle bought his man, it is a common practice. To get slaves they can trust with their women, the slavers in Turkey...
I stopped writing, for no more was necessary. It was a lie. I was sorry to have to defame Piero twice in as many minutes, first to say he was a simpleton and now this. A big, healthy eunuch such as our Piero would make—if the operation didn’t kill him—was worth too much money on the international market for poor mariners such as ourselves to own. He was, alas, as virile as anybody else.
Nevertheless, my bluff, inspired by the memory of those piercing, unearthly notes that had underscored our last meeting, worked. If I, the foolish first mate of a small galley bound for Corfu, knew about her failed attempt at freedom, how much further up the heap of Venetian society had it gone? The young woman hung limp with humiliation in her chair.
I smiled gently again, but her eyes refused to meet mine. “Come now,” I teased, almost sorry to see her humbled so. “Drink up your wine before you go. It will help you not to die of a broken heart.”
In a fury that spilled every drop, she slammed down her goblet and fled from the room. She made no reply to her aunt’s eager inquiries outside, but vanished down the deck in the direction of their cabin.
I gently closed the door behind her and sat and finished my wine, bemused into dreams by my brief treatise on the sexless ones, headed by her little scribble, Yes. The Venetian Sí: its capital S was the same as had undersigned the note that began My love, which I still kept close in the bosom of my doublet. I folded this correspondence, too, and stored it in the same safe place.
***
I saw no sign of either aunt or niece all the next morning. Only in the heat of the afternoon did the aunt have to come on deck to relieve herself of the sickness. I went over to offer her my condolences and what help one born to the sea can give without seeming to mock. She looked up at me with more gratitude than I would have thought possible from one in such distress.
“Bless you, Signore,” she said, then struggled to say more. U I don’t know what it was you showed my niece in your cabin last night, but whatever it was, it worked wonders. She hasn’t stirred from her bed since then.”
“I pray heaven she is not sick, too.”
“Oh, no, not she. She has a stomach of iron and veins of ice. Only—what shall I say? Soundly subdued. Yes, that’s the only word for it. Subdued. Subdued at last. Pray God it may last to Corfu.”
VIII
The year of our Lord, 1562. The end of January. Under the winter sky, the Dalmatian coast seemed more stark than usual, the fir trees like last defenders holding out upon the fortress of white granite cliffs. We had put in at Ragusa for supplies and to avoid a storm, but the storm was past now and another two days, three at the most, would see us in
