“I too awoke, fearing that I was alone again with only a memory to keep me company.” Gabriele’s hand warmed my fingers, and I relaxed into the certainty of that simple contact. “Beatrice, may I hazard a guess that we both need the same sort of reassurance?”
“What sort of reassurance?” He put his mouth on mine. “Oh, that was an excellent guess. Please do that again.” Gabriele proceeded to reassure us both quite thoroughly of my physical reality until we were damp with sweat, despite the open window.
* * *
“I almost wish I could be a man for a few hours,” I said to him afterward, still feeling the thrill of being carried along by that concentrated fury of want.
“It seems you will be, if you continue to enter my thoughts this way. And if I continue to allow you to do so.”
“I hope you will,” I said, truthfully. “I’d miss it if you didn’t.”
“I will—under one condition,” Gabriele said, his voice shifting.
“What condition?”
He cleared his throat. “This time, Beatrice, you will tell me, as I make love to you, what it feels like to be in your body. I do not have the powers you possess, but I would know the experience of being . . . taken.”
“I have to talk?”
“Yes, Beatrice. And if you need me to pause for you to catch your breath, I will do so, before I resume. And you must be frank, and thorough. It is only fair, is it not?”
“It is fair,” I said, shivering with the prospect.
“Then turn onto your knees, Beatrice; it will be easier for you to speak.” I did, and felt his chest against my back. “Now, start speaking,” Gabriele said, “and do not stop until you are beyond speech.” And I did as he asked, until I couldn’t.
For hours we moved in and out of sleep as the moonlight slanted across the bedcovers. Sometimes I woke first and reached for him, sometimes he reached for me, sometimes I could not tell who moved first. I could not have enough of him, and he was as gently relentless as I was hungry. We pushed each other beyond the line of reason, until we stopped talking at all. The night smelled of spent candles, and somewhere I heard the hoot of a lone owl. The moon had set by the time we disentangled ourselves from each other and the bedcovers. Gabriele propped himself up on one arm.
“I’m not going to be able to walk tomorrow,” I said, looking up at him.
“You can stay in bed, Beatrice. Although it may be more tiring to stay in bed than to rise, if things continue as they have thus far.”
I laughed, but his breathing had changed, and when I reached out to touch his face, it was wet. “Gabriele, why are you crying?”
“I, like you, am afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” He was safe in his own time, unlike me.
He took a deep breath before answering. “I fear this passion I have for you will give rise to new life.”
I’d thought of it more than once, what it might mean to bear a child in the fourteenth century, stripped of modern medicine’s reassuring presence. “We’ve survived a raging inferno, a collapsing scaffold, a storm at sea, your murder charge, the Plague. Don’t you think we can survive a baby?”
Gabriele’s shoulder shook, and I worried for a moment that he might be sobbing. But instead he laughed, a bright, sweet sound in the velvet dark.“If you continue to make me laugh, thus, even in the midst of my tears, then we are destined for a marriage blessed by God.”
“Amen,” I said, and this time, we slept.
PART XIV
THE CONFESSOR
I woke again without knowing why. Then I felt it, the internal hum I knew so well. I untangled myself from the blankets and slipped out of bed, then fumbled in the dark to find my chemise. Now the hum was louder, and with it came a flash of vision—a dark night with no moon, a makeshift ladder, the jutting edge of a loggia. Danger, I could feel it. But from what?
* * *
In the narrow alleyway, Baldi assembled the ladder. It nearly escaped him, swaying in his hands as he pivoted it sideways, then upward. The free end hit a ceramic pot resting on the loggia’s edge, and the pot teetered dangerously but did not fall. Breathing hard, Baldi braced the ladder against the building across the way, wedging it firmly, and began to climb.
He tested the first rung with one foot—it held. As he climbed, the ladder bowed under his weight. His foot reached the eighth rung, the ninth, the tenth. Then the jutting edge of the loggia was in reach, and he grasped it, his fingers scrabbling against rough plaster, until he was high enough to clamber over the wall. The shuttered doors opened with a hoarse creak as the hinges complained.
The room was darker than the alley. No matter, he’d have his quarry—especially drugged with spent lust after rutting with his new wife. Baldi began to make out the outlines of the canopied bed. There was one elongated shape draped with a patterned coverlet, or were there two? He fingered the dagger at his waist. Accorsi’s new bride was black haired, but it was hard to see anything above the blanket’s edge.
Then he saw a second head, a small one, in the bed with the large. Before he could make sense of what he saw, the child opened her eyes and let out an ear-splitting shriek. Baldi leaped to the bed to clap one hand over the screaming mouth, but as he did so, the babe, hellspawn that she was, bit down on his finger hard.
* * *
Gabriella’s scream sent me running. As I burst into the room Bianca’s yells joined her daughter’s. It was dark, but I could tell there was a stranger there, a large stranger who did not belong. I saw the flailing of limbs—Gabriella’s small ones, Bianca’s white and wild as she pounded the intruder with her fists. He was fumbling at his waist for something while trying to keep Bianca’s blows from landing. I knew, from a combination of common sense and my uncommon one, that a dagger was next. I threw myself at the bed, aiming for the attacker’s arm before he could find what he was fumbling for.
The man was heavy and smelled of sweat, and gave a grunt as I hit him. Then his force turned on me: he flipped me onto my back, pinning my arms to the bed with one hand, and drove his knee between my legs. Bianca pounded at his back with her fists but he barely flinched. I could see the dagger now, glinting as he drew it from the scabbard at his waist. Then there was a crack, the sound of metal hitting bone, and the intruder’s huge body collapsed onto mine, squeezing all the air from my lungs and blanketing me in dirty wool.
* * *
“That’s Giovanni Battista, the man who claimed he was an Ospedale scribe,” Ysabella declared, brandishing the bloody candlestick that she’d used to bash the intruder on the head. We all stared at the beached body of the unwelcome visitor. The man lay on the floor with blood oozing from a head wound. Bianca had retreated to the wall, holding the wide-eyed Gabriella in her arms, when Gabriele burst into the room.
“We shall find out more when he awakes,” Gabriele said grimly, “imminently. Light the wall sconces so we can see his face.”