Read Online The Rossetti Letter (v5) by Christi Phillips - Free Book Online Page B

while she was thinking about them? The harder she tried, the more they felt like two sausages dangling at her sides. And her dress, one of La Celestia’s that had been fitted for her, was so tight that it itched unbearably. She reached up to scratch her back, and in the instant she took her mind off her feet, she tripped and fell in a heap on the floor.
    “By the Virgin!” La Celestia exclaimed.
    “It’s this dress,” said Alessandra, exasperated. “Is it necessary for it to squeeze the life out of me?”
    “It’s not the life I’m trying to squeeze out of you, it’s your bosom. Little good it will do you, though, if you can’t manage to walk like a lady.”
    “If my faults are so pronounced—if even my breasts are inadequate—then what on earth am I doing here?”
    “Great beauties are not born, they are made. There isn’t a woman in the world who wouldn’t benefit from a bit of paint or a more flattering fashion.”
    Alessandra rubbed her ankle. A bit of paint? Clearly, in her case it required substantially more than that. In La Celestia’s adjoining dressing room, there was an array of lotions, powders, oils, and unguents, each with a specific use, that La Celestia insisted she learn. La Celestia’s maidservants, under her supervision, had primped and prettied Alessandra to the point that she hardly recognized herself. A few sessions on the sunny altana had lightened her hair to a golden blond; she’d been bathed in rosewater, had had her nails trimmed and buffed, her legs and underarms depilated, her hair and skin massaged with perfumed oils, her eyebrows shaped. She’d been fussed over so much that sometimes she felt like one of Bianca’s game hens, plucked and trussed.
    “Ready to try again?”
    “I feel as if you want me to be someone other than who I am.”
    “Precisely. To be a truly successful courtesan, you must be more than a woman. You must be a goddess.”
    “Is that all?” Sarcasm laced Alessandra’s voice.
    “Do you believe that men think of me as just another woman?”
    “No, but you’re…you. You’re La Celestia. You aren’t like other women.”
    “How do you think that came to be? Luck? A happy accident? Did you imagine that I was born to the life I have now?” She sat down in one of the chairs near the marble fireplace and motioned for Alessandra to sit next to her. Alessandra dutifully slipped out of the chopines and, dragging her skirts, limped over to the empty chair.
    “Not many people know what I’m going to tell you,” La Celestia said. “I wouldn’t like it to be repeated. Do you understand?”
    “Yes.” She’d already learned that La Celestia’s angelic countenance concealed a calculating mind and an iron will. It would be foolish to cross her.
    “Good.” La Celestia smiled, but there was little warmth in it. “I was born in Treviso, not Venice. My mother was a prostitute. My father was a French soldier who never married my mother. The way we lived was…mean. Squalid. It was nothing like this,” she said with a gesture that encompassed her luxurious bedchamber and its furnishings: the numerous carved and gilded chests and the palatial bed covered with gold-embroidered white silk linens.
    “My mother was uneducated, but she was shrewd. By the time I turned five, she could see that I was going to be beautiful, and she used every resource at her disposal to groom me for the life she knew I could have. She made sure that I learned to read, that I studied music, singing, and deportment, that my manners were impeccable.
    “When I was fourteen, we came to Venice for the sole purpose of launching my career as a courtesan. My father was long gone, but my mother had managed to save enough money to pay for our journey here and board and lodging for two weeks. Only two weeks. If her plan did not work, we would be out on the streets, poor, begging, and alone in a city where we knew no one.
    “Even though we could barely afford it, we took rooms at an