Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [53]
In the evening of the following day, Giuliano met his closest friend, Pietro Contarini, and they dined together. Giuliano savored the tastes of wine and food as if he might be hungry for months to come. They laughed over old jokes and sang songs they had known for years. They had grown up together, learned the same lessons, discovered the pleasures of wine and women and the misfortunes as well.
They had fallen in love for the first time in the same month, each confiding to the other the doubts and the pains, the triumphs, and then the agony of rejection. When they had discovered that it was the same girl, they had fought like wild dogs until first blood was drawn, Giuliano’s. Then instantly friendship was more important, and they had ended laughing at themselves. No woman had come between them since.
Pietro had married several years ago and had a son of whom he was immensely proud, and then two daughters. However, domestic responsibility had not dulled his eye for a pretty woman or robbed him of his joy in adventure.
Now they sat in the tavern facing the long sweep of the Grand Canal amid the laughter and clink of glasses, the smells of wine and salt water, food and leather, and smoke from cooling fires.
“Here’s to adventure….” Pietro raised his glass of rather good red wine to which Giuliano had treated them both, in honor of the occasion.
They touched glasses and drank.
“Here’s to Venice, and everything Venetian,” Giuliano added. “May her glory never grow dim.” He emptied his glass. “What time is it, do you think?”
“No idea. Why?”
“Going to say good-bye to Lucrezia,” Giuliano replied. “Won’t see her for a while.”
“Will you miss her?” Pietro asked curiously.
“Not much,” Giuliano said. Pietro had been nagging him to marry for some time. Even the thought of it made him feel trapped. Lucrezia was fun, warm, and generous, at least physically—but she was also cloying at times. The thought of committing himself to her was like locking a door that trapped him inside.
He put his empty glass on the table and stood up. He would enjoy being with Lucrezia. He had bought a gold filigree necklace to take her as a gift. He had chosen it with care, and he knew she would love it. He would miss her, her quiet laughter, the softness of her touch. But it still would not be hard to leave in the morning.
• • •
Giuliano found Naples a frightening and disturbingly beautiful place, full of unexpected impressions. The city had a vitality that excited him, as if the people tasted both the joy and the tragedy of life with a wholehearted intensity greater than that of others.
It had been founded by the Greeks, hence its name—Neapolis, New City—and the narrow streets followed a pattern like a grid, which the Greeks had formed. Many of them were well over a thousand years old, steep and shadowed by high houses. Giuliano listened to the laughter and the quarrels, the haggling over olives and fruit and fish, the splashing of fountains and the rattle of wheels. He smelled cooking and clogged drains, the perfume of bright trailing vines and flowers, and human and animal waste. He watched women scrubbing laundry by the fountains, gossiping with one another, laughing, scolding their children. Their loyalty was to life, not to any king, Italian or French.
The sun was bright and hotter than he was accustomed to. He was familiar with light on water, but the burning blue of the Bay of Naples, stretching to the horizon, had a brilliance to it that dazzled his eyes, yet he was drawn again and again to stand and stare at it.
But always intruding into his mind was the ominous presence of Mount Vesuvius looming behind the city to the south, now and then sending a breath of smoke up gently into the glittering peace of the sky.