Wedding Guests in Black

Half of Veravecchia comes to your wedding, and most of them wear black.

Not all of them mean it as a joke. Old Signora Pratesi from the bakery on your street wears black because she's been in mourning since 1989 and sees no reason to stop for a Lucchesi. But the councilmen in the front pews wear it, and the shipowners behind them, and a young man near the door has a black ribbon pinned to his lapel that he takes off, very quickly, when Leandro turns around.

Odo stands beside you at the altar in his only suit, which smells of cedar and the sea. He's your best man because there was no one else and because he said, when you asked, "Your father would want someone there who's not afraid to catch you when you fall over."

"I'm not going to fall over."

"The last one did," Odo murmurs. "Right there. By the candles."

You look at the candles. You decide not to ask.

Then the doors open and the church goes quiet.

She comes up the aisle alone. Nobody gives Ginevra Lucchesi away. Her dress is ivory, high at the throat, sleeves to the wrist, and over her hands she wears white silk gloves so fine you can see the shape of every knuckle. A veil of old lace falls from her hair to her waist. Through it you can see her face, and the church can see it too, and you hear a man in the third pew forget to breathe out.

She's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen walk toward you. She's also the only bride in the history of Santa Ilaria whose guests lean away from the aisle as she passes.

She stops beside you. Up close she smells of something cool and green, like a garden after rain.

"You came, Ethan," she says under her breath.

"You told me to."

"I told you to marry me. I didn't say you had to look like that while you did it."

"Like what?"

"Like you're glad." Her eyes find yours through the lace. "Stop it. People will think something's wrong with you."

The priest, a thin man who sweats steadily through the whole ceremony, keeps the vows short. When he says, "You may kiss the bride," he says it very fast, and then adds, "or not, of course, the church makes no requirement," and in the front pew Ludovica Lucchesi laughs softly behind her fan.

You bow over Ginevra's gloved hand instead. Silk, and under it, the warmth of her. She goes stiff as a mast.

"Husband," she says, like she's trying the word for poison.

The feast is on the palazzo terrace above the canal. Long tables, white cloths, gas lamps on iron stands, and enough food to feed the Fishmarket for a week. Nobody sits within three seats of the bride except you.

"They're not being rude," Ginevra says, cutting her fish with surgical neatness. Her gloves have been changed for black ones. "They're being sensible. There was a cardinal's nephew, four years ago, who sat beside me at a dinner and reached for the salt across my plate."

"What happened to him?"

"He used the pepper instead. He's fine. He lives across the sea now. He writes to my mother every Christmas to thank her for his life." She sets down her knife. "You're not eating."

"I'm nervous."

"You should be." She says it so plainly that you laugh, and three tables turn to look at the bridegroom laughing, and she looks down at her plate with something that might be satisfaction.

Leandro raises a toast to the happy couple. His fiancée isn't with him tonight, he says, she sends her regrets; the guests drink and you drink, and a servant refills your silver cup from a fresh jug carried out from the kitchen.

You reach for it. Ginevra's gloved hand moves across the cloth and knocks her own cup into your plate.

Wine everywhere. Red on the white linen. Servants rush in with napkins. In the confusion you see her hand, very quick, set her cup upright in front of you and draw yours toward herself. By the time the cloth is blotted, your cup is in front of her and hers is in front of you, and nobody but you seems to have noticed.

She doesn't drink from it. She just keeps her hand around it, like you'd keep your hand over a candle.

"Clumsy," Ludovica remarks, from the head of the table.

"Nerves," Ginevra says. "I'm a bride."

Twenty minutes later she excuses herself. She's gone long enough that you start to wonder whether brides are allowed to run away from their own feasts. When she comes back, her gloves are fresh again, and a cook's boy is crying somewhere below the terrace.

By the time the cake comes out, the story has gone around every table. The head cook, Pippo Murra, has been found on the kitchen stairs. His heart, they're saying. Too much heat in the ovens. Poor man. Such a day for it.

Ginevra eats one bite of cake and says, "It's dry."

Her apartment is the tower at the corner of the palazzo, three floors of old stone stacked above the water steps. Your room is on the second floor. Hers is beside it, through a door with two bolts, both on her side.

She stands in the doorway of your room in her black gloves and the ivory dress, and the lamp makes her look like a painting someone was afraid to finish.

"Rules, Ethan," she says.

"I thought there might be."

"One. My gloves stay on. If you ever see me without them, step back. Two. You don't come into my room. Not for any reason, not if you hear me scream. Three." She hesitates. "Lock your door tonight."

"Because of you?"

"Because of everyone else." She looks at you for a moment longer than she needs to. "You're not what I expected, Captain."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone who'd already started crying." The corner of her mouth again. "Goodnight, Ethan."

The bolts slide on her side of the wall. You lie down in a bed big enough for a crew and stare at a painted ceiling full of fat cherubs holding flowers you now recognize, and you tell yourself one night down, thirty-nine to go, and you don't know yet why the number matters.

You do lock your door.

It doesn't help.

You wake because the room smells wrong. Lamp oil, and sweat, and wet wool. The clock on the mantel says two. The window to the balcony is open, and the curtains are breathing.

A man is standing over your bed.

The gaslight from the canal catches the blade in his hand.