“Sir Wilfred,” he muttered under his breath, “you have no monopoly on insurmountable obstacles.”
Like Scott’s knight, he was now bound by honor to sacrifice his own happiness for the woman he loved. But unlike the fictional hero, he saw no prospect of a neatly tied conclusion in which virtue triumphed and love was rewarded.
Also, Ivanhoe got his lands and title back. Edward had had neither lands nor title to be returned.
He set his pen to the paper. The words he rendered into Italian were full of chivalry and noble suffering—men risking death in the lists to prove a maiden’s innocence. He, meanwhile, sat in a sunlit Venetian study, condemning himself to a quieter kind of death: the slow extinguishing of hope.
He had traded his freedom for Venetia’s safety, his happiness for her protection. And the terrible part was that she would never know the price he had paid—or the love that had driven him to pay it.
She’ll think I abandoned her. She’ll think I didn’t care. She’ll think last night’s kiss meant nothing.
And I can’t tell her otherwise without putting her in danger.
Outside the window, Venice glittered in the morning sun, beautiful and treacherous as ever. Gondolas slid along the canal, black and elegant as funeral barges. Voices drifted up from the water, bright and careless.
For Edward, the city had become a prison whose bars were forged from love itself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Venetia sat onthe bed, staring at the letter that had secured her release.
From accused jewel thief to free woman in under twelve hours.
Yet she’d been unable to leave her room for two days following her release.
No ordeal had sapped her of strength as spending the night in a dank, chilly cell, accused of something she had not done.
This was not the dark cupboard at her Aunt Pike’s that she knew was a temporary confinement.
This could have been forever.
And she’d been like an invalid, pretending to be asleep when Lady Townsend had knocked. Unable to face her English friends over meals.
The letter’s official seal bore Count Morosini’s coat of arms, and the elegant script promised his personal guarantee that she would remain free “pending no further charges.”
No further charges.
As if charges could not be conjured out of thin air by the right malicious tongue.
She folded the letter along its already-tired creases and set it aside. Freedom, such as it was, allowed her to sit here instead of in a cold stone cell. It allowed her to walk Venice’s labyrinthine streets, to return to Casa Bonaldi, to endure the whispered conversations thatfaltered when she entered a room.
And it allowed her, dangerously, to hope.
If this wereIvanhoe, she told herself, last night’s ordeal would be the trial before the triumph, the test of endurance that proved the lovers’ worth. Edward would emerge more clearly than ever as her knight—her Wilfred—ready to break every injunction of class and prudence to vindicate her. Their kiss on the balcony had felt like the beginning of that story: his mouth on hers, his hands trembling as if he knew there was no turning back.
That moment had been the most real thing she had ever experienced.
“Miss, you’ve no appetite at all,” Mollie fretted from the small table, where the bread and fruit sat untouched. “You must try something.”
“I’m not hungry,” Venetia said absently.
Her gaze drifted to the second letter on the coverlet. Not Morosini’s this time. The familiar, neat hand on the outside had made her heart leap when the errand boy delivered it.
Edward.
She picked it up again, though she could have recited it from memory.
Dear Miss Playford,
