A Rich Full Death (24 page)

I had allowed myself to say far more than I had meant to, and had spoken with undue warmth. Browning gave me a long thoughtful look. I knew that he had not yet been to call on Beatrice, and thus could have no notion of what awaited him there, or of how his secret had been betrayed. But however he explained them to himself, my words had plainly struck home.

‘I’m not sure that I am very interested in what Beatrice would say,’ he replied with distaste. ‘Who was she, after all? A vulgar merchant’s daughter who married a banker and died young. It may be that she would have been rash enough to speak of the poet in the fashion you suggest, although give me leave to doubt it. But if he had not singled her out from all the other pretty children, no one today would have the slightest interest in what she had to say about anything. One might hope she would remember
that
before she opened her mouth to mock her benefactor.’

I judged it expedient to bring these giddy conversational acrobatics down to earth.

‘I’m not sure that I see why Beatrice Portinari would have had any cause to consider Dante her benefactor. But let us leave Literature on one side, Mr Browning, for there at least I am no match for you. Tell me, what of the inscription we found at the Eakins’ villa?
Riminese
was the word, but who or what is of Rimini?’

‘Francesca,’ replied Browning shortly.

I did not pretend not to understand this reference to the most famous canto in the entire
Inferno:
the tragic and moving tale of Francesca da Rimini, murdered by her deformed husband when he found her in his brother’s bed. She and her lover appear in the second circle, where

    the stormy blast of hell
With restless fury drives the spirits on,
Whirl’d round and dash’d amain with sore annoy.

The reference irresistibly brought to mind the memory of how the long white shape which had proved to be Isabel’s body had been pushed and pulled about by the storm wind in the garden of the villa. She then, had been adjudged one of those carnal sinners ‘in whom reason by lust is swayed’.

I murmured some expression of appreciation for Browning’s achievement in deciphering these enigmatic graffiti which had so sorely perplexed us hitherto. But somehow the triumph was quite gone from my companion’s manner: he did not seem to care about the inscriptions any more, or his cleverness in deciphering them. When I enquired—as I was bound to do—about the fate of the hapless Tinker, knocked down in a slum and stuffed into a baker’s oven to roast, Browning once again contented himself with the briefest possibly reply.

‘Farinata.’

‘Sorry?’

‘One of the heresiarchs tormented in red-hot tombs in Dante’s sixth circle.’

‘And the inscription?’

‘Was written up on the wall of the bakery, in the usual fashion.’

‘It is strange, then, that neither appeared in any reports of the crime. Are the authorities perhaps attempting to conceal the enormity of this murderous conspiracy, to forestall any panic among the foreign community?’

‘No, they are merely ignorant of its existence—just as they were of the marks left by the garden table beneath Mrs Eakin’s body, which no one but I remarked.’

Mrs Eakin?
I thought—need you be so formal when speaking of your former mistress?

‘I found
them
because I was looking for them,’ Browning went on, ‘and I found the inscription in the bakery for the same reason. Among the painted list of items for sale, still visible on the plaster, was the word for flour:
farina
. Someone had added two letters in white chalk and a circled figure six.’

Browning was visibly regaining confidence as he recounted these further examples of his cleverness. It was time to prick the balloon again.

‘Very well,’ I commented wearily. ‘So we understand the messages this maniac leaves at the scene of his outrages. As an intellectual achievement this is no doubt something upon which you are to be congratulated. But forgive me please if I look at things from a more practical point of view. “The English in Florence are dying too much,” the police official told me. What hope is there of halting this process? Your discovery is very interesting, but what use is it? Where, in other words, does it get us? What are we to
do?’

We had all this while been walking up the great central avenue which leads from the lily pond at the south-western end of the gardens, near the Porta Romana, to the famous terrace in front of the fortress of the Belvedere, where we had just arrived. This commands the most striking and extensive view of the city, and thus Browning was able to parry my question with an urbane ‘ “Do”, Mr Booth? Why, with such a prospect as this before us I hope we shall not be vulgar enough to dream of “doing” anything — anything that is but just rest our arms on this railing and our eyes on one of the great achieved miracles of the human spirit’.

It is true that the view
is
miraculous, and it nothing more than the way it obstinately continues to survive the worst that journalists, diarists, essayists, belletrists, aquarellists, hacks, sketchers and daubers of every nationality and either sex, professional and genteel, have been able to do to render it trite, familiar and hateful. There it was again, as fresh and satisfying and perfect as the first time I set eyes on it—all those tiled roofs catching the light at every conceivable angle, showing up as hard and abrasive as sandpaper here, there as soft and plush as velvet. This warm wash of russet, together with the walls in infinite varieties of umber, buff, fawn and burnt sienna, is then punctuated by the three slim towers of the Badia, the Bargello and the Palazzo Vecchio; by the massive rectangular bulk of the Strozzi and Antinori palaces; by the buxom comfortable domes of Santa Maria Novella, San Lorenzo, Santa Croce; and by half a hundred monuments, antiquities, towers and turrets whose names even now I hardly know. AU this, good as it is (as who should say!), is lifted, made perfect, unique and whole by the presence at its heart: Brunelleschi’s great cupola rising massively weightless over the Cathedral Church of St John, superbly dominating and pulling together the entire composition.

Legions had stood where I was standing, gazing like Keats’s stout Cortez. What their wild surmises may have been I do not know, but I am sure I was the first to look out there and feel that the Florentines had done right to exile Dante!

To be sure, this nightmare inferno whose geography Browning was exploring with such excitement was but a parody of the poet’s vision. Nevertheless, a man who occupied his life with the creation of an all-embracing minutely-organised vicarious universe in which he was exalted and his enemies made to suffer atrocious and degrading torments—what had he to do with the genius of this place whose finest monument was just this scene before my eyes: not the obsessively organised masterpiece of some lonely exile, but the splendid product of evolution, chance, history, and a dozen different hands?

Browning had also been actively contemplating the scene.

‘How often I have stood up here,’ he pronounced, ‘or on the brow of Bellosguardo, or at Fiesole, looking down on Florence! There it stands, like a theatre after everyone has gone home. How noble the verses must have been! And how the actors must have moved like kings, and spoken like gods. What we but dream of and play at, they
performed
. But where are they now? Vanished without trace!’

A desire to shine was almost embarrassingly evident in my companion’s words and manner. The thought which flashed into my mind, rightly or wrongly, was that he had sensed that I had withdrawn my admiration, and was waxing brilliant in order to try and win me back. If so, his efforts were wasted.

‘Until now!’ he added, giving me a significant look. ‘Now that power and scope of conception and execution have surfaced once again, albeit in an evil guise. But let us admit it—there is grandeur, there is genius, in the thing! No petty crime this! No nasty tale of a lover’s spite, as at first I thought. No—nothing less than to re-create Dante Aligheri’s Inferno here on earth, bang in the middle of the nineteenth century, punishing the heirs of the poet’s sinners in ways which parallel those which he described. This is evil on a scale worthy of this setting! Tell me honestly, Booth, do you not feel some slight admiration for the man?’

‘Not the slightest,’ I replied coldly. ‘Indeed, I am afraid I must say that I most strongly deprecate the views you have just expressed. Unlike you, I do not find evil and crime amusing or inspiring, but dreary, dark and desolate. You ask me to be honest: let me therefore tell you that if I agreed to our meeting today, it was solely for the purpose of announcing my fixed intention of withdrawing from any further involvement in this affair.

‘As you must remember, I have on several occasions urged you to place such information as you possess in the hands of the authorities. You have until now succeeded in convincing me that this would be a mistake. In the wake of recent events I am no longer convinced. You, of course, must do as your conscience directs. But please be clear that I shall henceforth disassociate myself entirely from any further private investigations into these crimes.’

Browning stood staring, his bottom lip hanging down, for all the world like a little boy trying not to cry. I almost felt sorry for him—until I recalled how he had treated me that day at the English Cemetery.

‘But
why?’
he wailed. ‘You used to be so eager to help me! What has happened to change you? What are these “recent events” you speak of?’

This was too bad. I had thought he would be angry and stalk off, but by showing his hurt so plainly, Browning was managing to make me feel at fault. Was I never to be in the right with the man? There was, however, no turning back now.

Yes, I
have
changed,’ I told him. ‘We have been speaking of Dante. He said that his life began again the day he met the woman you have described as a vulgar merchant’s daughter. Well, I too have met Beatrice.’

Our looks met with an almost audible chink.

‘Very well, Mr Booth,’ Browning said—and his voice was hard and full of menace. ‘In that case I need detain you no longer.’

And now, at last, he turned on his heel and strode off—too late! My victory rang hollow, and I felt I had blundered badly, perhaps fatally.

I set off for home, only to get lost in a maze of alleys and paths of that over-elaborately calculated landscape. One spot in particular returned continually to haunt me: the path curved invitingly away downhill in what seemed the right direction, only to come to an abrupt end against a high stone wall in a close airless dead-end where I could hardly breathe.

As I found myself back there for the third or fourth time, and stopped to try and get my bearings, I heard laughter close behind me. I whirled round, but there was no one there. The air suddenly felt chilly, and I shivered as though someone had walked across my grave.

Then there was a rustle in the bushes, and I took to my heels! Had Browning been right, then? Was this garden hell itself, from which there was no escape? Would I always find myself back at that same spot where the path went wrong, listening to that mocking laughter, for all eternity?

Strangely, however, in my blind and stupid panic—for the gardens were now rapidly filling with people, and it had been some innocent laugh I must have heard, from another alley beyond the hedge—I somehow managed to find the exit which had eluded me before, and in a few minutes was out of the gardens of the Pitti Palace and back in the noise and turmoil of the streets.

When I had met Charles Nicholas Grant at Miss Chauncey’s ill-fated ‘séance’, he had told me that he was staying with the Ricasoli family, and urged me to call on him, and as my way home took me directly past the Ricasoli palace I took this opportunity of doing so. Mr Grant received me kindly, and sent the footman for a bottle of wine—which his firm imports, he informed me with a smile and a wink, to add substance to their claret in poor years.

Mr Grant proved to be a rather different quantity tête-à-tête than he had been in company. The urbanity and the polished charm were rather less in evidence, and a bluff boisterous high spirits considerably more. In particular I found him as thrilled as a schoolboy at the prospect of the poor old Florentine Carnival, which he evidently envisaged as a spanking new edition of the Roman Saturnalia, with all its original excesses intact and a variety of modern ones superadded. His manner became frankly conspiratorial as he intimated that one as long resident in the city as myself must surely know all those special places and times when the flame of Carnival burned most intensely, and a good time was to be had by all.

I agreed that I might possibly be able to furnish him with certain indications, and even offered to accompany him if he so desired. He said he could wish for nothing better. I then described some of the traditions of the Carnival, including the opportunity it presented to indulge in masquerade.

At this the staid merchant’s eyes lit up. Nothing would do but we must immediately repair to an outfitter who specialised in this kind of apparel, and look out something suitable—or rather
unsuitable
. After much reflection, Grant settled for a suit of jester’s motley, complete with cap and bells—and of course a mask to conceal his identity, lest his respectable acquaintances here catch him thus playing the fool. This costume was duly ordered to be made up in time for the Saturday, when the festivities commence in earnest, continuing without respite until the climax of the grand procession on Shrove Tuesday—on which day Grant and I made our arrangements to meet and sally forth together in quest of adventure.