“Linda will love it.”
“I saw her downstairs, making certain the torches were lit. I think she was going upstairs to dress.”
“Lord, that time already?” Porter mashed out his cigarette and stood. “I won’t be long, go ahead and get a feel for the room.”
The sun was nearing the horizon. It was an hour at which Holmes (to himself if no other) would admit a grudging admiration for the centuries of communal effort that had gone into shaping this peculiar city—especially when the view was filtered by the watery effects of eighteenth-century glass. He gazed across the red-tile roof-tops for a time, then turned to the wishes of his current employer, undoing the clasps on the case and tucking the violin under his chin. He moved about the room, his gaze rising to the frescoed ceiling, twice the height of the other rooms on the piano nobile. There, the chariot of Phoebus battled the dimming glaze of two centuries of smoke from fires, tobacco, and candles—a touch ironic, considering that the god’s name meant brightness.
The old violin began a cantata—the piece that had been the subject of his aborted studies in the Reading Room, a mere two weeks ago. The notes were Bach; the words addressed the question of good art versus bad, with Phoebus and Pan arguing their respective cases amidst a whirlwind of supporters and critics. As he walked up and down the ballroom, the instrument found certain spots where some combination of architecture and decor caused its voice to sing, brightening the dusk and giving polish to the stained frescoes. He was not surprised that the best place of all was where Porter had located his piano.
At the whisper of motion behind him, he edited the Phoebus aria to bring it to an end. A pair of hands began to clap, and he swung into a bow of acknowledgment.
“Good old John Sebastian,” Cole said.
“Did you know the librettist for that cantata was a lawyer?”
“Picander? No, I hadn’t heard that. I was at law school myself for a while, before I fell in with that old seductress, music.”
“Were you?”
“Yes indeedy. Nearly killed my grandfather when he found out I’d left the straight and narrow. Just think, I could be running the business today if I’d just played my cards right.” His homely face broke into a grin.
“A great loss to the world of commerce, I’m sure.”
Porter’s garment was similar to that of the muscle-men at the palazzo’s entrance, although while theirs had been coarse cotton in the brief servants’ length, his came to the ankles and was of a luxuriously heavy silk, subtly woven, with a geometrical border of rich golden threads. It also covered more of his upper body, which was just as well: the pianist’s muscles were no match for an Australian stevedore’s.
As the young man crossed the ballroom, Holmes noticed that the border of his tunic was echoed by a golden aura around his dark hair: a laurel wreath, crafted from exquisitely thin gold leaves, so light he seemed to have forgot he had it on. The delicate shapes shimmered with his every move. It should have looked ridiculous, atop such a physically unprepossessing figure of a man: it did not.
Although it did stretch his dignity nearly to the breaking point when he dropped onto the bench and began to warble, “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” not waiting for Holmes to catch him up. At the end of the chorus, he shifted into C minor, and with the darkening of keys, his words shifted as well.
Yes, we have no girls for you,
We have no girls for you today.
We’ve nice lads and ladies
And old tarts with scabies—
The words grew ever more suggestive and tinged with shades of blue, although typical of the man, they never descended to raw obscenity. They also broke off the instant Linda appeared in the doorway, returning to the more prosaic chorus of Greeks and bananas followed by a triumphant piano crescendo and violin glissando. The two men held…then cut off.
Linda clapped politely, then swept into the ballroom, followed by three guests who wore the awkward expressions of people realising they’re the first at a party. Porter instantly leapt to his feet to welcome them, and somehow ended up making them feel as if they’d done him a special favour by coming before the rabble descended and robbed him of the chance to talk to these, his true friends. Holmes, meanwhile, gritted his teeth into a smile and settled into the task of playing as background texture to the sounds of people having fun. He had resigned himself to Rossini arias and Verdi melodies, along with some girls’ school music from Vivaldi. Once the noise rose he might get away with a motet or two from Monteverdi.
Twenty minutes later, the windows were dark, the ballroom was filling nicely, and the noise level had rendered the violin all but redundant, even from its position of greatest authority near the piano. Holmes had seen several familiar faces, enough to be glad for the wide don’s hat which, together with the status of Paid Entertainer, rendered him invisible. When he came to the end of his current slice of Vivaldi, he ended with a flourish—and no one noticed.
Except Linda. She materialised from the crowd with a glass in her hand, holding it out with a smile of exceptional warmth. He transferred the bow to his left hand, took the glass, and raised it in a gesture that incorporated both thanks and a toast.
She leaned forward to have a word, a curiously intimate gesture from this formal woman. “The band is just finishing their dinner; you can have a rest.”
“It has been a pleasure.” And the champagne was not only proper Champagne, it was perfectly chilled.
“You are very good, Mr Russell, for an itinerant musician. I couldn’t think what Cole was doing, inviting you to play, but I should have trusted his judgment. Why aren’t you in an orchestra somewhere?”
“Oh, Mrs Porter, I am naught but an amateur.”
“A gifted one. But if you weren’t professional, what did you do?”
“This and that, and some of the other.” Linda Porter was of the class who did not expect a man to have a profession. “A bit of consultation, from time to time.”
“One of those clever devils who look at a business and see how it would be run better?”
“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 p
ocket-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 rôle—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.
Only to have the sky explode overhead.
Hundreds of sweating faces craned upwards; hundreds of throats emitted a chorus of Oohs. Hundreds of masked faces turned blue and then red with the bursts of the Excelsior’s fireworks. And although they were going off right overhead, most of the dancers began to move towards the beach and gardens, so as not to have one scrap of trailing ember hidden by the hotel’s roof-lines.
The plumed head-dress was tall enough that I could glimpse it across the crowd. I kept back, not wanting to alarm Vivian’s keeper when they were a brief dash from freedom: time enough, when the fireworks ended and they came back into the cabaret, to speak to Ronnie’s aunt unmolested.
The sea of people gleamed and flared and shifted colour. Exclamations rose at any spectacular or intricate burst of light. Even the band musicians came out to watch. A few explosions later, I noticed the Hon Terry, shoulder to shoulder with a very handsome young Venetian. He caught my eye, and we traded grins above the intervening heads.
The pops and booms from overhead built to a crescendo, until the last sparks were floating down towards the Adriatic. Reluctantly, the enthralled masses lowered their chins and looked around for the next thrill. The band stamped out their cigarettes and returned to their instruments, but to my surprise, the flow of the crowd divided, with some marching back for the dance floor, while an almost equal number drifted away in the direction of the beach-side doors. For many, the sky show marked the end of an exhausting and satisfying night, leaving the Chez Vous population much diminished.
I took a step towards the hotel—and had to grab the back of a garden bench to keep from keeling over. What was this? I’d been drugged! Someone had adulterated my drink, I must…
No, my brain patiently informed me. In between a handful of glasses containing nothing more than mineral water, I’d also consumed a great deal of champagne, punch, and heaven only knew what else. Just pause a minute and breathe deeply; your feet will start working again. And your brain. Did I really want to speak with an already nervous woman while I was in th
is condition?
I peered into the dance-hall, and there she was, happily fox-trotting across the floor. On the far side of the dancers—with space now between them, one could see—the Elsa Maxwell table had resumed, with some of the less fit individuals sitting and talking enthusiastically about something or other.
So I, too, sat for a while, on a garden bench overlooking the water. I took off the mask, rubbing at where it had irritated my nose and temples, then laid it beside me on the bench. This was one of those times I wished I smoked, to give my hands purpose—but when I became aware of a growing disinclination to rejoin the dancers, I fitted the mask on again, got up, and directed my feet back into Chez Vous.
However, the fireworks display that had signalled an end to the day for many seemed to have had the opposite effect on those I was with—or perhaps it was the diminished state of the dance floor. It was then I learned how much of an understatement the Hon Terry’s comment was, that a Maxwell-generated affair tended to “get a bit out of hand.” An Elsa Maxwell “do” was less a planned party than a lit fuse: shape the charge, point it upwards, then stand back to watch the fireworks. Unfortunately, I was only halfway across the dance floor when this one went off.
Miss Elsa Maxwell rose grandly to her feet and swept towards the entrance, pulling with her a flood of others, giggling and guffawing and grabbing their hats, wraps, and discarded masks.
Amidst the gabble I heard an alarming series of words: Porter and Cole, Grand Canal and boats—and belatedly, figured out what was going on.
The Lido set was gate-crashing Ca’ Rezzonico.
A riot spilled from the Excelsior, washing out onto the road and stumbling with hilarity over the tram-tracks. Any faint hope I might have had that their intentions would be stymied by the lack of late-night vaporetti vanished when they headed, not for the public docks, but into the manicured gardens and down to the yacht-strewn inlet. Every boat-owner in the crowd had his own mob of best friends; money was pressed into the hands of strangers to commandeer their resting vessels into taxi service; motors started up, women shrieked, men shouted.