Captain Rizzi’s voice intruded on the memory, brisk and satisfied:“An English lady in a gold diadem. You match the account I was given.”
An account. Someone had described her. Notalady in a tiara, buttheEnglish lady in a very particular one. The realization had sliced through the glow of Edward’s embrace like ice.
Miss Bentley’s words echoed next, sharp and cruel.Common. Performing. Undeserved fortune. Grasping creature.
Venetia stared at the opposite wall, tracing the damp streaks with her eyes. She tried to picture Miss Bentley’s face as she’d spoken to Captain Rizzi, pointing, insisting. Had she looked triumphant? Righteous? Genuinely convinced?
Had the count been standing just behind her, murmuring encouragement? Or had he merely planted the ideas in the days before, with those soft, poisoned phrases about sudden wealth and hidden vice, then left Miss Bentley to carry them out alone?
It hurt more that Miss Bentley might have believed it. That a woman who had praised her embroidery andher “sweet nature” could, in the space of an evening, recast her as a scheming little thief.
And then there was Count Morosini.
Would he lift a finger on her behalf? Or would he see only an awkward complication under his roof? An English scandal imported into his palazzo. A young woman whose very existence had upset his granddaughter’s expectations and whose affection threatened to distract his prize translator.
If he truly believed Edward was pursuing Sofia, then tonight’s scene on the balcony must have looked like confirmation of the worst kind of entanglement. A translator, a foreign heiress, disgrace, stolen jewels.
Perhaps he would do nothing. Perhaps he would simply step back and let Italian justice take its course, wash his hands of her and Edward both.
No. Edward. She forced herself to sit a little straighter.
Surely Edward would not abandon her. He’d been there when Captain Rizzi arrived, his expression thunderous, his body instinctively shifting between her and the officer. She had felt, for one dizzy instant, that he might actually fight the captain, grapple for her like some knight in a story.
Then he had remembered his reason, his position, his own precarious standing with Count Morosini. She had seen the calculation in his eyes. The fury. The hatred of his own helplessness.
He won’t let this stand, she told herself. He can’t. He’ll go to Lady Townsend. To Lord Thornton. Between them, they’ll—
What? Charm the emeralds back to their owner? Magically erase the fact that they’d been found in her tiara while she was kissing a man on a balcony?
She buried her face in her hands for a moment. The stone beneath her feet felt very solid. Unyielding.
A key grated in a distant lock; footsteps approached, then receded again. Somewhere down the passage, a man laughed coarsely.Someone coughed. The sounds of other lives, other miseries.
Her teeth began to chatter. She clenched her jaw, annoyed with her own weakness. If she must sit in a cell, she should at least do it with some shred of dignity. She would not give Captain Rizzi—or Miss Bentley, or Count di Montefiore, or whoever else was relishing this—the satisfaction of imagining her collapsed in hysterics.
“Miss Playford?”
The voice came through the little grille in the door, tentative, accented. Not Rizzi. Younger.
She looked up. “Yes?”
The hatch scraped open. A pair of brown eyes peered in, wary and curious. “You are cold, signorina?”
“I have been warmer,” she said, because if she started to list all the indignities of the evening, she wasn’t sure she’d stop.
He hesitated, then pushed something through the gap: another blanket, rough but thicker than the first. He glanced over his shoulder as if expecting rebuke, then added in a rush, “My sister, she says English ladies are very proud. But you”—he looked almost shy—“you do not shout. Or cry. You say ‘thank you’ when Rizzi is… not kind.”
She blinked. “You were there when he ordered me here?”
His mouth twisted. “Thecapitano, he likes when people are afraid. I think if you had shown you were afraid you might not have been sent here. He was angry that you were so… proud.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For the blanket. And for the compliment, undeserved though it is. I assure you, I am quite terrified.”
He gave a quick, sympathetic smile. “Maybe you are. But you do not look it. That is… brave.” He seemed to grope for the right English word. “Dignified.”
Dignified. That was something, at least.
“Will they keep me here long?” she asked, hating the thread of hope in her own voice.
