Order of Darkness Read online

  Isolde curtseyed modestly and shot a hidden laughing glance at Luca. ‘Of course,’ she said.

  The five of them set out in the gondola. Freize would accompany them and wait with the other servants in the servants’ room. The gondola would moor at the quay beside the house, bring back Ishraq and Isolde from their visit, and then go out again for Luca and Brother Peter. The men thought they would be out till late, perhaps past midnight.

  The men were wearing the hoods of their capes over their heads, and dark plain masks over their eyes. Isolde could see only Luca’s smiling lips as he looked at her strange beauty. She had a dark blue cape with a dark blue hood pulled over her fair hair. She wore a mask which covered her forehead, eyes and nose, so that her dark blue eyes gleamed at him through the slits of the mask. Blue feathers sprouted from the side of the mask and curled like a high question mark around her head. She looked exotic and strange and lovely. Beside her, Ishraq in black was like a beautiful sleek shadow, only her mouth showing below a black mask which was shaped like a dark moon and starred with silver.

  Luca leaned towards Isolde and whispered to her, his mouth against her ear. ‘I have never in my life seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said.

  Isolde, quite entranced, turned and smiled at him, her dark eyes gleamed through the slits in the mask.

  ‘Meet me,’ Luca whispered to her. ‘Meet me tonight. As soon as we can get away from this party.’

  He felt, rather than heard her swift gasp of shock and knew he had gone too far, stepped too close. He waited for her refusal, for a moment he was afraid that she would be offended. But then she leaned her head a little towards him and breathed, rather than whispered her reply.

  ‘I will.’

  The city was in carnival mood, every window overlooking the Grand Canal bright with candlelight and every dark canal and quayside busy with bobbing gondolas.

  Sometimes they glimpsed a couple entwined in the double seat of a gondola, their hoods drawn forward to hide their kisses, their hidden hands seeking to touch. In some, a pair of lovers had gone into the cabin of the gondola and closed the doorway, leaving the gondolier to idle in the stern, keeping the ship steady in the water as the clandestine candlelight shone through the slats of the door and windows. Brother Peter turned his head away and crossed himself to prevent the infection of sin.

  On the quayside, as their gondola approached the palace, they could see a huge crowd, beautifully dressed in the extraordinary costumes. Men dressed as monsters and angels, women in silks of every colour towering high as they stood on the chopines that were the mark of a fashionable lady. Some of them were dressed so brightly, and stood so proudly, that it was clear, even to the young travellers, that the women were showing themselves off for sale. They were the famous Venetian courtesans, and it would cost a man a small fortune to spend a night with any one of them, traded like everything else in this merchants’ city.

  Everywhere people were mingling, talking, flirting behind their masks, sometimes pushing their masks on top of their heads to expose their lips for a stolen kiss, sometimes turning away into a quiet garden or a darkened doorway. Isolde glimpsed the smiling face of a woman as a man took her hand and led her into the shadows. At the quayside she saw a man lightly step from one rocking boat into another, laughing like a child on stepping stones, invited by the wave of a silver glove.

  It was irresistibly exciting. Every gondola burned a torch at the stern, or carried a swinging lantern at the prow, and the young women could see that men and women were making assignations on the water, and then their gondolas would slip away together to the darker side canals, where they would drift side by side so that the women could flirt behind their painted fans, and the men make extravagant promises.

  On the white stone quayside the wooden chopines clattered like castanets as if they were inviting men to come and dance. Bursts of music came from one doorway and another and they could hear the bright laughter of men and women. Isolde exchanged one longing glance with Luca as if she wished that the two of them could go somewhere alone together at once, and dance and laugh and kiss.

  ‘Isolde,’ Ishraq whispered a warning to her. ‘Your mask doesn’t hide what you are thinking. You look as if you are ready to sin like a Venetian.’

  A ready flush rose from Isolde’s neck to her cheeks. ‘Ishraq,’ she said quietly. ‘I have to kiss him again. I think I will die if I don’t kiss him.’

  Ishraq could not restrain a shocked giggle. ‘Really? But you said . . .’

  The great watergate to the palace stood open, the bright torches reflected in the glassy waters of the canal as the gondolas queued to enter the palace and leave the guests on the red carpet which stretched extravagantly, to the brink of the lapping dark water.

  ‘It is like a strange other world,’ Isolde marvelled. ‘So much wealth and so much beauty.’

  ‘So much sin!’ Brother Peter mourned quietly.

  At last it was their turn and their gondola slid through the archway and drew up to the palace steps. Brightly costumed servants stepped forwards to steady the craft, but before they could get out, Isolde glanced back to the canal and saw a gondola with four beautiful women hesitate at the water entrance behind them, the women exquisitely painted and rouged, and wearing high headdresses and exotic masks. One of them waved a lazy hand to Luca and called out the name of her house. ‘On the Grand Canal,’ she said. ‘Come at midnight when you leave here!’

  ‘Sin all around us,’ Brother Peter said, shaking his head in horror.

  ‘I know what I said about never kissing a man before marriage!’ Isolde whispered fervently to Ishraq, as she rose to her feet and pulled her hood forwards. ‘But that was weeks ago, it was before we pretended to be married. And then he kissed me, so I know what it’s like now, and besides it’s carnival, and everyone, everywhere we go is courting and making love.

  ‘Don’t you see it?’ she urged her friend. ‘Don’t you feel it? It’s as if the very air is caressing the skin of my neck, is touching my lips. Don’t you feel it? I can hardly breathe for desire.’

  Isolde stepped out of the gondola and stood at the water’s edge. Ishraq was helped on shore and took her hand and held it tightly as they waited for the two men to disembark. ‘Isolde, what are you going to do?’

  Isolde’s dark blue eyes glittered like sapphires through the dark blue of her mask. ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘Of course! Always! But not to a disaster. Shouldn’t I be holding you back?’

  ‘No,’ Isolde said. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘We’ll follow you as you go in,’ Brother Peter said, getting out of the gondola and gesturing that the two young women should lead the way up the stairs to the inside of the palace. Isolde, as if recalled to the proper behaviour for a young woman of a noble family, tightened the tie on her mask and went up the marble steps into the brightly lit house.

  They were expected, and at once a lady-in-waiting took the two young women up the sweeping stairs to the upper floor where the lady of the house was entertaining her friends. Menservants greeted Luca and Brother Peter and took their capes and hats, leaving them in their dark masks, and showed them up to the first floor. Freize, always at his happiest when he was heading towards dinner, stepped into the servants’ hall at the canal side.

  As she climbed the stairs, Isolde looked back and saw Luca swallowed up by the crowd of young men, and heard the rattle of dice and a cheer as someone won a small fortune at cards, and a ripple of laughter from the courtesans who would entertain the men, while the ladies had to go up to the next floor.

  ‘Greetings, how pleasant to meet you.’ The lady of the house, Lady Carintha, came forward and took their hands. She was an elegant woman, dressed in dark blue, almost the match of Isolde’s gown, except that hers plunged low at the front and almost slid off her broad shoulders in an open invitation. Her shining gold hair was piled up on the top of her head, in a swirl of blue silk, except for three ringlets which fell over her creamy naked s