In the Company of the Courtesan (35 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

He is a different man from the one to whom I have delivered her food each day. This one smirks when he sees me—no doubt there are a million jokes to be made about a dwarf visiting a witch—but it seems that not all men who do foul jobs are made foul by them, and whatever his thoughts, he keeps them to himself. He lets me into a small courtyard, where another man meets me and takes me through a door down one, then a second, then a third set of stairs. The little light that was left in the day is snuffed as we descend. This far below ground it is perpetual night. Here a third jailer is waiting, this one built like a barrel and smelling as foul as his prisoners, though as much from stale beer as from the stench of his own body. He looks at me as if I am a cockroach until the purse is on the table. He empties it and stacks the coins into three separate piles. Three jailers, three piles. He counts them again, then looks up at me, sneering. “Where's the rest?”

There was a time when men his size frightened me, as much for the bluntness of their brains as for the force of their fists. But now I don't care. Now I just think of them as pieces of meat with mouths attached. God take their souls, if he can find them.

“Up your ass,” I say, grinning.

He growls at me for a moment, as if he might flatten my head against the wall, then he starts to laugh and moves over and slaps me on the shoulder as if I were his long-lost brother, and suddenly he is as sweet as tooth rot, offering me wine and insisting on bringing extra candles and a stool with us as he takes me to the cell, so I will not have to sit on the floor.

I follow him down the black corridor. We pass maybe a dozen chambers, each the size of a pigpen, the smoky light of his two candle lamps throwing up the occasional figure curled on the floor or in the corner, but no faces, and I am suddenly more scared of my own footsteps than I could ever be of his belligerence. The dark, the smell, the dankness. My God, why should anyone be afraid of dying if this is what passes for life? He has to count the cells to be sure he has reached the right one, and he puts down the candles as he opens the lock.

I walk inside. At first I think there is no one here. Then, in the gloom, I make out a small figure sitting on a pallet at the back of the cell, her body facing the wall. She—What shall I call her now? For she is no longer La Draga in my mind. She, Elena, does not look up or move in any way as I come in. I glance at the jailer, and he shrugs, dumping the stool and one of the candle lamps next to me and clanging the door behind him. The keys chatter loudly in the lock.

I move in front of her, adjusting the candle so that I can make out her face. Her eyes are in a terrible state; that much I can see from the start. They are swollen; one is almost closed, and the other is twitching and full of puss, and she blinks it constantly.

“Elena?”

No response.

“Elena. Can you see me? I'm here. Right in front of you.”

She puts her head to one side and frowns a little. “Ha! Is that the Devil or a dog?”

And because we were never familiar enough to laugh together, I am scared for an instant that this might be madness rather than humor.

“Neither. It is me, Bucino.” I take a breath. “Remember?”

She makes a small noise. “Then you had better wear white from now on and make sure you walk upright or you could be mistaken for both.”

I cannot help but laugh, but then nerves take men in different ways. From somewhere close, the next cell, I hear a thud, then the voice of a woman, moaning.

“Are you…I…How are you?”

Her face is half sneer, half smile. Each and every one of its gestures I have seen a thousand times before, and yet something closes in my throat to watch them now. “I am a witch, you know. Yet I can't free myself by flying out of the window.”

“I…There is no window in here,” I say gently.

She makes an impatient little noise with her tongue. “I know that, Bucino. So how did you get in?”

“Money. Fiammetta interceded through her great Crow, and we paid money to the guards.”

“Ah.”

“We would have paid money to the court also, I mean, to try to stop it, only—”

“—only they would have none of it. It is all right. I know. They were most proud of their sternness.”

“Yet people say you were as clever as they.”

She shrugs. “She swore it was the Devil's dog coming from my window when everyone knew she could barely see past the ends of her own fingers. In the court, when I asked her, she couldn't tell the judge from the statue next to him.”

She makes a crooked little smile at the memory of it. The light is better now, or my eyes better adjusted. Her face is grimy with dirt. Except for the rivulet of tears that leaks out from one of her eyes. I want so much to lift up my hand and wipe it clear. I watch as she tries to twitch the pain away.

“You have been getting the food we send, yes?”

She nods, though it doesn't look if she has eaten much of it.

“Did they tell you it was from us? We have done everything we could for you.”

“They said I had ‘a benefactor.'” She pronounces the last word as if it was almost a libation. “ ‘A benefactor for a malefactor.' Then they said ‘good for bad,' because they didn't think I'd understand it. They thought my notebook was written by the Devil until I told them the code. They read some of it in court—it was a remedy for constipation. Perhaps I should have charged them for it.”

“I doubt it would have helped. Shit builds up again fast in some people.”

She smiles at my crudeness. “How is she? Is Foscari gone?”

“Yes,” I say. “She is…she is lost without you.”

“I don't think so.” She blinks fast a number of times again. “She still has you.”

I watch another spasm of pain cross her face. I take a breath. “What of your eyes, Elena? What's happened to them?”

“It's an infection; it comes from the glass. I have had it for many years. There is a remedy I use, a liquid to soothe it. Without it…well, you'll be pleased to know that I see almost nothing now.”

“Oh, no,” I say. “No. It gives me no pleasure at all.”

From the next cell the thudding comes again, and then the moaning, louder this time. Then, from somewhere else, a voice yells out abuse, a chorus of madness.

She lifts her head to the sound. “Faustina? Don't be frightened. You are safe. Lie down, try to sleep.” And her voice is soft, like the one that spoke of glass souls to a dwarf drowning in pain. She turns back to me. “She bangs her head against the walls. She says it makes the thoughts go away.”

The moans turn to a whimper, then stop. We sit for a moment, listening to the silence.

“I—I have brought you something.”

“What?”

“Put your hand out.”

As she does I see the bloodied marks left by the ropes on her wrists and lower arms.

“They are Mauro's sugared cakes. Each one has special syrup inside it, to help you.”

“Who made up the dose?” And her head tilts upward in that way I know so well.

“You did. It's your recipe. From the one we mixed with grappa. Mauro made a syrup paste from it. He's tested them. One will dull pain and make you sleepy, two will drug you enough to…to rise above it.”

She holds the parcel in the palm of her hand. “I…I think I will try a little now. But only half of one. Mauro's sauces were always rich for me.”

I take one from her and break off a part—more than a half—and feed it to her slowly, mouthful by mouthful. She chews it carefully, and I see her smile slightly at its sweetness.

“They hurt you?” I put a finger onto the weal on her arm.

She looks down at it, as if somehow the arm belonged to someone else. “I've seen worse in others.” She grunts. “It stopped me thinking about my eyes for a while.”

“Oh, God, oh, Christ, I am sorry,” I say, and once it starts, it comes out in a great river of anguish. “So sorry…I didn't inform on you, you must know that…. This is never what…I mean, I did break into your house, yes. After I saw you that day on Murano…I—I opened your chest, and I found the book and the glass circles. But I put them back, and I didn't show them or talk about them to anyone. As for the bones, well, I didn't—I mean…they were in my hand, and the sack fell as I was trying to move…. This was never meant to happen….”

She is sitting very still now, in that way only she can, so much so that in the end it is her quietness which stops my chattering.

“Elena?”

“Don't talk about it anymore, Bucino. There is nothing to say. The glass is broken and the liquid is spilled. It's not important anymore.” Her voice is quiet, no anxiety, no emotion at all, though it is too soon for the drug to be working. “The woman across the canal had been angry with me for a long time. I tried to help her with a baby that died in the womb. When I couldn't save it, she decided I'd killed it. She was shouting it loudly enough everywhere she went—it was only a matter of time before someone heard.”

“What about the bones?” I say after a while. “Where did they come from?”

She says nothing. Now, in the set of her lips, for the first time I see an echo of the old La Draga, the one I used to fear, the one whose silence spoke of secrets and hidden powers. If she resisted the rope, she will surely resist me. Maybe they came from her? Or maybe, like a priest, she is keeping other people's secrets? God knows there are women enough in this city hiding swelling bellies under their skirts to save their reputations. And babies die as they are squeezed and spat out of the womb every day.

“You must have known they would condemn you for it?”

She shakes her head a little, and her face softens. “I never could tell the future, you know. I just threw the beans and told people what they wanted to hear. Easy money. As for the past, well, nobody can change that. Oh, you could charge a lot if you could do that….” She falters. “Then I could have given you your ruby back. My grandfather said it was the best copy he ever made.”

We sit for a moment without speaking. No doubt we are both remembering.

“Still, I was worried that you would notice before you took it to the Jew.”

“Hah…Well, I didn't. You grandfather was right. It was a most superior fake.”

“But you knew it was me, yes? Afterward, when you found out?”

I see us again, her sitting on the bed, frozen like an animal, me with my lips close to her ear. I remember the texture of her skin, the dark circles around her eyes, the way her lips trembled slightly. “Yes, I knew it was you.” But the fact that I was right gives me no satisfaction now. “Was it your idea?”

She hesitates. “If you mean have I always been a thief, no.”

“Why then?”

“Meragosa and I decided on it together.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Why? I want to say it was because she found out about me. About my eyes and what I was doing, and, knowing it, she made me steal the stone.” She stops. “But that's not how it was. We did it together because we could and because at the time—well, at the time I needed the money.”

“So did you steal from her mother too?”

“No, no! I didn't. I never did that.” And she is suddenly very agitated. “I knew nothing about her mother. Meragosa never came to me for help—and I could have helped, there were things I could have given to soothe the suffering. I told that to Fiammetta, and you must believe me. I knew nothing about her illness or death.”

“It's all right, it's all right. I do believe you.” I put my hand on hers to steady her, and for a while it rests there in silence. “I know you are not cruel.”

“Oh, but I would have been to
you
if I could have, Bucino.” And her voice has some of the old La Draga spirit in it now. “I was angry with you at the beginning. That much I do admit. Those first months I worked so hard for her—for both of you. But you never trusted me, never. As soon as her hair was grown, you would have had me out of your lives. Meragosa saw that as well as I did. We'd never have been good enough for the two of you. That was what she said.”

Too late for lies now. Especially to myself. For all her foulness, Meragosa was right. We had come as a partnership, my lady and I. And I had been determined that no one would join us. Even those whom we needed most.

“If that's what you felt, why did you come back? You knew I suspected, yet you came and helped us again. My God, I was so impressed by you then.”

She doesn't say anything. In the silence, the moaning returns. Now that I know what is happening, the force of the thud against the stone is almost worse than the cry that comes after it. Once, twice, then again and again.

“Faustina?” She moves her hand to locate the rest of the cake, then stands and shuffles her way to the bars. I get up to try to help. “Faustina. Can you hear me? Put your hand through the bars. Are you there?”

After a while in the gloom I see a long, thin arm stretch itself out, like the limb of some dismembered supplicant. Elena pushes the cake into the palm and closes the fingers over it. “Eat it. It is sweet, and it will make you sleep.”

Now, as she moves back toward the bed, she puts her hand on my shoulder for support. I can't tell if it is weakness or the potion working.

“Your size makes you a good walking stick, Bucino. I often wanted to lean on you when my back was hurting from pretending to be so bowed. But even when I stopped being angry with you, I was too afraid of your grumpiness.”

I watch as the smile moves over her face. She has always teased me, right from the beginning. Yet there had also been an edge to it, and in her as in me it was not only anger; it was as if she was afraid of something in herself. See—I have always known what she is feeling: anger, mischief, fear, guilt, triumph. I have seen and read every emotion as it moved across her face. Just as she must have done with mine. My God, how could we have mistaken so much?