Some of that gossip was about her in the last few months, she was sure. The cousins didn’t approve of Caesare. They really, really didn’t approve of her living with him. It wasn’t just that they weren’t married. A fair number of Caulker-guild brides, those of the Garavelli cousins among them, had tried for the reputation of having been the most pregnant at the altar. Cousin Rosina had looked as if she might just have to get the priest to help with the delivery! But Caesare came from above the salt. The Garavelli were artisans. Mostly caulkers, cladding Venice’s great ships. They had a pride in working with their hands and not much liking or trust for a man who didn’t.
She worked the oar just a bit faster. The only reason that bridge-brat Benito could have been giving her a silk scarf—a stolen silk scarf, she’d bet—was something to do with her Caesare. She set her mouth in a grim line. Scarf or no scarf, she’d sort that Benito out if he’d brought trouble onto her!
All the same . . . it was a gorgeous red, that scarf. It would set off her thick dark hair beautifully. She craved for lovely things like that—not for themselves but because they’d make her look a little less like a canal-girl. Caesare was so fine. Everything about him said Case Vecchie, from the smooth, curved golden hair that looked as if it were cast in bronze, to the long white hands. Her hands were work-hardened and brown. She’d kill young Benito if he’d brought trouble.
Without even realizing it, her fists were clenched tightly on the oars. Maria Garavelli was not one to back away from a fight. She’d been fighting for most of her young life; she could say it had even begun before she was born, when her mama’s own people had thrown her out for getting pregnant without the benefit of a husband. Like she’d have starved, except that she had a small boat, inherited from her grandfather, and a regular list of customers she made deliveries for, gotten on her own initiative. So Mama had worked right up through the first labor pains (so she’d said) and then headed for the canalside midwife she’d already made arrangements with, and the next day she was up and working again with Maria wrapped up in swaddling in a cradle made of half a cask.
Maria had grown up, like every other canal-brat, knowing that it was only fight and hard work that kept you that bare nail-paring away from starvation and disaster. She’d worked at Mama’s side from the time she could stand, and when Mama took the fever and died, she kept right on working.
And fighting. She had to fight with the toughs who saw her as an easy mark and tried to take her cargo or her pay. She had to fight with the other canal-boat owners who tried to steal her customers with implications that a “little girl on her own” couldn’t do what she’d pledged. She even had to fight Mama’s family who wanted her to come work at some miserable pittance of a dead-end job for them. She had to fight the boys—relatives and canalers and toughs—who figured since her mama had been “loose,” the daughter’s skirts were there for lifting. They finally let her be when one of their number had to join a castrati choir when she’d finished with him.
So it was no wonder that she’d never exchanged so much as a single solitary flirtatious glance with a boy, much less had anything like a romance. Oh, she’d certainly thought enough about it. She wasn’t made of wood, after all. When a good-looking tough sauntered by, flaunting himself for the admiration of the puttanas, or she’d see a wedding coming out of a church with the bride beaming—when she’d hear a snatch of song and see some love-sick student balanced precariously in a gondola, serenading a window she couldn’t help thinking . . . Even, on the rare occasions that she went to Mass at Saint Lucia’s and spent the entire time contemplating, not God, but the pale and beautiful face of Father Raphael—how could she not think about the ways of man-with-maid?