Your Scandalous Ways (Fallen Women 1)

James bent over, lifting the man off his feet, and threw himself backward. Piero hit the pavement first, James on top of him. He heard the crack of skull against stone, then the clatter as the knife fell out of Piero’s outstretched hand.

James bounded up and looked around.

Marta was gone and good riddance…

But where was…

His gaze went wildly about the square. No signs of life. The square was empty.

There was only the man lying motionless on the stones.

James ran down the Ruga Degli Orefici. As he reached the bridge he heard a scream and a splash.

“Francesca!” he roared.

James ran down the Riva del Vin in the direction of the scream.

The first, shocked silence had given way to cries and shouts from the gondoliers. It was dark here, in the shadows of the buildings, and he had trouble making out figures. He slowed, his heart pounding. People were pointing to the water. Someone shouted, “There!” and another, “No, there.”

“I see her!”

“No, over there!”

Then at last a woman’s voice, sharp, English-accented. “There! Quick! That way! Can’t you see?”

“No, signora. Nobody there. That is only a piece of wood.”

James raced to her and pulled her into his arms. “You’re safe. Dio del cielo, you gave me such a fright.” He kissed the top of her head, where the headdress tipped drunkenly to one side. “You’re safe, cuore mio.” He crushed her to him.

She wriggled. “Cordier.”

He held on tightly. The wriggling felt good. She felt so good in his arms. He’d never let her go again.

“Cordier.” She struggled.

He held on.

She stomped on his toe.

He let go, and looked down at her in bewilderment.

“That woman,” she said.

That woman? What woman?

Then he remembered what he’d forgotten in the blind terror as he raced here: Marta Fazi. She’d run away…and Francesca had run after her.

“You little fool!” he said. He grasped her shoulders and shook her. “Don’t ever.” Shake. “Do that.” Shake. “Again.”

She broke away. “What? Did you want me to stay and help you fight one little man?”

“I wanted you to stay put, and not scare ten years off my life,” he said. “She could have lured you into a dark corner and cut up your face. Have you any idea the delight she’d take in disfiguring you?”

“I have an excellent idea. Poor, ignorant creature—even she let Elphick play her like a fiddle. If she did go to the beautiful house in London, he must have had to evict the previous tenant. And she must have been eaten up with jealousy the whole time. Or maybe not. He would have told her, ‘Ma amo solo te, dolcezza mia.’”

But I love only you, my sweet.

James had uttered those words, teasingly, to her on the night she’d first been attacked, when she’d believed he was one of the villains.

“So easy for men to say,” she said. “So impossible for them to mean, truly.”

“Ma amo solo te, dolcezza mia,” he said. “I mean it.”

She regarded him for a long time. He felt his face grow hot.

“If she had disfigured me,” she said, “would you still feel the same way?”

The answer, the usual answer, was on the tip of his tongue: Of course I’ll feel the same way. But was that true? And could he risk not being true, even if the answer he gave was the wrong one? “I don’t know,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “That’s honest, by gad.”

“But we’ll never know, will we?” he said. He looked past her, at the canal, where the gondoliers and others in boats continued searching. “I think she can swim. But even so—with skirts and petticoats? I don’t know. This is not an interior waterway but the Grand Canal, where the tide can be very strong. I am not sure a woman, fully dressed, could manage.”

They were silent for a moment, listening to the gondoliers’ voices and watching the search—as well as they could, for the night was growing darker. James looked up. Clouds had drifted in to dull the half-moon’s bright glow.

“I don’t know whether to be sorry or relieved,” Francesca said. “What a cat she is! Those sapphires—a king’s ransom.”

James forbore saying, “I told you so.”

“I can understand her being angry with us—but to be so impractical?” she said. “If she’d a grain of sense—never mind breeding—she’d have said ‘Thank you,’ and gone away. Instead she told her man to kill you. At least, I assume that’s what she told him. I managed to follow most of what she said—but that last bit would have stymied me if he hadn’t pulled out his knife and got that ugly gleam in his eye.”

James hadn’t the chance to ask how she’d contrived to understand Marta’s far from literate Italian so well.

He saw Zeggio approaching, with another gondolier alongside.

“We have sent for more lanterns, signore,” Zeggio said. “But the clouds cover the moon and to find her is almost impossible now. She can hide many places. Or she can be on the bottom of the canal or carried away to sea. But this man, my cousin, he finds something.”

Zeggio’s cousin gave James a shallow box. “Zeggio says he believes this belongs to the lady. I hope it is not spoiled from the water.”

James gave the dripping box to Francesca. “This is what you went after her for, I collect?”

She opened it. The sapphires were there, still pinned to the velvet lining. “Silly cow,” she murmured. “She never even put them on.”

“That’s why you ran after her?” he pressed. “To get them back?”

Francesca closed the box. “I’m not sure. Perhaps. I was so furious. I wanted to tear her hair from her head.”

“I hope you didn’t risk your neck—again—on my worthless account,” he said.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “I was furious because she cheated. I tried to play fair with her. I tried to be understanding, and she…” She frowned. “Actually, it’s understandable, now I think of it. In her place, I should have wanted to kill you, too.”

James became aware of sounds behind them. New voices.

He turned. Giulietta and Lurenze hurried toward them. Giulietta flung her arms round Francesca. “You are not hurt,” she said. “I was so afraid, almost I was sick.”

“I was afraid, too, believe me,” Francesca said. “But I’m all right now.”

“We come as quickly as we can,” Lurenze said. “But all is over, I think?”

Bonnard looked about her, at the gondoliers, still searching, then down at the box of jewels she’d tried to give away to a woman who didn’t understand generous gestures. Her gaze went up to James, briefly, then away. “Yes, it’s over,” she said. “Why is everything so bright?”

Then she sank to the ground.

Chapter 18

For instance—gentlemen, whose ladies take

Leave to o’erstep the written rights of woman,

And break the—Which commandment is ’t

they break?

(I have forgot the number, and think no

man Should rashly quote, for fear of a mistake.)

Lord Byron

Don Juan, Canto the First

She’d fainted because she was not used to running, Francesca told them as they fussed over her in the gondola. It was Lurenze’s gondola, fortunately, one of the large and ornate vessels normally used for ceremonial occasions. But princes were allowed to be ceremonial whenever they felt like it, and the four of them were a degree less cramped than they would have been in her gondola.

“Have you ever run in stays?” she said to James. “Oh, why do I ask you? Of course you have. But you’re a man, and your lungs are larger.”