There is no mistaking the pleasure in her voice. Three months ago, this would have been enough to plunge Valentine in pleasant speculations, but his nerves are worn to transparency and his eyes are gritty from lack of sleep. His rear end burns, and his cough, thickset and heavy in the daylight hours, is prancing in a lively fashion now, ready for its nocturnal pillaging of his viscera. He cannot conceive of giving pleasure, so he renounces the thought of taking it. And whatever Cecilia Cornaro intends by that softly mewing voice, he will not be distracted from his primary object. No woman has been able to do that, he reflects, since he first laid eyes on Mimosina Dolcezza.
“I—I would like you to try again with the portrait,” he says, between coughs.
“Ah,” she pronounces. She has already risen from the divan and splashed water on her face. Droplets cling to her curls and she shakes them off. “What’s so different from last time, Mister Lord Valentine Greatrakes? Exactly? Remember,” and her voice is low and dangerous now, “I failed you before.”
He finds it hard to meet her eyes then; instead his own wander over the walls lined with painted faces. When last he came it had been night, and those faces bore the unmistakable look of sensual satiety. By contrast, in daylight, these same visages seem eager and desirous, even anxious to be about the business of love, lest it escapes them before the sun sets.
Cecilia Cornaro is awaiting his answer in no very patient manner. He knows she adores a novelty, so he offers her the new thing first.
“Now I would like you to draw a man for me. I have all the features.”
He flourishes the list like a child who has completed a laborious item of scholarship. Even that eddy of air provokes a fit of coughing. The artist turns her back on him and busies herself in a cupboard that seems to be a larder. She brings raw eggs and various powders and syrups to the table. She breaks the eggs into a goblet and stirs them vigorously. He thinks she is mixing up an egg tempera to commence the portrait, but she surprises him by thrusting it into his hand.
“Drink,” she says.
No one in the world addresses Valentine Greatrakes in this peremptory manner. Above all, he is used to more caressing tones in a woman. But he wants her to draw the murderer, so he drinks up the potion, which is loathsomely sweet and reeks of coltsfoot.
“A man?” she says, snatching up this list. “Have you seen him yourself? Gould you verify what I do?”
“Yes, indeed. I can see him even now!” Valentine is so weary that he almost thinks that the ghost of the murderous Venetian floats in front of him, transported from the scene of Tom’s corpse in the depository. So carefully has he imprinted the man on his memory that it is almost impossible to evacuate the image from his mind. He takes back the sheet of paper and reads her the list, embellishing it with new inspiration. She rapidly transcribes his words into Venetian on a leaf of a blank book.
In moments, the girl has set up a piece of paper on her easel and is sketching with charcoal. Swiftly she covers the page with an outline cross-hatched with small lines. Repeatedly consulting her translation, she adds details. Her hand hovers over the sketch like a hummingbird. She asks him to read again from his own list. She is troubled with a few words of English, and he is obliged to explain them to her.
Watching the head materializing on her paper, Valentine knows that he has his man now. He is itching to rip that cruel face off her easel and to hand it to the truncheoni who will soon be on the trail like bloodhounds. No, those drumbling boys will never get it right. He will do it himself. The man is as good as found. In any case he doesn’t dare ask Cecilia Cornaro to grind out copies of this sketch. He has another favor to ask her, a more important one, an unusual one, of the kind it gives her so much pleasure to bestow.
He knows she is fascinated by him. This makes him shy. He has already presumed on her too much, and he guesses that she will not accept mere monetary payment. He will have to think of something more unusual than that to reward her. Novelty is the wine of life to this girl.
But his own need is too great to be contained: “I have had a thought. I presume that you keep studies of all the ladies you paint. You told me once that all the beautiful women of the city come to you while they are still lovely, so that there is a permanent memento of their beauty.”
She nods, smiling. Valentine does not realize it but he has just uttered four sentences without a cough.
He asks, “Rich and poor?”
“Noble and gutter. The Golden Book families come to add another little face to their family tree. The poor ones, if they are beautiful, become the mistresses of rich men, who also want to immortalize the fact that they once were wealthy enough to bed such a lovely creature. A different kind of investment.”
“And do you keep studies, as I thought?”
She nods. She can see what he is seeking.
“Gould we… could I look through them?”
“Do you realise how many women I have painted? Also, I keep here the studies of my old master, Antonio, who used to be the most famous portrait artist in Venice. Before me, that is. His studies have preserved many family likenesses that I keep for my researches when I cannot myself discover what has gone into the making of a face.”
“I have as much time as it will take.”
“Va bene,” she smiles. “If she is to be found, then I am sure she will be here.”
She lights a row of candles and sets them on the table, then opens the window to monitor the water, the noise of which has risen noticeably.
“There’s a high tide coming,” she tells him. “Does anyone need to know where you are?”
He shakes his head—Smerghetto always already knows where he is—and moves to the window himself, looking down on the water that has started to steal the lower parts of the palazzi. He knows it is a childish thing, but Valentine has a foreign tourist’s love, a child’s craving for acqua alta. He thrills to feel the water churning up under the city, and to see it spill into the squares. He loves the drama and confusione. When he hears the water rising, he imagines the vagrant hands of the waves reaching out to haul themselves up to dry land. Millions of tiny hands, all grasping greedily at the inner edges of the island, as if trying to better themselves. When an acqua alta starts to abate he always grieves a little.
Cecilia Cornaro walks over to a huge cupboard and flings open the double doors. Floor to ceiling, Valentine beholds neatly stacked sheets of paper contained in large leather portfolios.
“So these are all the people you’ve painted? You and Antonio?”
She laughs. “No, these are just some of the women!”
And she walks to another cupboard, and flings open its doors. “And here are some more. And I’m not yet done.”
A fourth and a fifth cupboard are opened, all similarly stacked.
Valentine quails. He had not imagined such a work as raking through these sheaves. And he is already worried. What if looking at portraits is like sniffing at perfumes: after four or five the impression becomes blurred?
Cecilia Cornaro asks: “Are you sure?”
But what choice has he? He is determined to find his lover.
He sits at a desk and pulls three candlesticks toward him.
“How are they arranged?” he asks, wondering if some sifting might be done in advance. For example, perhaps blondes may already be separated from brunettes.
Cecilia Cornaro does not mitigate his task.
“By family, for the noblewomen and borghese, and by the names of their noble lovers, for the courtesans.”
He mislikes the last category, hopes that he does not need to look at such faces, or that he shall not find that of Mimosina Dolcezza among them.
“Family,” he says in a confident voice. “Let us start alphabetically.”
And so he works his way through the Golden Book of Venice, sees all that the city has to offer in the way of blue-blooded and middle-class beauties. He finds that he likes the strong, equine style of the Civran and Flangini women, but that the Mocen
igos have too much chin and the Morosinis are too heavy-lidded for his taste. The Soderinis are appallingly plain. By the time he gets to the Vendramin ladies he is worn out with lips and eyes and noses, and he is getting frightened. So close to the end of the alphabet of noblewomen and still he has not seen the face that he is seeking, or has he indeed become blind with too much seeing and already passed her by? Worse, is she to be found in the folders of the courtesans?
But when he opens the Venier folder, his breath quickens. In his very first Venier he sees a slight resemblance to Mimosina Dolcezza. He holds it up to the light. It is not her, but there is some cousinly blood running in the veins of this woman. He picks up another, and there it is again, that trace of her lineaments, something about the eyes and also about the nostrils.
Cecilia Cornaro, who has finished her sketch of the murderer, is watching him with interest.
“You have found something?”
“I think she’s a Venier.”
Cecilia Cornaro makes a low sound at the back of her throat; it seems to indicate that she is impressed. The Veniers, she tells him, are the bluest of the blue bloods.
He lingers over every Venier portrait. Of course it may be a long time since she was painted, so she could have changed. But how? These women are uniformly elegant, suave and well-informed of their own superiority. While they have approximations of her features, none of them has the febrile energy of Mimosina Dolcezza, and none has her vulnerability.
He asks Cecilia Cornaro, “How could a Venier lady end up as an actress?”
She too is mystified. “I never heard of such a thing.”
She bends over him as he looks, enlivening the search with scraps of personal history about the women she has painted. “Mistress of the French ambassador,” she observes, or “Lover of her sister’s husband!”
They seem a libertine lot, the Venier women.
Valentine detests the thought.
In the end he finds her. A piece of paper slips into his hand, just like any other, but it is she, Mimosina Dolcezza, real as life, though some years younger, and he has pressed his lips to it before he can restrain himself.
Cecilia Cornaro gently asks if she might see what he has found. He has whipped it up so quickly that she was not able to look.
When he hands it to her, the artist’s face darkens.
“This is one of Antonio’s, but I know it well. That is Catarina Venier, from nearly twenty years ago. She was a piece of work, that girl! A melodrama every minute, would never sit still, Antonio told me. You see the blurring round the chin. She changed her expression all the time. Every time he looked up, there was a different face there. He felt as if she was making fun of him. In the end he asked for her parents to attend, and he begged them to discipline her. Like Antonio, I do not care to intervene with silly adolescent girls. It is too boring: They are all precisely the same in their affectations and they all know the same amount of nothing. Anyway Antonio explained to Ippolita and Carlo Venier that her bad behavior was their problem, not his.’
Valentine stares at the young face of his lover. He cannot bring himself to think of her as “Catarina.” And it is simply not possible that thirty-five is the age of Mimosina Dolcezza. That would make her just ten years younger than himself. He looks back at the sketch. Its lines are less certain than those of the other studies.
“This is not finished, is it?” he asks. She shakes her head, her expression muted.
“What happened in the end?” he wants to know.
“Ah, that is something I’m not likely to forget. Antonio often told the story. She made the most tremendous scene, an outrageous fit of hysterics, because her father asked her to wear a piece of the family jewelery She sneered at it, and screamed that it was ugly and she would never wear it. She said she hated diamonds. Then she clawed at her throat and ripped the necklace off her neck and threw it out of the window. It fell in the canal, and that was the end of it, of course.”
“And the end of the portrait too?” asks Valentine, flushing as he remembers the actress’s reticence when presented with his diamond brooches.
“Yes. Her father bundled her out of the room, and she was never brought back.”
“Do you know what happened to her? Did she marry?”
Cecilia Cornaro’s face is kind, but it is clear that she has information that will cloud rather than clear the mystery.
“Yes, she married, in a sense. She became a bride of Christ. Antonio told me that after that scene her parents put her into a convent and that she has never been seen in public again.”
“Which convent?”
“It must have been San Zaccaria,” she said in a hard voice. “It’s the richest one. That’s where the Veniers bury their living daughters.”
• 5 •
A Balsamic Bolus
Take Conserve of red Roses, Lucatellus’s Balsam, each half a dram; Balsam of Peru 3 drops, mix.
It’s a prevailing Medicine against an inveterate Cough, and recent Consumption, Spitting of Blood, Dysentery, Contusion; and wheresoever the Vessels being opened, or broken bleed inwardly.
While he has gazed at women’s faces the tide has risen over the stones of the city and renounced them again. He walks back through the freshly baptized streets and he too feels reborn in this new state, a state of information. He knows who his lover is.
In London he has no eyes, he thinks, or at least dull, insensible organs in their place. In Venice, he sees so much more. It is as if the city speaks to him in a purely visual language, all the clearer because her spoken one is impenetrable to him. On this walk, illuminated by the night’s events, the salt efflorescence of the bricks speaks to him of perilous high waters that the young Catarina Venier once watched from her piano nobile window, and the black teeth of the loggias recount insupportably humid summer days when she took refuge there. There are salt-weeping bricks in London, and loggias too, but they are inscrutable, or passive. Valentine never notices them.
He turns the new truth over and over in his head, like a shiny coin in an impoverished hand.
He is not displeased—in fact, he is gratified—to learn that she is a noblewoman, although he finds it hard to believe. He felt so close to her: There was no distance at all. He has never mated outside his class, and had supposed the sensations would be different. He did not feel instinctively deferential toward her, except in normal ways with regard to her femininity. Perhaps it is true, something he has always liked to believe: that there is a natural nobility in human beings that can transcend their births and circumstances. “Catarina” has proved the ephemeral nature of class by floating downward, he by rising upwards in his great material success.
It begins to rain without mercy, flaking down out of the wet heavens, so hard that small dogs must be carried, or else be swept away in the sudden rivers that still overflow the streets. His stockings are sodden, his shoes shipwrecked. He is breathing rain and choking on it. Rain is washing the pupils of his eyes faster than he can wipe it away with fingers so sodden that it is as if he is distilling teardrops from beneath his nails.
The downpour ceases abruptly, and instantly an impossible volume of birdsong is gushing from the stone city. It follows him all the way home, swelling in greeting as he enters the garden of his headquarters, nosing through the frisking butterflies still jeweled with raindrops.
Valentine takes the two portraits back to his room, and lies down on his bed. He has propped the papers up against a candelabra on the table, and he looks now from one to the other: a beautiful blonde girl and a dark, refined-looking man.
Of course they have nothing to do with one another. It was mere coincidence that placed them together in the room where Tom’s blood suddenly burst from his breast. Mimosina Dolcezza—Catarina, that is—had come to seek out her lover and a sweet reconciliation after a meaningless quarrel. The murderer had come to revel in the spectacle of his handiwork, and to confirm its efficacy.
And the girl in the portrait does not look much
like a nun. He asks himself again: How could a Venetian nun become an actress? The scenario is so unlikely that he can find no possible logic to it. He longs to hear her own explanation: Now that he has got this far he is sure that face to face, lip to lip, in the quiet intimacy of their bedchamber, she will soon tell him the rest of her story. He has this cherished appointment to keep at the Black Bat when the mystery is solved. Soon, surely, the wait will be over.
He turns to the man’s portrait, so deftly rendered that he growls in his throat to behold it.
“I’ll see you whimpering,” he tells the face aloud.
The candle drops wax on to young Catarina Venier’s portrait. Swiftly he removes the candelabra and instead sets the two portraits up against the paper box that Dizzom has insisted that he bring with him, on the absurd hunch that it might provide a clue. “This box could be a message, too, or a clue in itself, you know,” he had suggested anxiously. Dizzom often has these portentous fancies; Valentine hates to throw cold water on them, even when they are as far-fetched as this one. So merely to please Dizzom he has brought the useless box. It is a white card creation with a blue woodcut that shows a church of some kind with an angel hovering above it. It once contained some marzipan cakes and the letter from “Catarina.”
And, he reminds himself sharply, that letter also concerns the whereabouts of his poor little ward, Pevenche.
• 6 •
Peruvian Antihectic Lozenges
Take fine powder’d Bark of Peru 1 ounce and a half; Balsam of Capive 2 drams; Sugar of Roses (dissolv’d in compound Wormwood Water) 8 ounces; with Mucilage of Gum Tragacanth make Lozenges, each weighing 2 drams.
The Communicator of these saith. Lozenges are a pretty pleasant sort of Medicine, and fit for delicate nice Persons, that must have their Palates complimented, as well as their Distempers cured. These are good in Hectic Fevers, Consumptive Coughs, difficulty of Breathing, and the like Symptoms.
The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 34
