“Well, thank God it didn’t happen in front of everyone! I keep hoping that most of them didn’t even know what happened in the reception room.”
“I’m sure they didn’t—and they still might not.”
“Not until they read the paper—and my friends, I assure you, read the paper!”
She greeted the workmen and asked one of them to open the doors to the loggia. When he did, they stepped outside. Yesterday’s storm had blown out to sea and had left only a small deposit of icy snow that had soon melted with the coming of the new day. The sky was a clear blue, the air fresh and bracing. The Contessa gathered her scarf more tightly around her throat.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to Josef,” she said, “but he can stay with me for as long as he wants.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the prosecutor overlooks his role in Porfirio’s death.” He paused. “How is Hazel?”
“Oh, didn’t you know, caro? She’s left already.”
“Left?”
“Not Venice, but the Ca’ da Capo. She’s staying at the Danieli for a few more days before going up to London.”
“What about Tonio?”
“I doubt he has anything on his mind now but his mother—and that’s the way it should be. I don’t think your Miss Reeve conducted herself very well last night in the reception room, even if she was under a strain. Perhaps Tonio saw something in her that he didn’t find attractive. And there’s another thing. I don’t think that Miss Reeve is ready to doff the role of lover for the equally difficult and perhaps less gratifying one of beloved.”
She looked sideways at him quickly.
“Do you remember how I said at the Regatta in September that you might be on the verge of a mistake? You were feeling so ridiculously guilty and saying that you wanted to ‘do’ something, as if you had been the prince of indolence! Well, you have ended up doing something, you see, something that neither of us could ever have imagined at the time. I don’t think I would have even remembered Berenice’s name then. And as for your mistake, well…”
“‘Well’ what, Barbara?”
“You were in danger, but you never quite went over the verge, did you? I commend you for that.”
They looked down at the Grand Canal. Everything seemed calm and arrested: the vaporetto nursing against the landing across from them, the mirror of the water, the almost motionless figures in the opposite campo, a woman drawing aside the drape of a palazzo window. Midnight had released the city from the thrall of Carnevale and restored it to its former serenity.
“Thank God it’s all over,” the Contessa said. “Next year I intend to be far away.”
“It’s a long time between now and then. Whether you realize it or not, your ballo in maschera was a success. You might have started a new tradition here at the Ca’ da Capo.”
“I doubt it.” She sighed and shook her head, looking across at the palazzi on the other side. “I can’t help thinking of poor Berenice. What’s to become of her? She won’t recover from this, not with her spirit intact. She’s parted from something forever.” There was a gentle sadness in her voice. “Poor fiery little Berenice Reilly of St. Brigid’s. Oh, caro, it was all such a long, long time ago.”
He put his arm around her waist.
“But you’re here now, Barbara.” He looked at her. “Did little Barbara Spencer at St. Brigid’s ever think she would be standing on her own balcony above the Grand Canal?”
“If she did, she certainly never thought it would be with you, caro.”
She rested her head against his shoulder.
“I’ve had enough of remembrance of things past,” she said. “And you’re too young to indulge in such things. Save Proust for your old age. That’s what I’m doing.”
But then, as they stared down at the Grand Canal sweeping like a flood between the double row of palazzi, she started to reminisce about her days at St. Brigid’s, and Urbino poured them each a glass of wine to warm them.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Mysteries of Venice series
1
“Now, Isn’t This just what you needed?” the Contessa said softly to Urbino as she seemed to glide past him the next afternoon to greet a newly arrived guest in the gardens behind Villa La Muta.
Urbino smiled. The Contessa’s “this” included not just the sixteenth-century villa and its gardens with their grassy parterres and laurel-shaded dolphin fountain, the hidden, apparently random water sprays triggered by secret sources, the herb and medicinal plant beds famous centuries earlier, and the maze and the giardino segreto where they often shared tea and drinks. It also embraced the view across the wide Trevisan plain to the Alpine foothills, the walled, arcaded town above them with its castle and citadel, and the lambent air playing over the hills—everything, in fact, down to the brilliantly plumed parrot in the brass cage under the pergola which kept saying “Ciao!” in a distinctly clear and welcoming voice.
The Contessa’s guests were gathered in decorous groups on the various levels of the gardens. A string quartet played Vivaldi, competing with the rustle of the wind and the singing of the birds. The whole golden scene, suffused with an air of dalliance and genteel conversation, was evocative of Watteau and delicately burdened with that faint suggestion of the melancholy and the transitory so often found in his compositions.
The da Capo-Zendrini family had chosen its retreat well. Instead of following in the footsteps—or rather the boat wakes—of other eighteenth-century Venetians who had made their summer villeggiature on the banks of the now brackish Brenta Canal between Venice and Padua, the da Capo-Zendrinis had gone to the hill town of Asolo, twenty-five miles northwest of Venice, where they had taken over La Muta, designed by Palladio’s follower Scamozzi. The British, who regularly descended on the area for villa tours, often mistook La Muta for one of Palladio’s own buildings.
The woman Urbino was talking with now said that she had once made the same mistake. She wasn’t British, however. She was the retired American actress the Contessa had mentioned yesterday on the Lido—the woman renting Silvestro Occhipinti’s villa farther up the hill toward town.
Although the Contessa claimed never to have heard of her, Urbino certainly had. Madge Lennox had made a respectable reputation for herself in a dozen American films, playing primarily independent-minded women, and had lived in an air of notoriety because of her rumored interest in both sexes. Known as “the woman whom Garbo and Huston had loved,” she had moved to Europe in the early sixties, after a dearth of roles in the States, and had appeared in Franco-Italian productions until her retirement fifteen years ago.
A tall woman with high cheekbones and skin that had avoided the sun and sought out the best of plastic surgeons, Madge Lennox looked much younger than her seventy years. A broad-brimmed hat shaded a face whose makeup was close to dead white, giving her aging beauty a timeless, even sexless look. She had a pair of large sunglasses that she kept putting on and taking off, drawing attention to both her large dark eyes and shapely hands. Her hair was completely covered beneath the hat by a deep-pink scarf. She wore ecru silk trousers and a man-tailored peach jacket. From the way she was holding her head and looking up at him, Urbino knew that she didn’t want his scrutiny and judgment, however, unless they were benevolent. She wanted to be seen as she saw herself on her best days. If he showed that he saw her this way she would treat him with special kindness and care.
“When I saw the villa ten years ago,” she was explaining in her lovely, exquisitely controlled voice, “I was certain it was by Palladio. Do you know something of its history?”
Urbino accommodated Madge Lennox by beginning with the villa’s name—La Muta, or “The Mute Woman”—telling her how it came from a seventeenth-century woman who had retired to Asolo after witnessing a murder in Florence and who had never spoken again in public. The Contessa had been disquieted by this somewhat Gothic association. After several unsuccessful attempts to establish a new name—among them La Barbara—sh
e had eventually found a way around the problem by commissioning a copy of Raphael’s painting of a gentlewoman, known as La Muta. The painting now hung prominently on the stone staircase in the front hall.
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” Madge Lennox said. “Wasn’t the original stolen?”
“Back in seventy-five. The art police came and examined the Contessa’s copy.”
“I’ve heard the Conte da Capo-Zendrini was flattered that they bothered to come here to look at it,” Lennox said in her soft, clear voice, showing that she knew something about La Muta—or at least the Conte—herself. “He was an unusual man. The people here still hold him in high regard.”
“I never met him. He died before I met the Contessa.”
“Oh, I see.” She seemed vaguely disappointed. She searched his face with her bold, black eyes. “I was wondering, Mr. Macintyre,” she said, slipping her sunglasses back on and smiling at him, “if you wouldn’t mind venturing into the maze with me. I must say you’re most appropriately dressed for that kind of thing.”
Lennox’s dark eyes ran over Urbino’s boater, red bow tie, blazer, and flannels. The Contessa had pronounced him perfectly “delightful,” but Urbino wasn’t so sure himself.
“I regret to say that I don’t know my way through,” Urbino said, “but there are covered signs you can lift whenever you’re lost.”
“But that’s no fun! I’d prefer being lost completely or being led through by someone who knows his own way.” She took a sip of her punch. “Do you live here, too? I’ve seen you at the Caffè Centrale with the Contessa.”
“No. I live in Venice, but I come here often.”
“Oh, you must be the American friend with the palazzo that I heard someone in town talking about!”
“I suppose so. I inherited a small building through my mother. She was American but her family was Italian. Venice has been my home for more than ten years now.”
“How interesting! I’ve never had the courage to live completely as an expatriate myself—to cut all the ties that bind me to home. I admire you, but isn’t there a danger you’re going to lose touch—with your past, your origins, I mean? Or have I read too many Henry James novels? To live in Venice all the time!” Madge Lennox shook her head slowly. “‘Venice the impossible’ is how I think of it, especially during this time of the year. It’s a smelly, slippery trap ready to catch you one way or another! Just look at that poor girl who was raped and murdered! You can’t convince me that it had nothing to do with all the heat and madness in Venice this summer. I was there last week for two days, and it was more than enough! I got caught in the middle of a sweaty mob pushing and shoving for a view of the Bridge of Sighs. I almost passed out. ‘The living are just the dead on holiday.’ That’s what Maeterlinck—an impossible dramatist—said, and he could have been describing Venice in high season. But Asolo!” she came close to sighing. “I’ve been here since April and I don’t ever want to leave.”
At this point they were joined by Silvestro Occhipinti, a bald, birdlike man who had had the ill fortune to outlive most of his family and friends, among them the Contessa’s husband. He was all turned out in a white suit and cravat.
“I hope you never do leave, my dear,” Occhipinti said in accented English in a high-pitched, reedy voice. “Villa Pippa is yours for as long as you like. ‘God’s in his heaven—all’s right with the world!’ I couldn’t be more pleased!”
Occhipinti often sprinkled his conversation with quotations from Robert Browning, who had lived in Asolo with his wife on what was now the Via Browning, where Occhipinti had his own rooms. Sometimes the quotations were apt, at other times inappropriate or enigmatic. What they always were, however, was precise, age having done nothing to dim the memory of the old friend of Alvise da Capo-Zendrini.
“I’ll have to leave in October as I’ve told you, Signor Occhipinti. The affairs of the world call me, I’m afraid.”
Occhipinti frowned. Looking up at the woman with his round little eyes from behind thick spectacles, he said, “‘Where the apple reddens never pry, lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.’”
Madge Lennox, like the cited apple of Eden, somehow managed to redden beneath her heavy makeup. Her color deepened when Occhipinti added, “Perhaps you are planning to return to films. Wouldn’t that be a happy day! How I remember you in Dark Lady! My heart was in your hands. But that was long ago. You’ve had a great career. Perhaps Signor Macintyre will write a book about you.”
“You’re a writer, Mr. Macintyre?” the actress said, turning to Urbino with evident relief.
“A biographer. I write about people who have some connection with Venice. Not complete biographies but only their lives in relationship to the city.”
“He’s written one on Robert Browning! ‘What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop’!”
“You must know Venice like the back of your hand, Mr. Macintyre. You probably found me foolish, running on the way I was. Why don’t you stop by Villa Pippa sometime? I have an open mind. I would love to love Venice.”
Occhipinti nodded as if he knew exactly what she meant and recited, with a thin-lipped smile, “‘Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.’”
Madge Lennox’s brows knitted in perplexity and annoyance.
“Consider it an open invitation, Mr. Macintyre,” she said, holding her head a little higher. “I’m leaving Wednesday for a few days in Milan. Anytime before or after that would be fine.”
Urbino said he would stop by. Excusing himself, he went over to the Contessa who was near the blue and white marquee.
“How are things going, Barbara?”
“Swimmingly!”
The Contessa’s eyes were shining with pleasure. Dressed in flowing fawn and cream with a wide-brimmed hat slightly angled on her head, she looked especially attractive this afternoon.
“So you’ve finally made the desired acquaintance of La Lennox. What do you think of her? No, you don’t have to say! I can see that you like her. Beware! She’s an actress down to her fingertips.” Just in case Urbino might have interpreted this as a compliment, she added, “Not that I have ever even heard of anything the woman has done. I notice that she decided against a turban today. But excuse me, caro, I see that the Rienzis would like to make their usual early exit.”
After the Contessa left, Urbino made his way up to the terrace near the conservatory to chat with Tommaso Beni, the landscape architect who had designed the maze. Beni soon got on one of his hobbyhorses—the eighteenth-century landscape gardener Capability Brown—and Urbino made the appropriate responses as he surveyed the party.
His eye was caught by a woman about twenty-five coming through the frescoed atrium from the front of the house. The Contessa’s Doberman, Catullus, was striding beside her. Gervasio, the majordomo, was behind her, keeping pace with a man and placing a hand on his shoulder. The man—small, wiry, and unattractive to the point of homeliness—stopped and called something to the woman. She continued walking. Gervasio hurried after her.
Here were two people Urbino didn’t recognize. Catullus, however—usually feisty with strangers—was acting as if he knew the young woman or, uncharacteristic of him, had immediately taken to her. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but Urbino doubted that he had ever seen her before. He would have remembered.
Slim, with a slightly elongated neck and abundant auburn hair that drifted behind her like a thick cloud, she had a Pre-Raphaelite look that Urbino found attractive. Her features weren’t perfect but they were close to it. Urbino had a good opportunity to take them in as the young woman passed beneath the terrace and turned her face up toward him. Deep-green eyes and generously curved lips were what immediately struck him and he knew he would find it impossible soon to forget them—along with her hair, bronze and gold in the sun and slightly wild.
But something seemed to be missing from the eyes. He didn’t expect t
o find recognition there or interest or even curiosity, but he did expect something. Oddly blank, they gave her striking face a lifeless look. Yet, as she strode across the parterre, oblivious of the other guests, there was force, even violence, in her movements. Heads turned, but no one seemed to recognize her.
The auburn-haired woman went directly to the box garden enclosed by the stone pergola where the Contessa was now talking with Occhipinti. She stood in front of them for a few moments, Catullus docile at her side like a unicorn in medieval paintings of the Virgin. Gervasio went over to the Contessa and bent close to her ear. The Contessa shook her head, and Gervasio left. He rejoined the ugly man, who was still standing at the end of the atrium, and led him to the front of the house.
Occhipinti peered through his spectacles at the young woman, who was now saying something to the Contessa. An angry look transformed Occhipinti’s features. The woman was smiling and had an unmistakable expression of triumph on her face.
But the Contessa’s expression spoke the loudest. It was as if something had collapsed inside her and she was doing all she could to put the best face on it. Her attempts at concealment might have fooled almost anyone but not Urbino. She was in distress. Urbino was already making his way down the terrace steps before the Contessa looked at him across the heads of her guests with what was a silent cry for help.
Urbino was at her side in time to hear the Burne-Jones woman say in low, soft Italian, “Yes, Contessa, I’m your daughter.” She paused, looking briefly at Urbino with her green eyes. “Or I should say that I’m your husband Alvise’s daughter. Didn’t he ever tell you?”
She reached down to pat Catullus on the head. The dog seemed in ecstasy.
2
Urbino And The young woman were waiting for the Contessa in the salotto verde. Catullus lay on the Aubusson, his eyes following the woman as she ran her slim hand along the carved and gilded Brustolon and Corradini furniture and glanced at the pastels and miniatures by Rosalba Carriera.
Farewell to the Flesh Page 31
