I ran forward. “Madonna Grazia Sanudo!”
The girl screamed. The man dropped his bag, flashed out his rapier, and slashed at me like a madman. Rapiers are not intended for slashing, but he was aiming at my face. I parried with my arm, then drew. Despite being forewarned, I barely had time to go to guard before I was fighting for my life. He was fast and had a significant advantage in reach, but his technique was erratic and reckless. He had either never taken lessons or, if he had, had forgotten them all in the horror of being in a real fight. Captain Colleoni would have blistered him with derision.
“Stop it, you fool!” I said, more or less. I parried, parried, and parried, not riposting. “There are people watching!”
Then I recognized him, yelled, “Saints! Danese? ” and narrowly escaped taking three feet of metal in my right eye. That did it. “Idiot!” I grabbed his rapier with my left hand and slammed mine down across his wrist. I used the false edge, but a steel rod can hurt without cutting.
He yelled and let go of his sword; his gondolier friend tried to smash my head in with his oar. Fortunately Bruno had seen the threat coming and arrived in the fight like a middling-sized earthquake. He snatched up the gondolier, oar and all, and without breaking stride bore him to the edge and threw him well out into the canal.
Grazia Sanudo screamed in fury and sprang at me, clawing for my eyes. I was forced to drop Danese’s sword and grab her by the neck with my left hand to hold her off.
I shouted over her yells, “I intend no harm to Danese! Your father told me to tell you that he loves you and wants you to be happy.”
She froze, glaring up at me with two of the largest, darkest eyes I had ever seen. They startled me. A man could drown in those eyes, had they not been so filled with rage and hatred. “You swear that?”
“I swear by all the saints. Danese has known me all his life, haven’t you, old friend?”
Our ogreish abductor was clutching his right arm and trying to curl up without falling over. I released his wretched prisoner, who rushed to wrap herself around him with many cries of, “My darling, my lover, are you all right, my heart, my…whatever…” And so on.
Sickening.
“He broke my wrist!”
“You damned nearly killed me!” I retorted. I sheathed my sword and retrieved his. Seeing that the fight was safely over, men were running in from both ends of the riva and also emerging from the calle. “Danese, old friend!” I detached the girl so I could embrace him myself. That, being a proper greeting in Venice, would hopefully discourage the busybodies starting to wander in around us.
I told his ear, “Let’s get out of here before someone calls the sbirri. We can talk it over somewhere quieter.” Releasing him, I said loudly, “I regret I frightened you, madonna. Your parents are very worried about you. I do have your father’s written permission to take you home.”
“I don’t want to go home!” Her voice was larger than she was. “My father has no authority over me now. This man is my husband!”
“Yes,” I sighed. “I know. Do you want to argue that to a magistrate? Now let’s go before the sbirri get here.” Taking him along was not part of the plan and would complicate matters considerably, but I knew him and had hurt him. Call me a softie, but I could not just abandon him.
Venetians are good Venetians first and good Catholics next, but most priests will marry a couple who threaten to embrace adultery-or embrace adulterously-no matter what the law says about parental permission. My tarot had told me what was brewing.
Giorgio had already brought the Maestro’s gondola across and I urged everybody aboard. Danese was in too much pain to argue and the girl clung to him like tree bark. Their would-be gondolier had emerged from his bath. Had I thought that he was just a gondolier, I might have tipped him a lira for his trouble, but he had tried to brain me and I need all the brains the good Lord gave me. The fight had gone out of him; he did not try to block our departure.
A grinning bystander handed me the portmanteau Danese had dropped. I thanked him politely.
The girl went in the felze, of course, but when her evil kidnapper tried to follow her I told him to sit on the thwart and trail his hand in the water to keep it from swelling.
“You think you’re a doctor?” he snarled.
“Not quite, but that’s the best way to ease the pain and stop it swelling.” I clambered in beside Grazia, being careful to leave visible space between us. A grinning Bruno settled in behind the felze , raising our prow significantly, and of course Giorgio stood at the stern, wielding his oar.
I told him, “Ca’ Barbolano please.” The original plan had been straight to the Ca’ Sanudo. He turned our stern to the Rialto and headed home.
Grazia was small, as I said, and seemed little older than she had in the family portrait. Her nose…Either Maestro Michelli had flattered his subject, or her nose had grown more than the rest of her since he painted her likeness. Truly she had her uncle Nicolo’s nose and on a woman it was a disfigurement. Her body might just qualify for “sylphlike” instead of “skinny” but her complexion was unremarkable and there was an unwelcome trace of hardness about her mouth. Her dress looked childish and somewhat crumpled. But oh, her eyes! They almost atoned for everything else. Without her excess of nose they would have made her a beauty.
Danese I have already described. Normally he always seemed a little too conscious of his good looks, but just then he was more like a lemon, pale and bitter.
“Damn you, Alfeo Zeno!” he whimpered. “Why are you meddling in my life? And how did you find us?”
The first answer was, “One thousand ducats,” and better not said.
“You have heard of the celebrated Maestro Nostradamus? Grazia’s parents hired him to find her. I am his apprentice. I will take you to his home so he can treat your hand. And maybe we can talk this out. You do have a piece of paper with a priest’s signature on it?”
“Of course we do!” the girl shouted at me, although we were side by side. “What sort of a woman do you think I am?”
Young and incredibly gullible to fall for a fast-talking snake like Danese Dolfin, despite his luminous sapphire eyes and subterranean voice. “But you did not have your father’s permission to marry, so you are married only in the eyes of the church, not under the laws of Venice.”
Danese said, “But we are married.” His sneer implied that he had made sure the Church would allow no annulment.
“Do you have the Great Council’s approval?”
He went back to sulking without answering my question. His name would be struck from the Golden Book, but that would be the least of his worries if Zuanbattista Sanudo chose to lay charges. Then he would face exile, or three years in the galleys, or worse. The galleys are a slow death sentence, each year counted equal to two years in jail. Grazia would still be married and likely doomed to end her days in a convent.
Grazia sobbed at my side, her hands covering her face. She was hoping, no doubt that a lovable, romantic young man like me could never resist such an appeal, but she was miscalculating. I felt no impulse to clasp her in my arms and beg forgiveness. She was too young to light my touch-paper, and her fake tears merely made her seem more childish.
“Madonna,” I said, “now that you are married, will not your family accept your husband and forgive? Your father did tell me that he loves you.”