Cross My Heart Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Working Partners Ltd., London

  Jacket art copyright © 2011 Ilona Wellman/Trevillion Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the UK by Razorbill, an imprint of the Penguin Group, a division of Penguin Books, Ltd., London, in 2011.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gould, Sasha.

  Cross my heart / Sasha Gould.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm.

  Summary: When Laura della Scala’s older sister drowns, Laura leaves the shelter of the convent where she has spent the last six years and enters the upper echelons of sixteenth-century Venetian society, while she searches for the truth about what happened to her sister.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98540-9

  [1. Secret societies—Fiction. 2. Sex role—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction. 4. Venice (Italy)—History—16th century—Fiction. 5. Italy—History—16th century—Fiction. 6. Mystery and detective stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G73585Cr 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011012357

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  With special thanks to

  Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  About the Author

  Prologue

  HIS GONDOLA SLIPS THROUGH THE WATER like a knife cutting into dark silk. The two passengers rustle and laugh, but from where he’s standing he can’t really see what they’re up to. It’s none of his concern if some rich old gentleman wants to pay for favors from a young beauty—even if she is some other father’s daughter.

  He sighs, pulls his oar against the water and slows to a stop. Wordlessly he helps them both onto the street. For a second he looks straight into the eyes of the man, taking payment, and then the improbable couple sweeps off, the man’s shoes clacking quickly on the stone, the girl’s laughter floating up into the night. Their steps echo down the lane past St. Mark’s Square.

  His gondola shines and flashes in the moonlight as he starts to make his way home. He steers it with the skill of generations, gliding by the looming palazzos, slanting and turning past St. Zulian, St. Salvador and Mazzini—along back canals that draw their convoluted chart from St. Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge. It’s a confusing network, full of false turns and unexpected hazards—easy to get lost, especially at night. Unless you’re a gondolier, in which case you know these watery alleys like the lines on your own face.

  He’s close to home when he hears it: a long and awful scream that fills the night. There’s splashing too, and someone bangs a stick on a rail. He rounds a corner and sees an old woman running up and down the bank, begging for help, still wailing. High above, shutters creak open. A voice thick with sleep throatily demands an end to the commotion. Curious faces lean from the frames of weakly lit windows.

  At first he thinks that what he sees in the water is a sheet or a curtain—a swollen, soggy dome bobbing gently in the blackness. He drifts closer and sees that it’s a dress that breaks the surface. A woman. Shoeless and facedown. She floats near enough the edge to be pulled to the bank by his oar. With the help of the old woman, he hauls her body onto the stone verge. He’s aware of the people gathering in a ring around them. Slowly, heavily, he turns her over.

  It is a girl, perhaps twenty. Soft fingers, now cold. Lips, already blue. In life she must have been exquisite. The eyes are half open, staring limpidly at the sky.

  The old woman’s wails become deeper. First she falls beside the body, pulling strands of wet hair from the dead face. Then she stands up and clutches at him with bony hands, wetly clinging to his jacket. “God help me, God help her. Jesus, God in heaven, do something for us!”

  He takes the woman’s hands and holds them for a moment in his. To the onlookers, it could seem like a gesture of comfort or care. But really it’s his effort to disentangle himself from all this panic and grief. “Signora. I’m sorry, Signora, but there’s no helping her now,” he says, and slips away.

  None of us is known by our real name in here. Almost as soon as you arrive, you’re christened all over again: La Grossa, La Cadavara, La Lunatica, La Trista, La Puera, La Pungenta—Fat, Deathly, Mad, Sad, Fearful and Stinky. Inside the walls of the convent, sneering adjectives are transformed, sooner or later, into names.

  They call me La Muta—The Silent One. It isn’t that I don’t have plenty to say, it’s just that most of the time I keep things to myself. Daughters learn this early. Second daughters sooner.

  The Abbess used to tell me that she could see something feral in my soul—that there was something of the animal about me. A dog, perhaps, or maybe a rat. The creatures that slip into the convent at night in search of chicken bones and rotting food. It’s something that she’s determined to stamp out.

  My life, which once belonged to my father, now belongs to her. I am awake before two for prayers and then again at five, to go and sing perfect harmonies as the Venetian sun rises behind the grilles and the bars, dancing on the marble and gold in the chapel.

  The Abbess controls all the correspondence coming in and going out. Sometimes she withholds the letters from my sister Beatrice and I can’t read them. Tell me your news, I beg Beatrice in writing. When will you marry Vincenzo? Does he make you happy? None of my questions can be asked without undergoing the prudish scrutiny of the Abbess. To a suspicious mind, alert to all possible evils, any of my words could somehow appear saturated with sin.

  “I see everything,” the Abbess tells me. “I know what is in your mind.”

  I used to believe her. I used to think that perhaps she really did have the power to see my secret longings leaking like olive oil from the press. Certainly, I’ve seen her holding our letters out in front of her by the corners as if there’s a danger they’ll smear her cowl or habit. As if they’re greasy, grubby things.

  Some of Beatrice’s letters reach me. I hide them under a wooden fl
oorboard with my own ring and with a silk-ribboned lock of her hair. Late at night, when Annalena is snoring and shifting under her sheets, I take my sister’s folded ink-filled paper treasures and I read them again and again. Each of her letters carries something from the outside world, smuggling it inside these walls that separate us. Through nothing but an accident of birth, she remains free, while I languish.

  Annalena is my conversa, my lay sister, my servant nun, and she teases me for smiling in my sleep. She says my eyelids flutter and she wonders what worlds I’m traveling to in the dark.

  In my dreams I’m a child again. Beatrice and I are running down to the Lido for treats from Paulina’s grandmother. Paulina—my friend without a father. It always saddened me that her papa had died when he was young, but now I wonder whether she might actually have been blessed, living as she did, alone with her mother. Her grandmama shrouded her body in black clothes, and the skin on her face was hard and grooved like a walnut.

  “The little princesses,” she would call us. And she would lisp, “Shhh!” and say “Don’t tell your papa you were here.” And as she looked at our faces she would gasp, “Oh, what husbands you’ll have! What riches! How many men will long to touch your skin and to comb your hair with their fingers!”

  She had a bakery, and in the summer, when she couldn’t bear the heat of the ovens, she would let them cool down and make nothing but meringues. She was famous for them. The recipe was known only to her, given to her by her own mother and her mother’s mother before her. Sospiri di monaca. That’s what they were called. “The sighs of nuns.” Many recipes share this poignant name, but none have ever tasted like the meringues of Paulina’s grandmother.

  On my seventh birthday, Paulina had taken me by the hand and we had run sweating and serious to her grandmother’s bakery, where we both stood silently, looking at the wizened woman. “Grandmama,” she had said eventually. “Laura’s seven years old today.”

  “E vero?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  With fingers bent and twisted and brown, like twigs on an old tree, she put seven “sighs” in a little basket and handed it to me. I took a meringue and I bit into it. Brittle at first, and then soft, slowly giving up its flavors of golden sugar from the East, roasted hazelnuts from the South and the zest of Tuscan lemons. I closed my eyes. The sigh that came out of my mouth was hot on my hand.

  “Oh, sweetheart!” The old woman grinned. “May all the pleasures in your life be so rapturous and so easy to make.”

  In my dreams it’s always summer. My mother is still alive, and she’s smiling. In the six years since I’ve been in the convent, slowly but terrifyingly it’s dawned on me that I’ve forgotten the details of her face. It must be because I’m about to be confirmed. They have set the date. I’m to become a Bride of Christ. The older nuns talk about it like a real wedding. An ethereal groom standing stern beside me, looking at me with neither pride nor with lust, but rather with the arrogance of a father, the stillness of a dead saint. The combined power of Doge and Pope.

  I wonder if my sister has kept up her drawing. Perhaps she can send me a picture. She was always the better artist, more methodical; I used to become impatient, losing perspective and spoiling the lines with haste.

  Mama. Her misty breath, as sweet as sugared almonds, was warm on my skin. I used to breathe her in, that angel mother of mine. I may not be able to see her face anymore, but I can still smell her: lavender, cinnamon, blossoms of orange and cherry.

  My letter is short.

  Dear Beatrice,

  Please tell me again what Mama’s face looked like. Send me a sketch, if you can.

  Love from your Laura

  There’s nothing for the Abbess to scratch or blot out. I worry that even the absence of something to censor will somehow frustrate and enrage her.

  The Abbess allows the letter to be sent. And then I wait.

  Three days have passed, and still no letter from Beatrice. The only other letters I receive, perhaps four times a year, are from my brother, Lysander, but he’s older than me by ten years—a stranger almost. He lives a scholarly life in Bologna, a place so distant I can’t really imagine it. My father never writes at all.

  I’m in the convent garden—and so is Abbess Lucrezia. It’s too late to turn around. She has seen me seeing her. She fixes her pale, watery old reptilian eyes on me, still and alert.

  “You’re needed in the infirmary. Go there directly.”

  I bow my head and rush off.

  It’s cool in the infirmary, and it smells pleasant today. Candles twinkle and shimmer in the dark. There’s a man making a terrible noise—wails and growls like those of two stray dogs at each other’s throats. He’s been put on one of the hard infirmary benches. Cushions and blankets are piled around him to protect his thrashing limbs from the bareness of the place. His body twists as though he’s possessed. From his mouth comes a whitish-yellow froth, like a clump of sea foam left on the Lido on a stormy day. His eyes roll back and the lids quiver.

  Sister Maria runs around and around the bench like an ineffectual insect, trying to get near enough to tend to him. She gets close, but one of his limbs lashes out and strikes her, knocking her prayer book out of one hand and a bottle of medicine from the other. She glances at me and runs to the shelf, grabbing a small length of wood.

  “He’ll bite out his tongue in a moment,” she says. “Hold his arms!”

  I try to restrain his twisting limbs as she attempts to wedge the piece of wood into his mouth. I don’t think there’s any chance she’ll succeed. The man’s mouth alternately gapes, wide and drooling, and then clenches shut—immovable and grunting. Sister Maria tries to find an elusive moment in between these contortions to force the wood in between the man’s teeth. She gives up the battle and slides away from him, exhausted and sweating, waving an arm limply at me, saying, “Take over. Take over.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Peony root,” she gasps. “He must swallow the extract from this bottle. If we can’t get him to take it, he may die.” She holds the small cracked bottle up in front of me, and her hand is trembling so much that some of the liquid comes splashing out. “And remember—his tongue.” With the other hand she holds up the wooden wedge.

  I’m the one who’ll have to find a way of getting them into his mouth. I take the bottle and wood and send up a prayer. Lord, give me strength.

  I approach the man very slowly. I touch his chest and feel the power of a stampeding horse rumble inside him. I look straight at his face, and for a second I think that he’s looking into my eyes too. But then he rolls and thrashes again and the beast within him seems to swell.

  I can do this, I tell myself. I can grapple with fierce things.

  Avoiding the worst of his kicking and scratching, I manage to clamber onto him and kneel on his chest. From this height I try to drop the golden peony liquid into his mouth, but his head jerks wildly from one direction to another. Sister Maria chants and turns the pages of her book of healing prayer. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I growl quietly as I wrestle with the monster beneath me.

  All of a sudden I’m sure there’s something wicked about this. I’m squatting on top of a man! I’m touching his body as he writhes and twists beneath me. But Sister Maria doesn’t tell me to stop. She carries on chanting in a mournful monotone. I watch the man’s face, waiting for the next grotesque, convulsive yawn. My timing is good, because as his mouth opens I clank the lip of the bottle against his teeth and give him some of the medicine. He gags, and I think he’s going to choke. I try to put the wooden wedge in then. But gently he splutters it away. The storm is receding.

  “Calma,” I say quietly to him. “Calma.” I touch his hair and wipe his forehead. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say anything. He shudders like a wild tide going out. Maria doesn’t cease her incantations. She’s locked into the rhythm of prayer
, and seems afraid to stop in case the spell is broken. I don’t know if it’s the prayer or the peony that’s cured him. Perhaps whatever was within him has simply run its course. He stops jerking, and peace ripples through his body. I slide off him, back onto the ground.

  The man props himself up on his elbows and looks at me. “Oh, Christ in heaven, not again. Oh, Jesus, I was near undone.”

  “You’re much better, sir,” I say to him.

  “Yes, well, thank you, little sister.” He looks at the bottle of peony oil, almost empty, still in my hand. “Thank you for taking the poison out of me. I’m almost myself again.”

  “Yes, but you’re very weak.”

  His face darkens and he grabs my arm, pulling me closer to him. “Weak—what do you mean? How dare you?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I only meant you must be tired. You need rest. You need to drink something.”

  He releases me and slumps back onto the bench. “You’re right,” he mutters. “I’m a weak man. Weak and yielding.”

  “Sir, I didn’t mean weak of spirit or weak of soul,” I say. “Just weak in your body. Because of what you’ve endured.”

  He smiles, but his voice is serious. “No one in Venice can find out what I suffer.”

  I promise him I won’t tell a soul.

  His gaze flickers to Sister Maria. Then he nods and tells me I’m a good girl. “I trust you,” he says. “I do, sincerely.”

  Sister Maria ushers me away. She holds a stern finger up to her curled lips: “Remember, Laura,” she says, “not a single word about this to anyone. This is a secret. Is that clear? Uno segreto.”

  I whisper the word to myself a couple of times. It has a dark sound. To say it I have to hiss. Then I have to close the back of my throat and roll the tip of my tongue along the roof of my mouth and peep it out between my teeth as if, for a second, that same tongue is trying to escape.

  Se—gre—to.

  Sibilant at the beginning. Guttural in the middle.

  Explosive at the end.

  At the end of choir practice the next day, I’m filing out of the chapel when I see Annalena. She’s standing at the door and beckons to me with her finger. She tells me she has a message. “What? What is it?” I ask as I run along beside her and we wind our way back to the sleeping quarters.