{"product_id":"in-the-company-of-the-courtesan-isbn-9780812974041","title":"In the Company of the Courtesan","description":"My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eThus begins\u003cb\u003e In the Company of the Courtesan\u003c\/b\u003e, Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith a mix of courage and cunning they infiltrate Venetian society. Together they make the perfect partnership: the sharp-tongued, sharp-witted dwarf, and his vibrant mistress, trained from birth to charm, entertain, and satisfy men who have the money to support her. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet as their fortunes rise, this perfect partnership comes under threat, from the searing passion of a lover who wants more than his allotted nights to the attentions of an admiring Turk in search of human novelties for his sultan’s court. But Fiammetta and Bucino’s greatest challenge comes from a young crippled woman, a blind healer who insinuates herself into their lives and hearts with devastating consequences for them all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, \u003cb\u003eIn the Company of the Courtesan\u003c\/b\u003e paints a portrait of one of the world’s greatest cities at its most potent moment in history: It is a picture that remains vivid long after the final page.Sarah Dunant has written eight novels, including the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller \u003ci\u003eThe Birth of Venus\u003c\/i\u003e, and edited two books of essays. She has worked widely in print, television, and radio, and is now a full-time writer. Dunant has two children and lives in London and Florence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTo schedule a speaking engagement, please contact American Program Bureau\u003c\/i\u003e at \u003cu\u003ewww.apbspeakers.com\u003c\/u\u003e  chapter one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Rome, 1527\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting   color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman   emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting   in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and   punishment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Italy was a living chessboard for the ambitions of half of Europe in   those days. The threat of war was as regular as the harvest, alliances   made in winter were broken by spring, and there were places where women   bore another child by a different invading father every other year. In   the great and glorious city of Rome, we had grown soft living under   God’s protection, but such was the instability of the times that even   the holiest of fathers made unholy alliances, and a pope with Medici   blood in his veins was always more prone to politics than to prayer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the last few days before the horror struck, Rome still couldn’t   bring herself to believe that her destruction was nigh. Rumors crept   like bad smells through the streets. The stonemasons shoring up the   city walls told of a mighty army of Spaniards, their savagery honed on   the barbarians of the New World, swelled with cohorts of German   Lutherans fueled on the juices of the nuns they had raped on their   journey south. Yet when the Roman defense led by the nobleman Renzo de   Ceri marched through the town touting for volunteers for the   barricades, these same bloodthirsty giants became half-dead men   marching on their knees, their assholes close to the ground to dispel   all the rotting food and bad wine they had guzzled on the way. In this   version, the enemy was so pathetic that,\\ even were the soldiers to   find the strength to lift their guns, they had no artillery to help   them, and with enough stalwart Romans on the battlements, we could   drown them in our piss and mockery as they tried to scale their way   upward. The joys of war always talk better than they play; still, the   prospect of a battle won by urine and bravura was enticing enough to   attract a few adventurers with nothing to lose, including our stable   boy, who left the next afternoon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Two days later, the army arrived at the gates and my lady sent me to   get him back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the evening streets, our louche, loud city had closed up like a   clam. Those with enough money had already bought their own private   armies, leaving the rest to make do with locked doors and badly boarded   windows. While my gait is small and bandied, I have always had a homing   pigeon’s sense of direction, and for all its twists and turns, Rome had   long been mapped inside my head. My lady entertained a client once, a   merchant captain who mistook my deformity for a sign of God’s special   grace and who promised me a fortune if I could find him a way to the   Indies across the open sea. But I was born with a recurring nightmare   of a great bird picking me up in its claws and dropping me into an   empty ocean, and for that, and other reasons, I have always been afraid   of water.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As the walls came into sight, I could see neither lookouts nor   sentries. Until now we had never had need of such things, our rambling   fortifications being more for the delight of antiquarians than for   generals. I clambered up by way of one of the side towers, my thighs   thrumming from the deep tread of the steps, and stood for a moment   catching my breath. Along the stone corridor of the battlement, two   figures were slouched down against the wall. Above me, above them, I   could make out a low wave of moaning, like the murmur of a congregation   at litany in church. In that moment my need to know became greater than   my terror of finding out, and I hauled myself up over uneven and broken   stones as best I could until I had a glimpse above the top.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Below me, as far as the eye could see, a great plain of darkness   stretched out, spiked by hundreds of flickering candles. The moaning   rolled like a slow wind through the night, the sound of an army joined   in prayer or talking to itself in its sleep. Until then I think even I   had colluded in the myth of our invincibility. Now I knew how the   Trojans must have felt as they looked down from their walls and saw the   Greeks camped before them, the promise of revenge glinting off their   polished shields in the moonlight. Fear spiked my gut as I scrambled   back down onto the battlement, and in a fury I went to kick the   sleeping sentries awake. Close to, their hoods became cowls, and I made   out two young monks, barely old enough to tie their own tassels, their   faces pasty and drawn. I drew myself to my full height and squared up   to the first, pushing my face into his. He opened his eyes and yelled,   thinking that the enemy had sent a fatheaded, smiling devil out of Hell   for him early. His panic roused his companion. I put my fingers to my   lips and grinned again. This time they both squealed. I’ve had my fair   share of pleasure from scaring clerics, but at that moment I wished   that they had more courage to resist me. A hungry Lutheran would have   had them split on his bayonet before they might say Dominus vobiscum.   They crossed themselves frantically and, when I questioned them, waved   me on toward the gate at San Spirito, where, they said, the defense was   stronger. The only strategy I have perfected in life is one to keep my   belly full, but even I knew that San Spirito was where the city was at   its most vulnerable, with Cardinal Armellini’s vineyards reaching to   the battlements and a farmhouse built up and into the very stones of   the wall itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Our army, such as it was when I found it, was huddled in clumps around   the building. A couple of makeshift sentries tried to stop me, but I   told them I was there to join the fight, and they laughed so hard they   let me through, one of them aiding me along with a kick that missed my   rear by a mile. In the camp, half the men were stupid with terror, the   other half stupid with drink. I never did find the stable boy, but what   I saw instead convinced me that a single breach here and Rome would   open up as easily as a wife’s legs to her handsome neighbor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Back home, I found my mistress awake in her bedroom, and I told her all   I had seen. She listened carefully, as she always did. We talked for a   while, and then, as the night folded around us, we fell silent, our   minds slipping away from our present life, filled with the warmth of   wealth and security, toward the horrors of a future that we could   barely imagine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By the time the attack came, at first light, we were already at work. I   had roused the servants before dawn, and my lady had instructed them to   lay the great table in the gold room, giving orders to the cook to   slaughter the fattest of the pigs and start preparing a banquet the   likes of which were usually reserved for cardinals or bankers. While   there were mutterings of dissent, such was her authority—or possibly   their desperation—that any plan seemed comforting at the moment, even   one that appeared to make no sense.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The house had already been stripped of its more ostentatious wealth:   the great agate vases, the silver plates, the majolica dishes, the   gilded crystal Murano drinking glasses, and the best linens had all   been stowed away three or four days before, wrapped first inside the   embroidered silk hangings, then the heavy Flemish tapestries, and   packed into two chests. The smaller one was so ornate with gilt and   wood marquetry that it had to be covered again with burlap to save it   from the damp. It had taken the cook, the stable boy, and both of the   twins to drag the chests into the yard, where a great hole had been dug   under the flagstones close to the servants’ latrines. When they were   buried and covered with a blanket of fresh feces (fear is an excellent   loosener of the bowels), we let out the five pigs, bought at a greatly   inflated price a few days earlier, and they rolled and kicked their way   around, grunting their delight as only pigs can do in shit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With all trace of the valuables gone, my lady had taken her great   necklace—the one she had worn to the party at the Strozzi house, where   the rooms had been lit by skeletons with candles in their ribs and the   wine, many swore afterward, had been as rich and thick as blood—and to   every servant she had given two fat pearls. The remaining ones she told   them were theirs for the dividing if the chests were found unopened   when the worst was over. Loyalty is a commodity that grows more   expensive when times get bloody, and as an employer Fiammetta Bianchini   was as much loved as she was feared, and in this way she cleverly   pitted each man as much against himself as against her. As to where she   had hidden the rest of her jewelry, well, that she did not reveal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What remained after this was done was a modest house of modest wealth   with a smattering of ornaments, two lutes, a pious Madonna in the   bedroom, and a wood panel of fleshy nymphs in the salon, decoration   sufficient to the fact of her dubious profession but without the stench   of excess many of our neighbors’ palazzi emitted. Indeed, a few hours   later, as a great cry went up and the church bells began to chime, each   one coming fast on the other, telling us that our defenses had been   penetrated, the only aroma from our house was that of slow-roasting   pig, growing succulent in its own juices.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Those who lived to tell the tale spoke with a kind of awe of that first   breach of the walls; of how, as the fighting got fiercer with the day,   a fog had crept up from the marshes behind the enemy lines, thick and   gloomy as broth, enveloping the massing attackers below so that our   defense force couldn’t fire down on them accurately until, like an army   of ghosts roaring out of the mist, they were already upon us. After   that, whatever courage we might have found was no match for the numbers   they could launch. To lessen our shame, we did take one prize off them,   when a shot from an arquebus blew a hole the size of the Eucharist in   the chest of their leader, the great Charles de Bourbon. Later, the   goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini boasted to anyone who would listen of his   miraculous aim. But then, Cellini boasted of everything. To hear him   speak—as he never stopped doing, from the houses of nobles to the   taverns in the slums—you would have thought the defense of the city was   down to him alone. In which case it is him we should blame, for with no   leader, the enemy now had nothing to stop their madness. From that   first opening, they flowed up and over into the city like a great wave   of cockroaches. Had the bridges across the Tiber been destroyed, as the   head of the defense force, de Ceri, had advised, we might have trapped   them in the Trastevere and held them off for long enough to regroup   into some kind of fighting force. But Rome had chosen comfort over   common sense, and with the Ponte Sisto taken early, there was nothing   to stop them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And thus, on the sixth day of the month of May in the year of our Lord   1527, did the second sack of Rome begin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What couldn’t be ransomed or carried was slaughtered or destroyed. It   is commonly said now that it was the Lutheran lansquenets troops who   did the worst. While the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, might be God’s   sworn defender, he wasn’t above using the swords of heretics to swell   his army and terrify his enemies. For them Rome was sweet pickings, the   very home of the Antichrist, and as mercenaries whom the emperor had   conveniently forgotten to pay, they were as much in a frenzy to line   their pockets as they were to shine their souls. Every church was a   cesspool of corruption, every nunnery the repository for whores of   Christ, every orphan skewered on a bayonet (their bodies too small to   waste their shot on) a soul saved from heresy. But while all that may   be true, I should say that I also heard as many Spanish as German oaths   mixed in with the screaming, and I wager that when the carts and the   mules finally rode out of Rome, laden with gold plate and tapestries,   as much of it was heading for Spain as for Germany.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Had they moved faster and stolen less in that first attack, they might   have captured the greatest prize of all: the Holy Father himself. But   by the time they reached the Vatican palace, Pope Clement VII had   lifted up his skirts (to find, no doubt, a brace of cardinals squeezed   beneath his fat stomach) and, along with a dozen sacks hastily stuffed   with jewels and holy relics, run as if he had the Devil on his heels to   the Castel Sant’Angelo, the drawbridge rising up after him with the   invaders in sight and a dozen priests and courtiers still hanging from   its chains, until they had to shake them off and watch them drown in   the moat below.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With death so close, those still living fell into a panic over the   state of their souls. Some clerics, seeing the hour of their own   judgment before them, gave confessions and indulgences for free, but   there were others who made small fortunes selling forgiveness at   exorbitant rates. Perhaps God was watching as they worked: certainly   when the Lutherans found them, huddled like rats in the darkest corners   of the churches, their bulging robes clutched around them, the wrath   visited upon them was all the more righteous, as they were   disemboweled, first for their wealth and then for their guts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Meanwhile, in our house, as the clamor of violence grew in the   distance, we were busy polishing the forks and wiping clean the   second-best glasses. In her bedroom, my lady, who had been scrupulous   as ever in the business of her beauty, put the finishing touches to her   toilette, and came downstairs. The view from her bedroom window now   showed the occasional figure skidding and hurtling through the streets,   his head twisting backward as he ran, as if fearful of the wave that   was to overwhelm him. It would not be long before the screams got close   enough for us to distinguish individual agonies. It was time to rally   our own defense force.New York Times bestseller; Author of The Birth of Venus [quote]--USA Today","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300511404261,"sku":"NP9780812974041","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812974041.jpg?v=1767729957","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/in-the-company-of-the-courtesan-isbn-9780812974041","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}