Marta Fazi was agile, certainly. Her dark gaze locked with James's, she climbed backward without a misstep. Her teeth gleamed white against her olive skin as she laughingly flung away the mask, the veil, the cloak that concealed a frail excuse for a gown: a flimsy article, little more than an elaborate shift, held together with a few easily untied ribbons and strings.

She left the emeralds on: the heavy necklace with its great pendant stone dangling between her breasts, the matching earrings, the bracelet.

James paused to ease out of his coat, taking his
time. He slung it over his shoulder as he climbed after her, maintaining the pose of mild curiosity he'd used to bait the hook.

Accustomed to getting what she wanted, Marta couldn't resist a challenge, and James hadn't to do much acting to become one. Given a choice, he wouldn't have touched her with a barge pole. Since he hadn't a choice, he'd simply let his reluctance show. That, as he'd expected, had piqued her vanity.

She was handsome, admittedly. He'd heard that Lord Byron had written a poem about her, not for publication. She was of the type the poet admired: Dark and passionate, she was what he would call “a magnificent animal.”

James was not nearly so enthusiastic about the type. He was thirty-one years old, and Marta was not his first passionate, uninhibited, and sexually talented foreign adventuress. If he survived this encounter, though, she'd be the last. If he didn't survive itâwhich was equally likelyâshe'd be the last.

Either way I win
, he thought.

If he failed this mission, he'd die a slow and painful death. He would not be mourned as a hero. No one would know that he'd died trying to save the world. They probably wouldn't even find his bodyâor what was left of it.

For bloody damned king and bloody damned country,
he told himself as the door closed behind him,
one last time.

He took off his waistcoat and dropped that and his coat over a chair near the door as he continued
to advance and she continued to retreat, unerringly, toward the bed.

Clearly, she knew the way backward and in the dark, though the room wasn't altogether dark. Servants must have readied it shortly before, because the candles were lit. They must have expected her to have company because they'd lit only two.

These offered light enough to show him her gleaming white teeth as her lips parted. It was light enough to make green fire of the emeralds and rainbow sparks of the small diamonds circling them. Even without light, he'd know where she was. Her perfume filled the room with a too-sweet aroma, like decaying roses.

She ran her hands over her full, firm breasts and down over her hips. She was magnificently formed, and knew it.

“You see, I keep nothing from you,” she said. “I give myself completely.”

Her speech told him she'd spent most of her life in southern Italy and had had a littleâa very littleâeducation. He detected, too, a foreign note: her native Cyprus, no doubt. Though his antecedents, like hers, were mixed, the Italian he spoke, his mother's language, was flawless. Since he'd inherited his mother's black, curling hair and his maternal grandfather's Roman profile, Marta had no inkling that he was not only the son of an English nobleman but an agent of His Majesty's government.

In short, James Cordier was an even greater fraud than this alluring panther. The trick was to make sure she didn't find out.

“Not quite completely,” he said as he unfastened his trousers. “The stones are pretty, but your beauty needs no adornment, you know.”

Not to mention that heavy jewelry was a damned nuisance during a plogging.
Yer could put yer eye out with one a them things
, he might have told her, in the accents he'd learned in his eventful youth.

She laughed. “Ah, flattery at last. I thought I should never hear it from you.”

He stepped out of his trousers. “The sight before me stimulates my tongue,” he said.

“Good.” Her gaze lowered. “And the little man is stimulated, too, I see.”

Of course it was. James might have had his fill of her sort but he was a man, after all, and she was exciting. They usually were, the deadly ones.

She unhooked the earrings and laid them on the table by the bed. She unclasped the bracelet, and dropped it next to the earrings.

He pulled his shirt over his head.

She was fumbling with the clasp of the necklace.

“Allow me,” he said.

It was an old clasp, very probably the original, and wanted both care and a sharp eye. The parure had not been intended for ordinary evening wear but for state occasions: It had been created for a queen more than two centuries ago. Its current owners, ejected by Napoleon, had had to secret their treasures and themselves to a safe refuge. The treasures had been on their way home in the care of a trusted retainer when she and two confederates, garbed as nuns, had stolen it.

The age and history of the emeralds did not
signify to her. Marta Fazi had grown up on the streets; she was literateâthough just barelyâamoral, and ruthless. She had a weakness for good-looking men and a passion for emeralds.

This was what James knew of her and all he needed to know to do the job he'd been sent to do.

Get the gems, get out, get them to their rightful owner, and let the diplomats sort out the details.

The jewels now lying in a careless tangle on the bed stand, James proceeded to business. “To battle” was probably nearer the mark.

He was a soldier, after all, though the army he belonged to was unacknowledged. Nobody pinned any medals on men like him, or mentioned him in dispatches.

And if he got caught, no one would rescue him.

So, Jemmy, my boy, whatever you do, he advised himself, don't get caught.

Then he gave the girl what she wanted, and did it thoroughly. Whatever he felt about his work, he was at least still capable of enjoying a handsome, passionate female more or less as any other man would.

When at last she seemed reasonably satedâfor the moment, at any rateâhe whispered, “I'm famished. What about you?”

“Ah, yes,” she murmured. “Wine, something to eatâ¦and then we regain our strength. The bell for the servant is beside you.”

“Let's let the servants sleep,” he said. “I'd rather forage.”

She laughed drowsily. “So you would. I marked you for a hunter when first I saw you.”

You got that part right.

He rose from the bed. His trousers were near at hand, as he'd taken care they should be. He pulled them on, then found his shirt. His back to her, he pulled it over his head, then slid the jewels from the table, the billowing cloth concealing the movement.

The rest was absurdly easy. The bed curtains hid from her view the door and the chair where he'd left his waistcoat and coat. He collected the garments and slipped through the door.

Another man would have postponed his exit until she fell asleep. James, however, was of Lady Macbeth's mind: “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well/It were done quickly.”

It would be well to move quickly in this case. Marta would soon notice the stones were gone, and she took betrayal very ill, indeed. The last man who'd annoyed her had lost his privates first. He'd lost them slowly, in bits.

James might have minutes to get away. He might have mere seconds.

He hurried down the stairs.

One second. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Sevenâ

“Stop him!” she screamed. “Get him! Break his knees!”

As he left the landing, a burly ruffian barreled up the stairs. James flung his arm out sideways, stiff as a tollbooth bar. The servant saw it too late. He ran straight into it, the muscled arm catching him across the throat. He fell backward, down the stairs, landing head first.

At the top of the stairs she was howling in Greek
for her men, telling them to keep him alive: She had plans for him.

A knife whizzed past his head.

In piercing shrieks she described what she'd do to him, which parts she'd cut off first.

James sidestepped the servant's inert body and ran into the hall, toward the entrance.

A door burst open and another of her henchmen exploded toward him. James stiff-armed this one, too, but this time with a forward thrust, catching the brute in the chest. The man's knees folded and he fell straight down onto his back.

James heard him yowl in pain. Kneecap broken, most likely.

His screams were nothing to Marta's.

James kept moving.

In the next instant he slipped through the door.

And in the blink of an eye, he'd melted into the night.

Chapter 1

Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear
Â Â Â Â Â You should not, I'll describe it to you exactly:

'Tis a long cover'd boat that's common here,
Â Â Â Â Â Carved at the prow, built lightly,
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â but compactly;

Row'd by two rowers, each call'd âGondolier,'
Â Â Â Â Â It glides along the water looking blackly,

Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,

Where none can make out what you say or do.

Lord Byron,
Beppo

Venice
Tuesday, 19 September 1820

P
enises. Everywhere.

Francesca Bonnard thoughtfully regarded the ceiling.

A century or two ago, the Neroni family had gone mad for ornamental plasterwork. The walls and ceilings of the palazzo she rented were a riot of plaster draperies, fruits, and flowers. Most fas
cinating to her were these winged children called
putti
. They crawled about the ceilings, lifting plaster draperies or creeping among the folds, looking for who knew what. They clung to the frames of the ceiling paintings and to the gold medallions over the doors. They vastly outnumbered the four bare-breasted women lolling in the corners and the four muscled adult males supporting the walls.

They were all boys, all naked. Thus the view overhead was of many little penisesâforty at last count, though there seemed to be more today. Were they reproducing spontaneously or were the buxom females and virile adult males getting up to mischief when the house was asleep?

In her three years in Venice, Francesca had entered a number of ostentatious houses. Hers won the prize for decorative insanityânot to mention quantity of immature male reproductive organs.

“I shouldn't mind them so much,” she said, “but they are so distracting. The first time visitors call, they spend the better part of the visit dumbstruck, gaping at the walls and ceiling. After giving the matter serious thought, I've decided that Dante got his idea for the
Inferno
from a visit to the Palazzo Neroni.”

“Let them gape,” said her friend Giulietta. She rested her elbow on the arm of her chair and, chin in hand, regarded the deranged ceiling. “While your guests stare at the
putti
, you might stare at them as rudely as you like.”

They made a complementary pair: Francesca tall and exotic, Giulietta smaller, and sweet-looking.
Her heart-shaped face and innocent brown eyes made her seem a mere girl. At six and twenty, however, she was only a year younger than Francesca. In experience, Giulietta was eons older.

No one would ever call Francesca Bonnard sweet-looking, she knew. She'd inherited her mother's facial features, most notably her distinctive eyes with their unusual green color and almond shape. Her thick chestnut hair was her French paternal grandmother's. The rest came from Sir Michael Saunders, her scoundrel father, and his predecessors. The Saunderses tended to be tall, and she wasâcompared, at least, to most women. The few extra inches had caused the caricaturists to dub her “the Giantess” and “the Amazon” in the scurrilous prints they produced during the divorce proceedings.

Her divorce from John Bonnardârecently awarded a barony and now titled Lord Elphickâwas five years behind her, however, as was all the nonsense she'd believed then about love and men. Now she carried her tall frame proudly and dressed to emphasize every curve of her lush figure.

Men had betrayed and abandoned and hurt her once upon a time.

Not anymore.

Now they begged for her notice.

Several were coming today for precisely that purpose. This was why Francesca did not entertain her friend in the smaller, less oppressive room, the one adjoining her boudoir, in another, more private part of the house. That comfortable, almost
putti
-free parlor was reserved for intimates,
and she had yet to decide which if any of her soon-to-arrive guests would win that status.

She wasn't looking forward to deciding.

She left the sofa on which she'd been loungingâa position that would have horrified her governessâand sauntered to the window.

The canal it overlooked wasn't
the
canal, the Grand Canal, but one of the larger of the maze of secondary waterways or
rii
intersecting the city. Though not far from the Grand Canal, hers was one of the quieter parts of Venice.

This afternoon was not so quiet, for rain beat down on the balcony outside and occasionally, when the wind shifted, against the glass. She lookedâand blinked. “Good grief, I think I see signs of life across the way.”

“The Ca' Munetti? Really?”

Giulietta rose and joined her at the window.

Through the sheeting rain, they watched a gondola pause at the water gates of the house on the other side of the narrow canal.

Ca',
Francesca knew, was Venetian shorthand for
casa
or house. Once upon a time, only the Ducal Palace bore the title
palazzo,
and every other house was simply a
casa.
Nowadays, any house of any size, great and small, might call itself a
palazzo.
The one opposite might have done so, certainly. Outwardly, from the canal side, it was similar to hers, with a water gate leading to the ground floor hall or
andron
; balconied windows on the
piano nobile
, the first floor; then a more modest second floor; and above that, attics for the servants.

No one had lived in the Ca' Munetti, however, for nearly a year.

“A single gondolier,” Francesca said. “And two passengers, it appears. That's all I can make out in this wretched downpour.”

“I see no baggage,” Giulietta said.

“It might have been sent ahead.”

“But the house is dark.”

“They haven't yet hired servants, then.” The Munetti family had taken their servants with them when they moved. Though they were not as hard up as some of the Venetian nobility, they'd either found Venice too expensive or the Austrians who ruled it too tedious. Like the owners of the Palazzo Neroni, they preferred to let their house to foreigners.

“A strange time of year to come to Venice,” said Giulietta.

“Perhaps we've made it fashionable,” said Francesca. “Or, more likely, since they're bound to be foreigners, they don't know any better.”

Everyone who could afford to do so abandoned Venice during the steaming summers. They moved to their villas on the mainland in July and tended not to return from
villeggiatura
âsummer holidayâuntil St. Martin, the eleventh of November and the official start of winter.

Francesca had left the Count de Magny's villa in Mira early, following a quarrel about a visitor from England, Lord Quentin. Here in her own house, she answered to no one. Here, too, she wasn't the locals' prime entertainment. She'd never cared much for rusticating, in any event. She preferred
town life. On rare occasions, she even missed London, though not nearly so much as she'd done at firstânot that she ever admitted to missing anything about England at all.

A manservant entered to set the table for tea.

“Arnaldo, have you heard anything about the Ca' Munetti?” Francesca asked him.

“The baggage came first, late yesterday,” said Arnaldo. “Not very much. They have hired the gondolier, Zeggio, who is a cousin of the wife of the cousin of our cook. He says the new master is connected to the Albani family. He desires to study with the Armenian monks, as your friend Lord Byron did.”

Eyebrows raised, Giulietta met Francesca's gaze. Then they laughed.

“Byron studied with the Armenian monks,” said Giulietta. “But he was
not
a monk.”

“Still, only two servantsâ¦” Francesca watched the water gates open.

“Perhaps the new tenant is a Venetian, after all,” Giulietta said. “They are too poor to keep a proper staff. Only foreigners and whores can afford a houseful of servants.”

Arnaldo went out, and the conversation reverted to English.

“My new neighbor might be a miserly foreigner,” Francesca said. “Or a hermit.”

“In any of these cases, he is not for us.”

“Good heavens, no.” Francesca let out a peal of laughter.

Her laughter was as famous as her unusual looks, perhaps more so.

After the divorce set her adrift from respectable Society, she'd had to learn how to manage men. She'd learned quickly. Fanchon Noirot, her Parisian mentor, had told her she had the gift.

The most important lesson Francesca learned was how to talk to menâor, more important, how to listen to them.

But when Francesca Bonnard laughed, men listened, with all their being.

“When you laugh,” Lord Byron had told her, “men catch their breath.”

“They'd do better to catch hold of their purses,” she'd answered.

Then he'd laughed, albeit ruefully, because it was true.

Francesca Bonnard was a courtesan, so expensive that very few men could afford her. Lord Byron wasn't one of them.

Meanwhile, across the canal

Of all the cities in all the world, she had to come to this one.

It was deuced inconvenient.

Not to mention wet.

James's gondola had set out from the mainland in a drizzle and traveled the Grand Canal in a torrent so fierce that they'd closed the casements of the
felze,
the vessel's black passenger cabin. Only a blur of houses and stone piers was visible through the blinds. No sound came to him but the rain drumming on the cabin and deck of the boat.

One might almost believe this was the underworld his Roman ancestors had believed in. He might be floating upon the River Styx, among the shades of the dead.

That flight of imagination thudded to earthâor water, ratherâwhen he heard the echo of oars under a bridge and their gondolier's announcement, “
Ponte di Rialto.
”

The gondolier's name was Zeggio. At first glance, the Venetian appeared too young to guide anybody anywhere, too pretty to be performing manual labor, and too innocent to be taken seriously. This appearance explained why James's associates deemed Zeggio the most suitable guide in Venice. He was, in fact, thirty-two years old, far from innocent, and they'd employed him before.

He was a highly regarded local agent. Nonetheless, he aspired to become the Venetian version of James Cordier.

Poor sod.

After turning off the Grand Canal into a narrower waterway, then another, they came at last to the Ca' Munetti.

“Ah, Venice,” James said as he took in the viewâsuch as it wasâin front of and behind him. The buildings and gondolas were merely darker shapes in the grey haze. “A fine place, indeed, but for the damp.”

His servant Sedgewick said something under his breath. He was a small fellow, so thoroughly nondescript that people tended to take no notice of him whatsoever. That would be their first mistake, possibly their last.

“What was that, Sedgewick?” James said.

“Wish I was in England,” his former batman muttered.

“Who doesn't?” said the master. England would be colder, and certainly no sunnier, but it was England, after all, not yet another damned country filled with foreigners.

Not that James was a foreigner here, precisely. His mother was related to at least half the great families of Italy, her ancestry as distinguished as that of his father, Lord Westwood.

Venice, however, wasn't Italy.

Venice wasâ¦Venice.

The gondola paused at the water gate and James glanced up at the house opposite, where
she
lived.

She
being Francesca Bonnard, daughter of the infamous swindler, the late Sir Michael Saunders; former wife of the so-called pillar of rectitude Lord Elphick; and at present the most expensive whore in Venice.

Some would say that winning the last title was not the achievement it might have been, say, three centuries earlier. Venice had come down in the world, most obviously in recent decades. La Bonnard, however, was reputed to be the most expensive of her ilk in all of the Veneto and very possibly all of Italy and, some said, the Continent.

Why the queen of courtesans should come to Venice at all was the pertinent question. The fabled city was poor, a large number of its noble families had departed, and its floods of visitors had thinned to a trickle.

Why hadn't she remained in Paris, where she'd
first achieved fame three or four years ago and where she might choose among multitudes of wealthy victims? Or why not Vienna? Or, at the very least, Rome or Florence?

He'd probably find out why, sooner or later, if he needed to. It had better be sooner. He had plans, and she'd interrupted them.

He'd recovered the emeralds from Marta Fazi and delivered them to their owner. In exchange for the British government's doing him this little favor, the owner had signed an important treaty. He'd rewarded James as well, quite handsomely.

That was supposed to be James's last mission. He was supposed to be on his way home, to a well-earned retirement.

But no.

He was wishing Lord Elphick's discarded wife in Hades as the water gates opened and the gondola came to a stop.

He stepped out of the boat onto the stone and marble squares that paved the
andron.
Dark boarding covered the walls. The space was cold, and the musty odor of damp filled his nostrils.

They followed Zeggio up a staircase to the
piano nobile,
and found themselves in a vast central hall. This
portego,
as the Venetians called it, ran from one end of the house to the other.

It was clearly designed for show. The line of magnificent chandeliers down the center of the ceiling and rows of immense candelabra standing on tables along the wallâall dripping the famously magnificent glass work of Muranoâwould, when fully lit, have made a dazzling display of the gilt, the plaster
ornamenting the walls, the sculpture, the paintings.

“All this, on top of water,” Sedgewick said, shaking his head as he looked about him. “What sort of people is it, I wonder, goes and builds a city on stilts on a swampy lot of islands?”

“Italians,” said James. “There's a reason they once ruled the world, and a reason Venice once ruled the seas. You must at least give credit for a marvel of engineering.”

“I'll give them credit for an easy route to malaria,” said Sedgewick. “And another easy one to typhus.”

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