CHAPTER 7

Lucianna stared at Serafino and the wooden plate in his hands, heaped with roast venison in a sauce that smelled of pepper, a chicken pasty, and a pork tart, all topped with a kidney stew that was surely soaking the pasty and tart shells to mush.

“ What are you doing?” she exclaimed as he swept past her into her bedchamber.

“Bringing you dinner. It became clear you spoke no idle threat yesterday when you failed to join us on the dais today. What sort of brother would I be if I let you starve?” He set the plate on a table near the bed, then turned and plucked a spoon and dining knife from his belt where he had tucked them.

He held the utensils out to her, but she ignored them. “I am not hungry. And if I were, looking on you would spoil my appetite. So take that mess away and yourself with it.”

“Alas, I cannot. Donna Siri was upset by your absence, so I promised her I would bring you a few of your favorite dishes.”

Lucianna crossed her arms, revolted by the mishmash he had made of the items on the dish. Serafino merely shrugged, sat down on the side of the bed with the plate in his lap, and tucked into the jumble of food himself.

“I spoke with your amore after you stormed from the hall yesterday,” he said around a mouthful of tart so drenched in kidney stew that some of the broth dribbled down his chin.

“I hope the gown I gave you to leave me in peace did not pay for that tunic,” she replied as he wiped the broth away with his sleeve. She should have known he would not keep his word.

He gave a brief, dismissive glance at the oily stain his mouth had left behind. “I confess, I was disappointed to learn that Signor Balduin is not as rich as that emerald ring and the silver needles he gave you had led me to hope. Still, he will be far from a pauper when Don Triston promotes him to castellan. I do not doubt that we will all grow quite comfortable together at NAME CASTLE and that Signor Balduin will be happy to lend me an occasional sum here and there as my needs require. He certainly will understand that his wife’s brother cannot appear shabbily clothed before his friends—”

Lucianna had joined Serafino at the bed to remove the nearest bolster before he could spill the increasingly swimming contents of the plate onto it, but she whirled at his words, inadvertently slamming the bolster into his shoulder.

“You are not coming to NAME CASTLE with us! How can you think such a thing?”

“I am your brother—”

“My half-brother who never dared show his shameless face to anyone I knew in Venice, because they would have thrown you out on your ear if you had, Walter, Simon, Alessandro, even Siri!”

He shoveled another spoonful into his mouth. “You should not have told Siri about my gambling,” he said, rolling a warning eye at his sister as he chomped on the food.

Lucianna felt a small chill steal down her back. “How do you know what I might have said to Siri?”

“The boy blabbed it, Don Triston’s son. I met him in the garden. He said Siri wanted him to stay out of my way. Now I know why she is so cold when I sit next to her at dinner.”

“It is all I told her, I swear.”

“Si, because you fear she would throw you out on your ear along with me if she knew all of the truth. Or that Don Triston would. No matter how Siri might try to defend you, do you imagine Don Triston would trust you anywhere near his wife once he learned all you embezzled/purloined from her first husband?”

“For you,” Lucianna said bitterly. “I never kept a single florin for myself.”

“And who will believe that once they know you are the daughter of a thief?”

Lucianna clutched the bolster so tightly to her breast it was a wonder the seams did not burst. “You dare not say that.”

She tried to hurl the words as a challenge, but they came out a whisper between lips gone dry and stiff.

Into his mouth went another spoonful of slop. This time he waited until he gulped it down before he spoke again.

“This is not Venice, cara. I could not pretend there, for too many knew me as the shiftless, carousing, womanizing son of a woolmonger. But at least I was a legitimate son of a woolmonger, not the base born daughter of his faithless wife and the hitherto trusted servant who seduced her, then fled in fear when he got her with child, taking with him a brace of candlesticks, a bronze goblet, and our mother’s favorite amber brooch—the one la forsa never found among his things because our mother hid it in the blanket she wrapped you in before she laid you on the doorstep of the Sisters of NAME ABBEY/CONVENT.”

And abandoned me, a nameless foundling, to be raised by the nuns. The abbess herself had christened the babe Lucianna for she had been discovered on the bitter cold morn of Saint Lucia’s Day. What dreams Lucianna had spun through the years with Elisabetta over the mystery of her parents, imagining them sometimes noble, sometimes humble, but at Elisabetta’s insistence, always honorable, though Lucianna had overheard enough whispers by the nuns when other foundlings were left at their door to plant a firm, unpleasant fear in her of the likely dishonorable truth.

Still, it had been a truth merely suspected and under Elisabetta’s influence, easily subdued for the most part, until Serafino had found Lucianna and recognized her wearing their mother’s brooch. Lucianna had refused to believe her kinship at first to the profligate son of the woolmonger who sometimes did business with Elisabetta’s merchant father. That the shade of their hair matched so precisely was pure coincidence, she’d insisted. But then, with Elisabetta looking on, he had taken the brooch Lucianna always wore as her only link to the lineage she had imagined for herself, pried the jewel out of its unmarked frame, and showed her the name etched into the back of the stone: Rosaria Amorosi. The same surname that Serafino and his father bore. But Lucianna had known if it had been her name, too, she would not have been given away in secret to an abbey.

Elisabetta had given Serafino a ruby and diamond bracelet from her wrist in exchange for a promise never to repeat the story he told them that day. But instead of winning his permanent silence, he had made them pay again and again to keep secret Lucianna’s shameful origins. The one time Lucianna had put her foot down and said non più, he had shown his black soul by carrying out the threat he always made when they hinted of defiance. He had told Vincenzo Mirolli a week before his wedding to Lucianna. Again, Elisabetta had stepped in to persuade Vincenzo not to spread the tale, suggesting that her father had power to make things unpleasant for him if he stirred up a scandal that would undoubtedly touch Elisabetta as well as Lucianna if it became known. Vincenzo held his tongue, but Lucianna had never forgotten the repugnance that replaced his formerly fond gazes at her and the anguished crack of her heart when he broke off their wedding to respond to a “family emergency” in Florence and never returned.

Lucianna had never dared defy Serafino again, knowing how quickly and gleefully he could and would destroy her future if she did. Until now. She had panicked when Serafino had unexpectedly appeared in Poitou, renewing his threats of blackmail on the eve of her wedding to Sir Balduin, and had given him her richest gown to sell in a desperate attempt to avert a repeat of the disaster with Vincenzo. But in a moment of matured clarity, she realized that she had not loved Vincenzo one tenth as much as she loved Sir Balduin—too much to tell him the truth and too much to lie. Leaving was the only way.

“Non più.” Lucianna repeated the words she had spoken to him X years ago. She felt her voice strengthen with her determination. “No more. If you tell Signor Balduin or Don Triston or anyone, it will benefit you nothing, for nothing you or Signor Balduin can do will persuade me to stay here and marry him, and if I do not stay you cannot force me to steal anymore for you.”

“But that is the beauty of it all,” Serafino said. “You shall not have to steal for me. Signor Balduin will ‘loan’ me all I need, because I am your devoted brother and he wishes to see you happy. Serafino Amorosi, the woolmonger’s shiftless son, is a forgotten man in Venice. Here I am Serafino Fabio. We shall be full-blood siblings, you and I, our parents as respectable as you and Elisabetta invented them all those years ago, my only vice being a slight addiction to the dice—”

“—and drinking too much and being too fond of women you are not married to,” Lucianna interrupted. “Men and women our age do not easily change, Serafino, and a man like you never changes at all. Signor Balduin will grow weary of you, and then he will grow weary of me. No. I have ended it between us. I will not marry him, and nothing you can do or say will make me.”

Serfino dragged the spoon across the wooden plate, scraping up the remains of the food his wolfish appetite had mostly devoured. “I do not say it will be easy to win him back,” he said as though Lucianna had not spoken. “Not after you called him a buffoon.”

She gasped. She had called Sir Balduin many things in an attempt to drive a wedge between them, but she had never called him that! “Did he say I called him a buffoon?”

“It is what he is convinced you think him,” Serafino said vaguely. “Not that he does not deserve the epithet after that appalling song of his. I cannot blame you for being mortified. It made my ears ache merely to listen to him.”

Lucianna bristled. “His voice was very handsome before he grew befuddled at the end.”

She had seen the panic in Sir Balduin’s eye that had veered off course a tune that had both surprised and delighted her for the clarity of a baritone she had never guessed he possessed. How could she not feel herself flattered that he would risk the privacy she knew he held so dear to court her in so public and melodious a way, even if he had stumbled a bit with the descriptions of her hair and eyes? It had not been offense at the fumbling he had fallen into that had made her spring from her chair and accuse him of drunkness. It had been the almost overpowering melting of her own resolve and her terror that Serafino might see it in her face. Still, she had not been able to leave Sir Balduin without attempting to smooth the hurt she knew she had heaped on him once again. Even as she had rejected him afresh, she had spoken of his courage and praised his song and kisses. His kisses. She felt herself quiver at the memories. How could he ever think she could call him a buffoon?

Lucianna saw Serafino watching her, a quirk of amusement on his mouth. She had let her thoughts drift dangerously and Serafino had observed it.

“You still want him, cara.”

“What I want is to go home to Venice, and there is no way for you to stop me.”

Serafino set the plate on the table beside the bed and licked off the gravy that had dripped over the edges onto his fingers. “Perhaps not. But how is it you will go? As the proud and dignified Lucianna Fabio? Or as Lucianna, the thief’s by-blow, who proved herself her father’s daughter by absconding with this when she fled?”

He dug a thumb into a pouch attached to his belt, and drew out a silver chain on which dangled Sir Balduin’s emerald ring.

She gasped. “How do you have that? I gave it back to Sir Balduin!”

“Flung it at him, as I recall,” Serafino said, swinging the ring on the chain. “Had he put it back on his hand, I never could have slipped it from him. But your stoic Frenchman is quite the romantic, cara. Instead, he put it on this chain and wore it inside his tunic, no doubt to keep your remembrance close to his heart. I comforted him as he sat in the garden yesterday, slumped forward, gripping his head in distraught despair at your latest rejection. His posture conveniently slung the chain forward so that he did not feel it slide free when I undid the clasp and eased it from his neck. I’d thought merely to pocket a bit of silver to pay off the wager I lost in the village/city before my dicing companions heard I was here—”

So that was what had brought Serafino so boldly to Vere Castle. An attempt to escape the consequences of a lost wager in NAME CITY.

“—but I found this lovely thing attached.” He flicked the ring with a finger so that it twirled the chain to the left, then respun to the right. “I will settle for this if I must. I told you I could likely pay off my debts with this for a year. But—”

“Ladro!” Lucianna made a grab for the ring, but he whisked it out of her reach. “Thief! Give it to me!”

His eyes gleamed with a familiar unholy mischief, but it still startled her when he suddenly dropped the chain and ring into her hand.

“As you wish, cara. But how will you explain to your amore that it is in your possession again?”

Lucianna stared down at the deep green jewel with a slowly dawning horror. True, she had considered selling it to fund her journey back to Venice, but it had been a gift to her then, freely given her by Sir Balduin. A gift she had since returned to him. She could not accuse Serafino of stealing it when it lay in Lucianna’s own palm. Serafino would deny it, and point the finger at her sordid parentage.

Lucianna did not fear losing Siri’s love. She had helped Elisabetta raise her from a babe and she trusted Siri’s generous heart to understand the dilemma Serafino had bound her in for so many years. But Triston was unlikely to be so forbearing, even for Siri’s sake, and Sir Balduin— The vision of him staring at Lucianna with revulsion, as Vincenzo had, buckled her knees and dropped her down on the bed beside her villainous half-brother.

Serafino patted her cold cheek as though he were the most loving of siblings. “There, there, cara. All you have to do is marry him, and that, from the way you gazed at him when he sang to you, you will hardly find unpleasant. As soon as the wedding is over, I will help you plant the ring in some corner of his chamber where he can find it with a broken clasp, right where it ‘fell off’ without him noticing. We shall live very happily together, the three of us, you will see.”

He rose, picked up the plate, and left her, no doubt to reassure Siri with the vanished meal that however dismal Lucianna’s spirits, her appetite remained perfectly healthy.

Lucianna gazed after him for several long, conflicted moments, hating herself for the elated little corner of her heart that welcomed a trap that would make her Sir Balduin’s wife. But she could not let herself give into the temptation. Everything she had said to Serafino was true. She could not live happily watching him bleed away Sir Balduin’s modest wealth, knowing Sir Balduin tolerated and indulged Serafino’s vices for love of her. The long, steady drip of Serafino’s poison would slowly but surely wear away Sir Balduin’s patience, and eventually, his affection for Lucianna. However blissful marriage might be in the beginning, the joyful years, whether long or short, could not be worth the bitter ending she knew must irrevocably come.

And always would hover the oppressive fear that if ever she sought to cross him, Serafino would tell Sir Balduin the truth of her birth. Sir Balduin would not merely grow tired of her then. He would hate her for having deceived him.

A teardrop splashed on the deep green stone winking up at her from her palm. Once a token of love, it now mocked her cowardice. For she knew there was one way to frustrate Serafino’s smug scheme, yet she shrank from it like a frightened, fluttering sparrow. She, Lucianna, who had always been called tigress, fury, spitfire, even once by an overawed suitor in her youth, an Amazon for her bold, fiery ways, had in truth been a pathetic, selfish, frightened child to have allowed Serafino to manipulate her so shamefully for nearly thirty years.

“Men and women our age do not easily change,” she had told Serafino. But if she truly loved Sir Balduin, she knew she must do just that. She must choke down her fear and embrace her shame and tell Sir Balduin the truth herself.

Her heart hammered so hard she thought she would be ill as she rose from the bed and stepped towards the door. She paused to try to still it, then lifted the ring to her lips, thinking the love it had once betokened might somehow give her courage. The silver chain slid dangling through her fingers and her eye lit upon its clasp.

The thought flowed into her mind before she could stop it. Serafino himself had given her another possible escape. There was no need to wait until after a wedding to place the ring where Sir Balduin would find it. Lucianna could do it now, herself, some place where it could bear no possible connection to her or Serafino. She hesitated. Or had Serafino thought of that when he had given her the ring?

She struggled desperately with herself, the woman who longed for the relief of honesty with the child who wanted to be remembered with love when she was gone. The child won out, as always. She returned to the bed, not without a few tears of remorse for her weakness, and sat down to plot a strategy that might escape Serafino’s suspicions.