She had to seize the few moments left, when she could see him, talk to him. Maybe even touch his hand again. Such beautiful, fleeting seconds would have to last her for a long time, once she was married to a respectable tradesman with no dark depths to his soul. No mossy green eyes that burned her very heart with their intensity.
Bianca smoothed her brown curls back, securing them as best she could with combs and pins. She discarded her apron, wishing she had time to change into something finer than her blue-striped work dress. But there was not a moment to lose, if she wanted to speak with Balthazar before his father finished hearing the message of the cards.
She spun around and dashed out of her room, hurrying down the back staircase. The house was quiet today, as their tenants were off to watch a play in the Piazza San Marco and the servants were at market. From her mother’s small room at the end of the corridor, Bianca could hear the hum of voices. Her mother’s tone was low and soothing, as it always was. Ermano Grattiano’s was strained, argumentative, angry. So foolish of him. Didn’t he know by now one could never quarrel with the cards?
Bianca snatched a blue wool cloak from its peg by the door and slipped outside, not bothering to change from her thin house slippers. Balthazar was still there, leaning against the wall. He did not read today, just watched the quiet walkway, his handsome face unreadable, his arms folded over his chest, as if he was deep in thought.
But perhaps his air of indifferent mystery was merely a product of too much Carnival, Bianca thought wryly. Of too much dancing and wine and debauchery. Their dressmaker tenant had told her all about a grand masked ball at the Piazza San Marco that had gone on until dawn. No doubt Balthazar had been there, too, with Rosina Micelli.
She longed to ask him about it all, to ask if the distant revelry she listened to from her window was as glorious fun as it seemed. Ask if he loved Rosina, or one of the other blonde courtesans. But she could not. She just leaned next to the wall beside him, and eventually he silently held out his hand to her. She slid her fingers into his cool, ungloved clasp, feeling the weight of his jewelled rings against her skin, the tenuous silken thread that was their connection.
“Do you not want your cards read, as your father does?” she asked.
Balthazar laughed harshly. “My father is a great fool, always thinking his future will change simply because he wills it so.”
“You don’t think we can change our future?”
“Nothing ever really changes, does it, Bianca? We all go on in the same way, day after day, trapped. I don’t need the cards to tell me what my life holds.”
Bianca gazed up at him in silence, at the smooth, perfect beauty of his face that concealed so much pain. Perhaps he was right not to see what the cards revealed about him, just as her mother was right not to tell Bianca’s fortune no matter how much she begged. Hope in the unknown future was sometimes all poor mortals had.
“What of the world in your books?” she asked.
“What of it?”
“Surely the future is anything but predictable there. Especially in those Spanish lands over the sea. It’s a new world, is it not, where a person could be or do anything. Discover a life that is wondrous strange, and old ways have no place. We—you—could be whatever you wanted. Not even the cards could say what.”
He smiled at her. “No more Balthazar Grattiano?”
“No more Venice, even.”
“It sounds a dream-world indeed.”
“Of course. But is it not there, in your books? Others have seen it, written about it. Why couldn’t we?” Bianca felt her excitement growing, expanding like a silken banner in the wind as she thought of it all. Of new, unknown shores. Her old fear burned away at the thought of no more Venetian society, no more strictures, even as she knew it was impossible.
Balthazar laid a gentle hand on her cheek, his smile rueful as he gazed down at her. “You are a dreamer, then, my practical Bianca.”
“Are you not as well?” she said, leaning into the warmth of his touch. The revelry of the sound of her name in his voice—“my Bianca.” “If you don’t wish to dream, to dare, why do you read all those books? Why do you study ships and the sea? If you truly think there is no other life than this, no chance to make a change, why bother? Why not just follow your father’s ways of thinking and being?”
His smile darkened at the edges, his touch falling away from her. “I am not like my father.”
Bianca knew that. Balthazar did not have his father’s air of easy contempt towards his inferiors, of assured, comfortable confidence. She saw Balthazar’s great struggle against all the feared Grattiano name meant, even if he did not speak his anger aloud. But before she could open her mouth to tell him so, to assure him she understood, the door to her house opened with a resounding crash.
She and Balthazar sprang apart as Ermano stormed out. Bianca eased back into the shadows for fear he would notice her, and turn that icy glare of his pale green eyes on to her. If Balthazar’s touch held the warmth of the summer sun, his father carried naught but the freeze of deepest winter. A killing chill.
She raised the hood of her cloak over her hair, watching Ermano warily. His bearded face was white with fury, as it always was after a reading of the cards. The gods of fortune had failed him yet again. His gaze scanned the walkway, and he gestured to Balthazar, not even looking directly at his son.
“Come, Balthazar,” he said tonelessly. “Let us leave the stench of this hovel behind us. I have had enough of its foulness.”
As he turned to stride towards the canal and his waiting gondola, his ermine-lined cloak swung back to reveal his white brocade doublet. Bianca let out an involuntary gasp, pressing her fingers hard to her lips to hold back the sound.
One of the fine sleeves was stained with crimson blood.
Balthazar’s face, too, turned pale. As white and still as an indifferent marble statue.
“Balthazar!” his father called imperiously. “Come, I do not have all day for you to dally with the maidservants. I have an errand at Signora Bassano’s shop.”
The words seemed to galvanise Balthazar to action. He wrenched one of the rings from his fingers, a large ruby surrounded by pearls. He pressed it, along with a bag of coins, into Bianca’s frozen hand.
“Just in case you need it,” he whispered in her ear. “Remember the new world, Bianca.”
Then he, too, was gone, and she was alone in the shadows of her house. She stared down at the ring, at the stone as dark red as the telltale blood on Ermano’s sleeve. The silence around her was heavy, deafening, a living, palpable thing. It was as if she was the only breathing thing left on the street. In the whole decaying city.
Surely that blood could not mean what her horrified imagination conjured. Surely it was just some bizarre ritual involving chicken hearts or goat livers, as she read about secretly in her mother’s forbidden books.
But she could not dismiss the whispered tales she heard of Ermano Grattiano, of his cold ruthlessness. Of the danger to anyone who became involved with him.
Bianca felt a haze of dreamlike unreality settle around her, like a drugging fog. She slipped the ring on to her finger and crept into the house, even as all her instincts screamed at her to run away. Whatever waited for her, she could not hide from it for ever.
The soft soles of her slippers made only a whisper of sound on the tiled floors as she tiptoed down the narrow, darkened corridor. Her mother’s work room, where she met with those seeking her counsel, was at the end, the doorway concealed by a heavy velvet curtain.
Before she even stepped through that portal, Bianca could smell it. The sticky, coppery tang of blood. The miasma of vanished life.
She