City of Masks Read online

  Mother puffed her lips. “Well, Monna Filomena should learn to speak English. The girl cannot follow one word of the conversation.”

  “Perhaps you should learn to speak Venetian?”

  Mother dismissed this comment with a shake of her head, just as another great cheer reached our ears from below. I tensed up, fearing that Enrico was en route to gouge me out of my bedchamber and force me to join his crowd for another night of entertainment.

  There seemed to be some sort of revelry in the city that night, though I had no idea what the Venetians were celebrating this time. I had looked out of my window earlier to see groups of young men sailing past in their small flat-bottomed boats, drinking wine from the bottle, and throwing perfumed eggs at the houses of a favored lady. Mother had remarked that many of these eggs had been lobbed at our own residence. Their white shells were now floating upon the canal, as their sweet rose water stained the walls. She had even expressed her surprise at being noticed by the young men of Venice, assigning this compliment to her delicate English beauty. Was it for me to tell her that the eggs were thrown for Filomena’s sake? I thought not.

  As Mother left the room in obvious disappointment, I heard Enrico and his friends rowdily descend into the bowels of the house and then board the sàndolo that was moored at the water gate. They had not come to find me, and perversely I felt annoyed. Their songs and jeering echoed about the canal as they rowed away, and suddenly I had the desire to run after them and beg to join their revelries. I was a young man of twenty-six years old, not some crusted old invalid.

  I lay on the bed, feeling sorry for myself, but my bedchamber was no longer a sanctuary now that my mood had invited something else into the room. I could feel it lurking in the corners just to the periphery of my vision, so I stood up quickly and walked over to the small basin, splashing my face with cold water and then rubbing my eyes until they stung. Even so, I could still sense the thing behind me, both cringing and discontented, so I quickly descended to the piano nobile, knowing that it would not dare to follow.

  I found Bearpark, his wife, and other house guests sitting at the table at the opposite end of this long chamber, and suddenly I wished we were staying in a warm and modest inn—somewhere that I might sit in front of a fire and stare silently into the flames. But this was Venice, and anybody with any money and good taste owned a house with a piano nobile—a vast room that stretched from the windows upon the thin street to the balcony over the canal, and was about as congenial and intimate as the nave of a cathedral.

  I joined the others at the table, and, after moving a supper of gray liver and sodden onions about the plate for a respectable period of time, I then allowed a servant to clear my place. It was the third night in a row that we’d been served this same dish, and it was becoming more and more unpalatable at each outing. I noticed that Mother fed most of it to her dog, Hector, when she thought nobody was looking. The servants were watching, however, with disappointed eyes. After months of the Hungarian blockade, meat was becoming increasingly scarce, and they had been hoping for the leftovers.

  After dinner I was punished again for not joining Enrico’s party, for tonight Bearpark was subjecting us to another one of his stories—tales that hailed from a surprisingly small collection of anecdotes. Tonight’s account had received its last outing the previous night, but we would hear it anyway—even though I politely tried to indicate my familiarity by making such comments as ‘Ah yes. I think I remember you mentioning this before.” Or even the explicit “you told us this yesterday.” Bearpark did not take the hint, and soon I came to the conclusion that he had not forgotten its recent performance. This story would be told because he wanted to tell it, and we would have to listen, whether it bored us or not. Such is the privilege of a host. Even one who is charging you to stay at his house.

  Tonight’s tale concerned Bearpark’s rise to riches, and I resigned myself to hearing it yet again, in the hope that there might be some new detail to ease the experience. Bearpark had grown up as the son of a poor tailor, somewhere in the county of Essex. Far from being embarrassed by his lowly beginnings, Bearpark was keen to stress the poverty of his early life, so that it might emphasize his later achievements—his large house in the most fashionable district of Venice, his army of servants, and his young and beautiful wife. Becoming a tailor had not appealed to Bearpark, so he had joined the king’s army instead, and was soon assisting Edward the Second’s flight from Robert the Bruce, which is where Bearpark had first met my father. After this debacle, he had left England to find his fortune in Europe, arriving in Venice around 1320. Bearpark was vague about the intervening years, and how he had amassed enough money to set himself up as a merchant in this city. It was my suspicion that he had traveled through Spain and France as a mercenary, fighting for whomever would pay the highest fee—though when I made such intimations, Bearpark was suddenly keen to bring his story to an end. He might have been a respectable merchant now, but he had built his fortune on war. I was sure of it.

  Mother had listened to Bearpark’s story with rapt attention, as if she had never heard it before, meeting every turn with a gasp or even a clap, even though Bearpark peppered his anecdotes with enough platitudes and pompous declarations to render the account painfully tedious. At least the story had ended. I might have made my excuses, but was still not ready to confront the darkness of my bedchamber again, so, when Bearpark’s clerk, a man named Giovanni, joined our party and challenged me to a game of chess, I quickly accepted.

  Giovanni spoke English, and could be tolerable company when he wasn’t inventing words in the English language—words that he then insisted were genuine. I had often corrected such terms as “childling” or “unfortune,” only for Giovanni to swear that he had frequently heard them spoken by other Englishmen, as if there might be something wrong with my intellect.

  Giovanni was also apt to become another of the household bores if allowed to express his opinion on the sin of pride. His unsolicited sermons on this topic always caused me to roll my eyes, since Giovanni was possibly the vainest man I had ever met. His clothes were fashionable, his shoes were clean, despite the mud of Venice, and his hair was assiduously curled at its ends, as if he had slept with dampened rags twisted through it. I should also say that he never stinted from admiring himself in one of the many looking glasses that were hung from every wall in the house.

  The only ugly addition to his appearance was the large ring of keys that was suspended from his leather belt. These dirty, heavy keys looked out of place against the fine wool of his hose and the embroidered velvet of his doublet, but Giovanni clearly didn’t feel that they ruined the look of his outfit—in fact he seemed excessively proud of having been given such responsibility, and made sure that these keys were always on display. In any other household, the mistress might have been expected to hold this ring, but Monna Filomena had been denied this privilege, either because of her youth or, more likely, because neither her husband nor Giovanni trusted her with the task.

  Sometimes, when Giovanni was boasting about how many doors he could open, I noticed that Filomena allowed the tiniest drop of animosity to slip through her mask. This was prompted not only by the snub regarding the keys however, it was also a response to Giovanni’s behavior, which was often disrespectful and even contemptuous toward her. Whether Giovanni was following his master’s lead in this behavior or he had developed his own personal grudge against the young woman I could not say, but it was obvious to me that they heartily disliked one another.

  As our game of chess proceeded toward my inevitable defeat, we were joined by Bernard and Margery Jagger. This pair had previously been sitting next to John Bearpark and his young wife, but the old man had fallen asleep and was now snoring in crescendos that peaked with violent, shuddering grunts. For a while, they had endured this noise by sorting through their piles of pilgrim’s badges, those small pewter souvenirs of the many shrines they had visited over the years—Canterbury, St. Albans, Bury St. Edmun
ds—but seemingly this activity had not proved an adequate distraction to the cacophony of Bearpark’s snoring, and eventually they’d given in and migrated to our end of the room.

  Our game of chess could hardly have entertained the new arrivals, however, since Giovanni was easily outwitting me. Each time he took one of my pieces, he gave a short growl of victory that was starting to become irritating. As we played, Bernard spoke to his silent sister, while staring absentmindedly at the ceiling. “Did you see those little silvery fish at the Rialto market today, Margery?” he said. “They looked just like herrings.” Or “I think they should reorganize the streets of Venice, don’t you Margery? It would be far more efficient if a person was allowed to walk in only one direction.” To each of these comments, Margery simply nodded, her face almost completely hidden beneath a thick and messily arranged wimple.

  Giovanni took an age between moves, giving me the chance to let my eyes wander about the room, and allowing them to settle on Filomena. Tonight she was sitting silently in a high-backed chair next to her snoring husband, stitching a gown for her child—a child that I had been told was due the following spring. Filomena didn’t seem aware of my interest—or if she was, then she didn’t look up. As I watched her work, I was reminded of my sister Clemence, back in England, and how she had stabbed and pulled at her embroidery, often unpicking great swaths of work in frustration. Filomena, by contrast, worked slowly and purposefully. Her small hands were industrious and light across the cloth, and I would say she found something satisfying and restful in this work. Sometimes she even smiled to herself, though only for the most fleeting of moments, before she once again withdrew behind her impassive mask.

  As I looked upon her young face, I found myself wondering again why Filomena had agreed to marry such an old man as John Bearpark. If I had entered the room without knowing this family, then I might have supposed that she was Bearpark’s granddaughter, and certainly not his expectant wife. I turned away with a sigh, for I had only to look around this elegant house to understand the old man’s appeal. And then I found myself wondering what it feels like to buy a young wife. Does the man fool himself into thinking that the woman loves him for himself, or does he simply not care? If this arrangement pleases both parties, then I suppose it cannot be criticized, but it would not have pleased me, and I had the impression that it did not really please Filomena.

  I put the thought to one side, for Filomena’s troubles were none of my business, and turned my attentions instead to Mother, as she paced the room with her elderly, flea-bitten dog, Hector, in her arms, stopping a couple of times to ask Filomena questions about her needlework. Mother spoke loudly in English, as if this might assist Filomena to understand her words, but the Venetian’s shrugs and half-hearted smiles of noncomprehension eventually caused Mother to give up and sit down with a huff, before making an observation about the young woman that was impolite. As Mother passed this comment I noted a flicker in Filomena’s eye, and suddenly I had the feeling that the young woman understood more English than she admitted.

  After losing my second match of chess to Giovanni, I decided, in a fit of irritation, that it was time to retire. My bedchamber seemed empty enough when I crept in, so I dropped down onto my bed and spent a while watching the moonlight seep through the shutters and cast her silver lines across the floor. When this no longer distracted me, I closed my eyes and tried to think of happier times, at my family estate in Kent. But Kent seemed so distant and alien, and I found it hard to conjure her green, fertile fields and her wide, languorous rivers. Instead, it was the years of the Great Plague that played out in my mind. My escape from the monastery at the age of eighteen, as the other monks were dying about me. My unexpected advancement to the position of Lord Somershill after the deaths of my older brothers. The desolation of the years following the Plague, as I fought to save Somershill from neglect and ruin. I should have been proud of my efforts, for my tenants and villeins were contented enough, and the estate was prospering. But instead my mistakes and failings kept whirling about my head like a game of carousel at a tournament.

  I jumped from the bed and threw a light cloak over my nightshirt, before returning to the piano nobile. The room was now deserted, so I opened the shutters onto the balcony and wandered out to stare into the canal below. The air was still, and the moon washed the waters with its silver glow. The scene was distracting, and I felt more composed, when somebody tapped me upon the shoulder.

  “What are you doing, de Lacy?” I turned sharply to see Enrico. His English was slurred and his clothes disheveled.

  “You surprised me, Enrico,” I said. “You shouldn’t creep up on people.”

  Now Enrico laughed and poked me in the chest. “Well, you should have come out with us for the night.”

  I walked inside to join him and closed the shutters of the balcony behind me. “Did you enjoy yourself?” I said, a little churlishly.

  He shrugged. “Yes. Enough.”

  “But you’ve returned early?”

  He waved my question away. “The others have different tastes.”

  I didn’t ask for an explanation, for taste in Venice stretched far beyond the narrow spectrum that I had encountered in my own life.

  Enrico tried to pass me a bottle of wine, indicating that I should take a drink.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  He thrust the bottle at me again. “Come on de Lacy. Have a drink with me.” He was struggling to focus his eyes, and his legs were swaying.

  I stepped away. “Thank you, Enrico. But I’m tired.”

  He smirked. “Tired of what?”

  “Just tired.”

  I had reached the wooden staircase to my bedchamber, when he hissed at me from across the room. “What exactly is wrong with you, de Lacy? Is it life that tires you?”

  I froze. “I have a problem sleeping, that’s all.”

  He laughed. “I know about your sleeping. I hear you wandering the house at night.”

  “Good night, Enrico.”

  He followed me up the stairs and caught up with me by the door to my bedchamber. “Are you enjoying your suffering?” he said, as he pressed a fist into my shoulder. “Your own little dark carnival?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “On the contrary. I think you are.” Now he leaned forward and whispered into my ear. His breath smelled of brandy and garlic. “I think you revel in it.”

  “That’s not true.” I moved aside, and he fell forward against the wall. “You’re drunk,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “And you’re miserable.”

  “I have reason to be,” I told him. Then I opened the door. “Now leave me alone.”

  He heaved a great sigh, and then staggered back down the stairs, waving the bottle in the air. “I know about you,” he said, as he nearly tripped on his descent. “I know all about you!”

  For a week after this unpleasant encounter, I succeeded in avoiding Enrico. I came to dinner late or to breakfast early. If Enrico entered the room, I childishly left immediately, or if there was no possibility of escape, I made an effort to laugh as loudly as was appropriate. I thought to convince Enrico that I was not wallowing in self-pity. Not in the least. But Enrico seemed troubled, rather than impressed, by my displays of jollity, often trying to catch my eye or to take me to one side. It is to my shame that I rebuffed every one of his approaches.

  One morning, before I had risen from bed, a square of folded parchment was pushed beneath my door. I picked it up with some trepidation, for I knew the seal—it was Enrico’s, and I suspected the letter to be full of criticism and rebukes for my unfriendly behavior. I put the thing to one side for a while, but then it sat upon my bed and looked at me reproachfully, until I broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

  De Lacy. I apologize if my words to you were hurtful. Your mother has explained your troubles to me, and I am sorry indeed for your woes.

  I was tempted to screw t
he letter into a ball and throw the thing from my second-floor window into the canal. Mother had no business in discussing my private life with strangers. No wonder Enrico had taken to regarding me with sad eyes and exaggerated concern. I would write back immediately and tell him to keep his sympathy to himself, as I did not need it . . . and yet I carried on reading.

  You have every reason to be sad, but I ask only this. Please, take care with your disposition. I have suffered such spasms and moods in my own life, and I know that an ill-tempered mind may commit treason against its own body. Be kinder to yourself. The past is done, and you cannot change what has happened, especially as it was not your fault. So, why not come out sometimes with men of your own age? You spend too long with your mother. I mean her no disrespect, but her company will not lift your humors. You need to laugh and be merry. You need to spend your nights with beautiful women and handsome young men. It is time to put your sadness aside and live again. Please de Lacy, let me help you.

  Enrico Bearpark, Your Friend

  I folded the parchment and fell back upon the bed—both furious and shamed. How dare Enrico write such a letter to me? I did not need his help. What condescension! But lying in bed made me feel no better, so I stalked over to the window and opened the shutters and looked into the canal, where a solitary boat cut through the water, its hull loaded with lumpy sacks of cloth and great casks of wine.