Season of Storms (6 page)

“We took a gondola to the Rialto.”

“Gondolas.” Den gave a shudder.

“You don’t like them?” I asked.

“Let’s just say I think Oscar Wilde hit the nail on the head when he said seeing Venice from a gondola was like being ferried through the sewers in a coffin.”

I’d always liked Oscar Wilde’s wit. “But it wasn’t like that, really. It was lovely. Very peaceful.”

“And since when is a holiday meant to be peaceful?” Den grinned.

I would have smiled back, but something in the way Rupert was watching me over the rim of his glass made me reconsider, and I couldn’t help feeling that somehow the peace of our trip had already been broken.

viii

I’D
been right to think Den was the Henry the Fifth type. When we’d finished our drinks he took charge with military zeal, touring us round all the buildings that ringed the Piazza San Marco. At first Rupert appeared to be happy enough to relinquish the lead and fall back in the ranks—he directed much better from that angle, anyway, where he could see the whole picture—but it soon became apparent that he hadn’t entirely surrendered his command.

A sort of competition had developed as we went along, with Den and Rupert trying to outdo each other in the tour guide department, coming up with interesting facts and curiosities, or pointing out some little-known detail about what we were seeing. A duel of knowledge, really, with me caught in between and doing my best to give them both my attention. It was wearying work. By the time we’d gone up the bell-tower and all through the Doge’s Palace and across the Bridge of Sighs, my head was fairly spinning with facts that I’d never remember.

They were still at it now, as we came out again into the piazza.

“. . . but then the doge, or duke, was really an elected dictator,” Rupert was saying, “who ruled until death, like the Pope, and was almost as powerful.”

“I always thought,” said Den, “the doges hit their peak with Dandalo. Now
there
was a doge—the way he tricked all those Crusaders into doing his dirty work for him.” He looked at me. “You know about the Fourth Crusade?”

“Well . . .”

“The one in 1204,” said Rupert. “It began as a Crusade against the Holy Land, but the Crusaders made the mistake of stopping in Venice, you see, to get ships and supplies, and Doge Dandalo—a very old and blind and very crafty man—kept the Crusaders lingering on here with one excuse or another, long enough for them to spend all the money they’d come with, till they were all well in debt. Then he promised them he’d
overlook
the debt, and give them the ships that they’d wanted besides, if they’d do him a couple of favours . . . First he wanted them to help him take back the city of Zara, in what’s now Yugoslavia—a city that Venice had ruled and lost. And then he wanted them to help him take Constantinople.”

“I don’t think he put it that bluntly, though,” Den said. “I’m sure his intention, of course, was to sack Constantinople, because it was such a rich city . . .”

“And the only real rival to Venice for the Mediterranean trade.”

“Yeah, but the way he actually got the Crusaders to go there was by using that king’s son, the kid who’d come to Dandalo for help in getting back his father’s throne. Then, once they
got
there, he got them all worked up—not too tough to do with a bunch of guys with swords who’d been waiting around for a chance to kill somebody. They tore the place apart.”

“Laid waste to everything,” Rupert went on. “Stripped the gold and silver right from the altars of the churches, and what they didn’t vandalize they destroyed by fire. The Pope was livid, when he heard. He’d given the Crusaders his blessing to kill Muslims, not Christians, you see, so he called the whole thing off and sent them packing with their tails between their legs.”

“But not before they’d divvied up their loot,” Den interjected. “A lot of guys got rich off that Crusade.”

Rupert pointed out that Doge Dandalo, who’d masterminded the escapade, had not been among those to profit. “He died there, at Constantinople. He was over eighty, anyway. They buried him, I believe, in one of the churches that his own men had only just desecrated—he was probably smiling in his coffin when they did it. Most of the wealth that they plundered came back here, to Venice.”

“You’ll see a good part of it,” Den promised, “in the basilica. Ninety percent of the things in their treasury came from the Fourth Crusade.”

Feeling like I’d just had a history lesson with not one but two teachers, I tried to absorb what I’d heard as we passed with the crowd through the massive stone entry of St. Mark’s basilica. Someone jostled me and Den briefly shielded me with an arm round my shoulders, but it was Rupert who guided me forwards, his hand at my elbow, to give me my first full view of the basilica’s interior.

Had I been a child, I would have thought I’d walked straight into heaven—a vaulted paradise of gleaming gold mosaic touched with jewel-like reds and blues and greens, soaring round domes over rich marble columns that seemed to go on to infinity.

Rupert tipped his head back to take in the mosaics. “You see how they’ve built it to draw your eyes upwards, by keeping the sunlight up there in the domes? And the rest of the space is quite dim, so that when you walk in you feel instantly that you’re in the presence of the divine.”

Small and insignificant and humbled, I should have said. I stood at his side gazing upwards for a long moment.

“Aladdin’s cave,” said Den, his breath skimming over the top of my head. And he explained how, when the basilica was being built, every merchant who set out from Venice had orders to bring something back to enhance the decor—a bit of gold or marble or some rare and stolen jewel. “The things from the Fourth Crusade are over there”—he pointed to the far southern wall—“in the treasury. Want to go see them?”

We had to pay an extra fee and pass a pair of guards to gain admittance to the treasury and its adjoining reliquary chamber, where a multitude of tiny caskets wrought in glass and precious metals held the preserved bones and body parts of various saints—a skeletal ring-finger here, and a scrap of skull there; a solitary molar, roots and all, displayed upon a tiny crimson pillow. I found it all very macabre.

Peering at a black and shrivelled something, Rupert remarked there was much to be said for a life full of sin. “At least when I die no one will put
my
bits and pieces under glass for all the world to see.”

I smiled. “You hope.”

“You do and I’ll disinherit you.”

“You can’t disinherit someone once you’re dead.” Keeping my head bent, I sent a glance sideways to check that Den was still behind us, out of earshot. “Roo,” I asked, tentatively, “is there anything I ought to know about Den O’Malley?”

He paused, then turned to look at me, his eyebrows raised. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. I’m just getting the impression you don’t like him.”

“I like Dennis.” His gaze drifted calmly away from mine, back to the display case. “He’s a nice chap, and a good SM.”

Unconvinced, I tried another tack. “How long have you two known each other?”

“Years.”

“Then why haven’t I met him till now?”

“Well, darling, he lives in New York.”

“Yes, I know, but he must have been in London at least once in his life.” He would have to have been, I thought, to have met Bryan—Bryan hadn’t been to America.

“I don’t know why you haven’t met him, then. Is it important?”

I admitted it wasn’t. “I just thought it odd, you know, because I’ve met nearly everyone else that you’ve worked with . . .”

“And now you’ve met Dennis,” he said, summing up. Clasping his hands behind his back, he moved on to the next display.

For all the morbid fascination of the reliquary, I was ready to get clear of all the vials and the caskets with their gruesome little contents. The main room of the treasury seemed larger, less oppressive, and I spent a long time looking at the rare and lovely items the Crusaders had carried out of Constantinople—ancient glass goblets with dainty gold rims; bowls and vases and chalices; censers and swords—all gleaming in the strong lights in their floor-to-ceiling glass displays.

“Of course the great tragedy,” Rupert said, “is what they destroyed in the process of getting all this. So much went in the fires. The museums, the libraries—think of the manuscripts that must have been lost. Medical teachings and histories; plays . . . did you know,” he asked me, “that Constantinople till then had a copy of every play by Euripides, Sophocles . . . just think of it. Over a hundred plays by Sophocles alone. For fourteen centuries they’d managed to survive, and then—” His hands swept up and out to imitate a massive conflagration. “What do we have left, now? Seven of them? Eight? It’s a crime.”

Den, who’d rejoined us, pondered this a moment, then said, “Though you can’t really blame the Venetians for stealing the horses. I might have been tempted to take those myself.”

He meant, I knew, the four sculpted horses that I’d seen featured so often in the Venice travel brochures. Rupert had already pointed them out to me from the piazza, in their place of prominence high up along the gallery of the basilica, from where they could look down and over the square.

But when I mentioned to Den that I’d seen them, he shook his head. “No, those are replicas up there. The real ones are kept indoors now, in a special room—the weather was doing a number on them.” As we came out of the treasury into the cavernous dimness of the basilica, with the golden mosaic domes glittering high overhead, he went on, “They’ve been around the block, those horses. They originally came from a place in Greece—Chios—but one of the Byzantine emperors stole them and took them to Constantinople to put them on top of his box at the Hippodrome, to look down on the chariot-races. Then the Crusaders in 1204 stole them again, brought them here.”

Rupert wasn’t sure he’d call it stealing. “They were stolen to begin with, don’t forget. The emperor had no legitimate claim to them, no more than Venice does now. They merely got passed from one thief to another.” And then, as we started up a well-travelled stairway to the level above, he trumped Den by pointing out that the horses had taken a few side trips as well, through the years. “Napoleon took them to Paris, part of his plunder after he’d forced the last of the doges to submit to him. They weren’t returned till after Waterloo. And during the First World War they spent some time in Rome, for safety.”

“Like I said,” said Den, “they’ve been around. Typical horses; they like to be moving.”

I couldn’t get over the size of the beasts, when I saw them. Cast in some sort of metal that might have been bronze, they were set in a row, as if recently freed from their chariot’s harness, one forefoot raised, prancing, necks arched, heads held proudly. A rubbing of verdigris green added depth to their gleaming gold coats and traced lines where their bridles had been, and their hooves, set on stone plinths, were nearly as large as my head. I tipped my head back, studying their faces and marvelling at the ancient sculptor’s skill in giving each horse an expression all its own. The first one, farthest to my left, looked vaguely worried; the second looked kind; the third looked perplexed; but the fourth—and my favourite—was laughing.

“What do you think?” Rupert asked me.

“They’re gorgeous.”

Den remarked that they didn’t look bad for their age. “Considering they’ve been kicking around since the time of Alexander the Great. Want to see the imposters?”

To get to the gallery outside we had to double back along a catwalk and a balcony set high above the shadowed aisle, high up amid the bright mosaics, close enough now to see and appreciate much of the detail. The walls curved over and around me, rich as an illuminated manuscript, with biblical figures and scenes large as life.

But my eyes, in the midst of this splendid confusion, came to rest instead on human figures, standing by the doorway to the treasury, below me. I noticed the woman, I think, because she wore yellow—a bright golden yellow designed to draw the eye, to make an artful contrast with her long dark hair. I couldn’t see her features clearly from this height and angle, but I guessed that she’d be beautiful, a woman who wanted to be noticed. She had that look about her, indefinable. The man with her looked much more ordinary. They were arguing, which struck me, in these surroundings, as being almost a sacrilege.

“Come on.” Den, reaching back, took my hand in a friendly grasp. “Come see the best view in Venice.”

Rupert kept close; he always kept close when he thought that I needed protecting, and this long crowded open-air gallery so high above the piazza, with nothing but a chest-high open railing between me and a dangerous drop to the pavement beneath, would be in Rupert’s eyes an accident waiting to happen.

As Den tugged me over to look at the replica horses, Rupert touched my sleeve and told me, “Do be careful.”

And I had the odd impression that he wasn’t speaking only of the height.

She came, as he had known she would. She came at the appointed hour that night; she came alone. It took all of his will not to leap from his chair when he heard the first knock at the door, not to bolt across the marble hall and wrest the great doors open himself, so urgent was his own desire to see her. But he clenched his hands and kept his place, determined that the scene should be played in the way he had staged it . . . she must find him here, sitting so, where the light from the candles fell just the right way to steal years from his face, and the tapestried wall at his back gave the proper effect.

She knocked a second time; he heard the measured tread of Thompson answering the summons; heard the scrape and creak of key and bolt and hinges; heard her voice within his hall.

With beating heart he listened to the footsteps coming nearer, arranging himself with great care in the armchair in the instant before Thompson opened the door to the study and announced, expressionless: “Signorina Celia Sands, signore.”

“Thank you, Thompson.”

And then the door swung closed again and there was only her.