Then, weaving in and out among rain-spattered revelers cavorting along that frontage, she raced up and over the Ponte Vela, and on through the calles until she came to the Grand, and then down the Serpentine until she had reached the Ca d'Oro itself.
She hoped for lights to show from its windows. She hoped he would have been patient enough to go on waiting for her no matter how late the hour. But there was no hint of light to welcome her. She only had her key, which he had given her, and she found the waterside door, down a difficult and precarious ledge that soaked her feet.
Inside, she saw dimly, by the lightnings reflected off the water, the candle they had left, and a small pile of matches.
She lit that candle, and shut the door and climbed the stairs, up and up until the candlelight blazed out like a hundred stars in so many mirrors.
"Harlequin?" she asked the dark and the silence, but the echoes of her voice were distant and frightening, suggesting dark and deserted halls far beyond the reach of her candle. When she stopped moving, there was only silence.
Silence, to her ears, but for her eyes, a rose, left on the dusty sideboard—a red rose, a difficult and costly thing in Venezia, in its storm and its floods.
He had waited, but lost faith and left too early.
Still, he had left her a token of his presence.
She searched her possessions for what she might leave for him in turn, and settled on the most precious, the best thing she had: her ring, her mother's gift. She laid the small gold circlet on the marble tabletop. In the dust of abandonment she wrote, Your Giacinta, and laid the rose beneath. Then, exhausted, sick at heart and cold, she took her light and went back to the water-stairs, and retraced all the difficult way home.
The servants met her at the top of the inner stairs. She went up to her room, gave her clothing to the maids, and fell into bed, in the freedom of breath and residual ache of the ribs that came with unlacing.
She slept the night by fits and starts, and waked all tangled in the bedclothes at noon. Her hair was so tangled that her unhappy maid had to comb and comb it, painfully. Nonna came in, with the maid looking for her shoes, which turned out to have half-dried, badly soaked, and suffered from mud and scrapes. A great to-do erupted, when Nonna knew it. "How can you have come in with wet shoes?" Nonna asked. "Where have you been walking?"
"The gondola moved," she said, a lie. "While I was getting out. The gondolier was a fool. I nearly fell in. I'm sure the duke doesn't care."
"Never speak badly of him."
"I find nothing good," she said, disrespectfully.
"Hush. Take the shoes away. Dry them in the kitchen, Anna." This to the maid. And Nonna insisted she eat a biscuit and take sweet tea.
"You're nervous, of course, you're only nervous, my dear. It's the day, the very important day ahead of us. He'll come himself, in the barge, in just two hours, and you'll do us proud. So grand, so beautiful a bride you'll be."
There was no escape, no escape she could see. She sat and let herself be coiffed, and her feet stockinged in spotless silk and set in restored and fire-warmed shoes.
Then, with no choice but Nonna's before her, she let herself be laced into the amethyst silk gown, and hung her two masks, dangling from silk ribbons, among its folds.
By then the time had run out, and Nonna saw her down not to the water-stairs on the Raceta, as she had come in last night, like a thief, but to the public walk, on the Priuli, where the whole city might see. A maid waited below to watch out the door, and soon the maid said the duke's gondola was coming.
Giacinta kissed her Nonna, and started to leave.
"The mask," Nonna said agitatedly, "the mask, Giacinta!" just as she went out the doors. It was not the white half-face she put on. It was the moretta, the black mask of silence, a reproach to di Verona, a caution to herself, that she would say nothing, nothing at all, nor eat, and especially not drink. She clamped the button behind her teeth, and that was the end of converse and compromise and the foolish warfare she had chosen with il duco. The gondola took her aboard and drew away down the lesser canals to the Grand, under a stormy sky, and there to the shore. Di Verona's grand barge was there, and he stood on the bank to meet her, with the passersby all curious to see the passenger for whom a foreign duke waited.
He was perhaps surprised, a little set aback by the mask she wore— he, the lion down to the lips, which at first frowned, then grinned at her with nothing of cheerfulness. "A mystery, are you, today?"
She did not, could not answer him, only inclined her head, took his hand, let herself be set into the barge, gilt and azure canopied, among other barges and other colors of the more grand and glorious of La Re-pubblica, on the great Serpentine.
"An improvement," il duco said, "over last night. Perhaps you should always wear it, as a wife." She turned her black-masked face to the water, gray water, reflecting the leaden sunlight that pierced the clouds. Rain fell in sporadic drops, and thunder muttered. He spoke, thinking himself a cutting wit, and she thought only of her rose in the Ca d'Oro, and the candle reflected in a hundred mirrors.
It was armor, her silence. She could not answer, so she need not listen to him, or to anything in the world. She could not find excitement in the festival any longer, so she need not regard the parade of wealth and power: she only stared bleakly at the passing buildings, and the leaden sky and the dull gray surface of the canal.
Trumpets blew. The great barges moved with oars, and occupied the center of the Serpentine, the sort of parade she would have loved to watch, safe on shore. They made their way to the landing nearest the great piazza, and there, amid a cheering throng, the barges disgorged their grandly-costumed occupants in what became a foot processional.
There was music. Banners waved. Giacinta moved where her captor dictated, her hand locked in his, and everything was a confusion of color and noise, swirling faster and faster. Cheers, then, and il duco demonstrated her to the masked, festive crowd, and with gallantry lifted up their joined hands, and shouts and pushing and shoving followed, for il duco's servants had cast fistfuls of coins into the crowd, all along their way.
"Share my happiness!" he cried to the onlookers, parading her along the edge of the crowd. "My bride, Venezia, my bride!" And his servants called out, "Giacinta Sforza is the bride-to-be of Cesare di Verona! Bring her flowers! Bring her joy and music!"
Flowers rained down, costly flowers, from his own servants, it was likely, and the music shrilled and piped. Di Verona seized her about the waist and swept her out across the crowd of celebrants. They danced, oh, they danced, and afterward, she was so thirsty, but wearing the moretta, she could not drink, or scarcely breathe. She felt faint, but still cherished her isolation. She stared blankly at the congratulating crowd, and then—
Then she saw a man among the others, a white and gold harlequin like her harlequin, who appeared just behind the first fringes of the crowd. She blinked, and he was gone. Then she could not get her breath. She could not speak. She wanted to tear off the moretta and run through the crowd crying out to anyone who would hear that she belonged to the harlequin, not di Verona. But the harlequin was gone, fled from the sight of the celebration, and she was not such a fool. She found herself swept up again to dance, and dance, and dance, and never a sip of water, never relief from the mask which she would not shed, not now. It hid tears as well as anger, and she was too proud to shed them for the crowd.
Only afterward, when they had repaired to the barges, and di Verona brought her to his palace for another round of drink and dancing, he opened her hand and pressed into it a small scroll.