13
When she looked the boy was gone. Despite herself, Lady Giulietta glanced at a huge marble pillar, seeing movement where it met a balcony. But the light in Basilica San Marco came from candles or oil lamps, and she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just shadows shifting.
“My lady…”
Captain Roderigo looked tired, and worried at how he found her. Since his scars said his courage wasn’t in question, she assumed he hung back to give her time to pull up her dress. He said nothing as she fixed her cloak and bent for the dagger, sliding it into a secret hiding place.
“What?” she demanded.
“I have a message for you.”
Lady Giulietta sighed. “So?” she said flatly, and watched the captain’s eyes tighten at her rudeness. As if she’d care.
“The Regent is asking where you are.”
“What did my aunt tell him?”
“My lady, I wouldn’t…”
“Of course you would,” Giulietta said crossly. “Everyone in the palace knows everything. They just pretend they don’t. It’s a prison.”
It wasn’t. She’d been inside a prison.
As a child she’d been taken to see a toothless and naked patrician, who huddled in a freezing cell, filthy with his own faeces and sitting in a puddle of his own piss. Nicolo Paso led a rebellion in his youth. The so-called Second Republic, which lasted three years and saw a hundred senators beheaded in a single day when it fell. Paso was spared.
His condition an object lesson in what awaited those who challenged the Millioni dynasty. She’d heard the Byzantine empire funded Paso’s treason. But then she’d heard the German emperor was to blame. And the Hungarian king, and the Mamluk sultan… Clearly, no one considered Paso might have thought of the rebellion himself. She kept that opinion to herself.
“I’ve seen Paso’s cell,” she said, by way of apology. She couldn’t help being rude. Well, she probably could, but she wouldn’t know where to start or why she would…
“Bother,” Giulietta said, fumbling a button.
Roderigo’s apparent fascination with her face obviously turned on the fact that her fingers struggled with buttons at the neck of her dress, and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “My lady,” he said. “Lord Paso’s conditions are good.” Before she could disagree, he added. “There are far worse…”
“Worse than that?”
“Much worse,” Roderigo said. “The Ca’ Ducale is not a prison. In comparison with the worst this city has, Lord Paso’s cell is almost a palace.”
“As I would know if I’d need a real prison?”
“Yes, my lady.”
Giulietta hated being patronised. “Tell me the worst then.”
Roderigo considered her demand, then shrugged and obviously decided he had nothing to lose in answering. “The pit of the Black Crucifers. It fills with water each tide and requires hours of labour to empty. Prisoners work in shifts to remove the water before the next tide comes.”
“They drown.”
“Well,” she said, fastening her last button. “I’d still rather pump water there than be here talking to you.” Captain Roderigo looked as if he wanted to slap her. That was fine; most days she wanted to slap herself.
Smothering a shiver, Giulietta ordered him to escort her back to the palace. Where she discovered Aunt Alexa and her uncle now separately abed, and retired to her own chambers on the palace’s family floor. Dismissing Lady Eleanor, who’d stayed awake to help her undress, she struggled out of her blood-stained dress, pulled off her undergown and changed it for a fresh one, hiding her bloodied shift under her mattress. Falling into bed, Giulietta dragged a heavy fur over her and dreamed of snows and wooden buildings burning.
Next morning she woke, pissed in a cold pot and dressed as quickly as her buttons and ribbons and Lady Eleanor’s slowness allowed.
“Eleanor.”
“My fingers are frozen.”
Her lady-in-waiting was fumbling the ribbons on the sleeve of an overgown when she stopped, with the ribbon half tied. Pulling back the sleeve she revealed a bruise on Giulietta’s wrist.
“My lady.”
“What?”
“It looks…” Eleanor hesitated.
“Well?” Giulietta said crossly. “What does it look like?”
“Finger marks.”
Lady Giulietta slapped her.
And having slapped her, she sent Eleanor to her room and tied the ribbons herself, pulling them too tight and making a mess of the bows. She considered recalling her lady-in-waiting to tell her she was dismissed for good. But Giulietta couldn’t face that, and Eleanor probably didn’t want to go to Cyprus anyway and would only be glad of the news.
So she said nothing and kicked her heels in the map room, endlessly examining a fresco of Cyprus, which showed pitiful little ships sailing in all directions. The artist depicted her future home as rocky and barren, with few towns and fewer cities. This made her no happier than arguing with Eleanor.
It was absurd and ridiculous. It made her sound like a maiden in a troubadour’s song, but Giulietta couldn’t shake the feeling that the touch of the boy in the basilica had set hooks into her soul. As if he’d stolen a part of her and left a part of himself in its place. A part that tasted bitter, unforgettable.
Aunt Alexa was too busy to be disturbed.
So Giulietta spent the rest of the day practising her harpsichord with fearsome intensity, until the guards in the corridor winced at every repetition. It was next morning before the girls spoke, and three days before they made up their quarrel. Without discussing it, both avoided mentioning the bruises again.