Amanda McCabe - High Seas Stowaway

One of the fine sleeves was stained with crimson blood.

Balthazar’s face, too, turned pale. As white and still as an indifferent marble statue.

“Balthazar!” his father called imperiously. “Come, I do not have all day for you to dally with the maidservants. I have an errand at Signora Bassano’s shop.”

The words seemed to galvanise Balthazar to action. He wrenched one of the rings from his fingers, a large ruby surrounded by pearls. He pressed it, along with a bag of coins, into Bianca’s frozen hand.

“Just in case you need it,” he whispered in her ear. “Remember the new world, Bianca.”

Then he, too, was gone, and she was alone in the shadows of her house. She stared down at the ring, at the stone as dark red as the telltale blood on Ermano’s sleeve. The silence around her was heavy, deafening, a living, palpable thing. It was as if she was the only breathing thing left on the street. In the whole decaying city.

Surely that blood could not mean what her horrified imagination conjured. Surely it was just some bizarre ritual involving chicken hearts or goat livers, as she read about secretly in her mother’s forbidden books.

But she could not dismiss the whispered tales she heard of Ermano Grattiano, of his cold ruthlessness. Of the danger to anyone who became involved with him.

Bianca felt a haze of dreamlike unreality settle around her, like a drugging fog. She slipped the ring on to her finger and crept into the house, even as all her instincts screamed at her to run away. Whatever waited for her, she could not hide from it for ever.

The soft soles of her slippers made only a whisper of sound on the tiled floors as she tiptoed down the narrow, darkened corridor. Her mother’s work room, where she met with those seeking her counsel, was at the end, the doorway concealed by a heavy velvet curtain.

Before she even stepped through that portal, Bianca could smell it. The sticky, coppery tang of blood. The miasma of vanished life.

She eased back the curtain, peering into the little chamber. Silvery incense smoke still hung in the air, its sweetness blending sickeningly with the blood, the remnants of Ermano’s bergamot cologne, the tang of spilled wine. Atop the round table was a jumble of cards, goblets tipped on their sides. The stools were knocked askew on the floor.

And Bianca could see her mother’s foot behind the purple tablecloth, the torn hem of her white gown.

Still caught in that stick web of dreams, the piercing numbness of ice, Bianca stumbled around the table and the broken stools. Her mother lay in a crumpled heap on the tiles, her eyes wide and staring, glasslike, into nothingness. Her long, dark brown hair spread around her, matted by the blood from the gaping wound at her breast.

The wound caused by the dagger still poised there in her body, its emerald-set hilt glinting in the gloom and smoke. The dagger Bianca had seen often enough in the sheath at Ermano’s waist.

She knelt slowly next to her mother, reaching out to lightly touch the cold hand. Bianca could see it all in her mind, as horrifyingly sharp as if she had witnessed it herself rather than mooning over Balthazar Grattiano outside, listening to his faradiddle about truth and new lives. She saw Ermano in a rage when the cards would not tell him what he wanted, saw him destroy the instrument of his frustration—her mother. Then he just walked away.

Bianca remembered the rumours. Ermano Grattiano destroyed who and what he chose, anyone who thwarted or angered him. It was even said that, years ago, he had murdered his own mistress, the beautiful Veronica Rinaldi. He never paid for his crimes, of course, and anyone who tried to hold him accountable, who even witnessed his evil deeds, soon vanished themselves.

Bianca stared in horrible fascination at that dagger. Ermano would surely be back for it, if nothing else. It was too valuable, too distinctive. He would be back to clean up his deed. Or he would send Balthazar to do it for him.

Had Balthazar just been using her, then? Using their ruse of friendship to help his father in this evil scheme? Betraying her feelings for him?

A sudden spasm of bone-deep grief and fear seized Bianca, banishing that distant, numb dream, those last hopes. Her hand tightened on her mother’s, and a ragged sob escaped her lips. Her mother was dead, at the hands of a terrible, and terribly powerful, villain. And she, Bianca, was trapped. If she stayed, if she confronted the Grattianos and took the revenge her heart cried out for, then surely she would also end up dead. A dagger in the heart, and then tossed into the canal to rot alone in the swirling waters.

Who would avenge her mother then? Who would see that justice came to the Grattianos, if she was dead?

As Bianca knelt there beside her mother’s body, it was as if the sheltered girl she had been fell away like a warm cocoon, a concealing shawl that held her apart from the cruel world. A wall of new ice encased her heart, hardening her, steeling her resolve. Ermano might have killed her mother, while she was distracted by the all-too-handsome Balthazar. But they would not destroy her. Instead she would be the instrument of their destruction.

This was one crime of theirs that would not go unpunished. She was just a girl now, but that would not always be so. She knew what she had to do, come what may.

Bianca dragged the purple cloth from the table, scattering cards and goblets, and used it to cover Maria’s body. Then she hurried to a small carved chest in the corner, rummaging through the linens and boxes of incense until she found the bag of coins her mother always secreted there. Those, along with that the treacherous Balthazar gave her, would see her away from Venice, to a place of safety where she could study and plan. No doubt Balthazar had pressed the ring and money on her as some sort of salve for his guilt, or perhaps as a silencing bribe.

But she would use it to keep herself away from the Grattianos—and to help with their downfall one day.

For she would be back, somehow, and when she was it would be Grattiano blood that would flow at last.

Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola—1532

It was a quiet evening in Santa Domingo. But Bianca knew very well that would not last long.

She stood behind the high counter along the back wall of her tavern, rinsing pottery goblets and keeping a close eye on her customers. It was mostly the usual crowd, sailors and merchants biding their time as they bought supplies, loaded their cargoes, and waited for the convoys that would bear them back to Spain. A few of the men were headed in the opposite direction, from Maracaibo or Cartagena towards the mines of Peru.

They were all focused on the riches they hoped awaited them, the gold and pearls and emeralds, and drank their ale and rum with a tense, watchful air.

Bianca had been hearing disquieting whispers, though, and she was sure they had something to do with the ship that had limped into port today. Its battered sails and broken mainmast were like an omen in a town that was far too superstitious already.

But the more frightened the men were, the more they drank, and thus the more coin they spent in her establishment. Bianca was all in favour of that, as long as things didn’t turn nasty. It had taken her a sennight to clean up after the last fight, and those were days she could ill afford to lose. She had to pay her servants, her suppliers—and she didn’t intend to end up on the streets. Not again.

She narrowed her gaze as she studied the room. It wasn’t vast or grand, nothing like the gilded palazzos of Venice still so vivid in her memory. It was just a long, low chamber, the walls freshly whitewashed after the last repairs. The wooden beams overhead were dark with smoke, hung with bunches of dried herbs in a vain attempt to drive away the stench of rum and wool-clad bodies in the island heat. The uneven planks of the floor were warped and sticky, covered by close-packed tables and benches.