Inamorata (7 page)

“Oh, I’m certain it is,” said Mr. Dane. “And I imagine those with a sensitive disposition feel it most keenly.”

“Spirits in the water and in the wind,” murmured my brother, staring off into the soft glow of the arcades.

“Is that what brought you here?” Mr. Dane asked. “Searching for those elusive spirits?”

I saw the familiar haunted look come into Joseph’s eyes—a brief moment, but enough for me to despair at what he was remembering. I tightened my hand on his, and the motion seemed to call him back to himself. He gave me a faint, wistful smile and said, “I’ve no wish to go looking for spirits. But I feel them just the same. Don’t you?”

Nicholas Dane said, “One would have to be numb not to. And Venice loves a mystery, doesn’t she? The place seems made for it. It’s what brings artists here in droves. It’s what brought Giles. Something in the air calling, an unstoppable force—”

“You make it sound like idiocy,” Mr. Martin protested.

“Well, half of genius begins with an idiotic whim,” Mr. Dane said affectionately. “Yours not the least of it. Is it what you felt as well, Hannigan?”

“I wouldn’t call it idiocy,” my brother said reflectively. “But it was a dream that brought me here.”

“A dream . . . like a wish, you mean? You’d always wanted to see Venice?” asked Mr. Martin.

“A dream like a dream.” Joseph’s smile was sleepy and fine, the smile I loved best. “I was dreaming of Venice and thought I should come to see why.”

It was a lie, of course. It was the kind of whimsy people expected of artists, and my brother was clever enough to be what was expected. But Joseph had never dreamed of Venice. He’d only listened to the talk of its salons held by expatriates and the sublimity of its light, and he and I had seen the opportunity we needed. Venice was the perfect place to escape to, a place to lick our wounds and hopefully find the fame and fortune Joseph felt we were destined for.

But leave it to my brother to make our flight sound romantic and artistic.

“Well,” Mr. Dane said. “I hope Venice lives up to the dream, my friend, and doesn’t turn into a nightmare instead.”

“You think it could?” my brother asked.

Mr. Dane shrugged. “I’ve seen it happen. There are those who will warn you not to stay very long here. They’ll tell you foreigners often discover that Venice’s legacy is despair.”

“Look at poor Stafford,” Mr. Martin agreed.

“That would never happen to Joseph,” I said ardently. “We’ve come here to escape despair, not to find it.”

I felt my brother’s warning in the tightening of his grip, nearly painful, on my fingers.

I tried to smile. “What I mean is . . . Joseph has a great deal of talent. No one with talent like that should ever despair.”

“Nor should any lady so beautiful as yourself,” put in Mr. Martin a bit too earnestly. “Have you seen Venice’s Public Gardens, Miss Hannigan?”

The change in subject, as well as his too-obvious compliment, disconcerted me. “Oh . . . oh no. We’ve been here too short a time.”

“Nick and I promised your brother the best views in Venice, and the Gardens have several. It’s truly the only bit of green in the city. We’ve agreed to go tomorrow. I, for one, would be delighted if you would join us.”

I’d meant to spend the day looking for a place to live. But Joseph squeezed my hand, and I knew what he wanted me to do. I looked at Mr. Dane. “You’ll be going as well?”

“I’d thought to,” he said.

Giles Martin said, “Perhaps there you’ll find the inspiration you’ve been searching for, Nick.”

I said to Mr. Dane, “How is it that inspiration has eluded you in a place like Venice?”

He gave me a languid look. “Who knows? Words are my trade, Miss Hannigan, but Venice sweeps them all away.”

“I keep telling him he simply hasn’t found the right muse,” Mr. Martin said.

Mr. Dane laughed shortly. “Oh, I’ve had enough of muses, I think.”

He said it with a bitterness that told me he’d been unlucky in love, and no doubt recently. It was a bit dismaying, but not fatal. There was too much at stake to let it matter. We needed Nicholas Dane to like us. To like
me.

“Oh, but perhaps you’ll find one more to your taste in the Gardens,” I said.

Nicholas Dane bowed his head slightly in acquiescence. “Perhaps so,” he said, but when he looked at me, I saw only politeness, and I thought of the bitterness I’d heard in his voice, my sense that he was a man who’d been thwarted by love. But love was not what I required from him.

Don’t forget that.
I could almost hear Joseph’s voice in my head.
Any man can be led by desire, Soph. But desire isn’t love. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it is.

I knew that better than most, didn’t I?

N
ICHOLAS

S
he w
as as stunning in person as his portrait had made her out to be. She was not quite beautiful, but there was something in her more interesting than beauty, than blue eyes and dark hair and pale skin. It was what her brother had captured in his sketch, a deep, almost primal carnality, some occult attraction. . . . He had not invented that eroticism, as I’d thought. It was there. It was real.

I’d known only one other woman who possessed that quality, and while Sophie Hannigan could not possibly be so dangerous—in fact, I would have said she was completely unaware of just how bewitching she was—I knew enough to be wary.

There were a hundred reasons to stay away from Sophie Hannigan—not the least of which was her relationship with her brother. What he’d seen in her, well . . . it was strange that a brother had noted it, though I told myself it was obvious enough that he no doubt saw other men’s reactions to her. But even beyond that, there was another strangeness about them. While Joseph Hannigan was compelling on his own, the two of them together were curiously irresistible, as if each enhanced the other. It made it impossible to stop looking at them. I was not the only one so captivated—Giles was as well. Perhaps it was only that they were twins and so shared that womb-deep connection I’d heard about but never before witnessed. Whatever it was, I didn’t quite understand it, though it was perversely fascinating, and it only served to feed the desire I’d felt for her since I’d seen that sketch. Such desire was reason enough to keep my distance; it was a complication I couldn’t afford. To keep Sophie Hannigan’s brother in my sights while I worked toward destroying Odilé would take concentration. I could not be distracted by another woman, no matter how tempting the package.

I resolved to be friendly to Miss Hannigan, but to hold her at arm’s length. Later, perhaps, when her brother was safe and Odilé was gone, I could reassess.

The Gardens were a swath of green at the very end of the Riva, a sudden crowding of leafy trees and winding walks dotted with statuary. One came out of Venice’s crowded, close
calli
and canals, a city of water and stone, and stepped into a different world, onto paths lined with hedges and roses and vines. The day was warm, the sky cloudless, the Euganean Hills blue and the Alps dappled with snow in the distance. There were several people walking the paths, reclining in the shade of the trees, lingering at tables by the balustraded wall overlooking the lagoon, San Giorgio Maggiore and the Lido.

After an hour or so of wandering about, we sat at one of those tables. The Hannigans had brought lunch: wine and sausage, bread and melon. Hannigan cut big chunks of the orange flesh with a knife, and I did my utmost not to notice the sensuous way Sophie Hannigan ate it. She had peeled off her gloves, and the juice dripped over her slender fingers, trailing down her wrists to disappear in the somewhat yellowed lace edge of her sleeve.

Giles was obviously equally enraptured with her. “To inspiration,” he said, raising a glass to her, his gaze fixed upon her plump lips.

“As elusive as it may be,” I added.

Joseph Hannigan bent to pick a bright pink rose from a bush twining near our table. He snapped off a thorn and then tucked it behind his sister’s ear, smiling broadly. “The pink becomes you. Don’t you think so, Dane?”

It did, of course. That shocking pink against her hair, bringing out the pink of her cheeks touched by the sun. I kept my voice as blandly polite as I could. “Indeed. It’s quite your color, Miss Hannigan.”

“You should be covered in pink,” Giles said fervently. “From head to toe in roses!”

“I should think the thorns would make such a thing quite uncomfortable,” I said wryly.

Hannigan tore off a chunk of bread and leaned back in his chair, studying his sister the way I’d seen a hundred artists study their subjects, a critical, assessing eye that depersonalized her completely. “Hmmm. Maybe not head to toe. But a few here and there, I think. Maybe against white, to highlight your skin. Perhaps we’ll try it. What do you think, Soph?”

She gave a little shrug, taking up another piece of melon. “Whatever you like. You’ve the eye, not me.”

“My God, it sounds beautiful,” Giles said. I thought I detected annoyance in her expression, but it could have been only that I was annoyed myself, despite the fact that by now I was used to Giles’s ardent attachments. He was never more foolish than when he was infatuated with some woman or another.

But I understood it too. The spell of her closed the space between us, touching and then drawing back. Her smile, along with that small overbite, was so sensual one was led immediately to thoughts of lovemaking. It didn’t help that her brother found myriad ways to bring her to our attention—the rose had been only one of a dozen or more little gestures, as if he himself was so taken with her he couldn’t help himself.

She leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed out toward the lagoon. “Such a beautiful day, isn’t it? It seems impossible to believe there could be anything but days such as this here.”

“Thus far I haven’t seen a bad one,” I said. “But I’ve only been here the summer.”

“The lagoon is magical,” Miss Hannigan went on dreamily. “Before we came, I read so much about it. Everyone spoke of the first sight of Venice from the lagoon. But that was before the train bridge was built. I suppose no one first comes upon it that way anymore.”

“No, probably not,” I agreed. “But even coming from the train station, Venice has its charm. Especially after Mestre.”

Joseph Hannigan laughed.

Giles said, “Such a dismal, dusty town.”

“It has its moments.” Hannigan turned to his sister. “Tell them, Soph. Tell them what we saw in Mestre.”

She smiled, that dreaminess in her eyes becoming more pronounced, impossible to turn away from. “We had an hour wait, and we were sitting there on the bench outside the station when a train came in. One of the cars had a carriage strapped to it. It shone even in the dust. It had a gold emblem painted upon the door, and its windows glittered in the sun like diamonds.” Her voice took on a lovely vibrance, a storyteller’s opulence, transitioning us into a fairy tale before I’d realized it.

“The train stopped so suddenly that the carriage jerked and the straps holding it broke. It rolled onto one wheel and hung there long enough that I thought it might stay that way, suspended. But then it crashed to the ground. The trunks on its roof broke open, and jars and bottles and wooden boxes rolled everywhere, cracking apart as if the violence of the world had been cast upon them, releasing butterflies and moths and bugs. The air shivered with shining, vibrant wings and the ground shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. It was so beautiful we could not look away.

“The man and woman whose carriage it was ran about, trying to gather them up again, desperate to keep them safe. Because you see, they weren’t really insects waiting to be dried and pinned to mats in museum exhibits, but fairies who had been transformed by a wicked demon and locked in a mummy’s tomb. They had spent hundreds of years in darkness, and that man and woman had rescued them, and meant to return them to the ancient gardens of Rome, where they belonged.

“But now the fairies were bathed in sunlight, and laughing because they would never be in darkness again. They would not go back into those bottles and boxes. We could feel their joy and hear them singing. The man and the woman let them go—what else could they do? They could protect them no longer. They could only hope that the fairies would find their own way to the gardens. Some of them have made it there already, I know. And the rest will as soon as they find the path the others have left for them to follow. I shall never forget the magic of Mestre.”

Her voice trailed off, but the vision she’d conjured for us lingered, impossible to forget. I had heard singers who could charm the world with their voices, and actors whose sonorous tones left one in weeping awe, but Sophie Hannigan’s skill with a story left me staring at her in wonder. It wasn’t just her words, it was her way of putting them together, the voice that seemed to gain power with each one, so that my head had been filled with images so magically vibrant it was as if I had seen them with my own eyes. She changed the world into something fine. She made one
believe
.

We were all dumbstruck, but Hannigan . . . Hannigan’s gaze was so full of love and yearning—such a fatal and somehow
wrong
combination—that I was momentarily distracted. I had no idea what to make of it.

“Did that really happen?” Giles asked, breaking the silence that had fallen over all of us. “The bugs and the butterflies? I mean, they
were
going to a museum for display, of course?”

Sophie Hannigan’s smile faltered—for a moment a darkness came into her eyes that only confused me more, and I wanted to throttle Giles for asking the question, for marring the magic of the tale, but it was Joseph Hannigan who said gently, “Sophie’s is the story I want to believe, don’t you?”

The shadows left her eyes. She gave her brother a grateful smile.

The moment held, lingering between them in a way so private I felt as if I were intruding, and I had to look away. But then Hannigan sighed, and I looked up again to see him rising. “Come along, Martin. Perhaps we should try drawing the view instead of simply talking about it.”

Giles frowned. He looked ready to protest, but then he rose reluctantly and followed, glancing back at Miss Hannigan as he did so, obviously loathe to leave her.

“That was quite a story,” I said when they were gone.

“Did you like it?”

“You’ve a way with words. And quite an imagination. Have you written it down?”

“Me? Oh no, I’m no poet. I like telling stories, but I’m not very good at writing them. You can have it if you like. Write it for me. I shall sit back and quietly admire the view while you do so.”

I looked away, up into the leafy canopy, and heard myself say, quite unexpectedly,
“
‘For she was beautiful—her beauty made the bright world dim and everything beside seemed like the floating image of a shade.
’
”

“Why, that is lovely,” she said with a smile. “A pity it’s not yours, but Shelley’s.”

That she knew it surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. She was obviously educated, and she and her brother had either come from money and fallen on hard times, or had been at the lower echelons of society. Or perhaps her parents had disowned her artist brother and she had followed him. There could have been many reasons why the gown she wore—good quality silk, unless I missed my guess—was not quite the current fashion. Or why I’d seen it twice now. Last night at Florian’s, and today, though she wore a different hat and shawl as if to disguise the fact. I found myself wondering about her history, her relationship with her brother, and where she’d learned to tell stories. I fiercely quashed the urge to ask her. I did not want to be so involved, I reminded myself.

She said, “Tell me one of your poems. Joseph said you’d published, though I confess I didn’t recognize your name. But there are so many writers we don’t know in America. I suppose you must be famous in London.”

I took a sip of wine, ignoring the resentment—very old now, and very familiar—I felt at her words. “I think even London doesn’t know me. At least not most of it. There’s nothing like publishing to humble a man.” Or to show the extent of his insignificance.

“Well, I expect Venice to do her best by you, whatever you think. Perhaps it’s as Mr. Martin says, and one day you’ll discover inspiration standing right in front of you.”

She was still leaning her chin upon her hand. Her eyes were bright, and fastened on me as if she found me fascinating. It was heady, I had to admit. “Perhaps. But thus far I haven’t been as lucky in my inspirations as your brother.”

I said it deliberately, hoping to tell something from her reaction, but she only blinked and said lightly, “You never know what the future will bring.”

“You’re another optimist, I see.”

“Another?”

“Well, Giles is one too. Or he’s mad—I can’t tell which. Is it optimism or madness that keeps one forging ahead despite failure after failure?”

“Faith, I think.”

“Oh? Faith in what?”

“I don’t know. God. Or fate.”

“Or symmetry,” I said unthinkingly.

Sophie Hannigan’s forehead furrowed. “Symmetry?”

“It was something an old . . . friend . . . used to say. That the world liked balance. Symmetry.”

“Oh.” She looked puzzled. “Well, I suppose that’s like fate. Everything works out for the best, doesn’t it?”

“Does it? You saw Nelson Stafford in that courtyard. There are plenty of horrors out there fighting for one’s soul, Miss Hannigan. Sometimes they win. Is that best? For whom?”

The brightness in her eyes dimmed, replaced by the shadows I’d seen before—and for a moment these were so dark and haunting that I was taken aback; I realized suddenly that whatever was the story in Sophie Hannigan’s past, it was much different than the one I’d imagined for her.