"Was it you?"
His voice behind her ear. His hands at her waist. The high-ceilinged room lost in shadow. Gas lights turned low in the sconce by the door, and the red-orange glow of a slowly dying fire in the antique grate. The wood smoked for hours before the damp was burned out of it, so the air smelled of soot and bitter myrrh and crushed styrax of sacred incense, and cut through with the sweet, woody musk of ambergris and and artemnesia still clinging to her sweat-damp hair.
"Tighter." She watched the moonlight move across the waters, the dull flicker of lights on Giudecca. Through the half-shaded Arabesque windows, the hum of the city's turbines a low and constant drone. Took a deep breath and braced herself to feel the familiar bite of the metal stays into her skin. "You have to lace them more tightly than that."
Just before sunset the rains had cleared away. Sunlight washed across the horizon as the clouds swept west. The pollution from the belching smokestacks of Mestre on and Malcontenta and Porto Marghera, on the mainland to the east, washed out by the constant rains, and so the sky was briefly clear. The peaks of the Alps visible in the distance capped with snow. The jagged evening light, that living, rose-window glow that enveloped the city gave way to this: a rare, clear, autumnal night. The moon riding the gently rocking waters of the lagoon.
"You Anglish women. You won't be able to breathe."
"We don't breathe. Far too vulgar. We just sip the air."
His laughter was quiet, his voice low. "Let me unlace them." Insinuating, just behind her ear. He wore no more than a dressing gown, the red robes of office strewn across the fainting couch. "Stay the night."
There were lights in the Redentore. Burning through the clerestory of the San Giacomo. And it struck her then that he did not mean Kitty Bridlington, but instead the family in the Campo of St. Ives. The husband. The girl. The atomized in the air. The responsive knot in her stomach uncoiled, then. Inappropriate laughter lodged itself in the back of her throat. She took one breath, then another, to swallow it back, voicelessly.
He took this for invitation. Wrapped his hands around her waist, and bent to lay a gentle kiss on the curve of her bare shoulder. "Well?"
"Don't you have souls of the dead to pray for?" Aspersion in her tone.
"I'm in private contemplation tonight. The wonders of mortality. The fragility of mankind." Mouth drifting along her bare skin; voice a low hum. "Was it you? If it was you, you should confess to me." His hands tightened at her waist, and he pulled her back, against him.
She did not yield.
"The stays, Galaxio."
Nor did he.
"Take the sacrament. Let me pry the iron nails of mortal sin from your tender soul. Save you from the flames of hell." Insistent. "The husband. The child, murdered at prayer."
"Your god, would she really listen to you? Look at all the vows you've shattered this eve alone."
"Your god, too. Converso."
"No." Her tone crisp and clear. "It was not me." Kitty Bridlington's dead blue eyes in the back of her mind. The distorted, bloated corpse surfacing in the blue-green waters of the canal. The wretched, hollow stare of her husband when the Garda called upon him to name her before a magistrate, the sweet scent of decay heavy in the air of that paneled room.
"I do wonder if the girl was really murdered. Or perhaps instead transported somewhere. Still, is this a suspicion you are actually entertaining, Gallo? Do you really believe me capable of cold-blooded murder."
"Mmph." His low laughter, wry, hands slipping from her waist to find the laces of her stays. "Not really. Or, should I say: Only in service to a cause."
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