The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (35 page)

If he was not our father, why would this so-called ‘Phelan Swiney’ give us money? And if he was our father, then Darcy had not killed and buried him. And if Darcy had not done it, then whose was the grave in the clover field that she had so hated me to enter?

Chapter 31

If Darcy had taken the money at the La Touche Bank, she made a mighty cover for her crime out of anger towards the robber-photographer Saverio Bon with his hands all over our rightful Venetian lire. Signor Bon had written to ask if we might like to donate some small percentages to the poor nuns in Venice, who’d been dispossessed of their grand convents by Napoleon and were still scratching for pittances decades later.

‘The Church?’ fumed Darcy. ‘The Bon fellow’s got the poor bowl out for Venetian nuns, I ask you! It’s all your fault, Tristan,’ she raged. ‘You sent us there to Venice to be taken advantage of and fleeced.’

Oona said mildly, ‘It’s not as if we’re in a pinch now, Darcy honey. We can wait.’

‘Is it that you are smarting because of the Grand National?’ asked Ida. She told us, ‘Darcy had a power of money on a lamed nag there.’

‘You took a big bet?’ breathed Oona. ‘No! Say you did no such thing!’

‘A tiny flutter,’ said Darcy firmly.

Gathering all my courage into an intake of breath, I voiced an idea that had flown into my head. I spoke quickly without giving the notion a chance to cower. ‘Let’s turn our Venetian money into a
palazzo
,’ I said.

‘What sorts of bushes are palaces growing on in Venice? With what Bon will pay us,’ said Darcy, ‘we shan’t afford more than a doll’s house or maybe a gondola. Or a straw hat for a gondolier, more likely. However, you are for a rarity right, Manticory. Stone and bricks are a good investment. And it wouldn’t hurt to be away right now, somewhere that faking Phelan Swiney hasn’t got our address to pester us with his lying letters.’

Mr Rainfleury and Tristan agreed with the idea of property in Venice. Tristan undertook to write to Signor Bon. In the meantime we agreed to a series of bookings in London.

I awaited Signor Bon’s answer with increasing anxiety, daydreaming my way through the days, and thinking of Venice and Alexander half the night. The Swiney Godiva shows did not flourish in London. Irishness was out of fashion thanks to some Fenian threats much exaggerated in pungency by the press. We were turned out of the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square in favour of Marian the eight-foot-two-inch Giant Amazon Queen. On an outdoor stage in Hyde Park, we were booed and a man shouted, ‘Female Fenians!’

I whispered to Darcy, ‘Perhaps he’s another one who thinks we are the daughters of one Phelan Swiney, Fenian Mariner . . .’

She couldn’t answer me as she was taking her bouquet from management. Afterwards, however, I was treated to the full length of her tongue on the subject.

Unable to work, we fell into a lassitude that rendered even shopping a chore. Only Darcy absented herself, returning flushed and irritable.

It was not only myself who was relieved when Mr Rainfleury appeared at our London hotel with tickets for the boat trains and new passports. ‘It is done. Your palace awaits you, my queens. Sadly, Tristan cannot attend you. But Mr Sardou has promised to assist. And I’ll be there at the first.’

His endearments also fell emptily on Darcy. ‘Away with your queens and more of the nuts and bolts. And bricks. What kind of hovel have we got? I want my own bedroom, I’ll tell you now.’

‘That will not be a problem,’ smiled Mr Rainfleury. ‘Signor Bon is proud as a dog with three tails.’

Alexander’s letter caught up with me at the terrifyingly grand Élysée Palace to which we’d been promoted in Paris. He’d written mysteriously, ‘You’ll not be humiliated by your new lodgings, Manticory.’

When I saw what Saverio Bon had done for us, I kneeled and kissed his graceful hand while the sweating porters lifting our trunks up to our floor deplored our parsimony with the tips, operatically calling us ‘Barbarian Dogs of the Virgin’, quite unaware that I understood them.

Alexander appeared in their wake. ‘What do you think, ladies?’ he asked.

He was scrupulously careful to let his glance rest equally on our flushed faces.

He exchanged a glance with Signor Bon. I was surprised to see the animosity written on their faces. Of course Alexander was not happy to see me kneeling at the photographer’s feet, but there was more to it than that. I promised myself to ask Alexander about it later, but was forcefully distracted by my desire to explore our new home.

We got a sight of
palazzo
for our lire: an entire vine-clad
piano nobile
in a Renaissance
palazzo
romantically situated on the Grand Canal.

When we bought our
piano nobile
, we bought the right to linger in the great hall, where we might sit on benches with blackboards painted in chiaroscuro with cupids in a water-stippled space, lit at night by a ship’s lantern bulbous like the thorax of an ant and as large as two tall men stacked one on top of the other. We bought the right to enter the stairwell via marbled corniced doorways that the second man couldn’t even reach with his fingertips. We bought the right to open inner gates of such intricate iron filigree that they should have been worn by rich giants as belt buckles. There were seeming splinters of ruby in the windows to our grand staircase frescoed with pastel porticoes on which lounged blonde ladies and liveried monkeys. We had bought the right to clasp our hands around the heads of green lions whose duties were to hold silken ropes in their mouths by way of banisters. And when you finished mounting the stairs, lion by lion, you looked up to a fresco of a painted sky, with nothing more to say than
Good morning, it’s a beautiful day – see here’s a hint of pink amid the azure to promise you a good heating-up later
. I think that empty fresco was my favourite thing of all.

We had bought gilded red damask that hung like flayed skins from the walls in a walnut library filled with books in Greek and Latin. A dense Austrian-looking crystal-drop chandelier gushed from the library ceiling. We bought a great
salotto
with yellowed painted beams and steps up to a pergola on which we might perch and own four bell towers with our eyes. And from which height the gondolas below were toy boats and the tourists were toy people, their eyes happily raised to the prospect of Rialto Bridge arching its back like a white cat in front of them.

We had bought twelve-foot architraves, and door hinges cast with delicate acorn tips. We had bought bronze rococo door handles. We were set up with an abundance of scrolled gilt candlesticks, armchairs fancy as iced biscuits (and as friable with the worm). Our gilded consoles rubbed up against diseased mirrors so tall that the spiders dangling from the cornices might admire themselves without descending an inch.

We’d bought acres of
terrazzo
flooring picked out in crests, and a mile at least of parquet stained with interesting formations.

Two small
palazzi
had recently been torn down simply to create the elegance of a walled garden with a pool of emerald grass in front of the jade-tinted blue of the Grand Canal.

We had bought an encrustation of amethyst wisteria in the garden and a view of water and marble through grates between nine stone columns.

It did not bypass my thoughts that all this magnificence was created at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Swineys immemorial back in Ireland were living on oats and sleeping in windowless turf huts heated by roasted dried cow dung, only dreaming of the luxury of a thin goose at Michaelmas. And most of all, I realised that we sisters who had once owned nothing but the air we breathed had now bought air – air trapped in the gloomy heights of the ceilings, the length and breadth of the rooms that made us all look like small afterthoughts.

There was an enfilade of bright bedrooms along the garden side; on the inner linings lurked secret passageways for the servants where perpetual twilight reigned.

Back in Harristown our cottage had been so tight that you couldn’t lift your arms without bruising someone. Those same Swiney Godivas – now a little older – who had slept on straw pallets by a turf stove would that night lay themselves down on beds of antique splendour rustling with velvet and silk, made up for them by two servants, after being fed by a cook and served with ceremony and silver plate.

Darcy of course took for herself the chamber on the Grand Canal with the oval ceiling fresco and the marble fireplace of dramatic zebra-striped marble, topped by a gilded mirror that rose up into the sky. Except where broken by gilded stucco work round the windows and doors, Darcy’s room was entirely panelled with squares of pocked and plaintive mirror, which refused to offer any semblance of your reflection but threw a dull shine into your eyes.

Berenice demanded the next room, hung with gold-silk damask cutwork in which acanthus and flowers of dull red-gold floated in a gold glossy background. The ceiling was afrolic with satyrs and busy nymphs (one breast being fondled by a satyr, the other giving milk to a cupid), flowers, fat ears of wheat. The whole scene was thickly infested with cupids fluttering the wings of cabbage white butterflies. Curious and impossible architectural forms were rendered in a bilious green around the edges where the ceiling met the walls. But Berenice pronounced it ‘perfect’ for her. The remaining sisters were pushed through the door to the next room.

‘This is mine!’ I claimed it instantly. The room was warm as an apricot on an August branch, painted in sun-infused pastels and buttermilky golds. Chinoiserie panels showed impossible Oriental architectural forms rising out of limpid lakes and drooping with spindly trees and outsized convolvulus. Cone-hatted figures bearing delicate standards ran over bridges that led to nowhere, or they smoked hookahs on gnarled outcrops surrounded by water. Each panel was highly peopled, yet every individual was confined to his or her own tiny island, with no boats or rafts to carry them back and forth. The upper parts of painted pavilions were occupied by grand ladies with double pagoda umbrellas, but there were no stairs to convey them up there or down again. My ceiling was stucco strawberries and peaches beaten and ploughed roughly through thick yellowy cream, particularly rich food for the eyes in the vibrant afternoon light.

‘Oh no!’ cried Ida, pointing. Of course, it was Ida who detected a darker side to those frescoes of a floating world. A man in red stockings vigorously beat his dog with a reed switch. A bound servant raised the terrified whites of his eyes to a master who appeared to be ordering him to throw himself into the depths of the lake. Another dog was caught in the act of a suicidal leap into the infinite water. And who was that hunched man lying in wait for the beautiful lady ascending to the pavilion? How did those rotting branches hold up those towering pavilions? Into what mist-shrouded distance did those perspectives of tufted palms and misty cypresses disappear? Where, if anywhere, did the water end and true land begin?

Then I discovered the best thing about my room – a secret passage behind it that led to the lobby and the stairs, which set me pleasantly speculating until I heard Oona’s chirrups and sighs of delight from next door.

Oona’s room was so encrusted with stucco that it no longer had corners. It had undulating outcrops, like a bleached grotto. Mother-of-pearl glittered in the tiny tiles in the floor. Oona pronounced herself ‘in heaven’ with the white marble fireplace that was more ornate than mine, and with the arched anteroom where a bed was made up with brocade hangings. She admired herself in her two mirrored presses. Her ceiling cupids had doves’ wings, and the little plump ones sported with the birds, whose feathers were as pillowy and luminous as Oona’s own hair. Gilded eagles draped gold garlands of leaves and medallions of laurel-crowned poets.

After Oona’s room came the bathroom we would all share and then, by default, Ida’s chamber – once a family chapel, still equipped with a kind of altar and painting of a friar in rapture being crowned with white lilies by a nymph. It looked over the back garden that joined our
palazzo
to the teeming streets of San Polo.

‘For me,’ pronounced Ida.

From Ida’s room, one reached a new wing at the back of the garden, tall chambers with painted ceilings looking down to the wisteria and the Grand Canal below. Enda and Mr Rainfleury took those rooms.

I was almost sick with the excitement of the
palazzo
. Within a day, I was already afraid of leaving it. I wanted somehow to make it part of our act, so that even when forced to leave it, I might inhabit it onstage. ‘An image of it on canvas as our backdrop?’ I mused over dinner served under the lucent gush of a chandelier, with the gondoliers singing beneath us.

But Mr Rainfleury ordered us to keep the palace a secret.

‘It wouldn’t do to boast, my darlings. A Venetian palace will attract envy. Envious people will want to hurt you. And if you are hurt, if they scent blood, that will excite the hack reporters and bring them swarming to you. Remember that you were not born respectable. You are raised to your current enviable position by my efforts and those of Tristan.’ He gestured at the damasked walls with his crystal goblet. He looked shabby in that room; disreputably shabby in contrast to its graces.

‘But even we cannot save you from the Grub Street hacks. Those men will bring down every good thing in this world with their busy black scribbles. They are the flies who feed on the wounded, simultaneously poisoning the weakened flesh by rubbing their filthy hands in it.’