City of Masks

  As they sat in the Oncology waiting-room, he tried to take his mind off the appointment by thinking about what had happened in Bellezza last night. At first, Arianna had been furious with the Duchessa. ‘You can’t just boss me around the way you do everyone else!’ she had fumed. ‘You’re no longer the Duchessa so I don’t have to obey you. And don’t think it makes any difference that you are my blood mother. You abandoned me. My real mother is the one who brought me up. And she wouldn’t dream of announcing decisions for me without even asking me my opinion first!’

  Everyone but Silvia had been embarrassed by this outburst. The Duchessa had just let it run its course, until Arianna collapsed sobbing and exhausted in Valeria’s lap. The two women’s eyes met over the tousled brown curls.

  ‘What would you have then, Arianna?’ the Duchessa had said, very mildly for her, Lucien thought. ‘Bellezza must have its ruler. And it must stay independent of Remora. You agree, don’t you?’

  The curly head nodded in Valeria’s lap.

  ‘Then who is it to be? I have not been grooming anyone to follow me. It is only recently that I have thought of stepping down. And then these assassination attempts convinced me that I could do more good behind the scenes. You will have to have a Regent – you are too young to rule on your own. But Rodolfo could do that. And I shall be only a few miles away in Padavia, willing to help you whenever you need me. I have only ever wanted what was best for you, Arianna, that was why I had you raised in secret. You would have made the perfect hostage to get me to sign the di Chimici treaty, or anything else they wanted. There will be several people in Bellezza who know the real situation. The people in this room and your grandparents. You will not have to do this alone.’

  Lucien remembered these last words as his name was called. He flashed a glance of gratitude at his parents. ‘I’m glad you’re both here,’ he whispered, as they went into the consulting room together.

  Enrico was completely unprepared for the visit from Giuliana’s father. Vittorio Massi was a big, broad-shouldered man and he was in a bad mood. He forced his way into Enrico’s lodgings, demanding, ‘Where is she?’ He followed this up with various incomprehensible threats, involving horsewhipping and calling his daughter ‘trollop’ and other even less complimentary names.

  Enrico was astonished. ‘Do you mean Giuliana?’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her for days. Not since before the Duchessa died, goddess rest her.’

  Vittorio automatically crossed himself and made the hand of fortune to be on the safe side, but he was not placated. ‘Nor have we,’ he said. ‘She told us that morning she was off to Burlesca for another of her wedding fittings, but the dressmaker has sent to say that she missed her appointment and to ask if she was unwell. So I guessed she had come here to you. Although shame on my family name that she should do such a brazen thing and the wedding only ten days away!’

  He raged around the room, but it was clear as day that there was no young woman in it and nowhere to hide one. Enrico felt a gnawing fear. Suppose she had run off with the silver?

  ‘Has she taken any of her things?’ he asked.

  ‘Come and see for yourself,’ said Vittorio. ‘As far as I can tell, everything is where it should be.’

  Vittorio, who had never liked his future son-in-law, was beginning to understand that he really did not know where Giuliana was. He felt mollified. And then began to be even more worried. If his daughter was not with her fiancé, then where in the lagoon was she?

  *

  The clearing up at the Palazzo lasted long after the funeral. The Glass Room was totally wrecked, of course, but all the pieces had to be sifted through, first for the grisly business of identifying the Duchessa’s remains, then to look for clues to the assassination, finally to see if there were any pieces of the costly glass that could be saved, repaired or preserved. Only after that could the unwanted débris be carted away.

  And there was extensive damage to the rooms around the audience chamber too. The Duchessa’s own private chamber, the Council room, the map room with the two great globes, one of the earth and one of the heavens – all would need repair and redecoration. But no decisions could be taken until a new Duchessa was appointed.

  Meanwhile, no one took any notice of Susanna, as she quietly packed and removed her mistress’s personal possessions. People just assumed she was following orders to take bequests to the Duchessa’s heirs, whoever they might be. Caskets of jewellery and silver, fine undergarments and nightwear, books and papers and a precious portrait by Michele Gamberi, but none of the fine dresses and masks that would have given Silvia away in her new life.

  Mr Laski, the consultant, had Lucien’s bulging file on the desk in front of him. He spent a few moments refreshing his memory about its contents, once he had greeted them. Lucien could tell that those moments seemed an age to his parents, but he felt quite detached about it. Mr Laski didn’t have his fate in his hands; that was already decided. He was only the messenger.

  ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid,’ said the consultant. ‘The MRI scan shows the tumour is growing back.’

  Lucien felt his blood go cold and noticed with detachment that that was what really did happen; it wasn’t a figure of speech. He heard his mother gasp.

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’ asked Dad. ‘Can you get rid of it again?’

  ‘The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ said Mr Laski. ‘Patients always want to know the answer to that and I simply can’t give it. We shall resume treatment, of course, and we hope to gain further remission from the disease, but I have to warn you that this recurrence is a bad sign.’

  There was silence in the room while everyone tried to take this in. Lucien thought wearily about more chemotherapy, more exhaustion, losing his fine fuzz of hair again. He wished he could use a body double like the Duchessa. But this was London, not Bellezza, and he knew he had to face up to the treatment himself.

  ‘Is there anything else you’d like to ask?’ said Mr Laski, gently. Sometimes he hated his job.

  ‘There have been a couple of times lately when I haven’t been able to wake Lucien up when I’ve called him in the morning,’ said Mum, talking fast to conceal her anxiety about the diagnosis. ‘I don’t just mean he was sleeping deeply. The first time it was only a few minutes. But the second it was nearly half an hour and I had to call our GP. Then he just woke up as usual.’

  ‘Oh, Mum!’ said Lucien. ‘What does that matter now?’ But Mr Laski was very interested and asked lots more questions and looked into Lucien’s eyes with a little torch.

  ‘I can’t explain it,’ he said at last, ‘but I’d like you to keep an eye on it and bring him in if it happens again. You can call my secretary for a quick appointment. I’d like to examine him on the day that something like that happens. Meanwhile, I’ll make the arrangements for Lucien to start chemo again as soon as possible.’

  There seemed nothing else to say, so they shook hands and left.

  Arianna’s head was in a whirl. In a few days she had gone from being a simple island girl, in danger of execution, to the potential next Duchessa. When the Duchessa had first told her about her birth, her emotions had been a mixture of disbelief, resentment and excitement. Now she was contemplating ruling the city she loved and she just couldn’t imagine what it would be like.

  About the Duchessa, she still felt the same. She simply could not think of her as her mother. That role would always be Valeria’s, the lovely, squashy warm presence, smelling of baking bread and herbs, who had been with her all her life. The Duchessa was a ruthless, selfish, stubborn, bossy woman, who couldn’t be bothered to raise her own child.

  But as the days went by, Arianna began to feel that perhaps she did have something in common with her blood mother after all. Although the thought of becoming Duchessa a bit short of her sixteenth birthday terrified her and the prospect of Rodolfo advising her was s
carcely more comforting, she was beginning to be attracted by the sheer glamour of it.

  Something similar had happened when she first discovered the secret of her birth: an initial revulsion followed by a fascination with the idea of a life so different from the one she had thought mapped out for her. It seemed a very long time since her highest ambition had been to train as a mandolier.

  In the end, before making her decision, she asked to go back to Torrone and spend some time with what she still thought of as her proper family. She would listen to their advice and be guided by it.

  ‘Let her go,’ said the Duchessa, when Leonora told her of Arianna’s wishes. ‘She’s my daughter – she’ll be back.’

  *

  Bellezza had ten days of mourning before the election of a new Duchessa. Posters had begun appearing in the streets with the name Francesca di Chimici hastily painted on them. Citizens began to talk listlessly of the future. The whole city was gripped by an apathy most uncharacteristic of the people of the lagoon. It was not their way to give in to depression and gloom. But nothing in the city had ever happened that was as bad as the murder of their ruler. Not since the night of the glass mask a hundred years ago had something affected them so severely.

  No one felt any enthusiasm for a di Chimici ruler, who would spell an end to Bellezzan independence, but there seemed to be no alternative candidates. It was part of the seeming immortality of the Duchessa that she had made no arrangements for the succession. Not many people could remember her election, as a young woman of twenty. No one remembered her family name or history.

  She had just been a brilliant politician and orator, gaining a seat on the Council when still in her teens. The previous Duchessa, a childless middle-aged woman called Beatrice, had taken a fancy to the young Bellezzan, who had been born in the city but grown up on Burlesca, and had groomed her to be her successor. It had happened sooner than expected, because of the plague. It was no respecter of persons and had carried off the old Duchessa as one of its very first victims.

  Bellezza had been disorientated then too, and the young Silvia had put her name forward while the city was still at a loss and looking for a strong leader. At that time the di Chimici were still building their power-base in the west of the country, so there was no real competition for the role.

  If there had been any opposition to such an inexperienced politician taking on the rulership, it had been overcome by her beauty and intelligence and her steely devotion to the city, and it had been in any case forgotten a long time ago. For many years now the Duchessa had been regarded as irreplaceable.

  *

  For Lucien, the time after the Duchessa’s funeral was very strange. Arianna was away on Torrone and he had no one to roam the city with in the afternoon. He missed her, but found a melancholy pleasure in wandering through the streets of a Bellezza now quiet with loss. It fitted in well with his mood. He spent a lot of time thinking about his prospects in his own world.

  So far he hadn’t started to feel ill again there but he knew all that would change when he resumed treatment. And somehow he didn’t think he was going to make it this time. He could tell that Mr Laski didn’t think so either. What should he tell his friends in Bellezza? For the moment he was numb and could do nothing but be glad that, at least when he was in the beautiful city, he was without the disease that might kill him.

  He enjoyed the city even more now that he had seen the real Venice. It wasn’t as clean, of course, but it was somehow fresher, the buildings more recent and the whole city more alive and full of hope. Until the catastrophe with the Duchessa of course.

  Lucien thought again how convenient it would be to have a body double for all the difficult things you didn’t want to face. And death was the ultimate of those. It had worked for the Duchessa. He leaned his arms on the stone parapet of one of the little bridges and looked down into the murky water, remembering the conversation with his parents after the diagnosis.

  Dad had been trying to tough it out, saying reassuring things that Lucien was sure he didn’t believe. But Mum, small and feisty, was fuelled by a new anger that Lucien hadn’t seen before.

  ‘We must help him, David,’ she had said, running her hands through her black curls that were so like Lucien’s own had been. ‘Lucien, we need to talk about the possibility that you might not be lucky a second time.’

  ‘I know, Mum,’ he had said as calmly as he could. But they couldn’t do it. Not then. They postponed that talk till another day and Lucien had fled to Bellezza as soon as he could, pleading the need for an early night.

  His morning with Rodolfo had taken on a different flavour. The three Stravaganti spent their time discussing whether Arianna would agree to stand for Duchessa. Silvia was still staying with Leonora, completely safe, concealed in the heart of the city that believed her to be dead.

  Rodolfo was completely distracted. ‘Silvia wants me to announce that Arianna is her child. Then I must offer to act as Regent. It seems that Arianna’s age would be the only obstacle to her election if the people believe the story of her birth.’

  ‘And you don’t want to do it?’ asked Lucien.

  They were all in the roof garden, in the late summer sunshine. Dethridge swung in the hammock, while Lucien and Rodolfo sat on one of the marble benches. Rodolfo now looked seriously at his apprentice.

  ‘It is not something I can talk about easily,’ he said. ‘Particularly to someone as young as yourself. I do not mean to insult you, but there are matters of the heart involved which I hope you will not have to suffer for many years. Silvia did not ask if I would be willing or not to take on this burden; she just assumed I would fall in with her wishes. That has been the pattern of our life together for twenty years, this last year most of all. And she knows that any true Bellezzan would do whatever was called for to serve his city. If it were any other young woman! But to look after another man’s child...’

  He broke off and jumped to his feet, pacing up and down the tiled terrace in the way that Lucien remembered from their first meeting.

  ‘Aye, it is a bitere thinge to have an untrowe wyf,’ said Dethridge. Rodolfo stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Not that the ladye is that,’ added the Elizabethan hastily. ‘But the herte of your sorowe is the same. Ye sholde ask hir what ye wolde knowe.’

  Lucien was surprised. He felt out of his depth with these two men, who were so much older and wiser than him. And he simply did not know how to ask Dethridge if he spoke from his own experience. The Elizabethan had never before referred to the wife he would never see again and he never talked about his children.

  Now he saw that Rodolfo was looking at him. ‘Luciano!’ said his master, coming over and taking his hand in both his. ‘I am greatly at fault. In the midst of my worries, I had forgotten that you had a very important event in your own world. Tell me what happened when you went to the hospital.’

  Lucien had been dreading the question, but there was no point in beating about the bush. ‘It’s bad news,’ he said. ‘I seem to be getting worse.’

  Dethridge got quickly out of the hammock and both men enfolded him in a silent embrace. They had tears in their eyes and Lucien felt a warm rush of affection for them both. It was bad enough fearing that he might have to leave the parents he loved, but now he had to think that he might soon have to say goodbye to Bellezza and all the people in it who had come to matter so much to him.

  *

  Rinaldo di Chimici was living on a knife’s edge. There was no hint that anyone knew of his involvement with the assassination. His young cousin Francesca was in the city and a friar had already performed a marriage ceremony between her and an elderly Bellezzan Councillor, who had gambled and drunk most of his family fortune away. Francesca was now a Bellezzan and eligible to stand as Duchessa.

  The next few days would see the fruition of all his hopes for advancement in the family.
To secure Bellezza for the di Chimici would be a fine jewel in the crown of his ambition. But he was playing for even higher stakes. He must possess what the boy had. And to this end he sent for Enrico again.

  But the spy would not come to the Ambassador’s rooms. They met in the little bar by the old theatre. Di Chimici was shocked to see how much the man had changed. His old swagger had gone and he had a three-day growth of beard.

  ‘What is going on?’ he hissed, as soon as his patron had bought him a large glass of Strega. ‘My fiancée has disappeared – no one knows where she is. And no one knows where her silver is.’

  Di Chimici thought privately that she might have changed her mind about tying herself to such an unprepossessing husband, but he could offer no explanation. He said such soothing things as he could think of, but he had not come to talk about his spy’s love-life.

  ‘I need you to do something else for me,’ he said at last.

  ‘It’ll cost you,’ said Enrico automatically.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Ambassador.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I want you to, er, capture the boy.’

  ‘Do you want me to kill him?’

  Di Chimici shuddered. ‘Not necessarily. Only if he puts up a fight. I want you to take all his possessions and bring them to me. Everything, mind, no matter how unimportant it may seem.’

  Enrico straightened up. The prospect of more silver had shaken him out of his lethargy. And this was an easy job. He was used to following the boy.

  *

  When Arianna returned to Bellezza, she went straight to her aunt’s house and was closeted for some hours with Silvia. Then they sent to Rodolfo’s house and the three Stravaganti joined them in the garden with the fountain.