Chapter Forty-Six
Edward flexed his cramped hand, causing a fresh scatter of ink across the already-blotted page, and forced his attention back to Ivanhoe’s latest declaration of noble self-sacrifice. Count Morosini had decreed that this chapter must be finished before week’s end, and it was barely half done.
Outside, Venice was making merry over Sofia’s fate.
From the open casement, the sounds floated up in bright, taunting snatches: the clatter of hammers as temporary stands were raised on the piazzetta, the sing-song cries of hawkers, the excited babble of children.
Church bells rang across the water. Once, when Edward rose to stretch, he glimpsed the pale bulge of silk above the rooftops—the balloon, half inflated, swaying like some monstrous sea creature straining at its tether.
Restless delight for everyone else. A sense of mounting judgment for him.
For Sofia, too. He had not seen the girl in days, save for that one brief, wretched encounter when her sobs had echoed faintly down from the upper gallery of the library.
He had been angry with her—justly so—for setting in motion the chain of events that had placed Venetia’s liberty in jeopardy.
Yet the memory of those choked entreaties to a higher being, her shoulders shaking beneath the lace veil, would not quite let him condemn her entirely.
She was so very young. So very trapped.
Like me, he thought grimly, bending again over his desk. Chained to a paper gallows.
He tried to lose himself in Sir Walter Scott’s rhythms, but the lines blurred. His gaze drifted to the folded note lying beside the inkwell.
Rizzi’s hand. Rizzi’s threat.
The captain’s superior returned to Venice on the morrow.
With him must go a report that “brought the matter of the jewel thefts to a satisfactory conclusion.” Without new evidence, Rizzi had said with bureaucratic regret, he would be obliged to describe Miss Venetia Playford as morally compromised and “possibly complicit”—a phrase that, in the mouths of English trustees, would be quite sufficient to pry her inheritance from her grasp.
Edward’s jaw tightened.
He knew the truth. Griselda’s confession at La Serafina’s had been halting but clear enough: the contessa’s maid, bribed and bullied by Paolo and Sofia into slipping the emeralds into Venetia’s tiara. No malice toward Venetia herself. Merely a reckless gamble to fund an elopement.
Merely.
He had tried that same night to persuade Griselda to repeat her story where it mattered—in front of Rizzi.
The girl had shaken her head until her cap slipped sideways, her dark eyes rolling in terror at the thought of dungeons and the contessa’s vengeance.
Even La Serafina’s assurances of protection had not moved her.
And time was running out.
His quill hovered impotently over the page. Ivanhoe, blast him, could afford to ride into battle with clear purpose. Edward had nothing but a guilty maid, a venal policeman, and a city that preferred appearances to truth.
“How,” he murmured to the empty room, “in God’s name am I to make you listen, Captain Rizzi?”
“Il conte wishes to see you, Signor Rothbury.”
Edward started. The footman in the doorway looked faintly apologetic, as if aware that no summons from Count Morosini ever boded well for a man’s peace of mind.
“Very well,” Edward said, laying down his pen. “Tell him I am coming.”
Morosini’s private salon had been transformed from the half-dusty retreat of a scholar into the command post of a general on the eve of a campaign.
Papers littered every surface—lists of guests, lists of suppliers, lists of expenses that would have made a lesser man blanch.
Bolts of colored bunting lay tumbled on a chair.
A footman was fussing with a tray of crystal flutes; another stood ready with a silver inkstand.
At the center of the chaos, in a coat of dark-blue velvet, stood the count.
“Ah, Rothbury.” He turned. “You look as if you have spent the night in a crypt.”
Edward bowed. “You sent for me, sir?”
“I did.” Morosini waved a hand, encompassing the room, the palazzo, Venice entire. “As if arranging my granddaughter’s betrothal were not enough—fireworks, music, that infernal balloon—I must also contend with the caprices of poets and policemen.”
He began to pace.
“Captain Rizzi will bring his superior—arrived a day early—to my festa,” he grumbled.
He ventured a glance at Edward, as if uncertain whether to voice the threat that lay between them.
Sofia is not to be drawn into any of this.
“He says it will show Venice that the law is diligent. Bah. The law is always diligent when there is an English fortune involved. And, the Marchese Valenti has condescended to leave his moldering island with demands of his own.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“He has been enticed—” Morosini stopped pacing and speared Edward with a look.
“By the promise of hearing with his own ears the man who translates his beloved Scott. He demands that you read from Ivanhoe. In English—so he may remember the cadence—and in your Italian prose, so that he may judge whether you have captured the soul of the thing—though he is more than happy when he sees it on the page.”
“I am honored,” Edward managed.
“You ought to be.” Morosini’s tone softened slightly “Between you and me, Rothbury, the old fool is half in love with you. Or with your pen, which in his case is the same thing. I have spent a year of my life enduring his complaints that your progress is too slow, his paeans of ecstasy when a new chapter arrives. Now he wishes to see the magician.”
He clapped his hands together as if the matter were settled.
“So. You will attend the betrothal. You will read one passage in English, then the same in Italian. Briefly, you understand. We must not bore them. We are promised a display of fireworks over the lagoon, and Sofia is to shriek in terror when the balloon lifts. This will amuse Bembo, who has all the sensibilities of a codfish. After that, you may slink back to your desk and drown yourself in ink to make up for the lost hours.”
Edward inclined his head. “Very well, sir. I shall do my best to excite the crowds—or rather, the marchese—and return quietly to my desk, as you say.”
Morosini gave a satisfied nod. “Excellent. Wear something respectable. And if I catch you making calf’s eyes at the English heiress when you ought to be thinking of knights and tournaments, I shall have you locked in the library with nothing but your work for company.”
A faint smile tugged at Edward’s mouth despite the knot in his chest. “Then I shall be very careful where I direct my gaze.”
“See that you do.” The count dismissed him with a wave of his hand and turned back to his papers, already barking orders about torches and musicians.
*
Venetia arrived at the piazza in company with her two English friends.
The day had blossomed into one of those crystalline Venetian mornings when every dome and campanile stood etched against an impossible blue.
Ahead, the great square and the adjoining piazzetta were thronged.
Silks and satins and bright parasols appeared like a glitter of jewels, and the hum of excited voices rose and fell like the lap of the lagoon.
And in the near distance, tethered above a wooden dais like some captive moon, floated the balloon.
Its vast silk envelope—striped in cream and faded blue—heaved and shivered with each breath of wind. Ropes creaked. The wicker car swayed a little, making Venetia’s own stomach pitch as she imagined what it would feel like to be lifted high above the glittering water with all of Venice watching.
She’d been spared the sensation of lifting off, suspended in a basket, by Edward’s timely intervention at Lady Townsend’s Comet Viewing Gala.
The last preparations were in full swing. Liveried servants wove through the crowd with silver trays, the delicate chime of glass punctuating the babble of Italian and French. Musicians tuned their instruments near the steps while children craned on tiptoe to see the progress.
“There is Signorina Sofia with her grandfather,” Lady Townsend murmured, squeezing Venetia’s arm. “My, but she is a very beautiful girl—though she has not your presence, my dear.”
Sophia, in palest pink, stood flanked by maids and footmen, her face composed, her mouth just tight enough to betray the strain. Beside her, Count Morosini swelled with satisfaction, and bearing down upon them with the air of a man approaching a newly purchased prize was Count Bembo.
“What with that long face?” Lord Thornton said, leaning closer so his words would be swallowed by the noise around them.
“Enjoy today’s festivities, my dear. Tomorrow will be soon enough to worry about Captain Rizzi and his report when you meet his superior and plead your case.
For now, take comfort in the fact that you are not the one destined to marry Bembo. ”
Venetia managed a smile for his sake. She had not confided in him about the wild scheme she and Sofia had spun in the dim quiet of the church.
In the clear light of day it seemed outlandish—reckless to the point of madness.
Two helpless young women plotting escape while surrounded by men who commanded the law, the courts, and the sky itself.
From this distance, with Morosini’s discreet guard of servants and retainers forming an almost invisible ring around his granddaughter, the idea of spiriting Sofia away in a balloon with a different bridegroom felt like something out of one of Scott’s more improbable romances.
Sophia was as much a victim of her circumstances as Venetia. Grandly conceived plans, born of fear and desperation, seldom survived when confronted with reality.