Your Scandalous Ways

  He’d ruined everything. He was supposed to make her chase him. Instead, he’d given in to the impulse of the moment—No, it was worse than that: He’d given in to the little brain between his legs. He’d given her what he wanted and what she wanted—and that was all she wanted, obviously—and now she was done with him.

  Ciao, cretino. I’m off to drive a French count mad. And a Gilenian prince. And perhaps some Russians and Bavarians, and maybe I’ll have a gondolier for dessert.

  “So what does that make me?” he muttered. “The hors d’oeuvre?”

  He stomped down the stairs, down the ramp, out of the Campanile, and along the same route she had taken. All the way he cursed himself, under his breath, in Italian, in English, and now and again, for a change of pace, in French, German, Russian, and Greek.

  When he reached his gondola, Zeggio reported that he and Sedgewick had seen the signora. She’d ordered her boatmen to take her to her friend’s.

  Perfect, James thought. She and Giulietta would compare their experiences. Giggling.

  “Sir?”

  James looked up.

  Sedgewick and Zeggio were exchanging that look again.

  “Where to, signore?” Zeggio said.

  James climbed into the gondola. “San Lazzaro,” he said. “The monastery. This time I’m joining up.”

  It was an inhuman hour of the morning, but Francesca was too desperate to think of that.

  She had second thoughts when she reached Giulietta’s house and saw the large, familiar gondola moored there. However, before she could tell Uliva to set out for home instead, a gentleman stepped into the boat. It promptly pulled away from the water gates.

  Moments later, the gondola passed hers. She made herself give a cheerful wave. The man inside turned a brilliant shade of red but doffed his hat with princely aplomb. The early morning sunlight turned Lurenze’s curls to a pale, sparkling gold.

  Not many minutes thereafter, Francesca was shown in to Giulietta’s boudoir. She sat at a little table by the fire, stirring a spoon round and round her coffee cup. At Francesca’s entrance, her faraway look vanished.

  “Well, I can see you had your fun,” Francesca said as she entered. “His highness was leaving as I arrived.”

  Giulietta shrugged. “I made him buy the cundum. I had to show him how to use it.” She ordered more coffee and bade Francesca sit down and have something to eat.

  Francesca sat down, and promptly burst into tears.

  Giulietta bounced up from her chair and moved to put her arms about her friend. “But what? What is wrong? Did you not want to be with Cordier?”

  Francesca pulled out her damp handkerchief and stared at it. A lot of useless decoration. Why hadn’t she taken Cordier’s when he offered? She could have taken it home with her and kept it as a souvenir.

  The thought made her sob afresh.

  Giulietta stuffed a napkin into her hand. “What?” she said. “What is wrong? You never weep. Are you pregnant?”

  “N-n-no.” Francesca wiped her eyes and nose on the square of linen.

  “You cannot be weeping about the prince,” Giulietta said. “Please tell me this is not so. I thought you wished to go with the other one. You looked—”

  “That’s why you took that sudden temper fit and stormed away?” Francesca said. “What if Cordier had come after you instead?”

  “But why should he? He was not the one who hurt my so-delicate feelings. It is Lurenze who calls me a child and so it is he who must chase me, and when at last I let him catch me, he says he is so very sorry. At first I am haughty and angry but by degrees I let him melt me, and then I say sweet things to him. And then…but you know how it is done.”

  “Not so well as some people, it seems,” Francesca said. “Cordier was positive you wanted Lurenze to pursue you, and decided to help. Well, you and Cordier are mighty considerate of each other.”

  Giulietta returned to her chair. “But you know I want Lurenze,” she said. “And I know you do not care about him. You want Cordier.”

  “But he’s a nobody!”

  “Why is it wrong to take a nobody for a lover once in a while?” Giulietta said. “Especially this one. He is not the waiter in the café or the handsome fisherman or flower seller. He is the son of an English nobleman. His mother comes from an old and very great Italian family. Everyone knows them.”

  “But in England Cordier is merely a younger son,” Francesca said. “Younger sons never have any money to speak of—not real money. He can’t afford to buy me treasures that will make Elphick gnash his teeth.”

  The coffee arrived then.

  After the servant had gone and after she’d made Francesca eat half a breakfast pastry and drink some coffee, Giulietta said, “I understand the vendetta. In your place, I would have killed the brute of a husband. Or better, I would arrange for others to take him to a place where he is made to die slowly and in terrible pain. But your way is more inventive and more fun for you. Now, though, the fun is not there. It is stupid to hurt yourself to hurt a man far away on a cold little island. If you want Cordier, have him—and to the devil with Lord Elphick!”

  Francesca gulped coffee. “I had him,” she said.

  Giulietta’s face lit. She grinned. “Ah, now I see. It was good?”

  “It was in the belfry of the Campanile San Marco,” Francesca said.

  “The belfry,” Giulietta echoed softly. “Ah!”

  Normally, Francesca would describe her experience in minute detail. This time she could not think what to say. She could not find the words to describe what had happened. The magic. The surge of feeling like that made her feel as music could make her feel. But more so.

  She said, “It was very romantic.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “And silly. But romantic.” She told about the bells ringing and the sun coming up.

  “Yes. He makes you laugh,” Giulietta said.

  “He makes me cry, too. He makes me…” Francesca hesitated. But she always told Giulietta everything. “When I’m with him, I remember who I used to be,” she went on. “Everything comes back.” Over her heart, she made a churning motion with her hand. “Feelings. Too many. I don’t know what to do. I cry. I’m angry. I’m sick, heartsick. I want to put my head on his chest and—and I want him to put his arms around me and hold me and say he understands…and I want to trust him.” She swallowed. “Is that not mad? I met him only five days ago.”

  “But he saved your life,” said Giulietta. “That is how you met him—when he risked his life to save yours. What could be more stirring of the emotions than this? And what is the better way for a man to earn the trust of a woman? What is the better way for anyone, man or woman, to show what words by themselves cannot prove?”

  “Magny doesn’t trust him,” Francesca said.

  “Magny is very wise,” Giulietta said. “But he is not all-knowing.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Francesca said. “Yet I can’t help feeling he sees more clearly than I.”

  The servant re-entered. One of Signora Bonnard’s servants was here, he said. He was sorry to interrupt the ladies, but the matter was most important.

  James had calmed down enough to realize he needed a bath and a change of clothes and breakfast, all of which meant returning to the Ca’ Munetti. He needed sleep, too, but he could do that in the gondola on the way to San Lazzaro.

  He was finishing breakfast when Sedgewick came in, frowning.

  “Sir,” he said, “something’s happened across the way.”

  “Nuns?” Francesca said incredulously. “Are you sure?” She stood in the Putti Inferno, looking about her.

  This time she didn’t need Magny to point out the signs. This lot had tried to be careful, too, but they weren’t as good at it as the ones who’d come to Mira.

  Her servants had noticed odds and ends out of order. They’d put this together with the fact that all of them had fallen mysteriously ill during the night—a few hours after supping with three nuns.
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  “They come a little while after you go to the theater,” said Arnaldo. “They are from Cyprus, they tell us. They are lost. They have wandered for hours. They have little money. They are hungry.” He lifted his shoulders. “What can I do? Holy sisters. How can I send them away? And so we share with them our supper.”

  A short time later, all those who’d shared in the supper—which was all the servants who lived in—became ill.

  “At one moment, they are taking care of us,” Arnaldo said. “This much I remember. I think, ‘Why are the nuns not sick?’ But then my head is so heavy and I must lie down. I sleep. I wake only a little while ago, and they are gone. Before too long I discover that all of the servants were the same. No one was well enough to watch the house. And soon we see that someone has been searching. Who else but these nuns? We think nothing of value is missing but we are not sure. This is why I send servants to find you. Do you wish for me to send one of the men to tell the governor what has happened?”

  “No!” The last thing Francesca wanted was the Austrian governor poking his nose into this. “Send to the comte de Magny.”

  Arnaldo tried to put James off. “The signora is not receiving visitors.”

  James was not in the most patient or rational frame of mind. What he saw was not a butler doing his duty but an obstacle in his path. What he wanted to do was pick up the obstacle and throw it aside.

  He told himself not to be an idiot. He reminded himself that he’d learned, a long time ago, that there was a time and a place for violence. He knew perfectly well that this was not the time or place. He was angry because he hadn’t been prepared for this possibility: that someone would not only dare but succeed in invading Bonnard’s well-guarded house. That was not Arnaldo’s fault.

  And so, in smooth, idiomatic Italian, James thanked him for his devotion to the lady—and walked past him, into the most feverishly decorated drawing room in all of Italy—and that, James knew, was saying something.

  “Thank God all the putti are still here,” he said. “When I heard something had happened, I thought for sure the children had all flapped their little wings and flown away.”

  She started toward him and for a moment he thought she would throw herself into his arms.

  But she stopped short, got as stiff as a poker, and said, “I am not receiving visitors.”

  “I heard you’ve had a visit from burglars,” he said.

  Her jaw dropped.

  “Word travels quickly across a canal,” he said. “My gondolier had it from one of the market boats who had it from your cook.”

  He looked about him. “Not amateurs, clearly,” he said. But of course they weren’t. Amateurs would never have made it past the porters. “What made you suspect?”

  “It was the servants who were suspicious,” she said. “I arrived only a short time ago. Not that it’s any of your affair.”

  Arnaldo, who’d followed James into the room, said, “We see that some objects and some furniture are not in the proper place, signore.”

  She threw up her hands. “Does everyone cater to you?”

  “It’s my charm,” James said. “Irresistible.”

  She turned away and threw herself into a chair. She waved at Arnaldo. “Go ahead, then. Tell him.”

  In rapid Venetian—which James could barely follow—and in considerable detail, Arnaldo told him.

  “Nuns?” James said. A cold knot formed in his solar plexus. “From Cyprus?”

  He knew that Venice had once been the center of a vast trading empire. People came from every corner of the globe, even in these unhappy days. The Armenians had their own church. So did the Greeks. The Jews had several synagogues.

  Nuns from Cyprus would be nothing out of the ordinary.

  The trouble was, he was aware that so-called nuns from Cyprus had been responsible for several spectacular thefts in southern Italy in the last year. It was one of these thefts that had brought James to Rome, and his encounter with Marta Fazi—the ringleader…who was mad for emeralds. If she hadn’t been mad and thus indiscreet, flaunting them in very public, if low, places, they might have gone missing forever.

  But Marta was supposed to be in prison. Her gang had been broken up. Was this the work of an imitator? A coincidence?

  Arnaldo must have finally noticed the baffled expression his listeners wore, because he reverted to Italian when he answered, “Everyone knows this accent. In Venice we hear it almost every day.”

  James recalled the trace of foreign accent in Marta Fazi’s speech. She’d been born in Cyprus.

  Anyone could claim to be from Cyprus. But the accent was distinctive, to Arnaldo at least.

  The chances of this being a coincidence or the work of imitators were shrinking by the moment.

  Someone could have got Marta out. She’d been imprisoned in Rome, and the Papal States were notoriously corrupt. Powerful friends with money could have arranged her release.

  All while James’s mind was scrambling through details and arranging them and making its way to the logical conclusion, he maintained his calm, casual pose.

  “Your jewelry?” he said to Bonnard. “Gone, I daresay?”

  She blinked at him. “My jewelry?”

  “That’s what Piero said they were after the last time,” he reminded her. He’d doubted the story then, both logic and instincts telling him there was more to it than Piero told. Now a pattern was emerging. It wasn’t pretty. “Your jewelry’s become famous among the thief community, it seems.”

  She bolted up from the chair and hurried from the room.

  James followed her.

  Francesca’s private quarters were not so neatly searched as the other rooms. She felt chilled as she took it in: The mattresses hung partly on, partly off the bed. The bric-a-brac of her dressing table was tumbled about, and some of it had fallen to the floor beneath.

  This was nothing like what had happened at Mira. Then the intruders had left very little trace of their doings.

  This was…disturbing.

  Thérèse stood on the threshold of the dressing room. She was weeping.

  Francesca had never before seen her maid shed tears. It had not occurred to her that the haughty, self-sufficient lady’s maid was capable of weeping.

  “Thérèse?” Francesca said, and went to the maid and put her arms about her shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, madame.” The maid turned and pressed her forehead against Francesca’s upper arm and sobbed.

  “It’s all right,” Francesca said. “Everyone was sick but no one was hurt.”

  Thérèse lifted her head, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and said in rapid, angry French, “It is despicable. Filthy brutes. To dare to touch your beautiful gowns, your jewels—”

  “Gone?” came a masculine voice from behind them.

  For a moment, shocked at seeing Thérèse in tears, Francesca had forgotten Cordier was there.

  Tearful or not, Thérèse ignored him, as she always ignored the men in Francesca’s life. “They throw everything everywhere,” she said. “They empty your jewel box on the floor.” She nodded at the dressing room’s interior.

  Everything was on the floor. Including her jewelry.

  “That’s interesting,” Cordier said. His voice came from much nearer behind her. He was looking over the maid’s head into the dressing room. “They didn’t take the jewelry. What on earth could they have wanted, then? Those memoirs you mentioned? Had you started writing them already?”

  This had nothing to do with the memoirs Francesca doubted she’d ever write. It had nothing to do with simple robbery, either. Ordinary robbers did not throw expensive jewelry on the floor and leave it there. They—whoever they were—were after something far more valuable: the letters.

  Francesca shook her head. She spoke lightly while her heart beat too hard. “Perhaps someone simply dislikes me. Perhaps it’s a prank.”

  “An elaborate prank,” he said. “Dressing up like nuns and poisoning your ser
vants.”

  “It’s very strange they didn’t take the jewelry,” she said. “Perhaps they truly were nuns. Who else could exercise so much restraint, and leave my pearls and sapphires behind?”

  There they were, glinting up at her from among heaps of dresses, petticoats, corsets, chemises, gloves, and stockings.

  Like a taunt. She’d taunted Elphick with reports of her jewels, her conquests. He’d taunted her, too, with his achievements, his conquests. A game, not very mature, perhaps.

  Now it had turned ugly.

  “Perhaps the nuns did this as a warning to me to mend the error of my ways,” she said. “Or to tell me that all is vanity or some such sanctimonious rubbish.”

  “Your letters,” the maid said, moving into the dressing room. “The box where you keep them is there, on the floor, madame, but I see no letters, no papers of any kind.”

  It was impossible, James told himself. Had she kept Elphick’s incriminating letters in so obvious a place, Quentin’s men would have found them when they searched her various residences.

  They had searched the obvious places and the not-obvious places. Agents had obtained access to all the banks with which she did business. In the vaults they’d found jewelry—saved against the rainy day that often came to harlots as age took its toll—and her will and various financial and legal papers, but not the letters.

  If it had been as simple as opening a portable writing desk or looking for secret pockets in her clothing or the bed curtains or hidden compartments in the furniture and such, they would not have needed James Cordier.

  Yet he heard her sharp intake of breath and was aware of how she struggled to maintain her composure. She knew she was in trouble. The trick would be getting her to admit it.

  “This grows more absurd by the minute,” she said. “It’s impossible to try to determine what’s gone and why in this chaos. Summon some maids to help you restore order here, Thérèse. Then you can make a list of what, if anything, is missing. Whatever these naughty nuns were up to, I shall be much amazed if they left without taking a single piece of jewelry.”