Free The Rossetti Letter (v5) by Christi Phillips

expensive inn on the Grand Canal, near the Rialto, so we would be close to the place where all the richest and most influential men in Venice congregated. On the very first morning after we arrived, my mother went out for a few hours, returning with a blue silk dress more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. She’d gone to the Ghetto and pawned her only piece of jewelry so that I would have something pretty to wear. Once she’d fitted the dress, and oiled and combed my hair, she bade me stand by the window overlooking the canal.
    “After a while, a gondola came by and stopped under the window. In it was a young lord, dressed very fine.” La Celestia smiled faintly. “I even remember what he wore: red hose and a red feather in his biretta. When he saw me, he burst into raptures.
    “‘Oh, my glorious lady!’ he called. ‘My heart is aflame! Your beauty is such as I have never seen! From whence do you come? Are you a stranger to this city? You must be, for certainly you are an angel, not a woman! Speak to me, my angel! If you cannot speak, show me a sign and I shall be yours forever, for your loveliness is beyond compare!’
    “And on and on he went. Everyone nearby was curious to see the great beauty who had captured this young lord’s heart. More gondole came to the window, and soon there were men of all sorts staring up at me. They shouted at me to step farther out on the balcony, to show myself, to let them feast their eyes. I grew afraid and went inside instead, to ask my mother what to do.
    “And I saw something I’d never seen before, and would never see again. My mother’s shoulders shook with mirth, and tears rolled down her face: she was laughing and crying at the same time. I said, ‘Mother, why do you laugh? Why do you cry?’
    “She replied, ‘I cry because I know now that everything is going to be fine, and we will not end up begging in the streets. I laugh because in singing your praises, that ridiculous boy has become a lyric poet—he babbles on far beyond what I paid him to say!’”
    Alessandra’s eyes grew wide. “She paid him?”
    La Celestia laughed. “My mother didn’t believe in leaving anything to chance. However, this young lord kept coming back to see me, even without further recompense. But no matter; soon he was just one among many.
    “Every day thereafter, all the men in Venice came by to get a glimpse of the new beauty who had just arrived in town. And a glimpse is all they got—for as I said, my mother was shrewd, and she played upon their curiosity like a fine musician plays an instrument. One day they might see a bare arm, or an ankle, or my hair cascading down my back, or my face in profile. I’m not saying I wasn’t pretty—I was—but this mystery combined with the imagination of men’s minds was incredibly powerful. Soon it was all over Venice that I was the most beautiful woman ever to grace the city. That I was also a virgin and destined to be a cortigiana onestà created a frenzy that surprised even my mother. Men sent their servants bearing all sort of gifts: fruit, flowers, jewels, expensive cloth. Poets wrote sonnets about me, and artists pleaded to paint my portrait.
    “One day, one of the men who was courting me recited a poem in which he called me ‘La Celestia.’ In it he wrote that I was as beautiful and as remote as the heavens, and somehow the name stuck. From then on, I was no longer little Faustina Emiliana Zolta from Treviso, but only La Celestia. Even my mother began calling me La Celestia because she understood the benefits immediately: I was transformed from a pretty girl into something akin to a goddess. My new name only added to my mystique; men became absolutely crazed with passion for me. Fights broke out in the gondole that gathered under my window. When the passions were at their most fervent, my mother began the bargaining. She sold my virginity six times. Amazing what you can do with gum Arabic, rosewater, and sheep’s blood, and, most