The Stargazer: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book One Read online

  “As it happens, signorina, I do have a plan.” The corner of Ian’s lip quivered, his version of a smile, as he watched Bianca struggle not to flinch at his intentionally condescending tone. He knew she would agree to his terms only if she were goaded into it, and he was surprised at how much he enjoyed the prospect of this goading. Plus, the madder she was, the worse she would behave and the faster his plan would come to fruition.

  Bianca waited for him to continue, sneezing twice in the silence that followed his words. That twitching at the corner of his mouth told her she would find his plan distasteful, whatever it was, but she little expected exactly how bitter it would be. She had decided not to encourage him, yet after what felt like an eternity had passed she heard herself saying, “Ah, I see, my lord, you are indeed as clever as everyone says you are.” She sneezed. “You plan to wait for the body to decompose, so that your problem will literally disappear. ”

  Ian ignored her gibe. “My plan is to detain you until you explain exactly what you were doing here and tell me all you know about Isabella. You may do so here, now. Or I will find you quarters, as uncomfortable as possible you can be sure, in the basement prison at the Palace until you are ready to answer. Think of how quickly this sneezing illness of yours will worsen there. Not to mention how your family will react to hearing you have been incarcerated as a murderess.”

  Bianca blanched. With her brother gone on another of his last-minute journeys, there would be no one to protect her from the wrath of her aunt and uncle if she besmirched the family name yet again. But if they found out what she had actually been doing at Isabella’s, it might be even worse than if she were accused of murder. She wondered if he could even guess the full force of what he was proposing.

  The girl was genuinely conflicted, Ian noted with surprise. Perhaps, he mused, she really was innocent. What if he were persecuting an innocent woman? He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should continue and then remembered that “innocence” and “woman” were fundamental opposites. Even if she were innocent of this crime, he decided, she had undoubtedly committed others, and besides, that mouth of hers had earned her some upset.

  When he judged his last words had had enough time to make an impression on her, he continued. “There is, however, one other option, but I fear you will find it even less pleasant than the others.” Ian then added, apparently as an afterthought, “It’s too bad, because it would be very convenient for me. You see, my priority is to get as much information from you as possible. If you were to move into my house, I would be able to question you at my leisure—whenever or wherever I wanted and using whatever means of persuasion I preferred. I am rumored to have a rather fearsome staff.”

  There was something decidedly threatening in the way Ian spoke his last words, but Bianca refused to be scared off by him or his reference to the rumors that circulated around him. She was sure that his house contained nothing more terrifying than a morbid butler or a lecherous steward, and impertinent questioning in the home of a count was nothing compared to the horrors of the Venetian prisons. Of course, strictly speaking, it was not proper for a single woman to spend a few days under the same roof as an unmarried nobleman, but it would win her nothing like the infamy she would face having been imprisoned for murder. Her family might even thank her for the valuable social introduction.

  Bianca sneezed and then prepared herself to savor the look of surprise on Ian’s face when she agreed to his proposal. “Despite your best efforts to scare me away from it, my lord, I should say that this last option is decidedly the best. I accept it,” she sneezed, heightening the dramatic effect of her final words, “with one condition.”

  Ian, disappointingly nonchalant, only managed to raise one eyebrow. “You can scarcely imagine how that surprises me.”

  Bianca ignored his sarcastic tone. “I would like to bring Isabella’s body with me to study it for evidence of how she was killed,” she sneezed, “and by whom.”

  Ian paused for a moment, thinking, and finally nodded. “Actually, that will work quite well. If I keep our possession of the body a secret, I can circulate a notice that Isabella is missing. This will make my inquiries easier and doubtless more fruitful.” Ian, still lost in thought, was apparently speaking to himself. Bianca thought he might have forgotten about her until a violent fit of sneezing brought his eyes to where she stood.

  “Fine,” he said, facing her, “it is settled. I will send my man, Giorgio, with the gondola for you and the body. You will stay here until he arrives.” Ian pulled a beautiful gold box out of his pocket, opened the lid, and glanced at the face. Beneath it, Bianca saw what appeared to be a very small version of the huge clock in Piazza San Marco. She was so absorbed by the intricate work and delicate mechanism that she missed the twitching at the corner of Ian’s mouth as he resumed speaking.

  He tried to keep his tone light, pretending the thought had just occurred to him. “Of course, it will be quite unseemly for you to reside under my roof.” Ian leveled his eyes at her.

  “My reputation does not concern me,” Bianca retaliated haughtily, crushing his obvious ploy to make her shrink away, then sneezed four times.

  “I don’t doubt that at all, signorina, but mine concerns me. No, having you in my house like that won’t do at all.” She had walked right into his trap. Ian lowered his eyes to his watch again as if thinking, but actually to conceal the triumph on his face. He spent a moment reestablishing control of his expression, then moved to the threshold. When he turned to deliver his last horrible words, he already had his hand poised over the doorknob, ready for a clean escape.

  “I see there is nothing else for it. I will have to announce our betrothal tonight at the meeting of the Senate.” The sentence was punctuated by the click of the door shutting smoothly behind him.

  As she stood staring at the space Ian had just occupied, too bewildered to protest or even sneeze, Bianca could have sworn she heard someone laughing.

  Chapter Two

  The young man followed the Moorish servant across the immense marble ballroom. Even the rich tapestries covering the walls could not keep out the chill of the rainy afternoon, and the visitor huddled deeper into his sable cape. The servant stopped before a massive mahogany door with a family crest emblazoned on it and waited to be admitted. As the door opened, the servant bowed his turbaned head and disappeared, leaving the man alone on the threshold.

  The sight that greeted him as he entered went a long way toward warming his blood. The room was magnificently furnished, an enormous rich carpet covering the entire marble floor, and frescoes on every surface. But the main attraction was on the massive settee in the center of the room. There, each in a burgundy velvet dressing gown, sat two of the most breathtaking individuals he had ever seen. Every time he saw the sister and brother together, he was awed anew by their beauty.

  As he entered, they beckoned him over. The woman shook aside her lush black hair and presented her cheek for a kiss as she suggestively ran her hand up his velvet hose.

  She swept her half-open eyes over him. “How well my angel looks,” she said, her lips curved into a half smile. “He must be bringing me good news.”

  Her brother smiled with her, happy that she was happy. As he gestured his visitor into the oversized seat nearby, he turned to his sister. “We are going to discuss business now, cara. Do you want to stay or would you like to have your bath? I’ll send Diana in…”

  “No, no, if he’s to tell us about the whore, by all means, I will stay. I want to hear it all. I shall savor every detail.” She closed her eyes and parted her crimson lips as if she had already begun to enjoy it. Then her eyes snapped open again, suddenly, and she pinned the visitor with a gaze that lacked even the slightest hint of seduction. “You have come to tell us that the whore is dead, haven’t you?”

  “Well, yes, I have. Or rather, that is what I should like to tell you.” The young man tried to affect nonchalance as he shifted in the
large chair. This gaze of hers was remarkably hard to meet.

  “S’blood man, I didn’t send for you so you could come and give me grammar demonstrations,” her brother erupted. Since his birth, his only concern, his sole desire, had been to please his older sister. That his plan for the gift of all gifts might have failed, a plan months in the making, enraged him. “Is she or isn’t she dead?” he demanded fiercely.

  The young man again shifted position and began inspecting his fingernails with diligence. “Well, you see, Your Excellency, she was dead, only now… Well, my lord, can a corpse walk?”

  “Will this catechism never cease? What do you mean by these evasions?”

  The woman slid forward on the settee and put a calming hand on her brother’s shoulder as she addressed the young man before her. Her voice was low now, serious, but strangely seductive. “Have I wasted all my time on you? Were you too selfish to do this one, small, thing for me after all I have done for you?”

  As she had intended, the young man was mesmerized by the way her lips moved to form the words. “No, no, nothing like that,” he hastened to reassure his mistress in a throaty voice. “She was dead, I saw to it down to that hideous dagger in the chest. A stroke of genius, madonna, that was, truly.” The woman tipped her head gracefully to acknowledge his deserved flattery, but her brother began to growl with impatience. The young man hurried on. “Anyway, when we went back later, to close the trap you know, there was no one there. No one—not even the body.”

  It was too much to bear, the woman told herself. She was surrounded by incompetence. How could fate be so unkind to her? She deserved better, she knew, and needed someone on whom she could vent her anger at this grave injustice. It would not do to upset the young man, he could still be useful, and besides, she had spent too much time cultivating him and could not bear to think that her efforts would go to waste.

  Instead, she exhaled sharply and turned toward her brother, tears of anger and betrayal quivering in her beautiful eyes. “How could you lie to me and say you loved me? How could you win my trust, my love, with your false promises?” Her brother’s face was a mask of pain as the accusing tone in her voice escalated. “You said you would do anything for me, that you would punish him for what he did to me. But now it is clear; I see that like all men, you were not to be trusted.” She paused to let her lip quiver, giving her audience the opportunity to admire the full extent of her distressed beauty, then went on to her finale. “I am all alone in the world; no one cares for me. I can trust no one, rely upon no one, am loved by no one.”

  “Of course we love you. Everyone who sees you must love you.” Her brother mounted a protest as soon as he had regained the power of speech. “And it is not so bad as you say, cara, the girl is dead, the threat to us is gone. Think of the money we shall have, the beautiful clothes I shall buy you.”

  She waved his comment aside with a sneer as if he had insulted her by mentioning such mundane concerns. “The money is nothing. I don’t want money. I want revenge.” Her eyes were hooded, unreadable. “You don’t care about my happiness any more than he did. You are nothing to me.” She left the divan and approached the visitor, her manner changing, softening as she neared him. She took a hand and stroked his cheek, then let it move down over his torso.

  She knew what this one liked, and how to control him. “You, my little angel, you are all my hope that is left. You will help me destroy that preening count, won’t you, angelic one? You will find the body for me?” She filled her gaze with promises she knew he could not resist. The young man felt himself growing warm and had trouble finding his voice to respond to her.

  When he did, he smiled up at her, a beautiful, beatific smile. “I think I already have.”

  “Come help me with my bath,” she said, taking his hand and leading him out the door.

  Chapter Three

  “Lucia’s eyes, will this pen not stay sharp?” Bianca glared down at the quill in her hand and then at the half-finished drawing in front of her. She never drew well when she was tired, and the forty-eight straight hours she had spent cloistered with Isabella’s body had left her completely drained. But she was determined to finish before the hazy gray day was plunged again in darkness. Exhausted as she was, she was still excited by the wealth of material she had been able to gather. Not only had she learned much about the crime, but Isabella’s body provided her with the first opportunity to draw the anatomy of a young woman. Her only female corpses before had been the poor old women of Padua who died without enough money for a proper burial. Isabella’s healthy young corpse was a dream come true, from a scientific standpoint.

  Her debts to Isabella seemed to mount even after the young courtesan’s death, Bianca mused philosophically. A few more drawings and her book would finally be ready to go to press, revealing the female body accurately for the first time. She could almost sense her triumph as she proved to those stubborn men in Padua that women had their own perfect anatomy and were not just flawed versions of men. Wandering wombs, hah! she thought to herself. She remembered hearing of her father’s debates on the subject with Andrea Vesalius when he was first starting his brilliant career, and she smiled as she imagined her book on a shelf somewhere as a companion to his. A vision of her future stretched invitingly before her—she would teach courses on female anatomy, study the female body and its cycles, do public demonstrations. It would be idyllic, truly. Except for this mockery of a betrothal.

  She knew that once announced before the Senate, a betrothal bore the mark of law and was virtually impossible to revoke unless both the people agreed to end it, or one person was shown to be unfit. Had she realized what Ian had actually been proposing all those hours—was it really only hours?—ago, she would never have agreed. Or probably not. Maybe. The Conte d’Aosto had always had a strange effect on her. From her first night out in Venetian society nine months before, he was the only man she always noticed, or at least, she noticed his absence. But that was probably because he was also the only man who never paid any attention to her. He had not even known who she was when they met at Isabella’s, she reminded herself. And now they were betrothed. It was positively idiotic.

  As she thought, she worked to reform the nib of her pen. But when the full force of the betrothal hit her—no freedom, no lectures, no book of her own—she missed and cut the quill in half. “S’balls!” she declared, and then looked up to make sure no one overheard her speak such scandalous words. But she was alone. Since her father’s death, it seemed as if she was always alone. But that was just how she liked it…wasn’t it?

  Clearly between her wandering mind, broken pen, and lack of rest, she could accomplish no more. With a sigh she stood up and removed her blood-soaked apron. She moved sleepily to open the door, but found it impossible to move. She tried again, twisting the cold knob with all her might, and again nothing happened. She was locked in. A mixture of desperation and indignation overcame her exhaustion, and she began pounding against the heavy door with all her force. Nothing. My God, she thought, he’s left me up here to die with this corpse. Panicked, she went to the far end of the room and, with a running start, hurled herself at the door.

  Ian heard her mad pounding from his laboratory. He had expected Bianca Salva to be difficult and even exasperating, but need she be so noisy? He pushed aside the rock-chip he had been looking at under his magnifying lenses and headed toward the other side of the palazzo, where he had given her space for her own laboratory. The noise seemed thankfully to subside as he approached the door and turned the handle.

  He was never sure afterward just how he ended up pinned against the far wall of the hallway with Bianca in his arms, but he felt the bruises for more than a week. It had not been an unpleasant sensation, he mused, just unexpected. He vaguely remembered seeing something come flying at him as the door swung open, but how that something was Bianca Salva remained a bit mysterious. They stood entwined together for a few silent secon
ds before the body next to his began to pull away.

  “My lord, how dare you?” Bianca gasped at last, stepping out of the circle of his embrace.

  “I beg your pardon, signorina, but I believe it was you who leapt into my arms, not the other way around.” Ian raised one eyebrow sarcastically.

  She glared at him as fulsomely as possible. “That is not what I meant,” she said with exasperation. “How dare you lock me in there with that body? I will not be your prisoner!”

  “There you are mistaken, carissima. You are my prisoner—remember, we are betrothed. That gives me no end of power over you.”

  Bianca resisted the urge to slap him, barely. “This betrothal is a mockery, we both know that. What I do not understand is why you proposed it—you wouldn’t possibly have suggested such a thing if you really believed I was guilty. Is it truly so hard to find someone willing to marry you, my lord, that you’ve had to turn to the criminal classes?”

  “On the contrary.” Ian matched her sarcastic tone with his own. “I have no more interest in marriage than you do. Hence a murderess is the perfect woman for me—I can dally with her at my leisure, destroy her mind and her reputation, and then turn her to the wolves when I am done. You will recall that a charge of murder is one of the honorable and legitimate reasons for ending a betrothal.” Ian smiled smugly to himself as he waited for Bianca’s next sally. But it did not come. Instead she sighed deeply and her shoulders began to sag. Oh no, he thought to himself, she is going to cry. Ian preferred anything to a crying woman, and was about to say so when Bianca opened her mouth.