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In the end, he didn’t have to. She approached him. He had been scanning the busy scene in front of him with great concentration, looking for a familiar figure, a turn of the neat dark head, a flash of the bright eyes, but she still surprised him, coming up on him from behind, and had taken a seat at his table, uninvited, before he had even realised that she was there.

He smiled at her, delighted, but the expression froze on his face when she said sternly, ‘I understand, Mr Challender, that you have informed half of Venice that you would like to take me as your mistress? Well, here I am, and you can tell me directly what precisely you mean by making a scandal of me and a laughing-stock of yourself!’

11

Xan was speechless for a moment in the face of Signora Rossi’s most unexpected accusation. ‘Who has told you such an outrageous thing?’ he managed at last.

‘Everybody,’ she replied levelly. ‘My landlady. The colour man from whom I buy my paints. The blind woman who sells oranges by the Rialto. Also Alvise, the boy who runs errands for me sometimes; you’ve met him. A few of them are shocked by the very idea – luckily my landlady is not such a person, or I might well find myself turned out into the street because of your criminal carelessness – but most seem to think I should make sure I get myself a good bargain for my virtue. Some have even kindly offered to negotiate on my behalf in case I should be embarrassed. They say that although you appear eccentric and solitary, you are a wealthy English gentleman from a noble family, and I might go farther and do worse. You have made me the talk of the city, sir, and I have come to ask you what you can possibly mean by it.’

For his part, Mr Challender was growing a little indignant; the heat of it might serve to mask his profound embarrassment, and other, deeper reactions that he chose not to dwell on just now. ‘All I did – I promise you, ma’am – was enquire of Lady Wellbeloved who you were, during my duty visit to her as an old friend of my family. I cast no aspersions on your virtue, I made no claims⁠—’

‘Letizia Wellbeloved, as she calls herself,’ the young woman broke in ruthlessly, ‘is the most notorious gossip in the city. I could go further and call her a dreadful old bawd. You might as well have taken out an advertisement in the newspaper, or stuck up posters on the walls with my likeness and yours on them, for the delight of those who cannot read.’

‘I did not tell her – you cannot possibly imagine I told her – that I want to make you my mistress. A man would have to be insane to do such a thing, especially just a few moments after meeting a person – an elderly lady, at that!’

‘And yet that was the impression that she took away from your visit, and which she passed on with great eagerness to everyone she has encountered since, and which they have passed on in their turn. I have never heard anybody say that she is a stupid creature. A wicked, mischievous person, yes, but not slow on the uptake; rather the reverse. So look me straight in the face, sir, and give me your word that you had no such thought in your mind, when you spoke with her or at any other time, tell me she is grossly misrepresenting your intentions towards me, whether through pure devilment or a genuine misunderstanding, and I will be satisfied.’

The last word she used was particularly unfortunate, perhaps. Xan knew his countenance must be perfectly scarlet. All the blood in his body appeared to have surged into his face, or headed south on a quite different errand. He’d never had such a conversation in his life, nor dreamed of having one. (Once more his brother’s mocking laughter echoed in his ears. Philip would know exactly what to say in such circumstances, and far worse ones too; Philip would be enjoying himself excessively just now, and probably already have his hand on the young lady’s knee, or worse – better? – under the table.)

Xan looked her full in the face, as she had demanded – she appeared to him even more lovely with her dark eyes sparkling with fury – and found he could not lie. ‘I can’t say that. It would not be quite true. I told Lady Wellbeloved nothing of the kind, of course, but it seemed that by some peculiar magic she could pluck my private thoughts from the air, even those I had not consciously admitted to myself before that moment. It was quite useless to protest, I could see. So I did not.’

She smiled with wicked triumph. ‘I knew it. And yet I told you that I was not a woman of negotiable virtue when first we met, did I not? Did you not believe me? Or was that what attracted you – the idea of corrupting and seducing a woman of principle, an unprotected widow with no family in the city to watch over her?’

Xan stifled a groan. Must she use these loaded words that set shocking ideas and lewd images whirling in his brain? Corrupting. Seducing. He must be seriously unwell. Delirious. An Italian fever had possessed him since he’d come to Venice. He wanted nothing more than to throw her down across this table at Florian’s and… ‘I’ve never corrupted or seduced anybody,’ he said baldly. ‘Nor tried to.’

‘So, you choose to begin with me? Should I be flattered?’

‘I wonder you wish to be seen with me, ma’am,’ he said hoarsely. She was wearing a prim bonnet today, a loose grey coat with unfashionably wide sleeves, and beneath it a black muslin gown over a fine white habit shirt. The clothing of a respectable widowed woman in any civilised nation, probably donned as armour for this extraordinary conversation she’d intended to have with him, and hardly calculated to induce passion in anyone who saw it. She was wearing gloves, too, grey kid ones. But the shirt fastened at the wrist with two little mother-of-pearl buttons, and a tiny sliver of skin could be seen there. An inch, perhaps, or less. The veins revealed in this small gap were blue, and he wanted to press his lips to them. Close his eyes. Inhale the scent of her. Kiss her, lick her. Good God, bite her. He did not do this; he was not quite so far gone yet. But he could not have stood up and walked away if his life depended on it, for several excellent reasons.

‘Surely appearing in public in my company merely gives credit to the gossip. I did not approach you today, madam, you accosted me, and there must be a dozen people with eyes on us in this moment.’

‘It’s perfectly true. But why should I modify my behaviour when I have done nothing wrong and have only met you twice, very briefly, before this, certainly nothing to give you the impression I might be amenable to such an offer? I am not to blame for thoughts you happen to have in your head, or anybody else, for that matter.’

‘You are not responsible,’ he acknowledged with a groan. ‘I do not say you are. And I have nothing to say in my defence.’ It was a mortification to Xan to know himself every bit as bad as his father or his brother, when he had tried so hard all his life to be different, to be better.

At this most inopportune of moments, a waiter appeared to ask in creditable English if the lady would like some coffee, and the gentleman more coffee. Xan made some reply, he could not have said what, and the grinning fellow went away. In a ridiculously short space of time, another waiter appeared with drinks that Mr Challender was not at all confident he’d asked for. He was being taken advantage of and there was nothing he could do about it. No doubt it was no more than he deserved.

‘I am a widower with a son barely out of short petticoats,’ he informed her baldly. At least he could tell her things that were real and true, though there was no reason in the world she should give a fig for anything he said. ‘I think I have revealed some at least of this before to you. I married young, by family arrangement, and I had never lain with a woman before my wedding night. This was a deliberate decision I made, you understand, and most unusual for a man of my rank. My older brother is a notorious rake, has been since his youth, as was my father in his own day, and their shameful behaviour, and my poor mother’s distress at it, has always horrified me; perhaps that was why I was never tempted to follow their example. I was faithful to my wife while she lived, and have not strayed since her death. Nor been tempted to, in all honesty – not seriously. But since I set eyes on you, and I know it is not in the least your fault… I find myself changed. Strange to myself, and unable to think of anything else. Possessed, almost.’

He could not tell what she was thinking, nor why she was still talking to him, why she hadn’t got up and left a while since. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ she asked flatly.

‘I haven’t the smallest idea.’

There was still a trace of anger in her expression and her sparkling dark eyes. ‘Perhaps you think I will allow you to make love to me as a sort of public duty?’ Xan closed his eyes for a second. ‘You are a frustrated English gentleman abroad, and I therefore owe you something; I have some bizarre responsibility for your uncontrolled feelings? I don’t know if that should be just because I am part English, or merely because I am a woman you have happened to meet and your erratic fancy has lighted on me.’

‘No… no, of course not. That’s ridiculous. Offensive, if the tiniest part of it were true.’

There were tall marble columns in the square by the canal, two of them. They had statues on top, and birds whirled and perched there. In his own humble way, he was adding a third vertical structure to the scene this morning, which he devoutly hoped nobody could see. A modest monument, in comparison with the others, and hopefully less enduring, but his own involuntary tribute to his companion. He felt faint. Even her voice, abusing and mocking him, was almost unbearably arousing. If she were to reach out and touch him, he thought, just the lightest of touches upon his hand or his face, he would explode. Literally explode. She wouldn’t even have to take her gloves off. Although, if she did take her damned gloves off, stripping each finger, revealing a little more skin, and then a little more, that would probably do it without even a touch. Suppressing a moan, he picked up a coffee cup with a hand that was not anywhere close to steady, and gulped down some liquid that he could not taste. It might as well have been bathwater; he would drink her bathwater with pleasure. Especially if she was in it. He was decidedly unwell.

‘You’re not saying much in your defence, Mr Challender.’

‘I can’t.’ She was looking at him, wordlessly demanding an explanation, so he gave one. ‘Sitting here with you, talking to you, is so exciting to me suddenly that I am barely in control of what I say or do. I am deeply ashamed, but it does not make me able to check myself. Certainly I am far beyond rational thought, or the presentation of any argument in self-justification, if indeed there should even be one. God knows I cannot tell.’

Now, a little colour crept into her cheeks for the first time in their short acquaintance. ‘I see,’ she said quietly. Was she, finally, embarrassed too? Perhaps so, because she picked up her own coffee and sipped from it, as if to buy time, as if she could not in the moment think what she might say in response. Her lips caressed the china cup, and he observed her fine throat move as she swallowed…

He saw now with something approaching panic that the waiter, unasked and unnoticed, had set down a plate of tempting small pastries on the table between them, such as they sometimes ate in the morning here. They might perhaps hold cream or some other filling, and she was looking at them absently, as if she was hungry, as if she was about to pick one up without really thinking about it and bite into it with her excellent white teeth. The cream would likely spurt out, onto her red lips, her firm chin, and she would be obliged to lick them clean. Unless someone else did it for her. Xan did not know how a man was supposed to endure such a thing unmoved. He could not endure it.

His voice was little more than a ragged whisper as he said, ‘I’m not making this your problem when it is mine, I know it is all mine, and possibly I am in fact going insane, but if you consume one of those cakes, which I acknowledge you are entirely free to do – do not mistake me as saying anything else – I cannot be responsible for the effect it will have on me. I will disgrace myself, here in public, in St Mark’s Square. I feel I am only a few seconds away from that now.’