A Rich Full Death (28 page)

The door was opened to me by a strange girl, who very quickly apprised me of the fact that Miss Kate Chauncey no longer lived there, that a German family had moved in, that no Englishman had called recently, nor had any packets or parcels been delivered—and then shut the door ungently in my face.

I stood dumbfounded on the step. Was the game to break down so soon, then? Had Browning not foreseen this check? Perhaps he was not so clever after all.

I was on my way downstairs when the horrible thought struck me—and the rock-like building itself seemed to move as in an earthquake. I ran quickly upstairs again, past the floor where the Chaunceys used to live, up to the landing above. And there, scrawled in chalk upon the wall, I read the hateful message:

From the wet heap of … where they burned.

In the corner stood a large earthenware pot, and inside this I found my half-hunter. I now knew that I had at all costs to go on to the very bitter end—and how bitter that end was bound to be.

I stalked the streets like a revenant till I saw a cab, and commanded the driver to take me to my destination with such a baleful glare he did not even haggle about the fare. Inside the musty vehicle I sat and tried to hold the book steady enough to hear another thousand lines of Sordello’s dreary story told. But I would grow cunning, I thought: instead of wading through pages of dead verbiage to find the quotation, which usually seemed to be near the end, I would work my way back. But once again Browning had out-guessed me, unless it was just my bad luck. At all events, the line was but fourteen from the
beginning
, this time, and the word ‘rubbish’—whatever that might mean. I seemed to hear Browning’s sardonic laughter echo about me, as that day in the Boboli Gardens. I was very tired by now, and subject to mild hallucinations.

When I reached Purdy’s villa I found that in this case there was not the slightest difficulty about gaining access to the property. The gate stood open, and I was able to walk in and look around to my heart’s content. The snag was that there seemed to be nothing to be found: no inscription, no ‘rubbish’—nothing. I searched for an hour or more in vain, and then at last sat down to rest my bones for a moment amid the fragrance of rosemary and thyme in the little herb garden on the sheltered south side of the villa.

I awoke, with a start, to find a dead man staring down at me. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then the corpse moved closer, growling fearfully, and I knew it was no dream. I crawled backwards, trying to distance myself from the thing. There was foam on its lips, I saw—and I knew it then for what had once been a man named Maurice Purdy.

Suddenly it sprang! I knew that death was on its mouth and in its touch. With an energy I did not know I possessed, I leapt clear of its attack and ran screaming from that place, and did not stop until I was out of sight of the villa.

That effort, and the terrible shock of seeing a man I had believed to be dead and buried—and very soon would be—standing there before me, utterly dissipated any beneficial effects of my long sleep. And it
had
been long, I discovered, for it was now past noon, and since my cabbie had long given me up I should have to walk the four miles back to Florence. And all without having recovered the object of my quest—or even knowing what it was.

As I trudged despondently along, I caught sight of some chalk writing on the low stone wall which bordered the lane, and the next moment read, with a thrill, this line:

As in his……she felt her tresses twitch.

Scattered all over the verge, I found scraps of paper, calling cards, letters, accounts from tradesmen, and such like stuff—each with my name figuring prominently. This, then, was the ‘rubbish’. I gathered it all up and stuffed it into my pocket. It had of course been here, I realised, that Purdy’s giant wolfhound had been discovered the morning after the attack on its master, stretched lifeless beside the road with its brains blown out.

As I continued my forced march back to Florence, more than one innocent peasant who saw me striding along—dishevelled, wide-eyed, an open volume of verse clutched in my hands—no doubt thought that he had seen a mad poet. ‘Mad perhaps, but no poet!’ I felt like shouting. ‘Spare me that, at least!’

Meanwhile
Sordello
drummed inexorably into my brain, five steps to each line of that damned pentameter, until I thought I would go deaf or crazy or both. But in the end I found the line, and knew it was a pair of gloves I had to try and recover from Cecil DeVere’s apartment.

The bells were striking half-past two when I finally reached the cypress-shaded mound to which most of those on whom I was presently calling had moved, and passed through the Porta a’ Pinti and back within the walls of Florence. My legs were aching fiercely, but I had to keep up my relentless pace as far as the Cathedral, where I found a cab at last, and drove the rest of the way to the Borgo San Jacopo.

By applying to the porter’s lodge, I soon discovered that DeVere’s suite had not yet been re-let, and on representing myself as interested in taking it I was able to have myself shown around the premises. A sad sight they were, now that all their late occupier’s possessions had been crated and shipped back to his family home: bare plaster walls, a few lost-looking pieces of furniture, the floor one gleaming bleak expanse of marble. For the first time I was struck by the melancholy of murder—not the thrills and horror of the hunt, but just the dreary reality of empty homes, of grief, and a way of life destroyed.

As soon as the porter showed me out on to the terrace I saw what I was looking for: the chamois pair with my initials stitched on a tag inside the wrist, draped over the newly-repaired railing at the very spot where DeVere had fallen to his death. Unfortunately the porter had seen them too.

‘Ah, the gentleman who came this morning has forgotten his gloves!’ he cried. ‘I will keep them until he returns for them.’

I had to think quickly.

‘I know the man! He is a friend of mine. He came to look the premises over for me—it is on his recommendation that I have come. I shall take the gloves and give them to him this evening at dinner.’

I added a brief description of Browning, which convinced the porter that I was speaking the truth, took possession of the gloves, and left.

It was by now the dead slack part of the afternoon, and I might have known that it would prove impossible to find a cab to take me up to Bellosguardo. Nevertheless I stood waiting for almost half an hour in the sun opposite the axe-like wedge of the Palazzo Guidi, trying to force my eyes to follow my shaking finger across page after page of Book the Sixth of
Sordello:
A Poem in Six Books; by Robert Browning Esq.; London: Edward Moxon & Son, 172, Fleet St; 9, Capel St, Dublin; & Derby MDCCCXL (his dad paid the costs, he told me) in search of the teasing reference I had found neatly penned on a slip of paper inserted into the right hand glove:

Quench thirst at this, then seek next ….-……

When at length I found the missing word it was like a needle through my heart, confirming all my fears. But at least I had done with Browning’s damned drivel for ever—and with a great hoot of glee kicked the volume like a punctured football about the courtyard of the Pitti Palace, till I woke the guard, who shouted at me to desist. Then I set off almost at a run through the slums of the Oltrarno round the Santo Spirito and Carmine churches, towards the San Frediano gate.

As I passed down a narrow street near the latter church, I heard an unearthly wailing, and the strange chant of many voices united in a barbaric rhythm, and the next moment six tall figures masked in black appeared, their faces hidden, trailing sable robes behind them and carrying a heavily draped coffin. I staggered back into a doorway and covered my eyes to keep the awful spectacle away—although I knew very well it was only the Fraternity of the Misericordia on their way to bury some pauper.

Yet I felt that it was also a bad omen, and wished I knew some spell to keep its baneful breath at bay.

Long, hard, steep and hot was the lane that winds up to the pleasant villas of Bellosguardo that day; still and silent as a tomb between the high stone walls which seemed to shimmer like veils in the heat. Four o’clock struck from a church somewhere as I neared the massive iron gates at the front of the villa, which I found ostentatiously locked with a length of heavy chain secured with several padlocks. I hardly paused in my step, but turned down the lane which skirts the villa to the north. The garden gate was also locked, but I soon found the key in its niche where lizards sport in summer, and let myself in.

The word I had finally found in the last Book of
Sordello
had been ‘well-spring’. This had puzzled me at first, for the words thus far had named the objects I had to seek, while this referred to a place. I knew it, though, and made my way without delay through the scattered trees and shrubbery of the wilderness at the end of the garden, across a lawn bordered by flowerbeds, and around the screen of box hedging to the corner where the well was to be found.

I peered down into the dank depths, without being able to make out anything of interest other than the fact that the mouldy green rope hung limp, the bucket which normally hung from it having been removed. Then, without the slightest warning, my ankles were grasped and raised and my whole body tipped forward and held helplessly poised above those horrid depths!

Of all the shocks I had sustained so far that day this was by far the worst—I seemed to hang there like a man above the gallows-trap, with the noose about his neck. Oh, I fought, of course—just as those about to be hanged do. I kicked, I screamed, I struggled—but all along I knew that if my assailant chose to tip me forward, head first down that narrow stone chute into the water far below, then I was doomed!

How long I remained thus I know not—merciful time had been abolished, as it is in hell. Then I was hauled up again, and released, and fell to the ground. I already knew, of course, who I would find standing there behind me.

‘Please forgive me!’ cried Browning, with a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘How often we used to play such pranks at Eton! Such jolly fun! Of course it would sometimes go too far. One fellow fell thirty feet into the quad. Landed on his head, luckily, so it didn’t do him any harm. He’s an eminent member of the Cabinet now.’

‘You were never at Eton,’ I returned coldly, when I could trust myself to speak. ‘You told me you had a private tutor.’

‘Did I? Did I? Well, well—I must have imagined it all. But why waste time here in one of the least conspicuous and attractive parts of the garden, when from the belvedere we may enjoy the fabled view as the sun sets? It is this way—but of course you know that!’

Thus burbling, thus chirruping, Browning led the way across the garden. It occurs to me now that I might have blown his head off there and then. But there was something so irresistibly easy and unsuspicious about his manner—whoever would have thought that such a man intended any harm?

The sun was by now low in the sky, bathing the fluted columns of the Classical summer-house in a warm pink glow. Before us stretched the famous prospect over the Arno valley, where little Florence lies dense and compact within its walls amid the isolated farmsteads and winding tracks of the plain. The belvedere itself was completely bare of furniture at that season—a mere empty shell. The only extraneous object stood near the foot of one of the columns. It was a large bucket, brim full of water; the well-bucket, in fact. For a moment I felt a stab of alarm. But what possible threat could a bucket of water, of all things, pose?

Browning turned to me.

‘Do you know why I have brought you here?’ he asked. ‘It is to hear my confession, before I do away with my worthless self. I have sinned greatly, Booth. I killed them all, of course. I admit it. That’s why I did not want the police involved. Yes, I duped you cruelly in more ways than one, I fear. I am the murderer we have sought for so long! Not only that—my poems are all written by my wife! I am a nothing! Worse than nothing: a dream, a nightmare …’

No, of course he did not say that. He did not say anything at all, in fact, but just stood there admiring the view, for all the world like a man without a thought on his mind or a care in the world.

‘Where is Beatrice?’ I demanded at last.

‘She is in a safe place, in good hands.’

‘What have you done with her?’

‘She is in the keeping of the sisters of the convent of Santa Maria Maddalena delle Convertite at Pistoia. They make a speciality of caring for fallen women.’

‘You sanctimonious bastard!’

I reached into my pocket—and Browning threw himself at me, like a football player. Taken utterly by surprise, I fell awkwardly, hurting the hip I had already bruised that morning and striking my head on the base of one of the pillars of the belvedere.

I have no notion how long I lay there on the marble, dazed from the blow. Then something struck me like a whiplash, and I sat up to find myself drenched in cold water. Browning stood over me, carefully shaking the last drops out of the bucket he had just emptied all over my recumbent form.