Free In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant Page A

ignited the spark of her spirit just for that instant. She held out her glass, and I refilled it. She took a longer draft this time. “You don’t think it was the pox, do you? I saw no sign of it on her, and surely she would have told me if it had been. But everyone knows that this city has it even more than Rome. Boats and boils—they go together. That’s what she used to tell me.” She looked up at me. “Have you really decided against it so soon, Bucino? I warned you that it would smell worse in summer.”
    I shook my head and lied with my eyes. At another time she would have noticed.
    â€œThere was a girl, when we lived here,” she said. “She was young, maybe only a few years older than I…. Her name was Elena something, but we used to call her La Draga. She had something wrong with her that made her walk strangely, and her eyes were bad, but she was clever and knew about plants and healing. My mother would get potions from her. There was a liquid. The Courtesans’ Cordial we used to call it. Holy water and pulped mare’s kidney. I swear that’s what my mother said it was. It would bring on bleeding if you were late. La Draga could make all kinds of stuff. She cured me once of a coughing fever when everyone else thought I was going to die.” She ran her fingers over the edge of the cut on her forehead into her stubbly hair. “If we could get in touch with her, I think she might know what to do with this.”
    â€œIf she’s in Venice, I’ll find her.”
    â€œWhat price did you get for the emeralds?”
    I told her, and she nodded quietly. “I don’t think he swindled me.”
    She laughed. “If he did, he would be the first.”
    Outside, a fat gull swooped past, screeching at the sun. She glanced out the window. “You know the air is better on the big canals. Many of the bigger houses have gardens, with frangipani and lavender and bowers of wild jasmine. When my mother was at her most successful, she was invited sometimes to such places. She would come back in the mornings afterward and wake me; get into my bed and tell me of the rich guests, the food and the clothes. Sometimes she’d have a blossom or some petals she had hidden in her dress, though to me they smelled as much of the men as of the garden. She would try to find the right words to make me imagine it all. ‘As sweet as Arcadia’ was the nearest she could get.”
    She looked back at me, and I knew the danger was past.
    â€œAs sweet as Arcadia. Now that would be something to aim for, wouldn’t you say, Bucino?”

CHAPTER THREE
    Downstairs, the kitchen is still empty and the food untouched. In the closeness of the room, with my stomach sated, my own smell rises up to clog my nostrils. I wedge a broken chair against the door, mix a pail of stove water with a few cups from the well bucket, and pull off my sweat-caked clothes. In Rome we used to wash with imported Venetian soap, so scented and fat that it looked almost good enough to eat, but here there is only a sliver of hard cake, which, when I pump fast enough, makes a thin lather sufficient to drown a few lice, though I doubt it does much to sweeten my smell.
    The road has taken its toll on me also, eating into the roundness of my trunk and thinning my thighs so that the skin on them is flabby. I suds my balls as best I can and hold them in my hand for a moment, my prick shriveled like a salted slug. It has been some time since it has been as gainfully employed as my wits. While there is nothing to be earned from my squashed stature (if you discount the oohs and aahs of a bored crowd watching a dwarf juggling fire and then prancing around as if it had burned him), my body and I have lived together now for some thirty years, and I have grown fond of its strangeness—which, after all, is not that strange to me. Hunchbacks. Cripples. Dwarves. Children whose mouths are joined to their