"No, no, madonna. I beg your pardon. I'm taking you straight home." Don't, she thought, but held it secret. She caught her breath. "Tomorrow," she said. "Tomorrow I'll come out again."
He held her hand. He kissed it. "You have caught my heart, madonna."
"Tomorrow," was all she could say.
Nonna was, of course, cross with her, slipping in late. But by next noon Nonna took her nap, and she met her harlequin on the water-stairs. They went to watch the day's bull-chase, and to have crustata in the piazza, and to watch a puppet show, before the clouds darkened, and the whole afternoon became thunderous and lightning-shot. There were frightening rumors abroad, as there always were, in dark storms.
"The gates will hold," her harlequin assured her, as they sheltered in the gondola, rain beating on the canopy, and the gondolier quite drenched. "I saw them this morning."
"Are you a merchant, then?" The port was out there, and the ships. He ignored her question. "Pietro," he said to the gondolier, "The Ca d'Oro, if you please." Without a word the gondolier swung their bow over, and they tended toward the Grand.
"Why there?" Giacinta asked, grown anxious. It was a famous place, but shut, long shut, since the last owner gave it up, so the story was, two centuries ago.
"Why not there?" her harlequin said lightly. "Do you trust me?"
"Yes," she said, only a little lie, and the gondolier delivered them to the water-stairs of the Ca d'Oro, that ancient palace. The door there was bound with corroded brass, and eaten with moss and rot at its bottom, where the water lapped up against the wood. It looked entirely forbidding, desolate.
Thunder cracked as her harlequin skipped out onto the steps, and proved to have a large and ornate key. He opened the ancient water-stairs door, and held out a hand to her. Rain was falling by now. The gondolier had made fast to the ringbolt there, and pulled the storm-cover across the well. She was doubtful and afraid, but her harlequin had never been other than courteous and protective of her. It made sense to go somewhere out of the rain, and she gave him her hand, and carefully negotiated the water-stairs, up, through the mossy doors and into a stucco hall with an immediate upward stairs.
An aged candlestick sat dusty, in a nook. Her harlequin found a match somewhere about his person and lit the candle, which sent a wind-fluttered light up to a barrel vault above their heads, and to ancient ormolu on faded azure walls in the hall above. Cobwebs were much in evidence.
"I shall show you the ballroom," he said. "Few have seen this sight, this century." He ascended the stairs, holding his light carefully, so that she could see her way, and led her up to a chamber so vast their light did little but spark off an array of mirrors.
"Stand still," he said, and went the circuit of the hall, touching light to candles, indeed, many of them new candles.
Light glittered about them, reflecting their images in a hundred mirrors, across a well-swept and polished floor. At the side of the room stood a table, and on that table a sweating pitcher, and blown-glass goblets, and a platter of crusted bread and cheese and meat, with two chairs.
"Supper," he said. "I had it laid, and the floor swept, in hopes you would join me here." She feared he meant her to become his lover, and the whole tale wanted to burst from her lips, how she was to marry di Verona, how important it was to Nonna, how she had only just escaped for a last holiday, a last breath of freedom. But it did not rush out. She said nothing. She looked around her, stunned to silence.
"And now you are here," he said, and drew back a chair for her. "Do sit. Please." She sat, stiff and fearful. By degrees, by a cup of wine, a morsel of bread and cheese and sweet pastry, she accepted his strange hospitality while the storm raged and thundered. She was alone, and shut behind walls, and wished she were home.
But he asked no more than to kiss her hand, when all was done, and to hold it in his, and to say he hoped she would have no fear of him, or of this place.
"I know who you are," he said. "And I know di Verona has asked you to his ball. May I ask you to mine?"
"Who are you?" she asked, that brutal, all-ending question of her dream.
"Hush," he said, and stopped her lips with a touch of his finger. "Hush. In carnevale, deceptions are allowed, between lovers. The mask is the moment. Never question."
"I can't be your lover," she protested. "Let me go."
"I would never hold you against your will," he said, and pressed something into her hand. It was his key. "Come here, come here for safety, any time you need it. Come here tomorrow, and trust no harm will come to you, ever in this world, while I can protect you." He tipped her face up, and kissed her a second time and lingeringly on the lips, and this time she felt nothing but safety in his arms—safety of a sort she had never felt in anyone.
But he would not pursue his advantage.
"If you come tomorrow," he said, "if you come here tomorrow, I shall tell you I love you, madonna. But I would never take advantage of your trust."
"I will come back," she promised him.
"Will you dance?" he asked, and she looked about, wondering if he had hid musicians, too. But there was no music. The rest was a dream, dancing in silence in a glittering hall all their own, and looking down from the fretted windows, afterward, onto the lights on the Grand Canal. She would have gone to bed with him, she knew she would have, if he had asked, but after they had drunk, and danced, and stood there, arms about each other, he pressed her hand and said he should get her home, straightway, or he might, after all, break his word. She remembered her promise to Nonna, the invitation to di Verona's ball, only when he had, in a moderate rain, set her safely on her own water-stairs, and she was halfway up the steps inside. She turned back, she opened the water-stairs door onto the dark rush of rain, the lapping water, to tell him, to change their rendezvous. But he was gone, the curtained gondola disappearing into the dark down the Raceta.
She could not tell him she had made a terrible mistake.
She could not tell Nonna, or fail her attendance at di Verona's ball. Nonna had asked nothing but this of her, after sheltering her all her life. And she had never failed a promise to her Nonna, never since she was in pigtails.
What can I do? she asked herself. What else can I do but what nonna wants? He says he will tell me he loves me. We would become lovers. But where is a choice for me?
At noon the following day, Nonna took no nap. Nonna sat all afternoon and supervised her hair, her dressing in her finery, with new petticoats, and with a great deal of fuss among the servants to clean splashes of mud from the violet silk. But it was good, thick fabric. It had dried spotless, and the black lace and the white petticoats were fresh-pressed and crisp. The plumes were renewed, her hair coiffed to perfection around the festival bonnet.
"No more foolishness this evening," Nonna said sternly. "You have had your days of folly. Now attend to a woman's duty, and please this man. It is essential. It is life to us."
"Yes, Nonna," she said, hiding all bitterness. There was no slipping away, no explanation. And the storm that had broken yesterday still rumbled and flashed in her windows, the heavens as roiled as her heart.
It was still raining, and the canals were running high, when she went to the stairs to wait. There would be a gondola, Nonna said, and Nonna set the servants to watch down by the front door, while she waited and took a cup of tea standing, so as not to crush the newly-freshened gown.
"It is here," the servants reported, in awe, running up from below. "With gold curtains, and servants, and umbrellas against the rain."
She wished the gondola and its finery might sink to the bottom of the Priuli. But she went down, and boarded it, and sat miserably inside as it took its gliding way toward the Acqua Dolce. Onward then. Lightning flashed through the curtains and thunder crashed. She wished a sudden bolt from the heavens might strike the gondola, a death unexpected, and she might never have to attend this wretched ball.