“What becomes of the humans?” Bezio asked cynically. “They slaughter each other all the time, yet they stumble on, year after year—”
“But don’t you want to do more than stumble?” Mircea turned to him abruptly, enough to make the old terra-cotta tiles underneath them shift dangerously. “To be more than what we were?”
“Careful, son,” Bezio said. “Or we’ll finish our drink in the drink.”
“I don’t want to be careful!” Mircea said passionately. “I’m tired of being careful! Of hiding in the dark, of waiting . . . for what? To continue in death the same patterns I knew in life? To see centuries come and go and the same stupidity repeat itself?”
“As opposed to?”
“Something new, something better! We have all eternity, and this is what we do with it? Refine our cruelty?”
“Seems to be a popular choice,” Bezio said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
Mircea didn’t smile back. “We should be better,” he insisted. “We could be better.”
“Not with that creature on the throne,” Bezio said, suddenly serious. And so softly that Mircea could barely hear him. Even right beside him, even with vampire hearing.
Because Bezio wasn’t stupid. And he was afraid. So was Mircea, and he was sick to death of it.
He just didn’t know what to do about it.
Chapter Nineteen
Business was still slow the next night, although that turned out to be a good thing. Mircea laid his head back against the doubled towels behind him, letting his body relax into water hot enough to have scalded a human. To him, it just felt good, the steam rising all around him and wafting into the cold night air, making patterns as it twisted and turned and eventually dissipated among the stars, far above.
He could see them because he wasn’t bathing in the kitchen. The cook/housekeeper had decided to use the slowdown as an opportunity to give everything a good scrubbing—and that had included the new arrivals. They had been banished to the sugar house, where large tubs had been set up in the overgrown main hall, with orders to get clean.
This part of the house was largely roofless, thanks to being gutted by the fire, although a few blackened pieces of flooring still jutted out here and there. But mostly, it was open up four stories, where large gaps in the roof allowed the stars to shine through. It was a calm, beautiful, idyllic scene.
Or it would have been.
If not for one small irritation.
“What about this one?” Jerome switched out the contraption on his head for another, equally as extravagant.
Mircea closed his eyes and sighed. He’d run out of things to say three, or was it four, options ago. Unlike Bezio, apparently, who had just come in with two more pitchers of steaming water.
“I think it looks ridiculous,” Bezio told him, setting one of the pitchers down on the overgrown ground.
“I don’t recall asking the water boy,” Jerome said.
“Oh, is that so?” Bezio removed the hat to dump the contents of a pitcher over Jerome’s blond frizz.
Jerome went under, the shock causing him to lose his footing and his head to disappear under the waterline. He came up sputtering, and mad as hell. “Now look! I have soap all in my hair!”
“Easily remedied,” Bezio told him, and poured on the other pitcher.
Jerome had a good deal to say about that, but Bezio wasn’t listening. He’d finished his voluntary service for the night, and stripped down, scrubbing himself all over before settling into his own tub with a deep sigh of heated bliss. Jerome eventually tapered off and resumed perusing a somewhat stupendous hat collection, which he had dragged out of the main house and put on a table beside his tub.
Mircea had no idea why.
He decided he didn’t care and settled in for an enjoyable soak.
Despite Jerome’s initial fears, the usual method of bathing at the house was of the sponge variety, done over the basins in their rooms with one of the “scented waters”—liquid soaps gentler than those used for laundry—that were popular in Venice. But once a week a full bath was required—and very much appreciated, in Mircea’s case.
He never ceased to be amazed at the ingenuity of the Venetians, who had settled on salt marsh flats with no source of drinking water, the kind of place that would have been lucky to support a fishing village. And yet they had built an empire. Although they never would have done it if some genius five hundred years ago hadn’t come up with a way to use the town squares for rainwater collection.
The rain drained through channels in the slightly sloping stones of the thousands of courtyards spread throughout the city. And from there into central marble grills, below which was a thick layer of fine white sand. The sand cleaned the water as it slowly filtered through, and directed it into a well. Like the one that had been built in the courtyard of his new palazzo by the sugar magnate.
It gave Martina’s house all the clean water they could use, and all the baths that anyone wished to take.
Not that everyone seemed to appreciate the luxury.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Bezio asked sleepily, only a few moments later.
Mircea cracked an eye to see Jerome trying to climb out of his tub.
“I’ve had enough. I’m turning into a prune!” Jerome told him.
“I just finished bringing out the hot water.”
“I bathed in cold.”
“Liar. You were busy trotting out all those things,” Bezio waved at the colorful array of headgear. “Although why you were, I have no idea.”
“It’s my new hair,” Jerome said, stopping to grab one of the pitchers of cold water the servants had left by each tub, and made a face. “I can’t wear half my hats now.”
“And that matters because?”
“Because of those tiny rooms they gave us,” Jerome said, busily rinsing off. “Paulo said I can’t buy anymore hats until I clear out some of the old ones. So I have to decide which ones to keep.”
“I can help you with that. None of them.”
“You wouldn’t know fashion if it bit you on the ass,” Jerome said, frowning at him from under dripping bangs.
“I know you couldn’t pay me to wear that,” Bezio said, nodding at one of the more bizarre specimens, near the table’s edge.
It was round and brown and made of felt. Fairly standard except for a much wider brim than was usual in Venice. But it redeemed itself with a deep fringe around the edge in a bright, screaming yellow, which shimmied whenever the wearer moved.
“I bought it off a sailor—” Jerome announced proudly.
“Who saw you coming.”
“—who said they’re all the rage in Portugal.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Heads turn when I wear this hat!”
“Yes. In horror.”
“Shows what you know.” Jerome scrubbed his wiry mane with a towel. “I saw another man with one in the Rialto the other night.”
“So the sailor duped two of you, did he?”
Jerome made a face and looked at Mircea. “What do you think?”
“I—” Mircea stopped, searching for something that was neither an insult nor a lie, while Bezio smirked at him. “I would keep it over that one,” he finally said, nodding at easily the worst offender on the table.
But Jerome frowned. “Really?”
He picked up a hat with no brim but with a greatly exaggerated crown. It was called a sugarloaf, after the shape of the cones of sugar Europe imported from the east, and had to be almost two feet tall. It would have looked ridiculous even in black.
But of course, it wasn’t.
“My eyes,” Bezio said, only half jokingly, and disappeared under the water.
Coward, Mircea thought, as Jerome turned to look at him. “You don’t like it?”