And, as I did, I was caught by my own sable collar and thrown in my turn against the next stretch of wall. When my head cleared, I found the dagger knocked from my hand with a singing roll into a display of large brass bowls.
And my eyes were transfixed by the blue-flinted-with-green that was the eyes of Ghazanfer.
“Go! Run!” the great eunuch hissed over his shoulder at the young attaché.
Barbarigo seemed as immobilized as I was with the monstrous, crushed hands resting on my shoulders. His Venetian eyes blinked wider with fright than they had with my blade tickling his ribs.
“Go!” Ghazanfer’s Turkish rumbled again.
Then I found my voice and spoke in Italian. “Stay away from her, Barbarigo.” The hands came down heavier and inched towards the vulnerability of my throat. But as long as air was there, I kept on shouting. “Barbarigo, I swear to you on the graves of my family, extinguished in me. I swear Sofia Baffo wall destroy you as she does every man who cannot resist the lure of that hellborn hair.”
Finally, Barbarigo ran. He disappeared at the turn of a jeweler’s sultry display, my words in pursuit.
Then I turned and took a breath—might it be my last?—in order to meet those hard green eyes again. By God, that khadim was totally without expression, without feeling, so it seemed. But when he allowed me a second breath, I used it to give a cough of shame, of threat, deep in my throat. With more courage than I felt, I let him know what I knew—and that if he didn’t want me to use it, I dared him to kill me now.
The great conical turban that towered over mine shook in a slow negative.
No, you will not use this, he informed me wordlessly. Things will not go well for you—or for either of your precious ladies—if you do.
And did he really know this? This deepest, most damaging of our secrets? I did indeed read it in the laconic slits of his eyes.
You expose my lady, I read, I will expose yours. We both know full well that precious daughter of hers is no honest offspring of the Grand Vizier.
PART II: ANDREA
IV
Overtones droned through the scented oleanders and roses like nocturnal bees after late summer blossom. The quartet of young ladies pursued the final chords of their madrigal and started another in the soft September Serenissima air.
Ah, Venice! Where one is duty-bound to feel romantic, no matter where his heart is.
Andrea hoped his circle of the company appeared to be the polite mingling of a bridegroom at his betrothal party and not a guilty son’s attempt to keep his father on the other side of the garden.
Now, which of the young singers was Andrea supposed to claim as his? Foscari. The remembrance of the family name, the ties the match would make, called the face to mind. The girl favored her father’s side—that unfortunate nose. There she was, second from the left, taking the descant part. Melissa Foscari.
Andrea took her hair to be the girl’s best feature. It had been brought up in a thick coil over her brow much too grown-up for the little face below. Ropes of pearls too precious, he thought, to be given so idly to one so young, had been pressed into service to make a crown of the coil, and they contrasted with the hair in an agreeable richness.
But this only emphasized the fact: Signorina Foscari’s hair was black, raven black. They’d given up even trying to give it blond highlights as any Venetian woman from the deepest brunette would do, under a wide-brimmed hat on her altena. They were all, in other words, trying to match Sofia Baffo’s perfection. In vain, in vain, Andrea sadly dismissed their efforts.
He struggled to keep the reaction on his face towards the upper side of the scale between disinterest and disgust as he greeted a few more guests. He who had held perfection in his trembling hands, how could he have patience with anything less?
Jesu, but the canals stank this time of year of lethargic tides. Andrea had forgotten how badly, and now the labor of breathing the foul air gripped his diaphragm like an iron manacle. He rubbed exhausted eyes against the sting of yellow-green decay and the sound of splashing rats. Typhus, he recalled, stalked the poorer sections of town in this unhealthy heat.
Wisteria reached towards the palace’s upper story like a lover towards his beloved’s balcony. A marble nymph flirted at him through the vine’s tendrils. The fortune in beeswax the Foscaris had spent to illuminate their assembly caught the statue’s perfect white curves with a sheen. This idealized beauty, so unself-conscious, luxuriating in her nakedness and its power over mankind, this was like his Sofia.
Andrea, very conscious that it was his first wine in over a year, took the glass a servant in sapphire livery offered him and let the fermentation fill his head. Over the tiny pool of red, Andrea continued to consort with the stone nymph.
“Well done, lad!”
Andrea looked helplessly down at the bloom of wine on his new lace ruff. A hurried abandonment of the Turkish in his costume upon his return to Venice had led to this ostentatious and brazen style. And now it was ruined with wine caused by a slap on the back and the hearty greeting of Messer Foscari, his future father-in-law.
I am not meant to be a Venetian fop, Andrea scolded himself.
The older man, who ignored the damage he had caused, was accompanied by Andrea’s father, Agostino Barbarigo, the Republic’s stern-faced proveditore.
Andrea shifted nervously under his father’s gaze, feeling like a child, his elopement with Sofia thwarted again in Ca’ Foscari. He felt the cut under his arm itch as it sloughed its scab. He remembered the eunuch.
It hardly seemed possible that the two beings were one and the same, the eunuch in Constantinople
