A Rich Full Death (21 page)

The Worst of It

Ash Wednesday
29th February

My dear Prescott,

This business grows more desperate with every day that passes. All may yet be well, however. True, the murderer has struck again; but the authorities are now involved, despite all Mr Browning’s efforts to keep them in ignorance—and I, at least, have managed to get myself clear of the whole foul entangling affair. Before telling you the how and the why of
that
, however, I must beg your indulgence to touch a more personal note for a moment or two.

You will remember with what keen anticipation I had looked forward to the Saturday evening when I was to call on Beatrice, Isabel’s maid, at the house where Browning was such a regular visitor. It was an oppressively warm evening. The day had been airless and overcast, as though the stone walls of Florence had grown upwards to form a grey dome sealing us off completely from the outside world. Night came as a welcome respite, the darkness falling like silence on the eyes. In marked contrast to the previous evening, I was now not in the slightest hurry, and savoured to the full the pleasure of walking slowly through the streets towards my goal.

These Florentine streets, at best narrow, are made to seem narrower still by the overhanging pent-roofs of the tall houses, to which extra storeys are continually being added as the population grows. Because of this, it is a keen pleasure to emerge into one of the great squares—like drawing a deep breath! One of the great joys of Florence is the manner in which one’s perception of the space about one is continually being modified by infinite imperceptible touches as the buildings press in or fall back, urge their attentions or gracefully withhold them; so that for richness and subtlety of impression there is really nothing quite like it in the world.

Nor was the human element missing. Indeed, the entire populace seemed to have quit the dim wretched rooms and dilapidated hovels which appear so quaint to a tourist’s eye, and had sallied out into the streets and squares and alleys and courtyards, where every man, woman and child was busily swanking and singing and flirting and talking. An ominous stillness, however, spoke of a storm crouched somewhere in the offing, and thus the gaiety was a little forced.

And so, for the third time, I entered the plain green-shuttered
palazzo
on Via Dante Aligheri. On the first occasion I had knocked at a door where no one was at home; on the second the door had opened, but I had not been admitted. But this time I was greeted, and ushered into a small parlour furnished in a fashion so classically Florentine in every detail that it proclaimed itself quite plainly to be the product of a foreign hand.

Beatrice was wearing a black skirt, a black shawl about her shoulders, and a severe starchy blouse fastened with a plain metalwork brooch; her hair was pinned tightly up. The contrast with her appearance the previous evening was so complete that it was clearly intentional, and I could only assume that in the twenty-four hours since our last meeting she had learned something, presumably from Browning, which had caused her to change her opinion of me.

On the other hand, there I was, visiting her alone in her house at night—surely, if my case had been as bad as all that, she would just have left me standing on the threshold. Instead of which I was invited to take a seat on the divan, while she chose a small and rather uncomfortable-looking stool opposite. On a low table near at hand stood a flask of
vin santo
and a plate of little dry biscuits, hard as rocks, to soak up the delicious honey-tasting wine. This was better, as was Beatrice’s manner and way of looking at me—the way I have had occasion to speak of before. I began to feel that I must have misread the portent of her severe appearance.

‘You have been lied to,’ she said at last, in a low voice, without looking at me. ‘I shall not lie to you. You may not believe me—that would be too much to ask, no doubt. Nevertheless, what I tell you will be the truth.’

‘Of course I shall believe you!’ I cried warmly.

She held up her hands.

‘You must not say that yet.’

‘Is it so very bad, then?’ I asked, half-humorously, for I was in a forgiving vein. Indeed, I rather hoped it
was
bad—I did not want my magnanimity to go to waste.

‘No, it is not!’ she replied defiantly. ‘It is not bad at all. But you won’t believe that. It is not your fault. No one could believe it.’

I said nothing. After a moment she went on—speaking very slowly, as though forming each phrase entire in her mind before uttering it. The first thing she said was a blow, although I had already guessed it: the apartment in which we were sitting was paid for by Robert Browning. It was he—the hypocrite! the whited sepulchre!—who had chosen the old books and pictures and hangings and pots and bric-à-brac. And it was he—the respectable and venerated Mr Robert Browning, who has made his marriage into one of the wonders of the world, a modern miracle to whose well-publicised shrine pilgrims flock from every corner of the civilised world—it was
he
who used to come thither every week, whenever the fancy took him, to visit his protégée.

And what, I enquired coldly, was the purpose of these visits? How exactly did the ageing man of letters and the young maid-servant spend their time together?

Beatrice gazed at me imploringly. In her eyes I read a desperate plea for comprehension, coupled with a very lively apprehension as to whether it would be forthcoming. But her reply, when it came, just served to make matters worse—for it was confused and evasive, all shrugs and mumbles and unfinished phrases.

I was merciless. I wanted to know—had to! Then I could walk out of there, search Browning out, and fling his filthy secret in his face. And so I pressed her. Had she not engaged to tell me the truth? Well, now I was calling in that note.

‘It’s no use—you won’t believe me,’ the girl repeated bitterly.

Now this intrigued me mightily. Improper or unedifying her revelations might no doubt be—but
unbelievable?
Surely, on the contrary, they promised to be all too drearily predictable! And yet Beatrice apparently remained convinced that I would not believe her. Why, in heaven’s name? What hideous tale had she to unfold?

Prurient fantasies ran riot in my brain. What barely-mentionable secret lay coiled at the heart of this young woman’s relations with Mr Robert Browning? What was so grotesque and unnatural about them? In a word,
what exactly used they to do?

At length, with an effort that was obvious, she looked me full in the face for the first time.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

Her eyes magnificently flashed.

‘You see? I said you would not believe me! Oh, it is too shameful!’

Well, the dam had burst now, and in a flood of words and gestures and tears I had the whole story. My salacious conjectures had been very wide of the mark, it seemed.

According to Beatrice, Browning spent all his time sitting demurely on the sofa, just as I was at that moment (I almost jumped up, as though the cushion had turned red-hot!). She sat beside him, or on the chair opposite, or walked to and fro. She always wore the smock I had seen on the previous evening, and made herself look as young and unsophisticated as possible—to facilitate this Browning would send a note to inform her of his visits in advance. Not of course—save the mark!—that he had stooped to instructing her explicitly how best to gratify his whims; she had learned her lesson as women do, by noting what he praised and criticised.

There they were then, sitting side by side on the sofa. Browning would ask her what had happened to her that day, and she would tell him about any little incident that had occurred—sometimes inventing, for want of matter. Or he would recount a walk he had been on, describing the plants and flowers and birds and animals and insects he had seen, in a grotesque and colourful way that had amused her at first. Sometimes she would sing to him, folksongs which her mother had taught her.

And then, invariably, after about half an hour, he would ask her to comb out her hair for him. Depending on the hints he gave her, she would either stand, or sit, or kneel before him, and set to work—teasing out the individual strands to form a clear untangled stream of hair over her face and bosom, then shaking the shining mass over her shoulders, cascading down her back, or twist it all up into a coil which she then let unwind and fall:

    like a gorgeous snake
The Roman girls were wont, of old,
When Rome there was, for coolness’ sake
To let lie curling o’er their bosoms.

I take the liberty of quoting from one of Mr Browning’s productions, since he is so much more eloquent upon the topic than I.

And then, after an hour or so, the poet would rise politely and remark that he had to be going. On each visit he would leave a little gift—a scarf, or painted box, or lace handkerchief with her initial embroidered in the corner—which proved to contain, hidden within its folds or recesses, a silver coin.

And that, if Beatrice was to be believed, is all that happened.

‘But does he then never so much as touch you?’ I enquired incredulously.

‘He kisses my brow each time when he leaves. It is like a priest’s kiss.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing, I swear it! Except that sometimes he touches my hair—hardly touches it, even, but since I have sworn … He just brushes it, with his fingertips. I cannot even feel it. But
he
does! It sounds crazy, but it is as if my poor hair is somehow hot, and he had burnt himself.

‘I am always afraid then. He struggles for breath like one whose heart troubles him. I do not like to watch him, for my mother died so. But after a while he becomes quite normal again, and goes on talking as if nothing has happened. And that is really all—I swear it by our Holy Mother and all the saints. But you will not believe me.’

Well, Prescott, what say you? What is your impartial verdict? ‘Nay but you, who do not love her, did she speak the truth, my mistress?’ (Again I take a liberty with Mr Browning’s mistress—forgive me, with his verse!)

Well,
I
believed her. A few days earlier I should not have. But incredible as her story might sound,
it was virtually identical to the account Browning had given Talenti of his relations with Isabel
.

In other words, if Beatrice was lying then she had very remarkably happened to choose a lie which corresponded exactly to Browning’s own description of his relations with another young woman. Such a coincidence was surely infinitely less probable than the one which I was being asked to accept—especially as the more I turned the whole fantastic business over in my mind, the more it seemed to tally with the shadowy outlines of another, barely-perceived, Browning—one whose figure I had dimly caught sight of stalking through the stanzas of his nastier poems.

So I believed her, and told her so, and a little rim of shining tenderness appeared in her eyes. I had the feeling of having passed a test, and with an air almost proprietary, got up and strode idly about the room, enquiring more generally about Beatrice’s circumstances. What of her family? And how had she come to meet Mr Browning?

She replied in the Tuscan manner, frankly and openly. Her mother had died when she was eight, leaving her and her five brothers and sisters to be brought up by an aunt, whose main virtue had been that while she lived she had protected the children from the worst excesses of their father. But with her death the situation of the children became desperate—particularly that of the girls, who were continually subjected to amorous advances on the part of their surviving parent, who had to be kept at bay by the elder brothers.

Beatrice had meanwhile found work in service to an English family, and the contrast between the squalor of her home life and the gracious atmosphere of culture and polite manners which she breathed in the foreign household where she lived, returning home once weekly, made a deep and lasting impression on her. Then her employers suddenly departed, their daughter having lost her struggle with the octopus in her lungs, and poor Beatrice suddenly found herself plunged back once again into the inferno of her own family.

She was desperate to find a new position, and contacted a number of friends of her old employers, including the Brownings, in the hope that one of them might wish to employ her. The Brownings had no need of further staff themselves, but had heard through Mr Powers that a newly-arrived American couple were looking for a pleasant reliable girl who spoke some English. And thus it was that Beatrice came to work for the Eakins.

Deeply grateful, she looked in at Casa Guidi one evening after work to thank her benefactors. When she left, Mr Browning insisted on her taking a cab, for which he paid, and even very gallantly escorted her to it. He asked if everything was satisfactory with her new job, and Beatrice replied that it was, except the post was not live-in’—for this was before the Eakins moved to the villa—so that she had still to spend her evenings at home, with all the horrors this entailed.