“Something of the sort. And I hope it will not seem forward if I were to say that I cannot imagine any way to improve on your efforts tonight.”
The compliment pleased her. She stood beside him for a moment looking over the big room filled with men and women in heroic dress. There were various Roman-type costumes that might have been Marcus Aurelius or Caesar—or Alexander the Great, for that matter. He saw two versions of George Washington, a Florence Nightingale, three Emmeline Pankhursts, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Robert the Bruce, half a dozen versions of Pocahontas or perhaps Sacagawea (two of them male), one remarkably fit and blond Mahatma Gandhi, several equally well-endowed versions of Achilles, a man with the moustaches of Louis Bleriot, and more Ernest Shackletons than he could count—although he’d seen Linda send their various dogs (some of them taxidermy) out to the garden.
“Mr Russell, you seem to be our only Zorro so far.”
“And you, Madame, the only true Hero.”
At that, the lovely face dimpled. “You caught it!”
“What, that you and Cole are Hero and Leander? Of course.”
“No one else has.”
“Mrs Porter, you see before you the product of an outmoded educational system, which is based upon beating Latin and Greek into a boy’s mind before he has a chance to meet the penny-dreadful.”
“Poor you.”
“Indeed. Though it does make one remarkably well suited to games of charades.” He took another swallow of the rather nice champagne, listening to her lovely laughter rising above the hubbub—but then the room’s ambience seemed to shift, and go a touch dark.
Literally so, with the entrance of two men dressed entirely in black.
Ebony suits, shirts, shoes. Black neck-ties and belts—Holmes wondered idly if their undergarments and pocket-handkerchiefs had been dyed to match.
Linda, following his gaze, made a small noise that might have been a curse, instantly stifled. The two men at the entrance to the ballroom looked large and implacable and out of place amidst the bright colours and happy noise. The one in the new-looking suit—older, larger, and standing slightly to the fore—was clearly the other’s trophy: proud proof that the junior man was entering a new and influential world.
The foreigners among the guests looked somewhat puzzled; the Italians looked either approving or uneasy. Some among the latter found reason to fade back into the room.
Cole appeared at his wife’s elbow. The Porters exchanged an eloquent and resolute glance, then donned brittle smiles of social cordiality to step down from the low stage and move towards the entrance.
Capitano Francoletti and the Marquess of Selwick had arrived amidst the Caesars and Shackletons, both of them dressed in the fashion of their Fascist hero, Benito Mussolini.
Chapter Forty-three
I WONDERED HOW HOLMES WAS getting on, across the lagoon in the civilised atmosphere of Ca’ Rezzonico. Long before my vaporetto reached its stop on the Lido, I began to hear the Excelsior’s band above the chug and chuff of the motor. As I walked across the narrow island, the very air seemed to reverberate: if there was a tinkling piano—heavens, if there was a full men’s chorus—one could not hear them.
When the cupolas and flags of the Excelsior were before me, I stopped to fit the Harold Lloyd spectacles through the mask. Settling the hat more firmly onto my slicked-down hair, I crossed the road to the cabaret.
I walked into a maelstrom. Gyrating figures, dazzling lights, the blare of trumpets and pound of drums, merged with the beach-resort tang of sweat and salt and alcohol and smoke of many kinds. It was dizzying, the wild pound and motion pulling at one’s blood in an effect that was primitive, overwhelming, and impossible to resist. The intentions I’d carried across the lagoon blew away like a wisp of eiderdown. In the face of this, any attempt to remain aloof and alert was preposterous. One could either flee, or join the frenzy.
And I was not permitted to flee.
I paused just inside the Chez Vous door, struggling for a point of balance between the hot pull of the cabaret and the cold needs of working a case. Committing myself to that dance floor would make it impossible to keep a careful eye out for the arrival of Lady Vivian and her nurse companion. But standing back and watching would put me outside of the crowd I needed to blend with.
I took a deep breath, and plunged in.
Many years later, I would participate in an aquatic event known as white-water rafting, a sort of half-guided fall down a long series of dangerously fast and boulder-strewn rapids. On that distant day, as I reached for a balance between pure terror and a desperate attempt at control, I would find the same attitude that saved me that night on the Excelsior dance floor: a small, cool voice directing an endless tumble through an irresistible force, with the one goal of not actually going under. Time and again, the pull that nearly drew me down—the temptation to just throw it all away and accept that I was going to wake up the next day under a table, or on the beach, or in someone’s bed—instead heaved me to the surface again, and I would see my hand reaching out for an olive-or fruit-bedecked glass and deflect it to the one containing only water.
The thin voice of sanity remained, overwhelmed but attending to my surroundings. And so, when a small figure flashed by my fast-moving eyes, I continued circling my partner about—one advantage of being the male partner—to look again.
A diminutive figure in a cloud of warm colour: loose gold dress, turquoise belt and shoes, terra-cotta-coloured plumes in her bandeau; a woman with pale hair and a beautiful gold-and-blue mask; a woman dancing with a figure in evening suit and simple black half-mask—a figure who had a dark mole along the jaw-line.
When the song ended, I bowed to my partner and abandoned her, making my way to the bar area at the less frenetic edges of the cabaret. As Harold Lloyd, I could have access to Vivian Beaconsfield simply by inviting her out onto the floor—but first, I wanted to watch. The band started up again. Vivian and her partner obeyed its call, while I eyed the two of them over the top of my glass.
I saw no trace of the dull, subdued woman I had met in the grey surroundings of Bedlam three years before. This cloth-of-gold creature was a swirl of light—loose frock, dancing fringe, a blur of colour from the plumed crown. She sparkled from head to toe. She even seemed taller than that dull, hunched figure who’d been brought to the asylum’s visiting room. With her heeled shoes, she was only three or four inches shorter than Nurse Trevisan.
And the nurse. The half-mask obscured her eyes, but she never looked away from Vivian, never stopped grinning. Her arms—positioned in the man’s r?le—were both supportive and encouraging. Some men bully their partners, others use them to show off: Rose Trevisan encouraged her partner to move wherever she wanted.
The two women leapt and shimmied with hundreds of others, in and among the contessas and principes, the sons of railway barons and the daughters of newspaper titans. And yet the pair were in a world of their own. There was affection in their stance and the touch of their hands—more, there was…trust.
Every inch of Vivian Beaconsfield shouted her joy.
I would have been very happy to walk away from the Lido then and there, leaving the two women to their dancing and their Venetian lives. Wherever they were hiding, here in the lagoon with their Dr Moreau, they had found what they wanted, and deserved.
But…the Marquess was in Venice, too. I could not go without warning Vivian—and without seeing what I could do to set the situation right. It was my carelessness that led Lord Selwick here, and put her back into his reach.
When the song ended, I set down my glass of champagne and took a step out onto the dance floor.