Her accompanying laugh was loud and shrill. With my mind still dipping into my afternoon from time to time, it had occurred to me at first that this might be Baffo’s daughter taking on the freedom of a mask to escape from the convent by night. I had been hoping for such a meeting to the degree that I fully expected it, and at the most unexpected times. The laugh convinced me this was not she; the girl of my dreams did not laugh like this crackle of lightning but like the soft breezes of a spring garden. And yet, the figure, at first glance, was similar. The storm was here, now, with a most sultry presence and, force of nature that it was, I could hardly resist it.
My biggest concern became how to join in her laughter without letting my vocal chords betray me into registers higher than hers.
“I just adore the intermedi,” my new companion declared, easing her ministrations when the strains of an instrumental group warming up announced a lull in the action onstage. Singers and dancers would now give pause to the actors who’d been on a merry chase from dungeon to the highest tower in the Sultan’s palace.
A tapestry dropped over the minarets of Constantinople. It announced “pastoral” and gave me another mental brush with the convent garden in the afternoon. These fanciful trees were in full leaf, the illusion of a million tiny stitches taken by a dozen seamstress’s hands; real leaves and flowers were difficult to come by even for the very wealthy at this season of the year.
The scene devised to play in front of this drop caused something of a jolt, however. It featured Phlegyas, the boatman from Dante’s Inferno, who appeared naked, but flickering with red gauze flame at the vital parts. This apparition quite took my masked companion’s breath away. At least, she had none to spare for me.
Phlegyas steadied his boat to receive the Damned, who represented a wild confusion of theologies: fauns and satyrs along with Adam and a buxom Eve, more recent heretics of note, traitors to the Serene Republic and the particular enemies of the Foscari. The Turkish Sultan himself brought up the rear, a stretched attempt to make the intermedio have something to do with the play it interspersed. It gave the pious illusion that the eternal was in some way watching over the fooleries of the mundane.
The Damned sang a dirge as they approached in a solemn grapevine. Phlegyas shook his chains to mark the rhythm, and imps sounded suitably woeful chords on trombones and bass viols which an ingenious costumer had disguised as instruments of torture.
“And the music is an instrument of torture,” I commented lightly to my companion.
To my confusion, she did not share my opinion of the entertainment. With rapt attention and even the glint of a tear of remorse through the moiré slits, she counted up her life’s sins and contemplated her own fate at the crack of doom.
So much for my evening, I thought.
Looking idly about for some other distraction, I noticed the tardy arrival of a pair of gentlemen who attracted my attention because they could well be my uncle and I: an older man and a younger. The similarity was further exaggerated by the fact that the younger’s black mask and white cone hat were the very image of mine. No mask, however, could conceal the graying, chest-length whiskers of the older man. All Venice knew them as sprouting from the chin of Agostino Barbarigo, head of the great Barbarigo family, one of the dreaded Council of Ten, in line for the post of Provenditor.
This identification saw through all attempts by the younger for anonymity. He must be the Barbarigo’s heir, Andrea. And as soon as the name Andrea Barbarigo passed through my mind, I recalled the last time I’d heard it pronounced, on the pouting lips of Sofia Baffo. My hand went automatically to my left hip. I must duel this man to the death, was my reflexive thought.
Young Barbarigo was looking anxiously about the audience as well. When his gaze met mine, like a mirror, he paused.
It was as if the very same thoughts of blood coursed through his mind, too. With a mask, however, it was impossible to tell. Presently he only gave me a stiff nod of acknowledgment, which such a lingering stare required even if we weren’t acquainted. I returned the nod, equally stiff. His eyes moved on.
By this time, our lovers were back on stage, romping through the seraglio with fantastic impunity once more. My companion in gold lace had forgotten all about hellfire in the time it takes to raise a tapestry forest. Or at least she’d decided to transfer perdition to play upon my person in a dozen places instead. It did in fact seem that her attentions were what drew Barbarigo’s elsewhere, convinced him that I was no threat. They certainly distracted me.
Nothing less than a servant’s tap on my shoulder brought more than my codpiece upright again, and made me straighten my mask. The servant, like everybody else, was masked and identified by no more than the scarlet Foscari livery. Wordlessly, he pressed a tightly folded piece of paper in my hand and, with a conspiratorial nod, vanished among the milling numbers of his species.
My companion in the moiré mask had still not righted herself from her attempt to make a bed of our stiff and high-backed chairs. She’d worked my chemise out of its tuck between hose and doublet and was tickling my bare skin with pricks of gold lace.
“Perhaps we need to go find out if this palace has a room that is not quite so crowded,” she murmured.
Her languid “Hmm?” might indeed have made me pocket the note to read later, but my first inquisitive unfolding had revealed a signature. It was a single feminine S elaborated with curlicues and flounces. Now the note burned in my hand more than the chafe
