15. February 23, 1711 Venice, Italy #2
She edges her way out of the crowd and turns where she stands, taking in the piazza.
The costumes are extravagant: a sea of colorful silk and jewels and masked faces.
An orchestra of costumed men plays in perfect rhythm while dancing couples spin around them.
A company of acrobats flips and balances in front of the basilica, a domed and gilt cathedral that rivals St. Paul’s.
Across the way, a jester juggles to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd, and a masked woman with hair the color of flame twirls fire in her hands.
The way the woman looks at Beatrix unnerves her, as if she can see right through her mask.
She dips her head and plunges into the crowd—
Straight into a man’s hard chest. She stumbles, and the gentleman catches her arm, steadying her. His grip falls away, and she bobs a low curtsy before she remembers she’s supposed to be a lady. “Pardon me, sir. I didn’t see you there.” Her gaze trails up his frame as she straightens.
The man is dressed in shades of silver and charcoal.
The green buttons of his brocade coat shine like emeralds in the night, and she wonders if they really are emeralds.
A black tricorn hat sits atop dark hair, and a fine porcelain mask hides his features from her, but not his sharp jawline or the glint in his eyes.
“Apology not accepted.”
“What?” Beatrix splutters, any semblance of ladylike manners gone.
The man smirks. “But a dance would make it up to me.”
Beatrix laughs. He’s shameless. “Is that so?”
The orchestra begins a new song, and the gentleman offers her his hand.
Beatrix takes it. He pulls her close and she catches the scent of lavender as he lays his hand on her back.
Probably the perfume of his last unsuspecting dance partner.
He guides her into a waltz, his movements practiced and graceful, the steps easy to follow.
Visions of another dance drift to the surface of her mind.
There were no masks, no fancy gowns, but if she closes her eyes, she could be back there, dancing in a tiny English village in a borrowed wedding dress with the man who gave her his love and promised her it would triumph over everything. She doesn’t close her eyes.
The man stares at her. Her cheeks flush with warmth, and she is silently grateful for the porcelain mask hiding her face.
“Where did you go?” There is no jest in the man’s tone, only a quiet curiosity.
“My mind wanders when I dance. A bad habit of mine,” she says. “One of many.”
“I find it difficult to believe a lady could have even a single bad habit,” he teases.
“You must not know many ladies.”
The man laughs, easy and bright, and turns her into the next steps. They glide across the piazza as if they have danced together a thousand times.
When the song ends, Beatrix dips into a polite curtsy. “Thank you for the dance. It was lovely.”
“How about another one, then?” the man asks.
Beatrix hesitates. She has rules. One meal. One dance. One night. Once is a fluke. Once is easy to forget.
The man offers Beatrix his hand. “It’s just a dance.”
Just a dance, wearing a dress that doesn’t belong to her, in a city she’ll leave behind, with a man who won’t be able to recognize her come morning. She doesn’t even know his name. What harm could it do?
She places her hand in his, and he pulls her close. His hand against her back sends warmth blooming through her, and when she follows him, it is effortless. Two dances turn into three, into four, into five, until Beatrix has forgotten all about her rules and lost all track of time.
She spills from the crowd of dancers, breathless and laughing, the man following after. “I need a rest. And some food.”
He takes her hand. “I know just the thing.”
She follows him to a wooden stand tucked into the corner of the piazza.
The scent of frying dough and oranges wafts across the crowd gathered around it.
They reach the counter, and the man slides a coin across the smooth wood.
The old woman standing behind it passes him a basket of fried pastries speckled with raisins and dusted with white sugar.
Beatrix sits with the man at a nearby table. “What is it? It smells divine.”
He offers her the basket. “Fritole.”
Beatrix selects a warm ball of fried dough and takes a bite. It’s crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside, and full of plump raisins. The icing sugar melts against her tongue, bright and sweet. She takes another bite.
“You’re an excellent dancer,” she says when she’s finished chewing. Not that she is an expert, but Lady DeSallowe is. She would be impressed by him.
“Thank you,” he says. “My mother was an instructor. She would be glad to know I’m putting her lessons to good use.”
“I’m sure dancing with strangers at Carnevale was not what she had in mind when she taught you,” Beatrix says. Royal balls were more likely.
The man laughs. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Beatrix takes another fritole from the basket. “What’s the best food you’ve ever eaten?” she asks. “Besides these.”
He ponders the question as he chews. “It’s a tie between oysters fresh from the Thames and pizza in Naples.”
“You’re a traveler?” Beatrix asks.
The man seems surprised by her assessment. “I guess you could say that.”
“All right, then, what’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten?”
“That depends on your definition of food. My brother dared me to eat a snail out of our mother’s garden once.”
“I hear that’s a delicacy in France,” Beatrix says.
“So had he.” The man laughs. “What about you?”
“Not to brag, but my sisters and I used to make the best mud pies in all of Britain.” Isabella was only six, Alice nearly eight, the last summer they were allowed to play together on the riverbank.
The tree had only just fallen in the clearing, claimed by an early summer storm, and they turned it into their bakery.
They lined up their best pies and cakes, topped with acorn caps and wild forest flowers, and used the roundest, smoothest stones from the river as their coins.
They took turns playing all manner of customers.
“We never ate any of them,” Beatrix clarifies. “Only pretended.” It’s the same thing she told her mother and her father and the parish priest when they asked her to explain what, exactly, the girls had been up to in the forest.
“Never?” the man asks. “Not even once?”
The parish priest didn’t believe her, either; he stared at her with those watery blue eyes, waiting for her to confess to something she hadn’t done.
He left their cottage in a huff, and her father told her it wasn’t safe for her to go into the forest anymore.
She thought he sounded almost sad when he said it.
That night, her parents’ voices drifted to where she lay next to her sleeping sisters, and she understood. The danger wasn’t in the forest.
Their neighbor’s wife had died that morning, struck by terrible stomach pains and fever.
Mr. Brown was bereft, until his daughter told him she had passed Beatrix in the woods on her way home with the washing, that she had seen her making strange cakes from dirt and sticks, that she had watched her eat them while she played at being her mother. The girl was inconsolable after that.
Mr. Brown went to the priest immediately, demanded Beatrix be held to account for his wife’s death. What did it matter that she was only a ten-year-old girl playing a game with her sisters, when he suspected she wasn’t a girl at all?
“Sorry to disappoint,” Beatrix says. “I have, unfortunately, eaten questionable meat pie.”
The man makes a disgusted sound. “That might be worse than snail.”
“I agree.” She licks the last of the icing sugar from her fingers.
The man considers her for a long moment before he asks, “What’s one thing you want to do before you die?”
Beatrix shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, there must be something,” he says.
“This conversation is becoming a bit serious for Carnevale, isn’t it?”
“It’s the masks,” the man says. “They turn people honest.”
“Do they now?” Beatrix props her chin on her hand. “What’s your answer, then?”
The man leans across the table, as if he’s about to whisper a scandalous secret in her ear. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
Beatrix scowls. She has never given it any thought, because it doesn’t matter. She has all the time in the world. She can do anything. Everything. And yet she hasn’t. She hasn’t even considered it, until now. “Anything?”
“Anything,” the man says. “Doesn’t matter how expensive, how far away, how impossible it sounds. Practicality doesn’t factor into it.”
“Only desire?” she asks coyly. She wonders if she’s made him blush.
“Exactly. If you could do whatever your heart desires, what would you do?”
She’d break free of her curse, but she can’t very well tell him that, even if he is a masked stranger. She chooses something that is less likely to get her thrown into an asylum. “I want to be happy.”
The man slouches in his seat. “That’s not a real answer.”
“Of course it’s a real answer. Don’t you want to be happy?”
He shakes his head. “It’s too easy. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Fine,” Beatrix says. “I want to go to Paris.”
The man shakes his head again. “Too boring.”
“Maybe I’m not that interesting,” Beatrix snaps.
The man leans close again. “Now you’re lying.”
She clenches her jaw. She has half a mind to leave the man to answer his own pointless questions. She doesn’t. He’s managed to get under her skin, a strange sensation when she is used to numbness. If she leaves now, his question will haunt her long after he is gone.
The man offers her the last pastry in the basket. She chews thoughtfully.