“Milord, are you feeling all right?” he whispered, under cover of a burst of loud conversation from three tables over.
Aldanto smiled thinly. “To tell you the truth, boy—no. Afraid I’ve got a bit of a cold, or something. Felt like death two days ago and now it seems to be coming back. A bit worse if anything.”
He broke into a fit of coughing, and his shoulders shook again; and although he was plainly trying, not all of his iron will could keep the tremor invisible. Marco made up his mind on the instant.
Marco turned to his brother. “Benito—go find Maria. Get!”
Benito got. Aldanto looked at Marco with a kind of dazed puzzlement. “She’s probably on her way. What—”
“You’re drunk—act like it!” Marco whispered harshly. “Unless you want Giaccomo to throw you in the canal for bringing plague in here! I don’t much imagine he’d be real happy about that.”
He rose, shoved his chair back, and seized Aldanto’s arm to haul him to his feet before the other could protest or react. And that was another bad sign; Aldanto had the reactions of any trained assassin, quick and deadly. Only tonight those reactions didn’t seem to be working.
Marco had always been a lot stronger than he looked—with a month of regular meals he was more than a match for the fevered Caesare Aldanto.
“Now, Milord Caesare,” he said aloud—not too loudly, he hoped, but loud enough. “I think a breath of air would be a proper notion, no? I’m afraid Milord Giaccomo’s drink is a bit too good tonight.”
There were mild chuckles at that, and no one looked at them twice as Marco half-carried, half-manhandled Aldanto towards the door. Which was fortunate, for they both discovered when Aldanto tried to pull away that his legs were not up to holding him.
They staggered between the tables, weaving back and forth, Marco sagging under the nearly deadweight Aldanto had become. Out of the double doors they wove, narrowly avoiding a collision with an incoming customer, and down onto the lantern-lit front porch. Down a set of stairs were the tie-ups for small boats, only half of them taken tonight. And pulling up to those tie-ups was a gondola sculled by a dusky girl in a dark cap. Maria Garavelli and no mistaking her.
Marco eyed her uncertainly, not sure whether he was actually relieved that Benito had found her. . . .
Maria was notorious along the canals. Her mother, kin to half of the families in the Caulkers’ guild, had done the unthinkable—she’d gotten pregnant by some unknown father, refused to name him, refused to marry in haste some scraped-up suitor, and had been summarily thrown out on her ear by her enraged father. The woman had outfaced them all, bearing her child openly, raising her openly, and taking the gondola her grandfather had left her and making a place and a reputation for hard honest work right up until the day she died.
Maria had continued that reputation, though she had been only just big and strong enough to pole the boat over difficult passages when her mother went to the angels (or the Devil, depending on who was doing the telling). With her skirts tied up between her legs for ease in movement, that dark cap pulled over her ears and all of her hair tucked up into it, she was as androgynous a creature as any castrati. Working a boat from the time she could walk had given her wide, strong shoulders and well-muscled arms. Her pointed chin and high cheekbones looked female, but the square jaw hinges and deep-set brown eyes, usually narrowed with suspicion, would have been more at home in a man’s face. There wasn’t anything about their expression that looked soft or female, nor was there in the thin lips, generally frowning. She hadn’t a woman’s complexion, that was for sure; she was as brown as any bargeman. If there were breasts under that shapeless shirt, it wouldn’t be easy to tell. But there was more than a hint of womanly shape in the curve of her hips—and her legs were the best on the canal.
Of course, if you dared to tell her so, she’d probably punch you in the jaw so hard it would be three days before you woke up.