ladies’ maid who had discovered the empty coop. She could not be a day older than twelve.
Trying to edge closer to the Palma Vecchio portrait, I got cornered by the leering Danese, who thanked me for returning his baggage. The cause of his good cheer was too good to keep secret. “You saved me a journey, old friend,” he whispered triumphantly. “Grazia has finally made her mother see reason. We are man and wife in the eyes of the church. There can be no sin in admitting it.” Or admitting him, in other words. Bedtime, all.
“Congratulations.”
So it went. We were obviously waiting for someone, and my next attempt to stalk a painting brought me within range of madonna Eva again.
“I am so happy that you can stay to dine, sier Alfeo” she declaimed. “I know my husband will be devastated at having missed this opportunity to thank you again, but he will be unable to join us.”
Danese and Grazia were locked in eye-to-eye adoration, out of the conversation. I rose to the occasion.
“I don’t imagine you see very much of him just now, madonna.”
She pouted, obviously not for the first time. Despite her comparative youth, her mouth was settling into mean lines. “Not much more than I saw of him when he was ambassador in Constantinople! The Signoria ’s schedule is brutal! At least sier Zuanbattista only has to put up with it for eight months; I cannot imagine how the poor doge stands it as a lifetime ordeal. The Collegio in the morning, the Senate most afternoons, and the Council of Ten in the evenings, not to mention all the purely ceremonial functions, the Great Council on Sundays, and many diplomatic meetings.”
Then she glanced past me and brightened like fireworks over the Grand Canal. I turned, expecting to see her husband striding through the doorway in his scarlet counselor robe, but it was merely the nondescript Girolamo in his ministerial violet.
There were many emotional crosscurrents in Ca’ Sanudo just then, and that new one sent a shiver down my backbone, followed by several other shivers in tandem. I remembered Violetta drawing my attention to Giro and Eva at the theater, not two weeks ago yet, although it felt like a lifetime. Why? She had never explained her real interest in them. I responded automatically to Giro’s greetings, apologies for not being there to greet me, and protestations of gratitude for services rendered, while part of my brain spun like a windmill trying to work out relationships. If Giro was his stepmother’s lover, as Violetta had hinted…That would hardly be surprising, when he was older than she was and she was thirty or forty years younger than her husband, who had been away for years anyway. These things can happen anywhere, not only in Venice. But if Giro and Eva were lovers, why had Danese lied to me about being her lover as well as her cavaliere servente? Could the lady have two lovers? At the same time? Day shift and night shift?
And what went on at night in the house now that Zuanbattista was back?
Giro had returned from the regular morning meeting of the Collegio with the rest of his day free, likely. He hurried off to shed his formal robes and we went into dinner as soon as he returned. Madonna Eva smiled like Medusa as she saddled me with the job of squiring her aunt, who gripped my arm in one claw and a silver-topped cane in the other, and moved like a glacier.
The dining room was adequate, but far from Ca’ Barbolano’s palatial grandeur. The food was better than Venetian average, but not a patch on Mama Angeli’s-the Risotto di Go e Bevarasse was overcooked and the Branzino al Vapore in Salsa di Vongole practically raw. It was served by the child Noelia and a fresh-faced youth addressed as Pignate.
I like risotto. The Maestro denounces rice as a newfangled foreign fad and forbids Mama to serve it. She does, quite frequently, which doesn’t matter because he never notices what he is eating. He often eats more than usual when there is rice in the dish.
Ca’ Sanudo conversation was infinitely duller than any of the Maestro’s table monologues. Politics was a forbidden topic, of course, as was anything to do with sex. Madonna Eva discoursed at length about the wedding plans, lamenting the haste required and the limits this imposed on the scale of the celebration. I hung on every word-with the rope cutting into my neck. Old Fortunata mercifully remained silent, poking listlessly at the tiny portions put in front of her but rarely eating anything. Danese and Grazia stayed in their locked-eyeball trance, smiling inanely. Giro was as colorless as always, rarely speaking, watching his stepmother’s lips move, but with so little expression or interest that I rejected my earlier suspicions. No one could love a snowbank like Giro. Or perhaps one could and the snowbank could not respond?
Mother and daughter ignored each other throughout the meal. There could be no question which of the two had the better face or finer figure or greater experience, yet youth could trump all of those. Madonna Eva’s lover had been stolen by her own daughter, and a certain amount of acrimony was understandable. If she had cherished secret hopes of one day wearing cloth-of-gold as dogaressa, they had been trampled in the dust of dead ambitions. One might even permit a small amount of rub-your-nose-in-it jubilation from Grazia. But where was Girolamo in all this? Whose side was he on? I could not hazard a guess.
Then Danese flashed his perfect teeth at me and asked how I had enjoyed the play. What play? of course, and I had to explain how he and I had met outside the theater the previous week.
“I understand that some of the dialogue was on the racy side?” he said blandly.
That was an understatement, because Violetta, always unpredictable, had chosen a bawdy Rabelaisian farce performed by a traveling company from the mainland, a rehash of the adventures of Captain Fear. No woman in Europe is better educated than Violetta, able to quote Ovid or Dante or Sappho at the flicker of an eyelash. She can sing, play the lute, and dance well enough to dazzle men who have known the courts of Paris or Milan. She might have made her selection to spare the strain on my threadbare purse, but she is a woman of unbounded variety and had enjoyed the vulgarity, laughing as loud as any of the groundlings.
“We do not need to discuss that,” Giro said. “Did Father tell you, Mother, that the tallies of the grape harvest are in?”
Eva smiled blissfully and I saw that one of Giro’s virtues in her eyes was that he could squelch his new brother-in-law. That did not mean that he had no others, of course, but evidently the lady needed his support against the triumphant Dolfin duo. I could easily imagine Danese throwing off three years’ humility and the rags of obsequious cavaliere servente to swagger in the finery of son-in-law and heir. Every smile must rub salt in the wounds of Eva’s humiliation.
Giro expounded on the grape harvest from the mainland estates; Danese went back to glowing at his bride in wordless rapture. He held all the cards now.
Eventually I asked about the Tintoretto on the wall opposite me, although even at that distance I was sure that it was a School of Tintoretto Tintoretto.
“Oh, my father is the collector,” Giro told me. “He has a great eye for art.”
He glanced at his stepmother as if this was one of those in-jokes that all families share, and for once there was a hint of a smile in his eyes. It was instantly reflected in hers. That was far from proof of guilt-of course a woman and her stepson are allowed to share a joke about her husband’s foibles! But by then my imagination was running riot and seeing double meanings in everything.
The meal ended at last. I thanked my host and hostess, congratulated the happy couple again, and was assigned to Fabricio to be rowed home to the Ca’ Barbolano and my afternoon’s labors, whatever they might turn out to be.
I had more immediate plans, though. I had sensed something far wrong at Ca’ Sanudo and if anyone could reassure me about that noble house, it was Violetta. I asked Fabricio to let me off at the watersteps between Ca’ Barbolano and Number 96, as if I intended to go along the calle to the campo. I tipped him more generously than usual, proving to myself that I was not Danese Dolfin. He flashed me an angelic smile as he thanked me. Not another, surely? My conscience roared at me for being an evil-minded prude.
I went into the alley, then retraced and emerged. I watched Fabricio row away as I walked along the ledge to the door of 96 and knocked, not having brought my key. If someone in the Sanudo family fancied handsome youngsters on principle-or lack of principles-then Fabricio was a logical choice. The serving girl, the gondolier, the cavaliere servente…madonna Eva herself. Saints! Even the cherubic footman, Pignate! Messer Zuanbattista Sanudo had a great eye for art, his son said. Had he meant beauty?
Draped in a gown of silver and violet silk, Violetta was seated at her dressing table while Milana brushed out her hair, but she twisted around to offer me a hand. She was Niobe, whose eyes are a gentle hazel, brimming over with pity.
“Alas! Alfeo, my poor darling! I do wish you’d come sooner, but I cannot dally with you now, or I’ll be
