“True with stone, and all the truer when the walls are of water. My cousin was interested, and so they found ways to strengthen those walls. Sympathetic family members spread rumours, reinforced by the bed-sheets and strange noises.”
“And your resident Dr Moreau.”
Rose Trevisan’s face was attractive, when dimpled into a smile. “A clever piece of theatre, is it not? Emilia arranged for him to come here the following summer. He seems happy. And there’s no doubt, having a man—a licensed physician, at that—to hide behind has proved terribly convenient.”
Holmes pulled at his lip in thought. “Why did you decide that Poveglia might be a reasonable place to bring a Bedlam patient?”
Vivian sat forward sharply. “She didn’t—”
“No,” Nurse Trevisan interrupted, “it’s a valid question. You are quite right: if Vivian had been an actual patient—committed by doctors, in need of treatment and a carefully controlled routine—it would have been hugely irresponsible of me. And I would have been professionally negligent to have entered into any sort of a personal relationship with her. But by the time we met, Vivian was no more insane than you or I. She was there voluntarily, behind those walls, putting up with its boredom and bad food and discomfort over the very real perils of living outside.”
“When Rose told me about Poveglia, it was I who wanted to come here,” Vivian said. “I who planned our escape. Most of it.”
Holmes sat with his fingers steepled in thought. I met his gaze for a silent consultation, knowing that he, too, was envisioning a searching boat with a Blackshirt Capitano. Both of us were thinking how easy it would be to lock thirty-two additional patients into San Clemente alongside my gondolier’s sister and Mussolini’s inconvenient wife.
And both of us could imagine all too well the complete and final disappearance of the sister of the Marquess of Selwick, allowing for a more permanent transfer of the woman’s inheritance.
I turned my gaze to the two women: the nurse in her man’s jacket, the golden fairy in her sparkles. Vivian’s feet were again tucked up on the chair, although it now seemed less an expression of comfort than one of making herself small.
Which was not difficult. Even now, all the parts of her seemed childlike, from her delicate hands to her tiny feet. How did she find women’s shoes? I wondered, considering…
A faint, tiny voice of a thought spoke into the back of my mind. Not a plan, not even a fully fledged idea, just an awareness of similarities.
I’d met someone else in recent days with child-sized feet in Cuban heels. Someone who had not struck me as particularly fond of Fascists.
Chapter Forty-six
HOLMES AND I ABANDONED THE ladies of Poveglia long before sunrise, having made certain there was someplace Vivian could hide if the Marquess came looking—and having extracted a promise that she would be there when we returned.
We putted sedately across the silent, dark water, at a speed that threatened to clog all the valves in the big motor. Rather than risk a third surreptitious entrance to the Lido, we retraced our route to the Ca’ Rezzonico landing. There we found the palazzo silent, but the other boats still tied up. The torches had burned out, and only one of the Greeks remained, snoring mightily as we came and as we left. The palazzo’s lights were burning, which suggested that either the partygoers were in a similar stupor, or they had moved to yet another venue.
The traghetto stop was deserted, so Holmes led me down a narrow path that opened onto a marginally larger passage that kinked around and came eventually to the Accademia Bridge, which took us through more lanes and campi to the Piazza San Marco—where we found the remainder of the conjoined party, their mad-sounding whoops ringing off the stones of the Ducal Palace. Somehow, they’d managed to get someone to open a café—not Florian’s—and drag out a piano, on which a small man wearing a sort of toga was currently pounding out dance tunes, while around him heels flew and costumes disintegrated. Sometimes, I had heard, local residents protested the disturbances of foreigners with stones and sticks, but tonight the only onlookers were two waiters in ill-buttoned uniforms leaning, half-asleep, against the wall.
“Is that your Mr Porter?” I asked Holmes.
“Yes. His wife is the one dancing with T. E. Lawrence.” Not the actual Lawrence of Arabia—unless the hero of the Arab War had somehow grown ten inches since we’d last met. I pointed out one or two of the dramatis personae from my side of the lagoon—Miss Maxwell and her companion Dickie; the Hon Terry and his Venetian friend; and Bongo, dancing with a small dark-haired woman and clearly no longer pining over the loss of his Cinderella.
However, there were some among the rowdy gathering who would instantly recognise Holmes beneath the Zorro costume. A duke, a High Court judge, two former Cabinet ministers—adults, it would seem, among the children at play. I chuckled at the idea of my twenty-five-year-old self thinking of men twice my age as children—then shook my head at Holmes’ inquiring look and addressed the question of how we might reach our beds.
“Shall we take to the back streets, Holmes?”
The wild rout was gathered mostly at the foot of the clock-tower, leaving the Piazza’s wide colonnaded sides dark and deserted. At the closest point to the Porters’ impromptu cabaret, the passageway would be hidden by the campanile—so, no: we did not have to turn back. We did walk briskly, and kept close to the darkened windows of shops and cafés, blending into the sea of chairs waiting to be scattered across the paving stones for morning seekers of coffee. At the end of the Ducal Palace, we clung to the walls until we were nearer the water, then made a straight run at the Beau Rivage.
We even made it to our beds without being pounced upon by dancers, or benighted sun-worshippers, or the city’s prowling black-clad Fascist Milizia.
* * *
—
Far too early on Sunday morning, bells rang. And rang and rang again. Not the harmonious peals of the English bell-tower, but the frank, flat clatter of Roman Catholic Europe, which required only a loud and no-nonsense call to prayer.
The words I spoke into my pillow might have been construed as a prayer, in different tones and settings, but the insistent noise did have one of its desired effects: I rose from my bed.
And once upright, the demands of the day came rushing in.
Coffee; bath; more coffee; breakfast. And when my tongue would work without my tripping across it, a conversation with Holmes.
I told him what I had seen on the Lido. He told me about his evening at Ca’ Rezzonico, how deeply annoyed Linda Porter—and hence, Cole—had been at the repressive presence of the Capitano and his English guest. We discussed the oddities and utopian dreams of Poveglia’s Amazonian settlers, and agreed that the likelihood of the women’s utopia surviving the Fascisti régime was lamentably slim. We talked about Vivian and Rose Trevisan, and agreed that, given the circumstances, it was not the unbalanced nurse-and-patient relationship it might have seemed on the surface.
And then I gave him my faint, tiny voice of an idea, based on the similarity in the shoe size of Vivian Beaconsfield and my guide to the city, Signorina Barbarigo. He listened; nodded; put down his cup and picked up his cigarettes, smoking as we watched the traffic build over the lagoon. At the end of his cigarette, he proposed a variation on the beginnings of a plan that I had suggested.
“Huh.” Now it was my turn to reflect. “Do you think he’d do it?”
“He might.”
“Well, then.”
And Holmes smiled: a wicked little curve of the mouth such as I’d rarely seen there. What’s more, I could feel precisely that expression taking hold on my own face.
It is a precious thing, to be in agreement with one’s husband, particularly when it comes to misbehaviour.
Chapter Forty-seven