Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [213]
He forced himself to smile. “If you have your mother’s papers, I daresay you are aware of a great deal that others are not. Some of it will be very dangerous. But you must already know that?”
“Oh yes, very dangerous indeed,” she said in little more than a whisper. “But you are foolish to pretend that you know of what you speak, Your Grace.” Her smile was bright and hard. “You don’t.”
What was it that obviously pleased her so much? She was looking at him and gloating. Why?
“It seems not,” he agreed, lowering his eyes as if he were crestfallen.
Helena laughed, a shrill, cruel sound. “I see my mother did not share it with you,” she observed. “But she discovered that your precious eunuch, whom you admire so much, is actually the most superb liar! His entire life and everything about him is a lie.”
Palombara stiffened, anger swirling up inside him.
Helena looked at him with derision. “Or to be accurate, I should say ‘her whole life.’” She went on, “Anna Zarides is as much a woman as I am. Or at least legally she is. There must be something repulsively wrong with her that she would masquerade as a man all these years, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you say it was a sin? What do you think I should do, Bishop Palombara? Should I assist in her deceit? Is that morally right?”
He was so stunned he could hardly find his voice. Yet as Helena said the words, he believed them. He looked at her face, shining with malice, and he hated her.
Then he smiled. Her envy was so highly visible. Zoe was gone, and now Helena could not taste her victory completely. Without Zoe to see, there was no flavor in it. But she could at least destroy Anastasius, the daughter Zoe had preferred.
Palombara met Helena’s eyes and saw the fury in them. “My condolences,” he repeated, then excused himself and walked away.
Outside in the street, the sense of triumph wore off within moments, replaced by fear. If Anastasius was actually a woman and Helena knew it, then she was in the most intense danger. If Helena chose to expose her, he did not know what punishment Anastasius would face, but it would be savage.
Zoe had known and had not betrayed Anastasius’s secret. That too was a mystery. She must, in her own way, have had a great respect, even a kind of affection, for her.
He walked along the busy street with the crowd jostling around him. News of the fleet having left for Messina had reached Constantinople with the ship on which Palombara arrived. Fear spread like fire on the wind, sharp and dangerous, edged with panic, quick to violence as the threat became suddenly no longer a nightmare, but a reality.
He walked more rapidly, facing into the wind. The more he considered what Helena had said, the more it frightened him. Should he find Anna Zarides and warn her? But what use would that be? There was nothing she could do, except perhaps flee, like so many others. But would she do that? It led him to the question of why she had ever begun such a desperate course in the first place.
Dressed as a woman, she would be beautiful. Why did Anna Zarides not use that? What could have compelled her to such an act, and over the space of years? Who or what did she care about to this cost?
To find out, he began with a man he knew quite well who had been a patient of Anastasius’s for some time. From him, Palombara learned of people she had treated without charge in her work with Bishop Constantine.
The picture emerged of a woman dedicated to medicine, absorbed in its practice but also fascinated by its details, its art, its curiosities, and the endless learning it inspired. Yet she was not without fault. She made errors of judgment, and she had a temper. Palombara became increasingly aware of a sense of guilt within her, although he had no idea what caused it. The more he learned, the more he was fascinated by her, the more intense became his need to protect her.
Over and over again, Anna Zarides appeared to have asked about the murder of Bessarion Comnenos.
Had she had some relationship with him? But she had not been to Constantinople before, and he had never left