Pleats, the depth of my thumbnail, crowded together four times the fabric more modest skirts would take to encircle that same slim waist. The confinement of a fashionably firm bodice was foreshortened and gave plenty of suggestion, through an almost sheer chemise, of the yielding reality beneath.
I thought there was a story in the great puffs of her sleeves: the stern old aunt had been cajoled to a limit of two yards a sleeve. But when her back was turned, the girl had snatched several fistfuls more; even made up, the fabric retained an avidity in the billows. So might Eve’s stolen apple have looked in both appeal and wickedness.
“At your service,” I repeated, conscious now of an uncomfortable and out-of-place tightness in my codpiece which before had seemed natural and pleasant, and which my foppish bow had aggravated.
I had dressed with care that morning. Knowing I would have walls to climb, I had refrained from my best, knee-length doublet of Turkish velvet, dark blue and shot with gold. That must remain for embassies of a more respectable sort. But I had not been disappointed in the effect of a sleek new pair of hose in varied green and blue, and a blue velvet doublet tucked and slashed to display a clean linen chemise beneath.
Life spent astride the rock and thrust of the sea had given me a fine, strong pair of legs, I knew, fine buttocks, and a fine, lean waist where the doublet pinched in tight and met the top of the hose with a gap for yet more chemise. For all the chill, I had not wanted to spoil the effect with overgarments, so I wore only the shortest of fighting capes. I was at the point of actual periodic shivering now from the long, inactive wait and from the feverish effect she had on me, but I tossed the cape behind my shoulders with a studied attempt at rakishness as I faced her and rubbed at my chin.
I had fussed more than usual with my beard—there wasn’t much of it yet—combing and encouraging. In the end, I had shaved it off completely, hoping Madonna Baffo would like the clean-shaven look of the West better than the beard of the East I could not yet attain.
Now I doubted the wisdom of that decision—of anything I did—and it was not just that the only stubble I found on my chin after two hours was in my mind. At fifteen, I had already turned several more experienced hearts, but the self-confidence this had given me now wore thin.
Baffo’s daughter fixed me with eyes as cool as brown autumn leaves. Her mouth, which I would later learn to know in its usual pout of delicious fullness, was set thin and firm for our interview. Her study of me was intense, minute, and not without desire. But it was not the complement of the desire which I had suffered as I watched her approach. That desperation so many other girls conceal so ill with blushes and fans was not even hinted at. If she pierced through my young nobleman’s trappings, she sought not the flesh beneath, but something else.
I can give that elusive thing a name now, so many years later, whereas then I stood merely baffled and ashamed of what my own feelings were. That part of manhood she coveted of me—of every man she ever met—was power, even though in my case it was no more than the power to climb a convent wall.
Baffo’s daughter danced when she moved, not like a courtesan but like a horse at the gate before a race. That afternoon when she was only fourteen years old, the passion that already burned in her was ambition.
“So state your message.” She grew impatient with my confusion.
“I have been sent by the Doge with a secret message for you...”I blustered, then faltered.
“It must be a full hour that you’ve been here.” Her impatience exaggerated wildly. “And yet nothing you have said so far is news. I know you are the Doge’s man, you know you are the Doge’s man. Does every urchin in Venice know you are the Doge’s man by now?”
I couldn’t answer for watching how her flesh was pillowed against the opulence of her sleeves. She had beautifully sculptured shoulders, collarbones, and a long neck that vied with a string of pearls in whiteness. Her face was a fine oval like a Florentine alabaster egg with a pinch of chin and nose. Its shape was reflected in the heavy, teardrop pearls that hung from her ears, and her eyes were like almonds—that color, large and luscious.
“Come,” she insisted, “what does His Serenity the Grand Doge of the Republic of Venice say to my suit? I, Sofia Baffo, daughter of the governor of the island of Corfu, have lately been ordered by my father to join him on that island in the middle of nowhere. It seems he has found a husband for me—some petty noble of the island—by which match he hopes to secure his position so as to govern with efficiency and as little bloodshed among the natives as possible.”
Watching her as she spoke, I determined that the most remarkable thing about Baffo’s daughter was her hair. Many Venetian ladies endured agonies with lemon and vinegar solutions only to have their hair bleach out to a harsh, lifeless, brittle shock of straw. Her blond, on the other hand, was real and full of life that could not be contained. Like polished gold filigree, it spilled from the somber white linen of her veil, a promiscuity of which, I decided, she was not totally innocent.
She was not innocent, but at the moment totally unaware of her effect.
