“Not a minute more.” Belinda gathered her skirts and climbed from the boat, her picnic basket swinging from one elbow. A young man with dark gypsy eyes and a ready white smile offered her a hand up, and she took it against her better sense, murmuring, “Grazie.”
His smile flashed deeper, showing dimples. She pressed a small coin into his hand and moved away, climbing up the steps and turning to walk back to the bridge the gondola had passed under. When she looked back, the gypsy man was staring at the coin in his hand with an expression of indignation.
* * * *
A woman waited on the bridge, leaning over stone that made up railing and wall both, watching her reflection in the water below. Belinda took up a place on the far side of the bridge, several feet down from the other woman, and studied her as she waited for her contact. She was lovely in the expensive way of a courtesan, not the more demure beauty of a well-behaved wife: she wore chartreuse, the strength of the colour far beyond what Belinda would ever be able to wear. Her corsets made her torso long and slender, narrowing her hips and pushing her breasts high. The skirts were full but light: Belinda imagined the woman could ride a horse astride in those skirts. Her hair was dark, highlighted with gold in the afternoon sun, and her forehead high. Lorraine would approve, adoring the popular theory that a high forehead was a sign of intelligence. The women of Lorraine’s court plucked their hairlines to emulate the queen. Belinda stilled her hand before it wandered to explore her own hairline; she already knew it followed Robert’s more closely than Lorraine’s, and that was just as well. Lorraine’s widow’s peak was distinctive, and a girl marked with it would draw comment and speculation that the queen could not afford.
Belinda deliberately inhaled, changing the tilt of her head to help chase away thoughts of Aulun and the queen. The woman across the bridge laughed unexpectedly, flinging a hand out. A gold coin sparkled through the air and hit a passing gondola’s deck with a thunk barely audible above the sound of water lapping against the canal walls. Belinda went still within herself, keeping her expression mildly animated as her gaze went to the gondola passing beneath her. A delighted pole-boy scampered forward and scooped up the coin that had landed on his boat, shouting, “Thank you, signora!” up at the bridge.
“You’re welcome!” the woman shouted back. She turned toward Belinda, looking through her and beyond her, a smile curving her full mouth. She waved; Belinda looked over her shoulder to see the gypsy man bowing deeply and extravagantly. The woman laughed and turned away again without meeting Belinda’s eyes; without giving her any sign that she was to be approached.
Belinda looked back at the water, watching the shadow of another bridge swallow the second gondola the woman had gifted with a coin. She tapped one finger against the stone wall, and decided: she would wait, and see how fate ruled a third time.
When it ruled in favour of another coin thrown to a bright-eyed young gondola lad, Belinda tilted her face up to the sun and swore under her breath.
“Gone and left you then, has he?” The woman across the bridge had a warm alto, a burr to her voice that gave it an edge of sultriness. A voice practised for the bedroom, Belinda thought, and glanced at the woman. There was still a chance; her father had never before sent a woman to meet her.
“Abandoned and left cold,” she replied. “Ungrateful bastard.”
The woman laughed again, a rich comforting sound, and crossed the bridge to lean next to Belinda, her hands turned wrist-out against the stone wall. “Was he rich?”
“No,” Belinda said. “Nor handsome, either.”
The woman arched finely shaped eyebrows. “What’s the point, then?”
“I suppose it’s all in what we do for God and country.” Belinda spoke the coded words with a shrug. The woman’s eyebrows shot up.
“Sod God and bugger country. I want a palmful of coin and a feather bed.”
Belinda let herself laugh aloud, relaxing against the rail. The dark-haired woman at her side was certainly not her contact. Despite what had seemed to be the signal coin, her answer left everything to be desired as a pass code, though not as a brazen woman. “With four posts and a canopy?” she asked. The woman shook her head vehemently.