20 June 1560

Cara mia,

Though I had scant comfort from his company Hakim was, at least, an ally, and I mourn him now he’s dead. The days pass dully and I have nothing left but my hope of you. I pray God you are well and that I find you.

Staring at the sea, I pluck from memory the day you came to us, newly widowed of that brute of a husband. How your father could have contracted for such a marriage appalled but did not surprise me. We are the chattel of our men until benevolent fate takes them away. It was the beginning of my happiness when the condottiere left you in our care and hired himself off again to warring. And yet, we had so little time, scarcely a year to discover our strange love and then to conceal it. Though Venice is lost to me now, I think it may have been the hand of fate that drove me out, westward, and to you.

But who would have thought it would be so cruel? Massimo hanged and Hakim left abutchered. His murderers have been taken off the ship at Corfu and incarcerated by the Venetian authorities. The hearing is tomorrow, but if they are to stand trial, the argumentations will take no end of time. The villains will have Vittor Morosini to plead for them, and no doubt he will use the weight of his family name to free them. He too makes the case that the murder was a defense of the faith. But to do that, he must give the book as evidence, and I cannot but wonder if he dares to do so.

I care not about the outcome, what ere it be, and am only grateful to have escaped discovery through the whole tragedy. The captain protects me by ignoring me, for he speaks no English, and I feign to speak no Italian. This dissembling leaves me lonely, for he is my only friend and prodigal in his generosity. ’Twas he who hid me in his palazzo when I escaped, and I trust him, not only with my life, but with the happiness of Lucca, my sweet apprentice. I see the nobility in his face when he strides past me on the deck, and I hear the wisdom in his voice at supper when he turns the subject away from hateful dogma.

Silence weighs heavily upon me and your image is my only companion, in sleep and waking. How shall you look at me when I walk through your door? I pray only that you do not marry in despair, thinking you have lost me, the while I am rushing toward you.

Corfu harbor is Venice in miniature. We were but one of the big-masted ships when we dropped anchor beside a Venetian galley bound for the Aegean. Splendid crafts, the galleys. What Venetian does not love their majestic size and the rhythmic motion of their oars? Their swiftness suits them for rapid trade down the Adriatic, but they are ill-suited for winter. Nor would I wish to be a passenger housed among hundreds of woeful prisoners chained to their benches.

We unloaded cargo from the upper deck, took on fresh food, and the scribe made note of all transfers. Chatter of Hakim’s death and the destruction of his cargo is on the wind through the harbor, though naught will come of it. I will never know what moved him to bring his translation to me. That he was a scholar and loved the truth, I do not doubt, nor that his book was honest meant, but how could he, or we, not have sniffed the poison in it?

But that is past evil now. The while, I am growing comfortable in my new guise. While the ship lay at anchor, I betook me through Corfu and to its marketplace. As a woman, I would ne’er have ventured alone through a strange city. But as a man, I marched uncontested where I chose. I marvel that clothing has such power to separate man from woman, noble from yeoman, yeoman from slave. I also puzzle at the way we alter inwardly with our garments. Is there something of the man in me that only needed breeches? Something of the woman, perhaps, in all men?

Though I dared not speak myself, I heard Venetian everywhere. Venetian bankers are active in the marketplace and Venetian laws apply.

There are pilgrims aplenty here, attending passage on vessels to Tripoli and Beirut. They wear one or another sign of the Holy Cross, drawing attention to themselves. When, perchance, I pass one on the street, I shudder a little and think, “If e’er they knew…”

“And that’s it.” Sara carefully folded the letter and slipped it back into its folder.

“‘If e’er they knew.’ Charmingly Elizabethan the way you say that. But ‘if e’er we knew’ too. I swear I’m going to find out if it kills me. For starters, what do we know about Corfu? It was a Venetian colony then, but would there have been a trial there?”

Sara poured more wine for both of them. “I think so. Corfu’s government was Venetian, and so it was quite logical that the captain—whoever he was—would leave the prisoners there to be heard in what were essentially Venetian courts.”

“So you think the ship would not have been delayed for the trial?”

“A day or two perhaps, but no longer, I’m sure. A trial could take weeks to unfold, and time was money. If maritime Venice was at all like Tudor England, we’re talking about a commercial venture worth a fortune, dependent on powerful investors and clients. I think the captain would have been able to leave testimony of some sort and continue. Besides, the assassin had already confessed.”

Joanna calculated. “That means we’ll want to look for a manifest, or ship’s log, or scribe’s report, whatever it was called. Of course we have to identify the ship, carrack or galleon, and hope that its log has survived the centuries.”

“Those nautical terms roll so easily off your tongue.”

“I’ve done a little reading since finding these letters,” Joanna said. “And I like to imagine life at sea. From the safety of a warm, dry living room, of course.”

Sara swirled the last of the wine in her glass. “It never appealed to me. Never wanted to be a sailor or a pirate, or even go fishing. It’s the water, of course.”

“Ah, yes. That’s right. Listen, I’ll make a pledge to you. We’ll minimize the vaporetto trips, and when we do make them, I’ll stay by you and jump in if necessary.”

Sara smiled and emptied the wine bottle into their two glasses. “Let’s drink to never having that baptism.”

Chapter Ten

So this is La Serenissima, Joanna thought as she wandered through the still-quiet Piazzetta San Marco toward the waterfront. She congratulated herself for arriving a half hour early, simply to see the sun rise, while Sara prepared for the day in more leisurely fashion.

Joanna faced the doge’s palace across the piazzetta and studied the rounded columns of its ground-floor arcade, their capitals curving gradually into arches. The first-floor gallery held another row of columns with delicate stone tracery. On top of it, the rest of the palace was a monotonous block of marble broken only by a few windows. Slightly silhouetted against the slowly lightening sky, the whole edifice seemed top-heavy and ghostly.

It had rained during the night; a morning mist dulled the light of the rising sun and the entire piazzetta was still wet. Joanna shifted her position a few paces so she could watch the burning orb rise under the arches at the corner of the palace. While she gazed, hypnotized, the mist began to burn away. Suddenly the sun flashed in undimmed whiteness and shot a sparkling path through the archway along the flooded walk.

How many others through the ages had seen the same spectacle through the doge’s archway? Hundreds of thousands, probably, though a more somber thought came to her. Just in front of her at the corner of the palace was the pillar of San Marco, with its winged lion at the top. Right below it, for centuries, criminals had been hanged at dawn, by the light of the rising sun.

“It takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”

Joanna jumped slightly as she heard Sara’s voice behind her. “Oh, you’re here. Good, you didn’t miss sunrise. I’m trying to enjoy the light show, but I keep thinking of the executions that took place right here, at just this time of day.”

“You’re thinking of Massimo, from Leonora’s letters. Yeah, I know what you mean. It makes that golden glow suddenly poignant, doesn’t it?”

Joanna nodded, trying to imagine how it might have felt, to stand before death and darkness just at the moment the sky brought awakening light.

“It’s almost eight,” Sara reminded her. “We’d better go meet Tiziana Morosini.” They made an about-face and approached the stately glass doors of the national library. “Tiziana. Such a nice name. Like the painter, I assume. Do you suppose she’ll look voluptuous and languid, like Titian’s women? You know, like the Venus of Urbino, naked on a couch?”

Joanna glanced sideways at her. “You’ve been spending way too much time reading art books, Sara. You need to get out more.”

*

Tiziana Morosini was, in fact, neither voluptuous nor languid. An attractive woman in her forties, with thick black hair drawn loosely into a chignon, she was energetic, businesslike, and completely clothed. Large brown eyes shone with guarded intelligence from an immaculately made-up face, while full Mediterranean lips suggested a sensuality at odds with the image of a librarian. After a cool handshake, she explained briefly the rules of the library—no food, no drink, no noise—then guided them to the stairs.

“I thought, before you started work, you might like to look at the staterooms of the library. We’re rather proud of them.”

Joanna had hoped to begin immediately, but one did not offend one’s host. “Yes, of course. Very kind of you to offer.”

They entered a hall in white and cream marble, full of classical statues and busts. Glass cases at the corners held massive globes revealing the Venetian understanding of the charted world. The checkered floor had a clean, modern look that discouraged lingering. “I will spare you a description of the sculptures, although several of them come from the collection of Cardinal Bessarion, the original donor of the library,” Tiziana said, and led them to the entrance of the next room.

“This is the salon,” Tiziana announced, ushering them ahead of her. She let them appreciate the opulence of the hall for a moment, then pointed to the wooden ceiling that held a grid work of plaster frames, carved in Baroque filigree and painted in gold. “As you can see, the ceiling contains twenty-one murals, all from the cinquecento.”

The onslaught of sixteenth-century allegorical paintings gave Joanna a headache, but apparently they did not intimidate Sara. “That one’s Veronese,” she said, pointing directly overhead, “and those two by the portal. But I don’t recognize the others.”

“Brava. I see you know our art as well as I do,” Tiziana said, though it was not clear whether she was amused or annoyed at being upstaged.

“What’s in the display cases?” Joanna asked.

“Opera scores by Cavalli, sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, the so-called Codex Marcianus. Shall I go on?”

“Well, actually…” Joanna searched for words to forestall any such listing, but Tiziana was already walking ahead of then.

“Let me show you the main reading room.”

Hardly a room, the space hinted more at imperial courtyard. Daylight streamed through the glass ceiling, so that one had the sense of open sky. The surrounding walls rose in three tiers, their architecture neoclassical and robust. The two lower levels were arcades, and between the levels, a handsome balustrade circled the entire space. Behind them all, visible through glass, countless bookshelves stood discreetly. The enclosed space was vast, the effect powerful. One could imagine mustering a battalion in the hall, were it not for the tables and low bookshelves that quietly suggested reading.

Tiziana guided them to a table close to the door. “Dr. Morosini tells me you both speak excellent Italian, so of course our main collection is available to you. Over there at the far end of the hall is our card catalog, from which you can locate anything in the library.”

At the door to the catalog room Joanna stopped, awestruck. Not one room, but two, with card drawers from floor to ceiling on all eight walls.

“The cards on this side are by subject, while those over there are by author’s name, and those at the far end are by title,” Tiziana said blithely, as if she swept through them every day for casual reading. “After you find what you’re looking for, give me the call numbers and I’ll have them brought from the shelves to your table in groups of five.”

Joanna glanced over at Sara and almost laughed at her slack-jawed expression. It was true, the thought of hunting through hundreds of drawers on a poorly defined search for which they had no reference point other than year was a bit daunting. But she also felt a certain euphoria at standing before such a vast amount of knowledge. She recalled suddenly how rich she’d felt as a child each time she came home from the library with a dozen new books. Even before she started them, she anticipated the pleasure of turning the pages, letting the characters and events flow into her mind, a pastime infinitely more satisfying than “hanging out” with school friends.

Tiziana spoke from the doorway. “I know. It’s frightening the first time you face these. But don’t worry. After a while, you get the hang of it.” Then, with an ambiguous smile, which could have been either condolence or schadenfreude, she left them to their labor.

Sara cautiously circled the first room, peering at the labels on the drawers. “Sure. We can do this. No problem,” she said weakly, obviously summoning courage.

“Of course we can. It’s what we came for.” Joanna unconsciously rubbed her hands in a little circular motion. “Think that we’re in the company of the thousands of world scholars who thought those ideas. Imagine them as phantoms swirling around us while we read.”

“Swirling phantoms. If you say so. So how about I look under Printing presses, sixteenth century, and you search under Commercial shipping or Merchant ships.” Sara stared up again at the cliffs of card drawers. “Piece of cake.”

*

Joanna began methodically, reading opening paragraphs to every relevant chapter, giving each volume a chance to yield its secrets. She savored the feel and sound of parchment as she turned each heavy page. The musty smell that came from them was evocative of monasteries and scriptoria, even when the book was an early print, and, just as she had in her study of the Tudors at the Bodleian Library, she imagined the scribe who penned the pages she read.

But soon she appreciated the number of books piled up in front of her and she forced herself to digest each one more quickly.

By noon they had perused some fifty books, skimmed whole chapters of nineteen, and photocopied excerpts from eight. After lunch in the Piazza San Marco, they began the labor again.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, Sara rubbed her eyes. “I’m completely burnt out, but I’ve located several independent sources that more or less agree. Apparently two presses in Venice in the mid-1500s had the initials T.A. One of them is a music press named Tomás Adorno, and the other is Tratti Audaci, a much smaller one that printed popular works.”

Joanna took off her reading glasses and rubbed her face. “Hmm. Neither one sounds promising, but if that’s all that shows up with those letters, one of them has to be ours.”

“It’s a start. If the State Archives has any evidence of the authorities closing either one in 1560, we’ll know that’s it.”

“Good point. We can check there tomorrow. But, look, I’ve got something too.”

Joanna slid one of her open books across the table. “Three merchant ships were sailing the Adriatic at that time with the initials G.D. The Ghianna Dore, the Gloria d’Venezia, and the Grazie Dei. The first one was a galley, the second one a galleon, and the third a carrack.”

“Didn’t Dr. Morosini say that only a carrack would have been able to make the trip to Flanders?”

“Yes, he did, and according to, uh, that pile of books over there, the carracks were large galleons, originally Spanish or Portuguese, but then showed up more in the Venetian fleet too. They were all-sail, that is, no rowers.”

“Wait, one of Leonora’s letters said something about ‘galleys being no good for winter travel, and she would not like to live among hundreds of prisoners chained to their benches.’ So she was definitely not on a ship with rowers.” Sara wrote out Tratti Audaci and Grazie Dei on a separate page of her notes, underlining both names with a solid stroke of the pen. “I think we’re onto something in both cases.”

Joanna was about to reply when Tiziana approached along the center aisle. “How is the research coming?”

“Very well. We’ve got some good leads,” Sara said.

Tiziana directed her reply to Joanna. “Good for you. You’ve scarcely come up for air all day and deserve some success. It must be very satisfying.”

Joanna studied the librarian’s handsome face. “It will be more satisfying when we’ve cross-checked everything with the State Archives, but otherwise, I think we’re finished here.” Joanna stood up from the table. “Thank you for your help.”

“You’re quite welcome. Are you sure the Libreria Marciana can’t do anything else for you?”

Joanna pondered for a moment, but Sara replied. “You can answer a question. What are the main collections in the historical part of the library? I mean, before the eighteenth century.”

Tiziana turned her attention back to Sara. “We have quite a large number, but that information is available in the introductory brochure. I’ll get you one.” She strode toward a bronze bust on a table where a box held pamphlets, and in a moment she was back with one in hand.

“You can read a summary of our entire history here. I’m sure you already know about the original endowment of the library of Cardinal Bessarion to the city of Venice in 1468.”

The pamphlet seemed to trigger a recitation that Tiziana had learned by heart and that Joanna had no desire to hear. “May we keep this brochure and study it at home?”

“Of course. It’s public information.” She pressed the booklet into Joanna’s hand. Was it Joanna’s imagination, or did Tiziana’s fingers brush against hers a bit longer than necessary?

“Thank you for all your help, Signora Morosini,” she repeated.

“Oh, you’re most welcome. Please let me know if I can assist you in any other way,” Tiziana replied with warmth.

“We certainly will,” Joanna answered automatically and moved toward the library door. In the reflection of the glass exit door, Joanna could see two things: Tiziana still watching them and Sara’s sudden frown.

Well, that added an interesting new wrinkle to the project.

Chapter Eleven

Joanna threw the apartment key on the table in the entry. “It’s probably not good to spend eight hours staring at small print and then have three glasses of wine. I thought the dinner would energize me, but it’s done just the opposite.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s only nine thirty and I’m dragging.”

“I am too, and I’ve got a headache, but I’m not ready to go to bed. I’ll just wake up at four and stare at the ceiling.”

“What about television?”

“Have you seen Italian television? I was thinking we could discuss the letters a bit more.” Sara ran her hand over the folder that contained them on the sofa end table. “The summaries that Giglioti wrote are so superficial, I think we shouldn’t bother with them, now that we can refer to the letters directly.”

“They’re that bad, eh?” Joanna passed by her to go into the kitchen and set water on the stove. “What’s missing?” she asked from the kitchen doorway.

“Giglioti presents the letters as a simple narrative of events, but they’re above all a collection of love letters, full of fear and longing.”

“How fortunate that you read the language well enough to get all of that.”

Sara ignited the gas fireplace, kicked off her low-heeled shoes, and padded over to the sofa. “It’s not just the language. It’s easy to put myself in Leonora’s place. Just imagine. All her bridges are destroyed and she has no way back.” Sara drew her knees up and let her thoughts drift. “She’s a woman alone, amidst rough and dangerous men. And even the nobles and clergy, who presumably wouldn’t molest her, were a threat to her life, since they’d return her to prison in Venice. Not to mention that the simple act of cross-dressing was a crime.”

Joanna came in with the tea mugs and an aspirin capsule for Sara and sat down at the other end of the sofa. “You’re right. She was in danger every minute. What kept her going?”

“She was in love. You can’t forget that. She had something precious to live for. Rough seas, sex-starved sailors, fanatical Jesuits, quarrels, murder, smashing of cargo, all that swirled around her, and she never lost her hope of reaching Anne. At least not in the letters I’ve read so far.” Sara tossed back the aspirin with a sip of tea, then studied her steaming cup. “Were you ever in love?”

Joanna thought for a moment. “I was in a relationship, but I think it was not so much love as the excitement of finding something foreign and forbidden.”

“And the other…person?” Sara asked delicately. They’d never discussed sexual preferences.

“I don’t really know what she felt. I can’t imagine it was love in her case either, but whatever it was, I got over it more quickly. It was pretty obvious that she felt cheated when I left. Maybe she was cheated. I don’t know any more. What about you? Have you ever been in love?”

“Not the way I imagine love should be.”

“How do you imagine it to be?”

Sara sipped her tea again. “Good question. It keeps changing. When I was young, I pined after anyone who came along, but I was looking for the kind of love I lost when my mother died. Then, when puberty hit, it was just a physical longing, usually for movie stars. You know when you see movies with love scenes between men and women? Usually you imagine yourself as one of them. I always wanted to be both. The beautiful woman who stirs love and the dashing hero who arrives and saves her. I guess I should have been a lipstick lesbian, eh?”

The half-humorous, half-serious remark seemed an invitation to more specific questions. Joanna studied her own cup for a moment, then ventured, “When did you start doing it? Dressing up, I mean?”

Sara hesitated, perhaps deciding how much to reveal. “I had a slight interest in it very early on, but I had no sister and, after the age of eight, no mother either, so I had no access to female stuff. I pushed it to the back of my mind until boarding school, when I had that ‘baptism’ at the pond. I came out of it with a different sense of myself.”

“Ah, yes. You told me the beginning. How did you get a hold of makeup?”

“I shoplifted things, lipstick, mascara. The first night, when everyone was asleep, I tried the lipstick and eye makeup. I just stared at myself in the mirror, hypnotized. The face that looked back at me was this person living inside me. The one I had been feeling all along. Then at some point when I was home on vacation and had my own room, I shoplifted a blouse too, a very fru-fru one, with ruffles and all. It was a revelation. I walked around my room for a while feeling wonderful, then took everything off and hid it again. I must have been about ten.”

“Did you wish you’d been born a girl?”

“Not completely. I liked some of the things boys could do. I even did sports. Well, track. It was the only time my father ever said anything good about me.”

“Ah, the father. Maybe you should tell me about him.”

Sara gave a little puff of disdain. “You could write a psychology textbook about him. I think he’d heard that in America, anything was possible, and he must have been deeply disappointed by how hard everything actually was for a foreigner. But when the Korean War started, he joined the army. Four years of service brought him long-term employment, and at the end of it he could apply for citizenship.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“For him it wasn’t. Soldiering suited his personality. It just didn’t suit mine. But when he came home on leave, he took me to a range to teach me how to use a gun. You know, ‘in case the communists came.’ That was bad enough, but then he took me to the country and forced me to fire at rabbits. Of course I missed every single one of them. Finally he’d had enough. He stood me in front of a chicken and held me by the collar until I shot it. Do you know how hard it is to kill a chicken with a rifle? I shot it three times and still it ran around. Finally he took out his pocket knife and cut its head off.” Sara brooded for a moment.

“I even remember the clothes he forced me to wear when we went on those bloody escapades. Little fatigues, made especially for children. I was supposed to be a miniature copy of him, but, well, you can see how that worked out.”

“You identified with your mother, then?”

“I don’t know. Mostly I knew I didn’t want to be like him.”

“But what’s your sexual preference? Sorry. You don’t have to answer that, if you don’t want. But I’m gay myself, so you’ll get no homophobia from me.”

Sara played unconsciously with an earring. “Well, I like pretty clothes and opera. Does that make me gay? I don’t know. I’ve never done romance, but I’ve been with men at various places along the transgender spectrum.”

“Theirs, or yours?”

“Theirs. There’s a whole range, you know, from straight male cross-dressers to drag queens, to…well, there are as many variations as there are men. I liked being courted, having someone be interested, but the sex part was never anything special.”

“And women? You don’t care for women?”

“Oh, I do. I like women best of all, but straight women don’t want boyfriends with breasts, and the stealth technique doesn’t work either. Girls don’t like finding out their girlfriends are guys. And that’s not even addressing the…uh…dynamic in bed.”

Arriving at the subjects of breasts and sex, the conversation came to a halt. They were topics Joanna wasn’t ready to pursue. She cleared her throat. “We seem to have gotten sidetracked. You started by suggesting that we work more on the letters since Giglioti’s summaries were insufficient.”

Sara also seemed relieved to change the subject. “Yes, I’d like to do that. The letters are pretty emotional, don’t you think? The Italian is elegant too. I would have loved to hear them in the author’s own voice.”

Joanna took up her notebook and the leather folder and slid out the next letter. “Well, short of Leonora’s voice, let’s hear it in yours.”

Sara drew her knees up on the sofa and settled in for a long read.