“Where is Jacopo?” she asked me.
As Delapole squirmed on the floor, he made no complaint, no moan, as if he felt the agony I must have inflicted on him as nothing more than a distant annoyance. “I don’t know. He was supposed to be here, helping you escape. The house seems empty.”
“Dead, dead, dead, oh, good boy, Gobbo…” Delapole laughed at us and then, to my amazement, stood straight upright, shook his bloody arm as if to cure it, and gave us both a gracious bow. “One Jew’s enough on this payroll, girl. D’you think I really wanted to feed him too? Gobbo went to find him, but not to fetch him back. Now, to return to business…”
He strode over and, with his one good arm, reached down and retrieved the knife from the corner where it lay. Then he walked back to us, his bloody shoulder hanging from its socket, and struck feints with the blade through the air.
“Lorenzo…” Rebecca whispered. “It cannot be possible….”
“I saw,” I answered. “Now, run.”
She went away from Delapole, across to the fireplace, and picked up a long poker which lay there. “Not without you,” she answered. “Not without my brother.”
Delapole could not decide which of us to lunge for first. He simply stood there, grinning, as if this were some game.
“You will not go?” he asked. “Good. I like that spirit. I like that….”
I almost fell to him. He dashed to one side and swept the air with that long knife, so viciously and with such speed it seemed impossible I had wounded him at all. Seeing that sharp line of metal cut towards me, I pulled the velvet drape to one side, watched it slice through the fabric like a scalpel through soft flesh, then jabbed the hammer into his face. Delapole staggered back, off balance, and Rebecca was there, dashing him in the head with one long arc of her poker. He clutched his skull and mewled like a wounded cat, then fell to his knees. I would have no more of this.
“Come,” I cried. “This madman’s best left for the city to deal with.”
I had her hand. I stared into her lovely face. In that instant we were closer to each other than we had been for days. She moved. Then the creature on the floor roared, “No!” And I saw, flying through the air, that devilish blade. Rebecca screamed and fell to her knees, clutching her thigh. The knife had bitten deep into her leg. Dark blood welled out from the wound and stained her dress. I grasped the hilt, withdrew it, and pulled up the hem. A red slit had opened just above her knee, a good two inches across, and now was bleeding badly.
I tore a strip from her hem. “Tie this,” I urged. “It will staunch the blood. And now we shall be gone.”
Her eyes did not meet mine. Their point of focus lay behind me, and I knew, without turning, what it was.
“Lorenzo,” the Englishman whispered, and I was a little cheered to hear a wheeze and some hurt inside his voice.
I twisted round to face him. He was a sorry mess, with a bloody arm and a bloody head. Yet he stood nonetheless, as erect and forthright as a soldier on parade, and would, I knew, be at me, weapon or no, in a moment.
I covered Rebecca with my body. “You are a stubborn fellow, Englishman,” I said. “What must I do? Break your legs so you cannot walk? Beat you until you stand no more?”
He bowed his head again and beamed in that familiar way. “Why, you must kill me, boy. Or wait until I do you a similar honour. This day. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year. It matters nothing to me. I have all the time in the world.”
The hammer lay between us on the floor. He shuffled towards it. I could not believe we must fight again.
“You are insane,” I said. “Perhaps they will lock you in the asylum, not send you to the block which you deserve.”
“Deserts. Deserts. Who gets ’em, eh? Not their rightful owners, I think.”
He fell towards the weapon. My foot shot out and pulled it back from his grasp. He squirmed on the floor and looked up at me, still grinning.
“You have a very narrow definition of triumph, Lorenzo,” he said. “As do all Italians.”
I refused to listen to more and gripped Rebecca about the waist. She seemed close to fainting from the pain.
“Lorenzo!” Delapole barked. “Ask who beds her best. Ask whose tongue is more agile and finds the most delicious morsels. Ask who turns above her sweetly and never allows release until she begs. Ask whose child she really bears… ”
She moaned and stared at me with open eyes that could not lie. I turned and gazed at the bloody wretch on the floor.
“Oh, fool,” he spat at me. “Do you think that fiddle carried no price? I placed it in her lap and followed there soon after. Though her breeding and her other talents remained, I must admit, a secret till you revealed them.”
I looked into her eyes, seeking some denial. She said nothing but retreated from my arms.
“Poor Lorenzo,” Delapole sneered. “And now…”
Whatever else he said escaped me. The redness was rising in my head as never before. If this was what Delapole wished, then so be it.
“Now I put an end to this,” I answered, and picked up the hammer.
She watched me begin, then, for reasons I did not at first understand, joined me with the dagger. There, on the second floor of Ca’ Dario, we butchered the man we knew as Oliver Delapole, methodically, with the hammer and the knife, as carefully as he must have slaughtered those women who were unfortunate to cross him in the past. We battered and we stabbed, to a constant, beating rhythm that filled the air with blood and the stench of meat, until all the spirit of this fiend was gone from the face of the earth. I knew at that moment that I should never again close my eyes and see an empty blackness. In this place there would forever be this deep, red stain and the plashy sound of metal upon flesh.
He laughed at us between the blows. This was a transformation for us all, and he had wrought it. Towards the last, when the blood was welling in his throat so much he was close to losing the power of speech, he muttered something. It was only after, when we had swiftly changed our gore-stained clothes and planned to stumble out of that charnel house, that I believed I remembered the quotation, though by then my brain was so fevered that I might have imagined it instead. The words were from the English poet Milton, in Paradise Lost.
Only part of Oliver Delapole died in Ca’ Dario that evening. The rest now lay inside us, like an infection that had darted into our blood, inseminating it with his devilish seed. By making us his murderers, he became our conqueror. Rebecca joined me in his slaughter that we might share the shame.
This much became apparent in that room by the Grand Canal as the long Venetian day made way for night. Deranged, in despair, I fell towards the great window overlooking the water, as if some kind of redemption lay beyond the glass. There was the strangest sight of all. Not the Venice I knew and now hated, familiar, heartless, and cold as the grave. Another view greeted my eyes, so outlandish I knew myself to be mad. Gone were the gondolas with their lamps, like fireflies on the water. In their place was a multitude of vessels, huge craft that lumbered across the channel, carrying scores of curiously dressed individuals on their backs. Around them were middling boats, bigger than gondolas and twice as fast, all scurrying across the surface with not an oarsman in sight.
The skyline of the city stood out against an aura of queer light, burning yellow yet too bright to be even the fiercest of torches. Outlandish structures, like the skeletons of great beasts, loomed over the western end of San Marco as if about to devour the buildings beneath their giant jaws. This was another world beyond the leaded panes of Ca’ Dario, one that was both familiar and untouchable….