Your Scandalous Ways (Fallen Women 1)

His expression hardened. “Thérèse, you’d better take madame upstairs,” he said.

She turned to Thérèse, snatched the tray from her, and threw it at him. He dodged and it struck the floor with a crash. “You weasel!” she cried. “Donnola!” She went on in Italian, the Italian of the streets, “You lying sack of excrement. I should have let them kill you. I hope they do, and you rot in hell. Come near me again and I’ll cut off your balls.”

She stormed up the stairs. Thérèse hurried after her.

James watched her go. He cleared his throat. “That went well, I thought.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sedgewick.

“Signore, it is nothing,” said Zeggio. “Women, they always say they will cut off the balls. It is like when the man say, ‘Tomorrow, I will respect you still.’ It means nothing.”

“It doesn’t signify,” James said. He looked toward the servants, all of whom regarded him with the same disappointed expression. Even the villains wore that look. They all expected him to run after her and make a great scene. A lot of screaming at each other, then a lot of lovemaking.

Italians, he thought.

Then he remembered: He was Italian, too. “Per tutti i diavoli dell’inferno!” By all the devils in hell!

He ran up the stairs after her.

“Vai al diavolo!” she shouted back. “Vai all’inferno!”

Go to the devil. Go to hell.

Ah, yes, the usual intelligent exchange.

“You ungrateful, impossible woman!” he shouted.

She’d reached the archway leading to the piano nobile. She paused and turned to him. Her exotic eyes were molten green fury. “You black-hearted, fraudulent swine!” she cried. “You are nothing but trouble, and you’ve done nothing but cause trouble from the day you came. I had a good life, a beautiful, peaceful life—until you came to Venice!” She swung round and marched damply down the portego, leaving wet footprints behind her.

“Your life was merda and you know it!” he shouted. “None of this would have happened if you’d owned a grain of sense. You started this!”

“My life was perfect!”

He’d caught up with her. She quickened her pace but he stayed with her. “A perfect lie,” he said.

“You’re a fine one to talk. I don’t go about pretending to be—”

“That’s all you do!” he snapped. “Pretend and play games and lie! Shall I call you an actress? It’s a gentler word—and you’d say that acting is what your profession requires. It’s the same for me.”

She turned into a doorway. Thérèse tried to close the door but he pushed through. “It’s the same for me,” he said more quietly. “And can we not talk about this in front of the servants?”

“Why don’t I stab you in front of the servants instead?” she said.

James looked at Thérèse. “Allez-vous en,” he said very quietly.

“Don’t you dare,” her mistress said.

Thérèse darted one look at her employer and one at him, then she hurried past him, out of the room.

“Thérèse!” Bonnard started after her.

James blocked the doorway.

“I hate you,” she said.

Of course she did. He’d lied to her from the start. He’d betrayed the trust of the innocent girl-ghost in her eyes.

He looked down at himself, at the gown he’d taken without explanation, because he was afraid of what would happen after he explained. He stared at the gown he’d taken when he left her in that cowardly way…after they’d given themselves to each other in the way that lovers, true lovers, did.

He pushed the gown down over his hips, and it fell to the floor. He stepped out of it and picked it up. He held it out to her.

She snatched it from him and pressed it to her bosom, heedless of the damp shawl and the sopping shift clinging to her body, and the stains the wet would leave in the silk.

“I know you hate me,” he said. “I know you can’t bear the sight of me. Just tell me where the letters are, Francesca, and I’ll go.”

Chapter 14

Alas! the love of women! it is known

To be a lovely and a fearful thing;

For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,

And if ’t is lost, life hath no more to bring

To them but mockeries of the past alone,

And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,

Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet as real

Torture is theirs, what they inflict they feel.

Lord Byron

Don Juan, Canto the Second

“I hate you,” Francesca said. She was wet and ought to be cold but she was hot with rage and humiliation. She could not believe she’d been such an utter fool. This was worse, far worse even than her stupidity about John Bonnard. Then at least she’d had the excuse of youth and innocence. What excuse had she now, at seven and twenty years old, after her brutally rude awakening five years ago—not to mention the months she’d spent learning from Fanchon Noirot how not to be a fool?

She’d met this man not a week ago—not counting the times she’d met him without knowing who he was—not that she knew who he was. Less than a week with him and she’d let herself…fall…in love.

She wished she might call it something else but what else was she to call it, when she’d leapt into the canal to save him? She burned with shame, recalling. For a time, for those few precious minutes before she’d realized why he was here, it had all seemed so…romantic.

“I hate you,” she said. “I hate myself more, if that’s possible.”

He closed the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you must tell me where the letters are. For your own safety.”

“What letters?” she said, as she had said, repeatedly, to Lord Quentin.

“Francesca.”

She looked about her. She had not been paying attention to where she was going, simply turned blindly into a doorway. Of all the doorways she might have entered, she had to pick the one opening into the Putti Inferno. Now the children were looking down and pointing their pudgy fingers and bums at, not the Great Whore, but the Great Fool.

She looked up at the ceiling. How many of those pestilential children were there? Had they multiplied since last she looked, like her troubles? “I hate them, too.”

“Francesca, we haven’t time to play games,” he said.

“I’m not playing,” she said.

“The letters,” he said.

“What letters?” she sai

d. Whose side are you on? she wanted to ask. But what was the point? Why should he tell her the truth? The truth didn’t matter. Only the letters mattered, plague take them. Plague take him.

“I’m going to explain,” he said.

“I don’t want your explanations,” she said. “I wish I could explain to myself why I risked my life—no, worse, my dignity—on your account.”

“I know you won’t believe me but I’m going to explain anyway,” he said. “Then I’ll choke the information out of you if I have to—because what’s at stake is more important than you or me or whose feelings get hurt.”

“You bastard,” she said.

“That’s how I stay alive,” he said. “That’s how I do my job. By being a bastard. If it weren’t for you, I shouldn’t have to do my job. If it weren’t for you, I might be in England now, learning how to be a human being again. I might be wooing gently bred maidens and luring some naïve fool into marriage and making babies. I might be spending my days at my club, reading the newspapers or gazing out of the window and making jokes or bets about the people passing by. I might show off my fine horse and my superior horsemanship in Hyde Park in between ogling the eligible girls and deluding their chaperons. I might be dancing at Almack’s with girls in white dresses. I might be getting drunk and telling dirty jokes with the other gentlemen after the women leave the dining room. I might be among normal people living a normal life. But no. You had to refuse to help Quentin. A handful of letters. That was all he wanted. But you refused to help a group of loyal Britons bring down a man who sold himself to our enemies. Because of you, I couldn’t go back to England. I had to come here—and hurt your bloody damned feelings!”

Her conscience stabbed, sharply enough to make her wince. She recognized the images he conjured and she understood exactly what he was missing, what he longed for. It was the world she missed, too, sometimes, despite the happiness and freedom she’d found after leaving it. The world that she’d left—the one that had cast her out—was not the best world, but it was familiar, and it had its joys. She’d liked her life there, before everything went wrong. At any rate, she knew too well what it felt like, to be locked out of what had once been home.