A Rich Full Death (22 page)

Mr Browning murmured that something might be done. Could she meet him at a café in a few days’ time to discuss the matter further?

‘And what exactly did you think Mr Browning meant when he said that something might be done?’ I enquired ironically.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t care.’

‘You must have had some notion, nevertheless.’

‘You sound like that policeman! I tell you I didn’t care. If you knew how we lived, all crammed together like puppies, and that disgusting father of mine always trying to touch me—why should I have cared? Anything would have been better than that!’

And so she went to the rendezvous. Prudent Mr Browning, however, did not appear. Instead, the waiter handed Beatrice a note directing her to come to an address in Via Dante Aligheri.

‘When I arrived he simply handed me the key and said he would return in a few days to see that all was well. I could hardly believe it. Two rooms all to myself! It was like being in heaven—so much space and air! I told my family the Americans had changed their minds, as foreigners will, and that I was going to live with them. Much they cared! I never see them now, except my sisters sometimes at church. Two days later Mr Browning came, and we sat and talked for three-quarters of an hour, as I said, and when he went he left a coin behind.

‘It has been like that ever since. At first I looked forward to his visits. I was a little lonely, for one thing, but also I admired him—truly! I thought it wonderful that any man should be so noble, so pure and selfless, as priests should be but never are. Not ours, at least—your heretic priests may be better. But then, by degrees, all changed. At first I grew bored with this dressing-up. Am I not young enough? Why pretend to be a child? “If this man really sought my good,” I thought, “he would not try and make me what I no longer am. He would let me be, let me grow, and take delight in
that”

‘But there was also something else—something more difficult to speak about. This way of his with me—so cool and distant, gossiping like neighbours from one balcony to another—all that was well enough at first, when we were still strangers. But with time it began to trouble me. It is
unnatural:
men do not behave so with women, that much I know! And so what had seemed pure and noble at first came to seem a hideous and shameful secret which I knew I must keep hidden from all the world—just as he keeps me hidden away here. Do you understand what I mean? I blush to say it, but a time came when I almost wished this Browning would use me as my father tried to do. No, do not look like that! I did not love him—never! But that at least would have been a human thing—I could have understood him, and felt that all was well. As it is, I was frightened. I
am
frightened.’

She crossed herself.

‘But it will soon be over! He will tire of me—find some younger girl, and turn me out of here. It is terrible to think what will become of me then. My people will have no mercy on me, for I have committed a great sin.’

‘But you said there has been no sin!’ I exclaimed.

‘Of course there has—the worst in Italy!
I have turned my back on my family!
Unless some other foreigner takes me in, I am lost.’

It crossed my mind that it would be extremely unwise of Browning to risk simply ‘turning out’ Beatrice, in view of the disastrous damage she could do his reputation by telling others what she had just told me.

Then that thought, and its disturbing consequences, was lost in the lingering look Beatrice gave me as she spoke these final words—and at last I felt I understood why she had assumed that prim and proper manner at first. It was not that she had changed her ideas about me. On the contrary, she had been afraid that after what I had seen the previous evening I might have changed
mine
about
her
, and had wished to make it very clear that she was not just some
demi-mondaine
with whom anyone might trifle away a pleasant evening for a price. A marked change had come over her manner since I had accepted that despite appearances this was not what she had been to Browning. Was she now not intimating what she
might
be to me, and I to her?

Beatrice may have considered the room which the philanthropic Mr Browning had taken for her to be spacious and airy, as by the standards of the Florentine populace it indeed was; but to my senses it nevertheless appeared distinctly cramped, and on such a night as that, intolerably close and stuffy. I therefore walked over and opened a tall double-door giving on to a small balcony, and stepped outside. It was cooler here; the air was hushed, and from the distance there came a low exploratory rumble, like a kettledrummer trying his instruments quietly in the empty hall before the concert begins.

A few moments later when Beatrice emerged there was barely enough room for us both. As we stood there side by side in the darkness like two conspirators, I realised once again how remarkably at ease I felt in her company, despite the social gulf between us, and the ambiguous nature of our relations. It was no doubt her foreignness which made the thing possible at all—and once possible, it could not but be easy.

I pointed out old Dante’s house, fifty yards off on the other side of the street.

‘Do you think he chose these rooms because of your name?’ I asked playfully.

Beatrice’s reply was that characteristic Italian plosive which means that the speaker does not know, does not care, and cannot imagine why any sensible person should do either.

‘Who knows what goes on in his head?’ she said. ‘But I don’t want to speak of him.’

I was leaning over the balcony, looking down at the empty street—when I suddenly felt her right arm lightly brush my face, and caught the perfume of her brown skin. The thing might have gone for nothing, had she not looked at me. But that glance, I know not why, bereft me of all reason, and the next instant I had seized her, lowered my face to hers, and was madly kissing her!

Arresting this initial impulse was as hopeless as thinking twice about diving into a deep pool a moment after you have jumped. But another moment later, shocked by the delicious impact, I saw my gesture for what it had been—the unbridled licence of a degenerate, who had basely yielded to his animal instincts and forced his repulsive caresses on a helpless girl, rushing in where poets evidently feared to tread. Desperately I struggled to disengage myself, preparing a speech of fulsome apology.

I
struggled
. But why did I have to struggle with someone who should have been pushing me away with all her feeble strength? The answer, I realised with amazement, was that far from forcing me away, or collapsing flaccidly, a sacrificial victim to my loathsome embraces, Beatrice was responding to my passion with a vehemence that equalled if not exceeded my own. She was kissing as much as kissed, her beautiful live mouth sporting with mine like a creature which had at long last found its fellow, and was glad.

My experience of the female sex—apart from casual encounters with women of the streets—had until that evening been limited to a single experience of love which was illicit, protracted, and as devoid of joy as it was of hope. The object of my desires, when she at length yielded to them, did so in such a way that they were instantly extinguished, and nothing remained but my excitement. This, although of course intense, was entirely superficial. I was excited by the idea of possessing this woman I had so long desired—excited by the idea, not by the act itself, which was in every way brutal, brief and unsatisfactory.

This being so, I was quite unprepared for the very different experience of
that
night—for I did not return home until morning. And it was Beatrice who wished it! You may not believe that, but it is true. I thought I was seducing her, and all the time it was really she who was seducing me! I am convinced she foresaw the whole encounter—indeed that knowledge came to me, quite literally, in a flash.

The flash in question was lightning, and it awoke me out of a profound slumber, with a confused impression of being at sea. I seemed to see an open companion-way, the hatches banging back and forth in a high wind, and a stretch of slippery deck beyond, with squalls of rain driving across it—memories dredged up from those years when my father sent me out on the schooners plying across the gulf to Nova Scotia, to make a man of me. As if to confirm the illusion, the thunder sounded out like ripping calico when a sail splits.

I sat bolt upright, and found myself in a strange bed. On the other side of the room the windows lay swinging open in the wind gusting around the house. The air was filled with the fresh damp smell of rain, and with the sound of it pelting down. Then, suddenly, I made out some sort of shape moving in the darkness. Terror gripped my heart! It had all been too smooth, too convenient and easy. The woman’s tales had been lies, just like the man’s! I had been decoyed to that house—
his
house—to be made away with!

Then the lightning—as bodiless as moonlight, though far intenser than the sun—suffused the scene again, and I saw that the figure was Beatrice, as naked as Eve. The torrential rain blowing in through the window, which she had gone to shut, had sprayed her shoulders and bosom, and the skin gleamed like polished bronze. It was the most erotic image I had ever seen, and all my fears were swept away as I sprang from the bed and rushed towards her, and found her in the darkness, and embraced her repeatedly.

She
did plan
it, though! She all but admitted as much the next morning as we sat over our coffee. But not for Browning—for herself! She is in love with me, Prescott. Imagine it—Robert Browning’s chosen mistress in love with
me!
She scorns him, and calls me a real man—as indeed I am with her.

She does not of course expect me to marry her. Rather I am to replace her previous protector—who will be politely instructed to discontinue his visits forthwith, as his attentions are no longer desired.

‘He will ask why,’ Beatrice pointed out.

Then tell him!’

‘He will ask your name.’

Tell him!’

‘It’s strange! I thought you were his friend.’

‘So did I, once,’ I replied grimly. But I did not feel grim—on the contrary, I awaited the outcome with the liveliest interest.

So much for this part of my tale. Meanwhile events elsewhere were moving rapidly towards their astonishing climax yesterday.

Last Wednesday morning readers of the local news-sheet were startled by a headline in thunderous capitals, reading ‘TERRIBLE DEATH OF AN UNKNOWN WRETCH!!!’ Here, roughly Englished, is the story which appeared underneath:

‘It is early. Sol has not yet shaken his locks above the snowy Apennines, nor will not do so for many hours to come. The city slumbers; each burgher, of whatever rank or station, dreaming of the madcap merrymaking and joyful japes in store at Carnival-tide. The streets are silent, save for the steady reassuring sound of the watchman going his rounds, ever-vigilant in defence of the lives and property of his fellow-citizens.

‘As he makes his way along Via di Calimala, near the Old Market, this upright servant of the people perceives a pleasant odour—a perfume redolent of joyful hours around the familial board after Sunday mass, the roast sizzling on the fire. But the zealous watchman straightway thrusts this deceitful vision aside: at hand is a humble palace, once cradle to many generations of Florentines, but which has stood untenanted since Arno in his anger rose two lustra since.

‘Wherefore then this olfactory ignis fatuus, this fata morgana of the nostrils, this fragrant will-o’-the wisp? Such is the question which leaps to the alert constable’s mind, and without an instant’s delay or a single thought for his own safety the intrepid one irrupts into the edifice—ignoring, in his single-minded dedication to Duty, the directive affixed to its walls by our enlightened civic authorities, warning the citizenry of the perils attendant upon any such ingression.

‘Within, the darkness is of Cimmerian intensity—a very abyss of impenetrable obscurity which threatens to extinguish by its overwhelming preponderance the feeble rays of the watch’s lantern.

‘But stay! What is this other light? What this weird luminance which seems to emanate from the very walls themselves? And what, ah God! say, what is that fiery portal gaping there like the very maw of our Dante’s celebrated Inferno?

‘What a terrible scene! A citizen of Lucca, sure, would straightway turn and fly from such an awful apparition! Never would a faint-hearted Siennese or braggart Pistoian have stood his ground—nay, though it were broad daylight and they in five or ten, as one would they have turned and fled!!

‘No daylight here. No cheering companions. It is the witching-hour, when hell-hags roam. Our man is all alone.
But in his breast there beats a Florentine heart!!!
Unmoved, he boldly advances upon the terrific vision—which shrinks—dwindles—fades before his unquailing orbs, into another horror, no less ghastly for being of this world. Too much so!