Free 5 - Her Deadly Mischief by Beverle Graves Myers Page B

risking his wrath.
    Eventually, Messer Grande addressed his prisoner in a tone of sorry reproof. “I’ve already made inquiries at the Pearl of the Waves.”
    “Yes?” The question was a whisper.
    “You were spotted the minute you stepped over the threshold.”
    Alessio clutched the bars again. A look of fear passed over his features, but he quickly collected himself. He cleared his throat. “You’re right, and I beg your pardon, Excellency. I mustn’t lie. It will just cause more trouble, won’t it?”
    “You may be sure of it. What was your business at the Pearl of the Waves?”
    “I was supposed to meet someone, but I was late. The man had already left.”
    “Who is this man?”
    “I…I can’t tell you.”
    “Your tongue seems to be working perfectly to me.”
    “All right. I refuse to tell you.”
    Messer Grande slapped his tricorne on his breeches. “This isn’t sport!” he cried. “Answer me, man! Who were you meeting before the opera?”
    Pale, serious, countenance as cold as the surrounding stones, Alessio shook his head. “It’s a matter of honor, involving innocent men. You must take my word that the business had nothing to do with Zulietta’s death.”
    Messer Grande drew himself up. His nostrils flared to twice their size. I shuddered for Alessio’s sake. Was the boy brave or foolish or merely stubborn?
    “An innocent man has nothing to hide,” Messer Grande said. “If you won’t answer my simple question, I’m forced to believe that you murdered the courtesan Zulietta Giardino.”
    Alessio went very still. He replied in exquisitely pronounced words, “I loved Zulietta. I would never hurt one hair on her head.”
    “Perhaps you did love her…until you discovered that she’d made a cynical, corrupt bargain for your heart.”
    “The wager? Is that what you mean?” Alessio ran a hand over his jaw. He looked to me as if I could offer help. Finding none, he turned back to his interrogator with a challenge writ large on his face. “I wouldn’t have killed Zulietta over that wager.”
    Messer Grande grunted his disbelief. “Are you made of granite, then? Your lady deceived you shamefully. If her plan had come to fruition, you would have been the butt of ridicule for years to come. Women have been murdered for far less. Just last month, a husband strangled his wife for trying to convince him that his cat-meat stew was really chicken. The magistrate went easy on him—only ten years in the galleys. Perhaps the court would find you worthy of equal leniency…” The chief constable lowered his voice. “If you start telling me the truth.”
    “I am telling the truth. Some of your questions I’m not at liberty to answer, but what I can tell will be the full truth. The women’s wager had no power to wound me. I could have put an end to it whenever I chose, but Zulietta was keen to proceed. She wanted to get one up on La Samsona—payment for past misdeeds, apparently. We laughed about the wager and about her rival’s obnoxious efforts to seduce me. Then we went on to discuss more serious things.”
    “That’s not how I heard it,” Messer Grande retorted.
    Alessio’s eyes flashed. “If you heard it from Pamarino, you can be sure it’s a lie.”
    Messer Grande raised his brows in silent question.
    “He’s a preposterous little man,” Alessio continued, “who makes himself difficult in a hundred ways. He took an extreme dislike to me on our first meeting. I don’t understand why Zulietta kept him around. She was too kind.”
    “By his own words, he served as cavaliere servente and majordomo rolled into one.”
    “Pamarino exaggerates his own importance, Excellency. And since I stand behind these bars, I can only assume the pitiful creature has also exaggerated a few things about me.”
    “You are here because you hid from the law. Why would an innocent man do that?”
    Alessio shook his head as if that vigorous motion could dispel a horrifying memory. “I beseech you, put