Kit
Authors: Marina Fiorato
Contents
The Glassblower of Murano
The Madonna of the Almonds
The Botticelli Secret
Daughter of Siena
The Venetian Contract
Beatrice and Benedrick
Marina Fiorato is half-Venetian. She was born in Manchester and raised in the Yorkshire Dales. She is a history graduate of Oxford University and the University of Venice, where she specialized in the study of Shakespeare's plays as a historical source. After university she studied art and since worked as an illustrator, actress and film reviewer. Marina was married on the Grand Canal and lives in north London with her husband, son and daughter. She is the author of five novels: THE GLASSBLOWER OF MURANO, THE MADONNA OF THE ALMONDS, THE BOTTICELLI SECRET, DAUGHTER OF SIENA and THE VENETIAN CONTRACT. You can follow Marina on Twitter at
@MarinaFiorato
and find out more about her and her writing at
www.marinafiorato.com
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Marina Fiorato
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2015 Marina Fiorato
The right of Marina Fiorato to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 473 61047 7
Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 61045 3
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
In memory of Joshua Bennett
who had his own battles to fight
Aughrim, Ireland, 1700
The red-headed girl was the bravest.
She went higher up the green hill than all her fellows, and rolled down head over heels, breakneck and reckless. There might have been half a dozen girls with her, but it was hard to see the others. She drew the eye like a comet.
She seemed to have no mind for her modesty. Her petticoats flew anyhow about her bare legs. Nor did she heed her safety; more than once she knocked her head on a tussock or clod, fit to break her crown. And if she did? There would be no king’s horses or men to put her together again. Nine years ago they were plentiful here, for this place had been a battlefield where Jacobite rebels had been put down by the forces of an English king. They had bled into the ground, those renegades, melted away like the Jacobite claim itself, and now Killcommadan Hill was a playground for their daughters.
The red-headed girl scrambled to the top of the hill, and tumbled again, egged on by her less courageous fellows. As she fell this time, pitching and turning, her universe contracted to a rolling drum of green earth and blue heaven. Snowy clouds flocked in the sky, sheep grazed in the fields. Sheep floated in the sky and the clouds grazed in the fields. No – the sky was the one with the sun; a golden coin, too bright to look at, a coin that left a white round ghost on the back of her eyes when she blinked.
This time, in that spinning scene, a coach and four drew across the earth-sky. Not Phoebus’s carriage or anything fanciful like that, but something solid and tangible and wooden. She practically rolled into one of the great wheels. The quartet of horses whinnied and stamped, unsettled by this missile.
A fancy gentleman, plump and bewigged, leaned from the carriage. His beckoning hand wore a glove, and the snowy fingers spun a gilt coin dexterously between them. A little golden sun in a glove as white as cloud. He looked at the redhead, close to. At the top of the hill she had just been a petticoat with a hank of red hair; now he could see her properly she stole the breath. He took an inventory; a slipwillow of a girl with copper curls falling to a handspan waist, bottle-green eyes in a pearl-pale face, full rose lips and a brand-new bosom.
‘Well done, Bess,’ said the fancy gentleman.
The girl frowned as she scrambled to her feet. Her name was not Bess. But the protest clotted in her throat. She was spellbound by the golden coin. He seemed to have plucked the sun from the sky.
‘It’s yours,’ said the fancy gentleman. ‘
If
you roll again; from the very top.’ He leaned farther from the carriage window, lowering his voice, so close that she could feel the breeze of his whisper. ‘And this time, show me your
tail
.’
Her frown deepened. She had come to the hill looking for a little excitement. Now this man held adventure in his hand, and his admiration warmed her like the sun. That little coin meant freedom – freedom from a mother who had beaten her every day for nine years, ever since her Da had died on this very field. That little coin meant she could go to Dublin, to live with the aunt she had heard of but never seen.
Kit turned and climbed the hill, marching higher and higher, with an almost martial step. When she reached the top, with her eye on the distant carriage, she tilted and launched herself. She could feel her skirts rising – the winds rushing between her legs and across her bare rump. The fancy gentleman would get his wish.
Down at the carriage again she righted herself. She half-expected him to drive away, but he handed down the coin to her. Now it lay in her hand, warm and heavy. It was gold, and it was stamped with the head of William III, the English king who had murdered her father.
‘Well earned, Bess,’ called the fancy gentleman at her retreat.
She turned back. ‘Why do you name me so?’
He leaned towards her again, the curls of his wig spilling out of the carriage window. ‘Bess was a red-headed queen; and when she was by, no one could see anyone but her.’ He nodded to the other girls, specks and smears in the distance. ‘Those others are nothing to you.’
‘My name is Kit,’ she said, with a conqueror’s confidence. ‘Kit Kavanagh.’
‘That’s your given name?’ The man frowned, his eyebrows appearing below the piled fringe of his wig. ‘But it is a gentleman’s name, surely. Are you not Katherine or Kate?’
‘My mother named me Christian. It was my father who called me Kit.’
He smiled. ‘No love for Mama, eh?’
‘I would not care if I never saw her again.’
He snorted. On another day he would have bundled her into the carriage and then, of course, the redhead would never have had to see her mother again. But he was a man who lived on his whims – it was a whim that had made him stop in the first place and a whim that made him leave again. He knocked his cane on the driver’s box. ‘Kit, then,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Queen Kit.’
She did not stay to watch the carriage away but turned for home at once, the coin hidden in her bosom. Six months ago she had been as flat as a board and the coin would have fallen to the ground. Now her new landscape cradled it. She felt powerful as she walked; so drunk with the tumbling and the coin and the prospect of freedom that she forgot the fancy gentleman long before he forgot her.
And not once did Kit Kavanagh imagine that she would ever meet him again.
Chapter 1
Dublin, Ireland, 1702
For a soldier he leads a very fine life …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
There was nothing unusual about the day that Kit Walsh lost her husband.
There were no dark portents drawn on the sky by the flight of the Dublin sparrows, nothing to be read in the leaves of the tea, nor in the eyes of the little plaster virgin behind the bar who beadily watched the sinners drink. All was as usual in Kavanagh’s alehouse, also known as ‘The Gravediggers’ – set as it was between the teeming lively city and Glasnevin cemetery. ‘Noisy neighbours one side, quiet the other,’ said the locals.
Kit stood behind the bar in her Friday gown, ready to serve the regulars. Aunt Maura sat at the far end of the bar, smoking a pipe for her health – she suffered with a canker in her breast – taking the beer money in her fingerless gloves. Dermott Shortt and Martin O’Grady sat in the snug laughing the skeletons of the week away, their grave-digging spades propped outside the half-door. Old Eamon Pearce propped up the other end of the bar, telling toothless stories to anyone who’d listen, passing the time until he too would lie under the diggers’ dirt. It was quiet for a Friday, and Kit took a moment to look around her. She loved Kavanagh’s, she loved Aunt Maura for taking her in with the beer barrels two years ago, but most of all she loved her handsome new husband, Richard Walsh.