Your Scandalous Ways (Fallen Women 1)

Cordier turned to her and started to pull up her bodice. She slapped his hands away and quickly covered herself.

She smoothed her skirts and her expression. When the gondola stopped, she was ready. She let Cordier hand her out of the vessel but she pretended she had eyes only for Lurenze. She gave the prince her warmest, most intimate smile and addressed him as though only he mattered, as though the others didn’t exist.

“What an agreeable surprise,” she said. “Or ought I not to be surprised? Had I scheduled a conversazione and forgotten it in all the recent excitement?”

“No, madame, not at all,” said Goetz. “We are here because we did not wish to lose a minute in informing you.”

His highness only nodded. No doubt he was gathering his wits, which her smile must have scattered.

“A moment after you left with Mr. Cordier, I received a message,” the governor went on. “A man was captured on his way to the mainland in a stolen gondola. We have reason to believe this may be one of the men who attacked you. Mr. Cordier, we have him in custody. I must ask you to come to identify him, to spare the lady this distressing task.”

“All is well,” Lurenze told her. “You must have no fear, madame. I remain to protect you—like the guard dog.” He shot a defiant look at Cordier.

The defiance couldn’t quite mask the prince’s uncertainty. He had reason to be unsure, she knew. She’d rejected all of his previous efforts to protect her.

She moved to him. “You are exceedingly kind, your highness. Thank you. I shall be very glad of your company.”

His grey eyes lit. The corners of his beautiful mouth turned up, transforming his expression to pure, unmasked, unashamed happiness.

How could she help smiling up into that face, at so much sweetness?

She glanced at the governor, making it seem that she could scarcely tear her gaze away from Lurenze. “Until next we meet, Count Goetz,” she said. He bowed.

She turned away and took Lurenze’s arm. “Addio, Mr. Cordier.” She tossed the dismissal over her shoulder and went on to the stairs with Lurenze. She didn’t look back.

Later, at the Doge’s Palace

James fervently hoped the Austrians had the right man in custody because he needed, very badly, to hurt somebody.

He’d come within a gnat’s testicles of losing his wits entirely and taking Bonnard then and there, in the gondola.

You’d think he was a schoolboy with his first tart.

It was the great pearl, tapping against his head as he was losing himself in the silken smoothness and warm fragrance of her breasts. If that light tap hadn’t recalled him to the moment, made him remember where he was, who she was, what he was about…

His face burned, recalling.

Imbecille! he berated himself. Idiota!

A fine way to play hard to get.

She would have had him, proved her point, and tossed him aside. She had much larger fish in her nets.

Peridots, indeed. Mere baubles to her, though the set she had in mind would no doubt send the typical younger son deep into the nets of the moneylenders, from which he might never disentangle himself.

Still, he had managed to save himself. He had won, and she was furious. Had Goetz not turned up, with the goggle-eyed boy, James might have provoked her to extend the wager.

I’ll give you another chance, he could have said. Then she might have invited him into the house, and—if he were clever and careful—into her confidence.

But no. Instead, he must spend hours in officialdom, trying to extract information from a ruffian while concealing from the Austrian governor his true purpose.

Such were James’s thoughts as he and Count Goetz made their way through the Ducal Palace. En route here, they’d discussed how they would deal with the suspect, and James had succeeded in making Goetz believe the resulting plan was Goetz’s. Now, having traversed a dark, narrow passage from the great council chamber, they stood in the State Inquisitor’s room.

It was not a happy room. Even one whose nature was not fanciful would sense its dark history, as though the souls of all who’d suffered here haunted it.

Fear was an old but reliable tactic, as the Austrians clearly understood. To strike terror into their prisoner’s heart, they’d lodged him in the pozzi, the “wells.” The narrow, dark, dank cells had once held great crowds of those who’d run afoul of the Venetian Republic. Nowadays, it was a lonely place.

While James and Goetz waited for the man to be unearthed from the prison depths, the governor showed James about this part of the Ducal Palace.

At last the prisoner entered, with guards fore and aft—an unnecessary precaution, given the heavy chains about his ankles.

James stood in the shadows, as he and Goetz had agreed. The prisoner took note mainly of the governor, disregarding James as merely a minion. The interview proceeded in Italian.

It did not proceed very far. For one, the southern dialect the suspect spoke was nigh impenetrable to the governor and difficult even for James. For another, the fellow—who gave his name as Piero Salerno—claimed to know nothing about any lady. He had fallen off a fishing boat, he said. He wasn’t trying to steal the gondola. He’d only climbed into it because he was tired of swimming.

That was his story. It made no sense whatsoever and he couldn’t be made to budge from it.

Goetz sighed and turned to James. “Sir, do you know this man?”

The prisoner started, apparently having forgotten anybody else was there. Now he craned his neck forward and squinted into the shadows where James stood.

Though parts of the chamber were dark, as James had advised, the place to which they’d led the prisoner was well lit. Even in poorer light, James would have known the man. He’d seen this face only briefly, but it was his business to notice and remember details.

“This is the one,” he said.

He stepped out of the shadows.

Piero shrank and took a hasty step backward. One of the guards prodded him back into place with his bayonet.

“What a pity,” James said. “I was hoping for the other one. All this one did was row the boat.”

“He is an accessory,” said Goetz. “The penalty is the same.”

“But if he cooperates?” James said. “Perhaps if I spoke to him alone, he would be more confiding.”

Piero’s eyes widened. “No!” he cried.

He had not gone far last night, then. Judging by his reaction, he’d seen what James had done to his large friend.

James smiled at him.

Goetz signaled to the guards. The three of them exited the room, leaving James alone with the prisoner.

Speaking in the plainest and simplest Italian he knew, James said, “This has not been a happy night for me, Piero. I had to leave the opera before it was over—I must abandon Rossini, of all things! One woman complains to me about her man problems until my ears ache and the other woman is breaking my balls. I didn’t want to come here in the first place. I have better things to do. Lying little mounds of filth like you are sucking from me time I shall never get back. I am not in a good mood and I want to hurt someone. You’re not my first choice, but you’ll do, you ugly little pile of shit.”

He advanced. Piero tried to back away, but he stumbled on the manacles and fell.

James grabbed one arm and hoisted him up, pulling hard enough to make the prisoner shriek. “I can pull harder than that,” James said. “I can pull it right out of the socket. Shall I demonstrate?”

Piero began to scream. “Help! Help! He will kill me!”

He tried to run to the door, but stumbled again. When James reached down to pull him up, the man tried to scramble away on his backside.

“None of them care if you scream, you reeking pustulence,” James said. “No one cares if I kill you. It will save the government the cost of a trial and execution. But I’ll give you a kind warning: After the troublesome women, this noise you make is not improving my humor.”

Once again he

jerked the man to his feet. This time James held onto his arm, squeezing hard. Piero whimpered.

“The way to improve my humor,” James said, “is to tell me who you are, who your friend is—or was—and why you attacked the lady. I shall give you to the count of three to begin putting me in a better frame of mind. One. Two.”

“We do it,” the man said. “We attack the whore.”

James squeezed harder.

Tears started from Piero’s eyes. “The one you throw in the water is Bruno. I hide and wait for him but he never comes. Then I think you have killed him. And so I steal the gondola and try to go back.”

“Never mind that,” James said. “Why did you come here in the first place?”

“To steal. This is what we do, Bruno and me. We have some trouble in Verona, and so we go to Mira. The whore was there, for the summer holiday. Everyone talks of the jewels she has. But then, she moves from the villa there back to Venice. And so we come to Venice, because it is easier to follow her here than in the little village, where everyone watches everything. We come to Venice, and then we wait for the right time.”

Once he’d begun talking, he babbled on and on. But most of the rest he had to say was irrelevant

All the way to Venice, simply to steal? That made no sense to James. Crime was far easier elsewhere in Italy—in the Papal States, for instance, where corruption was rife. Or farther south, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. But to come here, where the Austrians ruled? It made no sense.

Still, Piero would not budge from his story. It was theft, mere theft, he insisted. Bruno had only decided to make some fun with a little rape. He’d choked the English woman to keep her from screaming, Piero claimed. “She’s a whore. This is what they like, as everyone—”

James flung Piero away from him so violently that the man tripped and fell.

This time James left him where he was.

If he touched the swine again, he’d kill him.

Chapter 6

And even the wisest, do the best they can,