This was no youthful Carnival prank, though it was both the year’s season and mine. I’d been told I must do it. I must climb the convent wall to deliver a message. The message was unusual not because of what I must say—which was what the Doge of Venice would say to any young lady under the circumstances—but because of the lady herself. His Serenity’s secretary had decided to humor this lady’s own singular demands of secrecy.

My blossoming sense of romance and adventure had tingled to life from the first suggestion: I’d jumped at the chance.

I’d never seen a convent garden before, of course; I was no priest. I guess I’d envisioned it in the hull-splitting life of spring. But the naked branches of the plane tree—like hoary, shedding antlers—provided very little cover apart from their woolly winter tassels. Nor did the air—hard, cold, and clear as a diamond.

It was the bare-bone structure of a garden, odorous of moist loam and worms working. The beds were damp but barren, turned over for the season, and against anything but the sky I must stand out like a sapphire on sackcloth. Afraid this would happen, I’d climbed high in the tree. But I was going to be very dependent on the lady’s skills of subterfuge, a position of helplessness for which I didn’t care.

And my fingers were beginning to grow numb and clumsy with the chill.

She was in the company of her aunt when I saw her. The pair had appeared against the gray stone of the refectory at the far end of the garden. If I stood out like she did—a garnet on a weathered grave marker—I was in serious trouble.

The older woman was part of the stone—and she had her face to me.

My heart skipped a beat and my hands, grown stupid and senseless, slipped their hold. How careless of Madonna Baffo to bring her aunt out into the garden! Or, if this were a chaperon she could not avoid, to let the older woman look directly into my hiding spot—A young man hiding in the convent gardens! Whatever would the old woman say if she saw me?

The aunt’s face was a crab apple at winter’s end—chafing, red, soft, and wrinkled out of her wimple. It was full of bitterness, the bitterness of a fruit left neglected at the bottom of the bin, the bitterness of virginity consigned to a sisterhood, a sacrifice to the consolidation of the family fortune.

I dared no more than glance at this unhappy nun. If the girl were foolish, I would not add to her foolishness with a misuse of my eyes. And yet I had time to see, besides her features, that the older woman was enthralled in her companion. I can only think that Baffo’s daughter knew she had control over her aunt and was playing with the danger as a tightrope walker may pretend to lose his balance for the thrill of having the audience gasp. And why, I ask myself, does the audience stay and watch, but for the thrill of gasping?

When next I dared to look, the older woman was gone— vanished, I knew not where-—and she, the younger, was walking toward my hiding spot, whistling the popular tune by which I had been told I would know her. “Whistling girls and crowing hens are sure to come to some bad ends.” I laid no particular store by this old wives’ cant, only wondered how a patrician girl, raised in a convent, should have contrived to learn such a sure, brazen pipe.

She walked toward me in a manner that let me know I was not the first she had ever met there beneath the plane tree. Although slightly disappointed, I was not surprised. That she had so often managed that conjuring act with her aunt and that she was so young did surprise me, however.

I slid down the tree trunk quickly, hoping to impress with my rigging-learned grace.

Madonna Baffo was tall and womanly for a fourteen-year-old. But most of all, I was surprised by her beauty. Like demon-cold at midnight, she took my breath away.

Others have said it and I, who saw her in her youth before these eulogists were even born, will say it, too. When she walked, it was dancing. She came down the flagstone path with steps that swept like the galliard to the very tilt of her head. It was movement full of fascination to both viewer and executor, sensuous steps matching the popular and ribald tune she whistled. The tune was called, as I remember, “Come to the Budding Grove, My Love.”

When she approached, I was compelled to sweep the cap off my head and brush its blue-tinted ostrich feather across the earth before me in a deep bow.

“Madonna Baffo,” I said. “May I present myself? I am Giorgio Veniero, at your service, if you please.”

“You’re the Doge’s man.”

She stated rather than asked it and her business-like tone made me straighten up at once. But I gained no sobriety looking at her. Convent life was seen in the breach rather than in the compliance of her costume. The “brown” of her dress would really better be called the blush of sun-ripe oranges, and it was trimmed with peach and gold. Like a wanton giggling at her grille, the satin fabric flirted with the sheen of opulence quite naughtily.

Pleats, the depth of my thumbnail, crowded together four times the fabric more modest skirts would take to encircle that same slim waist. The confinement of a fashionably firm bodice was foreshortened and gave plenty of suggestion, through an almost sheer chemise, of the yielding reality beneath.

I thought there was a story in the great puffs of her sleeves: the stern old aunt had been cajoled to a limit of two yards a sleeve. But when her back was turned, the girl had snatched several fistfuls more; even made up, the fabric retained an avidity in the billows. So might Eve’s stolen apple have looked in both appeal and wickedness.

“At your service,” I repeated, conscious now of an uncomfortable and out-of-place tightness in my codpiece which before had seemed natural and pleasant, and which my foppish bow had aggravated.

I had dressed with care that morning. Knowing I would have walls to climb, I had refrained from my best, knee-length doublet of Turkish velvet, dark blue and shot with gold. That must remain for embassies of a more respectable sort. But I had not been disappointed in the effect of a sleek new pair of hose in varied green and blue, and a blue velvet doublet tucked and slashed to display a clean linen chemise beneath.

Life spent astride the rock and thrust of the sea had given me a fine, strong pair of legs, I knew, fine buttocks, and a fine, lean waist where the doublet pinched in tight and met the top of the hose with a gap for yet more chemise. For all the chill, I had not wanted to spoil the effect with overgarments, so I wore only the shortest of fighting capes. I was at the point of actual periodic shivering now from the long, inactive wait and from the feverish effect she had on me, but I tossed the cape behind my shoulders with a studied attempt at rakishness as I faced her and rubbed at my chin.

I had fussed more than usual with my beard—there wasn’t much of it yet—combing and encouraging. In the end, I had shaved it off completely, hoping Madonna Baffo would like the clean-shaven look of the West better than the beard of the East I could not yet attain.

Now I doubted the wisdom of that decision—of anything I did—and it was not just that the only stubble I found on my chin after two hours was in my mind. At fifteen, I had already turned several more experienced hearts, but the self-confidence this had given me now wore thin.

Baffo’s daughter fixed me with eyes as cool as brown autumn leaves. Her mouth, which I would later learn to know in its usual pout of delicious fullness, was set thin and firm for our interview. Her study of me was intense, minute, and not without desire. But it was not the complement of the desire which I had suffered as I watched her approach. That desperation so many other girls conceal so ill with blushes and fans was not even hinted at. If she pierced through my young nobleman’s trappings, she sought not the flesh beneath, but something else.

I can give that elusive thing a name now, so many years later, whereas then I stood merely baffled and ashamed of what my own feelings were. That part of manhood she coveted of me—of every man she ever met—was power, even though in my case it was no more than the power to climb a convent wall.

Baffo’s daughter danced when she moved, not like a courtesan but like a horse at the gate before a race. That afternoon when she was only fourteen years old, the passion that already burned in her was ambition.

“So state your message.” She grew impatient with my confusion.

“I have been sent by the Doge with a secret message for you...”I blustered, then faltered.

“It must be a full hour that you’ve been here.” Her impatience exaggerated wildly. “And yet nothing you have said so far is news. I know you are the Doge’s man, you know you are the Doge’s man. Does every urchin in Venice know you are the Doge’s man by now?”

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