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was instructed to arrive at ten o’clock precisely. The letters and some pages from Luciana’s only surviving diary would be ready for me. I would be allowed to remain in the library for exactly two hours.
    I understand that very few people would think a morning spent looking at old letters could possibly be exciting, but I anticipated the following day as eagerly as a child looking forward to Christmas. I felt certain that Luciana’s correspondence would provide the missing piece of the jigsaw I had been putting together for years.
    The Lover’s Lessons , an anonymous erotic novel about a young girl’s sexual awakening, caused an absolute scandal when it was first published in 1755. It claimed to be written by the young woman herself, a virgin at the time she began the life journey that led to the creation of the extraordinary work. The good people of Venice, licentious though the rest of the world believed them to be, were still shocked to read such a candid account of female sexuality. Members of the church called for the work to be burned, which naturally ensured its notoriety, popularity and numerous reprints.
    It wasn’t long, however, before people began to wonder if the book was in fact a hoax. Intellectuals of the time debated whether it was really possible for a young woman to have such a hearty sexual appetite; the narrator claimed she was befriended by a courtesan and indulged in a lesbian affair just a few weeks after losing her virginity. They concluded that it would have been highly unusual. Far more likely was that a man had written the book in the guise of a woman to extract maximum outrage from his musings. For months on end, the gossip in the coffee shops and gambling houses concentrated on the true identity of the author. Venice already had a long history of erotic writing, beginning with fifteenth-century writer Pietro Aretino. Giorgio Baffo, a well-known erotic poet of the time, was flattered by the gossip but denied any involvement. Eventually, Casanova himself emerged as the most likely candidate. When asked if he was the person behind the novel, he neither confirmed nor denied it.
    As the centuries passed, Casanova’s name was so often associated with The Lover’s Lessons that the theory of his authorship of the work passed into fact. However, I was not convinced. For my master’s degree, I had made long study of Casanova’s work and I felt instinctively that The Lover’s Lessons came from a different pen. The phraseology and the vocabulary were subtly different. Though he had risen to dizzy heights in Venetian society, even partying with the Doge before he wound up in prison, Casanova’s beginnings were quite humble. I felt there were qualities in The Lover’s Lessons that betokened a more refined upbringing and a genuine feminine sensibility.
    Luciana Giordano came to my attention shortly after I first suggested that Casanova was not the author of Lessons . I had been trawling through Casanova’s diaries again, matching the acronyms he used to describe certain of his lovers with women known to have lived in Venice at the time. At first Luciana seemed an unlikely associate of the well-known bad boy, but further investigation into her life suggested that the highly born girl had gone right off the rails. She was admitted to a convent in 1754. Back then, a girl of her class didn’t end up in a convent unless she was orphaned, or she was in serious trouble. Since records suggested that Luciana’s own father had sent her to the island convent near Torcello, disgrace was the only possible motive. But how had she disgraced herself? I felt there had to be a man involved. With my very own history of falling for bad boys, I was determined to find out.
     
    At the end of my first day in my new office, Nick wandered over to my desk and suggested I join him for dinner. I happily accepted his invitation. Despite my enthusiastic promise to the fishmonger, I really didn’t feel like cooking for