When she came back, she asked if I dared cross the water without lights.
“It would not be the first maritime sin I’ve committed tonight,” I told her. This time, I went slowly, so as to give our hull a chance against large floating objects. Holmes moved up, sitting on the decking that covered the motor and dropping his feet onto the empty seat behind where I stood. Nurse Trevisan also remained standing, watching the water first in one direction, then the other.
Drawing near the other side, she directed me into a narrow opening, and we passed through that canal as well, the throb of the engine echoing off the high buildings. At this one’s end, she repeated the manoeuvre of walking ahead and looking.
When she stepped back into the Runabout, she said, “Let’s light the lamps but go slowly. If they’re out there, they’ll be looking for someone in a hurry.”
So I took my leisurely time, tucking our passage in beside the string of islands as closely as I could. The night grew chill; Vivian leaned against the other woman’s legs, for warmth and companionship, her feathered bandeau dancing in the breeze. Holmes waited for a hidden patch to light a cigarette, and smoked it behind sheltering hands. Santa Maria della Grazia, then San Clemente, with its mysterious Portuguese woman and its inconvenient First Lady, followed by Santo Spirito—until finally, Poveglia lay before us.
“Turn off the motor,” said Nurse Trevisan, the first words spoken since we had emerged from the last canal.
I silenced the boat and we lay, bobbing gently, straining to hear the sound of a motor above the breeze. Nothing.
Our engine coughed into life and I eased our valiant and twice-stolen craft in beside the other vessel in the narrow boat-house, trying to ignore the spill of lights from the macabre ground-floor laboratory. The nurse tied up, shut the boat-house doors, and pulled out a tiny pocket-torch to lead us towards the inner side of the long building.
This side was the campo, or perhaps derelict orchard, that Holmes and I had passed through the night before. Keys rattled into a lock. A click of mechanism turning; a door wheezed open.
Inside was a dimly-lit foyer that joined the middle of a long institutional corridor with many doors on either side. A small light bulb burned directly overhead in this cross-roads, with another over the stairway we climbed. The layout on the upper floor was much the same, although the walls here were covered with fresh-looking wallpaper rather than the dingy paint below.
The nurse went through the first door to the left. As we filed in, she set about lighting a paraffin lamp, then crossed the room to make sure the curtains were drawn. This was a communal sitting room, with chairs and settees that would accommodate twenty or more people, arranged in three casual groups. A large fireplace occupied the inner wall, clean and bare for the summer but for a vase of dry grasses.
Nurse Trevisan said, “I need a cup of tea. Vee?”
Vivian had sat in what seemed to be a favourite chair, which in the daytime would be next to a garden window, and was in the process of unpinning the plumed crown—slightly the worse for wear—from her blonde head. “Oh, yes thanks.”
“And for you two? Tea, coffee, cocoa? A drink?”
Holmes and I were both happy with tea. She nodded and walked out, crossing the hallway to an open door on the other side: the run of water; the scrape of a match, and the puff of gas igniting. I exchanged glances with Holmes, who followed the nurse. Vivian placed the headdress, mask, and a small pocketbook on the low table at the centre of her chosen circle of chairs, then kicked off her shoes and tucked her feet under her on the wide cushion.
“Which is your room?” I asked.
“Why?”
I did not answer, but after a moment she nodded as if I had. “You want to know if there are bars on the windows. Back into the hallway and to your right, it’s the fourth one on the right after the stairs. Take a lamp. And kindly be quiet, Miss Russell. Women are sleeping.”
The hallway was plain, its floors of tile cracked here and there but clean to the edges. The walls had fresh wallpaper; the fourth door had been recently painted. And it was clearly her bedroom: the first thing that caught my eye when I held up the lamp was an odd flesh-toned half-mask with moustache, precisely the size of one of the gaps on her wall in Selwick. Hanging beside it were two photographs, both taken in the Selwick garden. One was of her brother Thomas, which from his carefree stance was taken before the War. The other was more recent, showing Thomas’ wife and daughter. This one I could date with some precision, because Ronnie’s pregnancy was just beginning to show. She glowed with happiness.
The room was even more sparsely furnished than the rooms she had made for herself at Selwick. It could be simply that she’d only just arrived. Still, its walls had been freshly painted, and in the same colours as the other: warm terra cotta, cool turquoise. Which, I suddenly realised, were the very colours of Venice.
There were no bars on the windows. Her wardrobe held colourful new clothing, from skirts to shoes to four brand-new belts. A pretty bowl on the table held an assortment of fresh fruit. A tiny, pitted bronze figurine—probably Roman, probably a dog—stood beside the lamp on her bed-side table. Inside the table were some papers and two small jeweller’s boxes. The smaller one had a Medieval locket on a modern chain; the larger one held an exquisite lapis-and-gold Fabergé egg. I looked carefully at the papers, and as I shut the drawer, I could not help thinking that the bed itself was plenty wide enough for two people.
Smiling, I went back towards the communal room. I could hear snores, and the voices of Nurse Trevisan and Holmes from across the hall, though not the words. I set down the lantern and closed the door, then took a chair across from Vivian, pulling off the Harold Lloyd mask at last. It took some time to disentangle the spectacles, but I did not rush: the nakedness of a face that normally wears glasses is disarming, and I wanted Vivian to feel herself in a position of strength. I finally dropped the mask beside hers and donned the spectacles alone, wrinkling my face to settle the unfamiliar nose-rests into place.
I sat back in the chair, returning her scrutiny.
Why did I keep thinking of Vivian as older than she was? In part, I supposed, because the aunt of a contemporary is usually of the previous generation, but also because when I’d seen her she’d seemed as small and bent as a geriatric. Lady Vivian Beaconsfield was in her early thirties. Tonight, she looked it.
Her hair, artfully tousled by the bandeau, might have belonged to any Young Thing on an Excelsior chaise longue—though her skin was not as tanned, and her eyes were considerably clearer. She’d spent a night dancing followed by two fraught hours in an open boat, and yet she looked less exhausted than I felt.
Time to see how resilient she actually was.
“You came to Venice to get away from your brother.”
She winced, but did not retreat. “That’s right.”
“You used his birthday celebration to get your hands on the diamonds, then took advantage of the confusion not only to slip away, but to take out the money in your bank account.” She nodded. “You took a chance with the safe.”
She said nothing.
“You wanted a couple of things it held.”
“They belonged to my mother’s family, not to Selwick.”
“Where are the diamonds?”
“They’re too valuable to leave around. I had Rose put them in a bank vault in town.”
“I’d have thought the egg would go there, too.”
“You’re right, I should put it there, but my mother loved it so, I wanted to have it for a little while.”
“And then, there was this.”
I took from my pocket the third thing I had found in the table: a shot in the dark, but I could see it hit home.
She looked at the unsealed envelope without reaching for it. “Did you read it?”
“I merely glanced at the opening lines.”