see the thing. As I gazed upon the crazy lines and divisions, the countries of our world marked out in gold upon an immense azure disk, I marveled at how small our own peninsula was, and yet how powerful. As we crossed back over the lagoon, choppy angry jade waters that day, I noted at firsthand how skillful Signor Cristoforo was at sea. I sat in my cushions, tasting the spray that flecked my lips salty as a man’s seed, and relaxed. Not for me the heaving and retching over the side that poor Marta, my constant chaperone, was experiencing. I watched the treacherous witch heave her guts up, with no small pleasure. For I had been in a worse pass than this in the straits of Naples, shipwrecked and near drowned. I looked at my tutor, competent at the tiller, his pale eyes narrowed at the sky, seeing to the horizon and beyond, and wondered what he would say if he knew I had more practical experience of seagoing than he thought. But my tutor was busy warning me of the high tide, or acqua alta, that flooded the city each autumn and spring, And it was Signor Cristoforo who told me, when we were safe in San Marco’s basin, with my white prison looming above, the most valuable piece of information he had ever imparted to me. As he cursed the ignorant tourists clogging the waterways, he complained that in a sennight things would be ten times worse, for every gondola and traghetto the city owned would be abroad on the Grand Canal for Carnevale. At this time the city held a great celebration before the privations of Lent began; fourteen days and nights of drinking and debauchery and daily regattas on the Grand Canal. Twenty times worse, said he, for at Carnevale everyone went about masked and costumed and jug-bitten, so the inexperienced sailors were further handicapped by being drunk and having their vision obscured by masks and their limbs impeded by heavy costumes. Several revelers drowned each year, said he, but, he finished with typical dry humor, not nearly enough. I pictured these unfortunates falling from their perch to be dragged below by heavy velvets and brocades. I thought fleetingly of those well-dressed skeletons dancing below us, weighed down by their fancy shoes, upright and dancing for eternity in an eerie measure, their own underwater Carnevale of the dead.
By that time I had made up my mind.
I dismissed Marta as soon as I reached my room. Tool and spy of my mother’s she may have been, but she was also lazy, and went quickly enough, knowing that I was once more safe in my cell. I had to be alone to think. I calculated—I had been here some months; the long winter was passing. My heart had turned to ice in this snow palace but was beginning to thaw again; a little of the beating matter remained, a small ruby of flesh within me that burned like a tiny coal. That tiny kernel blossomed and grew together with the beginnings of an idea that spread the warmth all the way through my body and burned in my cheeks. I knew at once that that time of Carnevale—of masks and confusion, of dissembling and deceit, of constant, unnoticed leisure voyages—must be the time that I quit this place. I planned to leave the city as I had done sixteen years ago—by boat to Mestre and then by horse cart to Florence, there to seek the one I could not bear to be without.
I knew that I needed help, and knew I must look to my tutor for it, because he was the nearest to a friend that I had—all the other servants of this place, and even my father, were bewitched by my mother and utterly in her thrall. I knew also that I put Signor Cristoforo at great risk if I told him what I intended; yet I could not think of anyone’s safety but that of Brother Guido. I needed a boatman to take me from Venice, February was already upon us, and I was certain that Signor Cristoforo knew every seagoing wight in the city. I decided to broach my problem at our next lesson. On the appointed day I could not break my fast but sent my kitchen girl back with the tray untouched. I could barely stand still to be dressed—appropriately, in a gown and shift as blue as the sea, with