Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Well . . .”

  “The one in 1204,” said Rupert. “It began as a Crusade against the Holy Land, but the Crusaders made the mistake of stopping in Venice, you see, to get ships and supplies, and Doge Dandalo—a very old and blind and very crafty man—kept the Crusaders lingering on here with one excuse or another, long enough for them to spend all the money they’d come with, till they were all well in debt. Then he promised them he’d overlook the debt, and give them the ships that they’d wanted besides, if they’d do him a couple of favours . . . First he wanted them to help him take back the city of Zara, in what’s now Yugoslavia—a city that Venice had ruled and lost. And then he wanted them to help him take Constantinople.”

  “I don’t think he put it that bluntly, though,” Den said. “I’m sure his intention, of course, was to sack Constantinople, because it was such a rich city . . .”

  “And the only real rival to Venice for the Mediterranean trade.”

  “Yeah, but the way he actually got the Crusaders to go there was by using that king’s son, the kid who’d come to Dandalo for help in getting back his father’s throne. Then, once they got there, he got them all worked up—not too tough to do with a bunch of guys with swords who’d been waiting around for a chance to kill somebody. They tore the place apart.”

  “Laid waste to everything,” Rupert went on. “Stripped the gold and silver right from the altars of the churches, and what they didn’t vandalize they destroyed by fire. The Pope was livid, when he heard. He’d given the Crusaders his blessing to kill Muslims, not Christians, you see, so he called the whole thing off and sent them packing with their tails between their legs.”

  “But not before they’d divvied up their loot,” Den interjected. “A lot of guys got rich off that Crusade.”

  Rupert pointed out that Doge Dandalo, who’d masterminded the escapade, had not been among those to profit. “He died there, at Constantinople. He was over eighty, anyway. They buried him, I believe, in one of the churches that his own men had only just desecrated—he was probably smiling in his coffin when they did it. Most of the wealth that they plundered came back here, to Venice.”

  “You’ll see a good part of it,” Den promised, “in the basilica. Ninety percent of the things in their treasury came from the Fourth Crusade.”

  Feeling like I’d just had a history lesson with not one but two teachers, I tried to absorb what I’d heard as we passed with the crowd through the massive stone entry of St. Mark’s basilica. Someone jostled me and Den briefly shielded me with an arm round my shoulders, but it was Rupert who guided me forwards, his hand at my elbow, to give me my first full view of the basilica’s interior.

  Had I been a child, I would have thought I’d walked straight into heaven—a vaulted paradise of gleaming gold mosaic touched with jewel-like reds and blues and greens, soaring round domes over rich marble columns that seemed to go on to infinity.

  Rupert tipped his head back to take in the mosaics. “You see how they’ve built it to draw your eyes upwards, by keeping the sunlight up there in the domes? And the rest of the space is quite dim, so that when you walk in you feel instantly that you’re in the presence of the divine.”

  Small and insignificant and humbled, I should have said. I stood at his side gazing upwards for a long moment.

  “Aladdin’s cave,” said Den, his breath skimming over the top of my head. And he explained how, when the basilica was being built, every merchant who set out from Venice had orders to bring something back to enhance the decor—a bit of gold or marble or some rare and stolen jewel. “The things from the Fourth Crusade are over there”—he pointed to the far southern wall—“in the treasury. Want to go see them?”

  We had to pay an extra fee and pass a pair of guards to gain admittance to the treasury and its adjoining reliquary chamber, where a multitude of tiny caskets wrought in glass and precious metals held the preserved bones and body parts of various saints—a skeletal ring-finger here, and a scrap of skull there; a solitary molar, roots and all, displayed upon a tiny crimson pillow. I found it all very macabre.

  Peering at a black and shrivelled something, Rupert remarked there was much to be said for a life full of sin. “At least when I die no one will put my bits and pieces under glass for all the world to see.”

  I smiled. “You hope.”

  “You do and I’ll disinherit you.”

  “You can’t disinherit someone once you’re dead.” Keeping my head bent, I sent a glance sideways to check that Den was still behind us, out of earshot. “Roo,” I asked, tentatively, “is there anything I ought to know about Den O’Malley?”

  He paused, then turned to look at me, his eyebrows raised. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just getting the impression you don’t like him.”

  “I like Dennis.” His gaze drifted calmly away from mine, back to the display case. “He’s a nice chap, and a good SM.”

  Unconvinced, I tried another tack. “How long have you two known each other?”

  “Years.”

  “Then why haven’t I met him till now?”

  “Well, darling, he lives in New York.”

  “Yes, I know, but he must have been in London at least once in his life.” He would have to have been, I thought, to have met Bryan—Bryan hadn’t been to America.

  “I don’t know why you haven’t met him, then. Is it important?”

  I admitted it wasn’t. “I just thought it odd, you know, because I’ve met nearly everyone else that you’ve worked with . . .”

  “And now you’ve met Dennis,” he said, summing up. Clasping his hands behind his back, he moved on to the next display.

  For all the morbid fascination of the reliquary, I was ready to get clear of all the vials and the caskets with their gruesome little contents. The main room of the treasury seemed larger, less oppressive, and I spent a long time looking at the rare and lovely items the Crusaders had carried out of Constantinople—ancient glass goblets with dainty gold rims; bowls and vases and chalices; censers and swords—all gleaming in the strong lights in their floor-to-ceiling glass displays.

  “Of course the great tragedy,” Rupert said, “is what they destroyed in the process of getting all this. So much went in the fires. The museums, the libraries—think of the manuscripts that must have been lost. Medical teachings and histories; plays . . . did you know,” he asked me, “that Constantinople till then had a copy of every play by Euripides, Sophocles . . . just think of it. Over a hundred plays by Sophocles alone. For fourteen centuries they’d managed to survive, and then—” His hands swept up and out to imitate a massive conflagration. “What do we have left, now? Seven of them? Eight? It’s a crime.”

  Den, who’d rejoined us, pondered this a moment, then said, “Though you can’t really blame the Venetians for stealing the horses. I might have been tempted to take those myself.”

  He meant, I knew, the four sculpted horses that I’d seen featured so often in the Venice travel brochures. Rupert had already pointed them out to me from the piazza, in their place of prominence high up along the gallery of the basilica, from where they could look down and over the square.

  But when I mentioned to Den that I’d seen them, he shook his head. “No, those are replicas up there. The real ones are kept indoors now, in a special room—the weather was doing a number on them.” As we came out of the treasury into the cavernous dimness of the basilica, with the golden mosaic domes glittering high overhead, he went on, “They’ve been around the block, those horses. They originally came from a place in Greece—Chios—but one of the Byzantine emperors stole them and took them to Constantinople to put them on top of his box at the Hippodrome, to look down on the chariot-races. Then the Crusaders in 1204 stole them again, brought them here.”

  Rupert wasn’t sure he’d call it stealing. “They were stolen to begin with, don’t forget. The emperor had no legitimate claim to them, no more than Venice does now. They merely got passed from one thief to another.
” And then, as we started up a well-travelled stairway to the level above, he trumped Den by pointing out that the horses had taken a few side trips as well, through the years. “Napoleon took them to Paris, part of his plunder after he’d forced the last of the doges to submit to him. They weren’t returned till after Waterloo. And during the First World War they spent some time in Rome, for safety.”

  “Like I said,” said Den, “they’ve been around. Typical horses; they like to be moving.”

  I couldn’t get over the size of the beasts, when I saw them. Cast in some sort of metal that might have been bronze, they were set in a row, as if recently freed from their chariot’s harness, one forefoot raised, prancing, necks arched, heads held proudly. A rubbing of verdigris green added depth to their gleaming gold coats and traced lines where their bridles had been, and their hooves, set on stone plinths, were nearly as large as my head. I tipped my head back, studying their faces and marvelling at the ancient sculptor’s skill in giving each horse an expression all its own. The first one, farthest to my left, looked vaguely worried; the second looked kind; the third looked perplexed; but the fourth—and my favourite—was laughing.

  “What do you think?” Rupert asked me.

  “They’re gorgeous.”

  Den remarked that they didn’t look bad for their age. “Considering they’ve been kicking around since the time of Alexander the Great. Want to see the imposters?”

  To get to the gallery outside we had to double back along a catwalk and a balcony set high above the shadowed aisle, high up amid the bright mosaics, close enough now to see and appreciate much of the detail. The walls curved over and around me, rich as an illuminated manuscript, with biblical figures and scenes large as life.

  But my eyes, in the midst of this splendid confusion, came to rest instead on human figures, standing by the doorway to the treasury, below me. I noticed the woman, I think, because she wore yellow—a bright golden yellow designed to draw the eye, to make an artful contrast with her long dark hair. I couldn’t see her features clearly from this height and angle, but I guessed that she’d be beautiful, a woman who wanted to be noticed. She had that look about her, indefinable. The man with her looked much more ordinary. They were arguing, which struck me, in these surroundings, as being almost a sacrilege.

  “Come on.” Den, reaching back, took my hand in a friendly grasp. “Come see the best view in Venice.”

  Rupert kept close; he always kept close when he thought that I needed protecting, and this long crowded open-air gallery so high above the piazza, with nothing but a chest-high open railing between me and a dangerous drop to the pavement beneath, would be in Rupert’s eyes an accident waiting to happen.

  As Den tugged me over to look at the replica horses, Rupert touched my sleeve and told me, “Do be careful.”

  And I had the odd impression that he wasn’t speaking only of the height.

  She came, as he had known she would. She came at the appointed hour that night; she came alone. It took all of his will not to leap from his chair when he heard the first knock at the door, not to bolt across the marble hall and wrest the great doors open himself, so urgent was his own desire to see her. But he clenched his hands and kept his place, determined that the scene should be played in the way he had staged it . . . she must find him here, sitting so, where the light from the candles fell just the right way to steal years from his face, and the tapestried wall at his back gave the proper effect.

  She knocked a second time; he heard the measured tread of Thompson answering the summons; heard the scrape and creak of key and bolt and hinges; heard her voice within his hall.

  With beating heart he listened to the footsteps coming nearer, arranging himself with great care in the armchair in the instant before Thompson opened the door to the study and announced, expressionless: “Signorina Celia Sands, signore.”

  “Thank you, Thompson.”

  And then the door swung closed again and there was only her.

  ix

  VENICE grew more beautiful at night.

  Freed for a few stolen hours from the sunlight that showed every flaw in her fading complexion, she emerged in all her finery, transformed by the darkness that gave back her youth and her mystery. The brilliant stars above became her personal adornments, as did the moon, almost full, that threw its bright reflection into the thousand murmuring ripples of the canals.

  Gone was the city of commerce and trade; in its place was a city of lights, of strolling couples and soft conversations half-caught in the shadows; the paddle and splash of a gondola’s oar and the sound of a footfall in darkness, retreating.

  I sighed, a small unconscious sigh, and scooted back my chair across the paving stones beneath the wide green awning of the family-run trattoria where we were eating dinner.

  I’d chosen the place myself, more of necessity than anything else—Rupert and Den had been so locked into their rivalry, searching for the perfect restaurant, that we might never have eaten at all if I hadn’t stepped in. Not that it was really a rivalry, in the proper sense of the word. After watching them all afternoon I’d come to the conclusion that Den was only being Den, he wasn’t doing anything on purpose. He was simply one of those people who knew everything and had tried everything and no matter what story you told they could do you one better, though he did it in a non-annoying way. It was Rupert, I’d decided, who kept trying to compete.

  At any rate, they’d paraded me for miles, it had seemed, through tight twisting streets and close alleys, along back canals and over bridges. I’d finally had enough. When we’d passed the trattoria, set along one of the smaller canals, I had dug in my heels and pointed. “There,” I’d said. “That’s where I want to eat.”

  I’d taken them both by surprise, I think, but they’d stopped, and now, my menu spread in front of me, I was finally enjoying a bit of peace. The night air felt soft and cool and relaxing, faintly scented by the sea but only now and then, when the breeze blew the right way along the canals. I lifted my face to it, looking across to where the high water with dapples of light lapped the mossy green steps of a derelict building. It made a nice picture, quite soothing.

  To make sure that Rupert and Den didn’t get going again and spoil it, I steered the conversation clear of anything to do with history or sightseeing, opting instead for the more neutral topic of food. “I wonder if they’d let me get away with just having one course, instead of all three. Any one of these pasta dishes would do me for a meal.” I didn’t think I’d be able to keep with Italian tradition and follow my pasta with a plate of meat and vegetables.

  Rupert assured me he’d eat what I didn’t. “Anyway, you could do with a good solid meal for once.”

  Den glanced up. “Don’t you eat well at home?”

  “She does not,” Rupert said. “She eats things out of tins, with a spoon.”

  “Not always, I don’t. I take some of my meals at the restaurant, when I’m working. I waitress part-time,” I explained, for Den’s benefit.

  “So this must be kind of a treat, having someone serve you for a change.”

  He was very perceptive. I smiled. “Yes, it is. I’ve decided if I ever win the lottery I’m going to hire somebody to serve all my meals, and bring me breakfast in bed.”

  “Perhaps I’ll apply for the job,” Den said, with a wink and a smile. He was, I thought, an irrepressible flirt. It seemed as much a part of his nature as his fidgeting—even sitting here it seemed some part of him was always moving, poised for action. His restless hands twisted the thin paper wrapper from a breadstick into a little baton that he tapped on the table.

  “So, Dennis,” said Rupert, “I expect you’ve got the whole play memorized by now, have you?”

  Den grinned. “Almost. I’ve been over it backwards and forwards and broken it down into sections of scenes that might do for rehearsals—you’ll have to look those over later, tell me what you think. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. Three acts to the play, and every act essentially one
scene . . . except for the first act, I guess you could see that as two separate scenes, couldn’t you? Still,” he said, shaking his head, “it’s a bastard to break down.”

  I’d assumed that the play, having only three actors, a handful of props, and one standing set, would be something of a stage manager’s dream, but recalling it now I could understand why it might pose a bit of a problem for Den. The SM eventually had to run all the play’s performances from his prompt book—a ring binder holding the master copy of the script, on which he’d written all the technical cues and directions that came out of rehearsal—and to make up his prompt book he needed to break the play down into scenes.

  The problem was that, except for the intervals between acts, D’Ascanio’s Il Prezzo didn’t really break anywhere, it simply went on in continuous motion.

  So would I, come to that—my character appeared on the stage before anyone else and remained there until final curtain. The first and last speeches were mine.

  I’d been trying not to think about that, trying not to dwell on the responsibility, but Den, as though reading my mind, asked me now, “Are you nervous at all, taking on the lead role?”

  “I’ll have Rupert to direct me.” Not that that answered his question, but it certainly pleased Rupert, who smiled the first real smile I’d seen all afternoon, and said to Den, “She’ll do just fine. She’s very talented, you know.”

  “I’m sure.” Den’s voice was a little too carefully pitched to be convincing.

  Determined not to let that shake my already wobbly confidence, I managed a fair imitation of my mother’s casual sophistication. “And it really is such a wonderful part. The whole play is so beautifully written.”

  He agreed. “A little too beautifully written, for some people.”