Free In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant

make this work. What is this bog of self-pity? Your mother didn’t teach you this. We could be breeding maggots now, like half the rest of Rome. With the right salves on your wounds and a fire in your stomach, we might be eating off silver plates before next summer comes around. But if they shaved your spirit when they shaved your head, then you’d better tell me now, because I didn’t come to this cesspit of a city, where sewers run like open veins and where I am indeed scarcely bigger than the rats, for you to give up on us now.”
    I pulled myself off the bed. There are those who say that it is funny to watch squat men posture indignation, that when dwarves stamp their feet, kings and nobles only laugh. But my mistress was not laughing now. “I’ll come back when there is more in your stomach than bile.”
    I moved toward the door and stood there for a long moment. When I looked back, she was sitting, staring at the plate, jaw set, and though she would not admit it later, there were tears sliding down her cheeks.
    I waited. She put out her hand and took a scoop of fish flesh. I watched the flakes go into her mouth, saw the threads of saliva forming at the edges of her lips as she chewed doggedly. She sniffed and took a sip from the glass. I stayed where I was. She took another mouthful, and then another slurp of wine.
    â€œWhen she left Rome, she had enough to live well here,” she said in a fierce whisper. “It was what she wanted. To come back to this house and live like a lady. Yet all that’s left is filth and sickness. I don’t know what happened here.”
    I have few enough memories of my own mother. She died when I was still young. Some people said it was the burden of having given birth to such a monstrosity, but I do not believe that, for in the hazy tumble of the past, there is a woman’s face smiling down at me, holding me, running her fingers over the top of my head as if it was a thing of wonder rather than a thing of shame. My lady’s mother I had known for the best part of two years, when my employment overlapped with her increasing homesickness in Rome and her decision to leave. No doubt she had been a beauty once, for she still held herself more like a lady than like a whore, but her face had grown sharp counting purses. For the first six months, she spied on me as a falcon spies on a mouse in the grass, waiting for it to break cover enough to pounce, and she would have had my liver for dog meat if she had spotted as much as a missing button from the household accounts. There are those who would say that she sold her only daughter into prostitution to provide for her own old age. But all the moralists I have met either live off the Church or have purses of their own to nourish their sanctimony, and where I come from, anyone with a profitable trade would be a fool not to pass the tricks of it on to their children. All I know is that Madame Bianchini was a woman with a stout head on her and a fist as tight as an asshole when it came to money. When she was in her right mind, it would have taken more than Meragosa to swindle anything out of her. Though my lady had missed her when she had left, she was well trained by then and not one to dwell on what she couldn’t have. That, too, was something she had been taught. There are times, however, even in the best learners, when despair cuts sharper than the will.
    I walked back to the bed and clambered up close to her. She rubbed her eyes fiercely with the back of her hand. “Remember what they say, Bucino?” she said at last. “How if you sleep in a bed where someone has died, you too are doomed unless it’s been blessed with holy water?”
    â€œYes, and the same people also say that God doesn’t let anyone die on the same day they go to Mass. Yet the ground gobbles gangs of pious widows and nuns every day. What? You never heard that one?”
    â€œNo,” she said, and her smile