The Lying Tongue (40 page)

I let the letter drop onto the floor and ran back to the study. As I turned into the corridor, I slipped. I looked down at my foot. The blood from my wound had soaked through the towel, which was now a mass of red. I raised myself upward, screaming and cursing, leaving a bloody snail-like trail behind me.

Yet the pain from my foot was nothing compared to the sense of panic inside, a plague of locusts trapped in my ribcage. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were drowning. I felt like I was going to swallow my tongue.

Crace’s lizard eyes stared blankly out of his ghastly white face, his thin lips curved into a slight smile as if he were determined to have the last laugh. Feeling repelled by the idea of searching his dead body for the book, I steadied myself by the chest. But then my legs gave way and I collapsed by Crace. Underneath me I felt the sticky viscosity of his darkening blood clinging to my skin. Closing my eyes, I pressed my hands down onto his nightshirt and began to feel his skeletal corpse for any signs of the hidden manuscript. The blood from his wound stained my palms and, as I searched, I left another trail across him. Slipping my hands underneath his slight frame, I turned him over and repeated the process on the back of his body, feeling the sharp bones jutting out of his thin, cold skin. As I traced my fingers down toward the bottom of his spine, I felt something hard and rectangular under his nightshirt. I pushed my hand under the fabric.

Pulling back the nightshirt, I saw a black, cloth-bound book strapped to the base of his back. I pulled the elastic, snapping it. Here was the lost manuscript that I had been looking for. I turned to the first page where the words
The Lying Tongue
had been written in Crace’s spidery handwriting. As I started to read, spots of blood from my hands dropped onto the paper. A terrible fear gripped me. Its main character was called Adam. It was my story. They were my words.

I could not have written this book without the support and love of those around me, especially my parents and family. Thanks, too, must go to my ever enthusiastic agent and friend, Clare Alexander, whose insight and judgment is second to none, and to all the staff at Gillon Aitken, in particular Sally Riley, Lesley Thorne and Justin Gowers.

I would like to thank the whole team at Canongate Books in the United Kingdom, especially my wonderful editor Dan Franklin, and first class publisher Jamie Byng. In the United States I owe a great deal to everyone at Atria Books and Simon & Schuster, in particular to my editor Peter Borland and his assistant Nick Simonds, designer Jaime Putorti and publisher Judith Curr.

Thanks to Gavanndra Hodge, who read an early draft of this novel, and to Christopher Fletcher, Susan Shaw, Peter Parker, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Mary Greene, Victoria Millar, Mike Jones, Frances Wilson, Christopher Stocks, Charles Darwent, Salvatore Grigoli and Ewa Gizowska. Thank you, too, to Marcus Field—you know how much you mean to me.

This is a work of the imagination, but a number of sources have proved invaluable, including:

K. Andrews.
Catalogue of Italian Drawings,
two volumes. Cambridge: National Gallery of Scotland, 1968.

P. Aretino.
Selected Letters,
tr. George Bull. London: Penguin Books, 1976.

B. Berenson.
The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance,
3rd ed. London: 1907.

M. Garrett.
Traveller’s Literary Companion to Italy.
Brighton: In Print Pub., 1998.

M. Garrett.
Venice: A Cultural and Literary Companion.
Oxford: Signal Books, 2001.

M. Grundy.
Venice: An Anthology Guide.
London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 1980.

P. Humfrey, T. Clifford, A. Weston-Lewis and M. Bury.
The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections.
Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2004.

G. Mazzariol and A. Dorigato.
Venetian Palazzi.
Cologne: Ever-green/Benedict Taschen Verlag, 1998.

J. Newman and N. Pevsner.
The Buildings of England: Dorset.
London: Penguin Books, 1972.

B. Skinner, Andrew Wilson and the Hopetoun Collection,
Country Life,
15 August 1968, pp. 370–372.

J. Steer.
Venetian Painting.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1907, reprinted 1970.

G. Vasari.
The Lives of the Artists,
tr. George Bull. Penguin, 1971.