I smiled benignly, having established myself as a Good Sport and a Clever Girl, and stretched out an arm for my glass.
That Thursday afternoon and evening with the Lido set went much like Tuesday’s: the smells of salt air and cocoanut oil and perspiration, the sun beating down, nothing on the schedule except food, drink, flirtation, and endless talk about nothing at all. I could see why everyone drank so much. How else to bear the monotony of gossip, card-playing, and magazine-reading? How else push aside the suspicion that a responsible adult did not while away entire days playing games or paddling in the water and pushing servants around?
I should leave, I thought. I’m finding precisely nothing about Vivian Beaconsfield.
But if she had come to Venice, wouldn’t she show up in this group, sooner or later? This was what she had enjoyed, in her Season: not the serious business of finding a mate, but the colour and buzz, the silliness and whirl, the dancing and the masks.
One more day here. If I’d heard nothing by tonight, that was it: I’d have more luck scouring the coffee-houses on the Giudecca.
So I lay, surrounded by marchesas, principes, Ladies, and Sirs who drank Prosecco and champagne, nibbled lemon ices and hunks of watermelon, and discussed matters no more pressing than the dinner menu. These were people who could put together a revolution—and certainly bankroll one—yet here they lolled with no more purpose than a beach-full of sea lions.
Perhaps, I wondered as the Excelsior’s shadow crept with infinite slowness across the sand, the fault is mine? Maybe after so long running flat out, I’d forgot how to relax. Holmes and I had been on the road and on the case for…well, years now, and any muscle so long tensed takes time to stop its clenching.
Perhaps my twitching boredom with the titled and the rich was the mental equivalent of a cramp in an overworked muscle? If so, my fretting was not going to reduce the cramp any. Instead, give the muscle—or the mind—some form of exercise, however pointless.
So, with little better to do, in between casting delicate hints about small, blonde Englishwomen and taller, black-haired women with moles on their necks, I devoted the remainder of the day to perfecting my persona, stretched upon my divan with the other lords of the realm. The Miss Russell I’d begun with was something of a cipher; she now edged into outright mystery: interested in those around her, but oddly aloof. Widely travelled, but not in these circles. A person more apt to be polite to a bar-man than to a baronet. Who understood even the most suggestive of double-entendres, but seemed to find them…disappointing? True wit caught her imagination, but the ersatz left her untouched.
Was I wealthy? And how. Educated? No doubt. Was I a prig, a prude, or a bluestocking? Absolutely not. But was I hetero-, homo-, or non-sexual? Hmm: now there was a question.
In between listening hard for any trace of Vivian Beaconsfield, and dropping oblique remarks into various conversations, I set out to vamp the Lido crowd. I did not aim for Elsa Maxwell herself—too obvious, and fortunately, I didn’t appear to be her “type.” Instead, I took some care in turning the attention of others back onto her, subtly but regularly.
The result was an invitation to dinner, informal and private, with Miss Fellowes-Gordon-oh-please-call-me-Dickie and a handful of others—including, I was delighted to see, my young man from the other night, the Hon Terry, who’d spent the day with chums in the town.
I claimed the chair beside him, ruthlessly elbowing aside a daughter of Count Volpi. On my other side was a remarkably brown young Tory MP who (as the evening went on) proved to be great friends with Winston Churchill and more or less married to a duke’s more or less daughter. That is, they were married but he spent his life straying, and his wife bore a striking resemblance to the duchess’ paramour.
Introductions made, I turned back to Terry with a question about the upcoming masked ball—which theme, I had been told, was, “Come as your true self.”
“Tell me, is Elsa’s ‘do’ on Saturday night actually a ball?”
“No, that’s just what the old girl’s calling it. There’ll be a band and dancing and food, of course, but—well, now that I think of it, I guess that does make it a ball. You are coming, what?”
“I haven’t been invited.”
“Invited—hah! Elsa!” The American looked up from her conversation with a white-haired woman I’d seen in a cabana so high in status, it nearly touched the water. “Haven’t you invited Miss Russell here to the bash on Saturday?”
“Of course I have, honey. She’s one of my intimate friends, why wouldn’t she come?” And with a twinkle, she turned back to the old lady.
“So, Terry, what’s your ‘true self’—what costume are you wearing?”
“Oh, mustn’t tell. That’s what the masks are for, to keep people guessing.”
“The costume balls I’ve been to, it was pretty easy to see who people are.”
“Sure, sometimes. Depends on the mask, of course. Mine—well, you won’t have much of a problem. But sometimes between the mask and the paint and the feathers, it’s hard going. And of course, there’s always a few newcomers, so just when one is about to say, ‘I know you!’—one looks down the line and sees the person one thought one was talking to.”
“I’d imagine Elsa would be pretty hard to disguise.”
He chuckled. “She’d need a pretty substantial costume, that’s true. And for you, it’ll be tough to hide your height. Like the girl who came last week—only the other way ’round, of course.”
“Who was that?”
“Dunno. We called her ‘Cinderella’ ’cause she disappeared around midnight. Itsy slip of a thing. Pale hair, pinky mask, said almost nothing, danced all night—then poof! She was gone.”
Good Lord: I’d endured an entire day baking on the beach and here, all along…Terry frowned. “Er, did I say something wrong?”
“Oh, sorry, no. I was just…reminded of a thing. That I have to do tomorrow. Sorry. But about this Cinderella girl. She sounds like someone I know—I don’t suppose she had a companion? Tallish, darker? Has a mole on her jaw?”
“Well, there was a fella she danced with a lot, he had a mole—he didn’t say much, either, but not a bad mover.”
“Did you by any chance see which way they went, after they left? I mean to say, they’re not staying at the Excelsior?”
“I didn’t, no. But you might ask Bongo—he was madly taken with her, moped around for days when he couldn’t find out who she was.”
“Bongo…?”
“James is his name. James Farquart-Sitherleigh. Big fellow, small head?”
“I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“He’s around—maybe not today, he had something going in town.”
“Might ‘Bongo’ be back tonight?”
“Anything’s possible.”
After an interminable meal, punctuated by the MP’s hand on my right knee (Why did I keep expecting Holmes to walk in the door?) and Terry’s blithering about American sports in my left ear, we adjourned to Chez Vous. There, I found many of the same faces, a few new ones—but not, unfortunately, that of James-Bongo Farquart-Sitherleigh. As the night wore on, alcohol flowed, music pounded, and drugs made their appearance, discreet at first and then less so. It became harder to shake off intrusive hands on the dance floor, as daytime flirtations became the more urgent decisions of the night.