‘I do, with all my heart. I don’t want to lie in the dark with a man who doesn’t even really want me and wonder if this is all there is. If I’m being deprived of something, I’d rather know. Ignorance is not bliss. It’s just ignorance.’
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, in what was almost a whisper that tickled her cheek, ‘A man who has no real interest in you will not engage fully with your pleasure. He may wish to make you come, as I have said, but for his own ends, not yours.’
She understood what he was saying. ‘As a duty…’ It was not a welcome thought.
‘I don’t want to make anything even more difficult for you. But yes. I would be very surprised if he would ever ask you to show him what pleases you, so that he could be better for you.’
‘You want to watch me…’
His hands were warm on her and his voice gentle. ‘I want so much that I cannot have. There are many things I could dotoyou, Allegra. I could worship you with my mouth. I could turn you over on this sofa and take you in a manner that a husband who only wants an heir never would. Or I could teach you to do things for me – but I think such knowledge might be dangerous for you later, if you incautiously revealed you had it. You are naked and vulnerable to me already, and you know that I find you glorious, and wonderfully brave. Will you not indeed show me something you may never have the chance to show anyone else?’
She settled back on the cushions across from him, and when he saw the expression on her face he sank to his knees, looking up at her. ‘I am honoured by your trust in me. Would you close your eyes, goddess, if you were alone?’ he asked. She nodded. ‘Please don’t. Watch me as I watch you, see how it affects me. Share this with me and me alone. Let the world burn as long as this is ours, and always will be.’
Suddenly she wasn’t embarrassed in the least. If all she could have was to know that once she had been desired as much as this, seen as clearly as this, it would have to be enough.
She stroked her breasts, and pinched her erect nipples, always aware of his amber gaze intent upon her. Her hand slipped down her body and tangled shamelessly in her dark curls as still he watched. Her pleasure built as she caressed herself, and it felt strange not to lower her lids and drift away on a tide of private sensation. But she did not, and the hunger written on his face aroused her more than she could have imagined. It was his gift to her, she understood. He was kneeling between her spread thighs, and when she began to peak and cried his name, he reached out and held her. His hands hard and strong on her hips, his eyes still devouring her, prolonged the waves of intense pleasure.
When at last they began to recede, and her left hand lay cupping her sex in the aftermath, he picked it up and began kissing it, licking it, sucking greedily on her fingers, biting the soft places, inhaling the scent of her, glorying in the taste of her. She’d not imagined he might do that, and because of it she was not done, she found, not done at all. Soon he was back on the sofa again with her, his weight welcome on her body, his mouth hot on her breasts, his fingers replacing hers and bringing her once more to a place where she saw stars and lost herself for a precious time. Then his thigh ground hard between hers as they moved against each other, slick and sweating, and she understood that he was seeking release too. She was glad of it.
It was a reverie that could not last forever. At last they acknowledged without speaking that it was time; he picked up her clothes and helped her dress, kissing her with a new tenderness that brought tears stinging to her eyes as he did so. ‘Allegra, there is little enough I can do for you beyond this. But let us agree always to be honest with each other, as far as we are able, and I will then lay another duty freely on myself: if you are ever in trouble, come to me at my home in St James’s Square, and I will do everything in my power to help you, and ask nothing in return.’ He must have seen doubt in her face, because he added with a little heat, ‘If you ask me why I should say such a thing, let me respond that I wish it. Call it an idle whim if you please. You may never need a friend; in fact, I trust you won’t… but if you do, come to me, or send to me, and I will come to you.’
‘There’s no point me saying the same; it would be a pure fiction. I have no freedom and no power.’ She hoped this didn’t sound petulant, after all that had just passed between them, but even if it did, it was a stark fact.
‘Whether that’s true or not, and you seemed powerful as agoddess to me a little while ago, it makes no difference to what I say, Allegra. I told you: no obligation save that of honesty.’
It was a word that sounded simple, but was not. ‘Honesty is hard.’
‘For most people, I am sure it is – most people in the world lie as easily as they breathe. Not for us; not for you. Don’t tell me that you lie to your mother, that you lied in order to come here. You know what I mean. But now you must go. There is such a thing as too much danger, even for me. For us.’
He was right, of course. This precious time together was too good to last, or to be repeated. They tidied themselves and shared a final embrace, before she opened the door and slipped reluctantly back through the velvet curtain, where the real world waited.
25
When the house was quiet at last that evening, Mrs Constantine made her way carefully down the stairs to the basement kitchen, avoiding the steps that she knew creaked. The servants slept in the attic, and were all abed, as were her daughters. She could hear Allegra turning restlessly as she passed her door – she’d always been an uneasy sleeper – but Leontina was confident that her own progress remained unheard. She’d done this so many times over the years and never once been caught.
The basement room was stuffy, and smelled of all the meals that had been cooked in it, most of which seemed to have chiefly consisted of cabbage, and of unsavoury drains. But she paid no heed; Leontina was far away in her mind, not even in England any more.
Soon a soft scratching could be heard at the tradesmen’s entrance below street level, and she rose and unbolted it, the enormous kitchen tabby slipping lithely out past her as she did so, then went back to sit at the scrubbed deal table. ‘Pader,’ she said softly.Father.
‘Mefiola,’ was the equally quiet response.Mydaughter. Theold man took off his disreputable hat and sat down opposite her. He was tall, of an impressive build still, and though he was dressed in worn garments that had originally belonged to someone else – to several someones – he had an oddly distinguished air about him. Confidence, resolution. The dusty black velvet of his old-fashioned frock coat suited him somehow, as did the jaunty red belcher handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck. His thick hair and beard were silver-grey, and his eyes dark and watchful. He bore a strong resemblance to his only surviving child, and to his granddaughters too, whom he’d never met, though he had seen them often enough, at a little distance and without their knowledge. He had great-grandchildren, Sabrina’s and Viola’s children, also strangers to him. But then, he was supposed to be long dead. If he was indeed a count from a noble line, as his daughter claimed, he appeared to have fallen on hard times.
A lady or gentleman who saw him in the London streets would have summed him up and as quickly dismissed him as one of the many Italian immigrants who made a precarious living by selling ice, or by playing upon the barrel organ for ha’pennies while a poor shivering monkey danced to his tune. And that was part of his story, but not all of it.
Most speakers of Italian, which was to say Tuscan, would have struggled to understand the conversation in the shadowy kitchen. The dialect the pair were using had familiar Italian words in it, but also a great deal of what sounded like French. It was a fast, softly slurred mixture that was distinctive to Piacenza, and the northern Italian hills and valleys around it. But it could also be heard here in London, where so many people – mostly men and boys – had come to see if they could scrape a better living than their effective state of slavery offered them at home. They weremezzadri– half-people, bound serfs; who could blame them forescaping the hardships of their lot, even if the streets of London offered an uncertain future too?
It was a language of the poor, without question, not a tongue that anyone would expect a nobleman from the ducal court of Parma and Piacenza to use – certainly not when addressing his own daughter. Such a gentleman might have been taught it in secret by his wetnurse, perhaps, or by some other servant woman who had raised him and loved him while his mother, elegant in silk and lace, flirted with powdered gallants in some gilded salon or scented garden. He might use the peasant tongue, when grown, with his grooms, or with hismezzadritenants in their dirt-floored hovels, if he deigned to speak directly to them at all. But never with his own family.
‘What’s the matter, Tinette?’ he asked her softly. Nobody but him called her that now. He could express himself in English more than adequately too, after so many years here, but he did not do so with his daughter, now or ever. She knew thatheknew without being told that these rare opportunities to speak freely and naturally were infinitely precious to her.
She sighed, and rested her forehead in her hands, discarding her habitual facade of strength and invulnerability that was a burden in itself. She was so tired always. But it was good to chat like this in the friendly shadows, without the pretence she put on for everyone else. ‘Allegra is being wooed by a lord – a baron. A decent man, I think, though God knows it’s hard enough to tell. He’s offered for her hand, and she’s considering it. He’s told her something or done something that she refuses to share with me; I see it on her face. I have not pressed her. But she is thinking on his proposal. You know she doesn’t have it so easy as Sabrina or Viola did. She cannot help but question the way the world works.’
A low, rumbling laugh. ‘She’s too much like you, then.’
‘Before I learned to hide myself.’
‘We’ve all had to do that, and I suppose she will too, unless she is very lucky. But you didn’t call me here to tell me things I already knew, Tinette. I have seen for myself thatalpicininahas suitors. What is really the matter?’
‘I’ve been lucky, I suppose, in the past. Da Costa was besotted with Sabrina, and wouldn’t have given a fig if anyone had told him he shouldn’t woo her. And all Winterflood cared about was getting an heir. Neither of them had mothers living – or any close female relatives, for that matter.’
