Venetia gazed at her with frank admiration. “I hope one day I am as wise as you.”
“Patience is all that is required,” Lady Townsend said lightly. “Just another thirty years and you will be brimming with such wisdom. Now, my dear girl, not another alteration to your appearance is needed. You look precisely as you ought: innocent enough to soften Captain Rizzi’s report, and desirable enough to make Edward cast every other consideration to the wind—the marchese and Morosini be hanged—in order to pledge you his troth. Thatis, after all, your greatest desire, is it not?”
Venetia’s throat tightened. “Yes,” she whispered. “It is.”
“Well then,” Lady Townsend said briskly, squeezing her hand. “Let us go and meet our fate—with good posture and our chins held high.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Edward flexed hiscramped hand, causing a fresh scatter of ink across the already-blotted page, and forced his attention back to Ivanhoe’s latest declaration of noble self-sacrifice. Count Morosini had decreed that this chapter must be finished before week’s end, and it was barely half done.
Outside, Venice was making merry over Sofia’s fate.
From the open casement, the sounds floated up in bright, taunting snatches: the clatter of hammers as temporary stands were raised on thepiazzetta, the sing-song cries of hawkers, the excited babble of children. Church bells rang across the water. Once, when Edward rose to stretch, he glimpsed the pale bulge of silk above the rooftops—the balloon, half inflated, swaying like some monstrous sea creature straining at its tether.
Restless delight for everyone else. A sense of mounting judgment for him.
For Sofia, too. He had not seen the girl in days, save for that one brief, wretched encounter when her sobs had echoed faintly down from the upper gallery of the library. He had been angry with her—justly so—for setting in motion the chain of events that had placed Venetia’s liberty in jeopardy. Yet the memory of those choked entreaties to a higher being, her shoulders shaking beneath the lace veil, would not quite let him condemn her entirely.
She was so very young. So very trapped.
Like me, he thought grimly, bending again over his desk. Chained to a paper gallows.
He tried to lose himself in Sir Walter Scott’s rhythms, but the lines blurred. His gaze drifted to the folded note lying beside the inkwell.
Rizzi’s hand. Rizzi’s threat.
The captain’s superior returned to Venice on the morrow. With him must go a report that “brought the matter of the jewel thefts to a satisfactory conclusion.” Without new evidence, Rizzi had said with bureaucratic regret, he would be obliged to describe Miss Venetia Playford as morally compromised and “possibly complicit”—a phrase that, in the mouths of English trustees, would be quite sufficient to pry her inheritance from her grasp.
Edward’s jaw tightened.
He knew the truth. Griselda’s confession at La Serafina’s had been halting but clear enough: the contessa’s maid, bribed and bullied by Paolo and Sofia into slipping the emeralds into Venetia’s tiara. No malice toward Venetia herself. Merely a reckless gamble to fund an elopement.
Merely.
He had tried that same night to persuade Griselda to repeat her story where it mattered—in front of Rizzi. The girl had shaken her head until her cap slipped sideways, her dark eyes rolling in terror at the thought of dungeons and the contessa’s vengeance. Even La Serafina’s assurances of protection had not moved her.
And time was running out.
His quill hovered impotently over the page. Ivanhoe, blast him, could afford to ride into battle with clear purpose. Edward had nothing but a guilty maid, a venal policeman, and a city that preferred appearances to truth.
“How,” he murmured to the empty room, “in God’s name am I to make you listen, Captain Rizzi?”
“Il conte wishes to see you, Signor Rothbury.”
Edward started. The footman in the doorway looked faintly apologetic, as if aware that no summons from Count Morosini ever boded well for a man’s peace of mind.
“Very well,” Edward said, laying down his pen. “Tell him I am coming.”
Morosini’s private salon had been transformed from the half-dusty retreat of a scholar into the command post of a general on the eve of a campaign. Papers littered every surface—lists of guests, lists of suppliers, lists of expenses that would have made a lesser man blanch. Bolts of colored bunting lay tumbled on a chair. A footman was fussing with a tray of crystal flutes; another stood ready with a silver inkstand.
At the center of the chaos, in a coat of dark-blue velvet, stood the count.
“Ah, Rothbury.” He turned. “You look as if you have spent the night in a crypt.”
Edward bowed. “You sent for me, sir?”
“I did.” Morosini waved a hand, encompassing the room, the palazzo, Venice entire. “As if arranging my granddaughter’s betrothal were not enough—fireworks, music, that infernal balloon—I must also contend with the caprices of poets and policemen.”
