The Best New Horror 2 (57 page)

Susan lifted her chin proudly; she swept all the evidence back into her purse. The Signora looked into the courtyard from the kitchen and turned back to give a stream of instruction to one of the maids. As Susan hurried off Hadley called:

“Wait, Miss Field!”

She lowered her head and went away without a backward glance. Hadley was already late for his appointment with Monsignore Venier, head of an architectural committee, but he spent a moment outside the Pensione Guardi staring up at its junction with the Palazzo Castell-Giordano. The larger building, stemming mainly from the seventeenth century, was not of much interest to him and it was not open to the public. He felt sure that certain relicts of one or
other of the families still lived in its draughty chambers. On his way to the Accademia bridge he glanced at the palazzo’s modest façade, in a side canal, almost a backwater. It would be easy enough, with his architectural connections, to make some enquiries and satisfy the poor girl’s curiosity.

Susan had known all along that Hadley would fail her. Her appeal to him had been simply a nod in the direction of rational behaviour. In her bedroom for several days now she had kept a small lamp with a glass shade burning before a picture of the Madonna. Her white purse did not seem right for such an expedition but she put all her evidence into the right hand pocket of her sailor blouse and a stump of candle into the other. When the Pensione Guardi sank into its long siesta she took the lamp and set out.

The writing room was full of moving shadows. She was very much afraid and cast a last long glance at the tapestry picture for reassurance. “Go along, silly goose!” whispered the masqueraders. She went up close and laid her hand upon the satiny expanse of the lady’s cloak. Then she slipped into the recess and wrestled with the heavy key until it turned in the lock.

The door grated open an inch at a time and behind it there was a misty thread of daylight. She was in some kind of no man’s land between high walls; there was a strong odour of sea-damp and rotting wood. The place reeked of Venice. There were two ways to go: the stairs, which were pitch black, and a kind of landing, greenish and slippery, where light struggled down from above. She went this way for a few steps and fell down, desperately trying to save the lamp.

The little guttering flame did not go out; she looked into evil-smelling depths, full of the roar of water. Slowly she drew back and moved to the stairway. The surface of each step was hazardous, covered with lumps of fallen masonry. She went up slowly, pressing against an inner wall. There was no banister; the staircase seemed to hover over an abyss.

Her fear, which had been a little in abeyance, returned in a sickening black wave. She trembled at every step. There was nothing anywhere that she could bear to touch. Beyond the feeble light from her lamp the world was sharp and hard with a cutting edge or else damp and foul. An icy wind played on her face and neck. She was terrified that she might have to stop, sink down on the filthy stairway and cry for help. She pictured Mrs Porter, gloating like a harpy at the daughter of a mad mother, and it gave her strength. One step, two and a whiff of perfume came to her on the cold wind. There was a door at the top of the stairs and a thread of golden light under the door. Susan dragged herself upwards
and laid a timid hand on the door; it swung inwards at her touch.

Light and warmth flooded over her. It would have been wrong or at least disappointing if she had been accompanied by Mr Hadley; she knew all this was for her alone. There was soft carpet under her muddy shoes; she bumped against a chair; her cold hand touched velvet. The Lady shone more brightly than the candles; she was all softness, her satins and pearls glowed with an inner light.

“
Cara mia
. . .”

Susan ran to her embrace and it was dreamlike, incorporeal. At the same time she was aware of her own body, naked under her clothes; she drew back a little and the Lady did the same. They were parted yet they spoke together in shared thoughts and broken phrases. Susan had been very brave; the Lady knew how much she had suffered. Rescue? Yes, rescue for both of them. It was a new beginning; a world waited for her, full of warmth, adventure, love.

“But is it
life
?” asked Susan.

A long life, came the answer. She found herself gazing into one of the mirrors in the secret chamber. There was no sign of her own reflection or of the Lady but she saw a huge bed, a four-poster, with filmy curtains drawn back. Propped up on her pillows there was a very old woman, a stranger, her features peacefully composed.

“She was the sister of my soul,” said the Lady. “You will be guarded just as tenderly.”

Susan put out a hand towards the mirror and said in a loud shaking voice:

“Am I allowed to say no?”

There was a gentle sigh and the presence was withdrawn. She stood alone in the midst of a small hot room under the leads of the palazzo. It had been a lady’s dressing room; the candles were long burnt out, the only light came from her own oil lamp, still burning on a commode, and from the curtained door to a roof-garden. In the dusty mirror she saw a faint reflection, a girl who might become invisible at any minute. Who was there left in all the world to care for such a girl? A faint glow of light arose in a corner, near the inner door that led into the palazzo. Susan spread her arms and cried out softly:

“Oh come back! Come back! Don’t leave me!”

The light grew around her and the Lady smiled. For a moment she was displaced, afraid, shrinking down inside herself, then some mysterious balance was achieved; they were one. In the glass there was Susan, bright-eyed, smiling now, smoothing her tangled hair. She could hear people outside on the landing. “Are there others?” “Our true servants . . .” She saw her own hand reach out firmly and open the door into the palace.

*

The search for the young English girl, Susan Field, went on for several months. The Venetian authorities were, in their own way, more thorough and more discreet than the Anglo-Saxon visitor might have expected. Even so it was a harrowing experience for young Field and his new wife. As the days went by, poor Olive Field, her bloom quite gone, became increasingly nervous and distressed. She went home alone, accompanied only by her maid, another bad omen for the marriage.

Ashton Hadley watched poor James Field trying to do his duty. He felt an obscure satisfaction when Jamie raised his fists to a senior police official who again questioned Susan’s innocence. A young girl’s disappearance suggested to the Venetians, at least, elopement or abduction as alternatives to violation and murder. These suspicions tainted the victim herself and dishonoured her family. There was only one fate for a lost girl and that worse than death. Female suicides were generally supposed to have been seduced and abandoned. Hadley stood by James Field on three occasions when they were called to examine the bodies of drowned women.

Hadley took the opportunity of insulting the egregious Mrs Porter. When she offered information about the family tragedy which had resulted in Susan’s trip to Venice he called her a scandal-monger and a pharisee. She went thumping out of the writing room where this encounter had taken place and Hadley gave way to despair. In fact he blamed himself for the girl’s disappearance. He knew that he would be haunted for a lifetime by his failure to respond to her last appeal.

The writing room had changed since the day Susan was lost. There seemed to be more light; the door in the wall stood open and its tapestry panel had been removed. Signora Ruffino had come first to Hadley with her anxiety as he sat reading in his bedroom. It was nearly midnight and the girl had gone; she was nowhere in the Pensione. Soon the Porters would return from the opera and the alarm would have to be raised.

He spoke at once of the door in the wall. Yes, the English Miss had mentioned this entry into the old palazzo. Was it possible that she had gone exploring? The Signora crossed herself and talked of the cloaca. They went at once, secretly, taking lamps. The Signora called him to witness that the key was in the lock; it usually hung upon the wall.

So they came into a tiny courtyard, crowded by the extension of the building that was now the Pensione. There was a gaping hole that led to the cloaca, a deep, swift underground waterway that carried waste into the canals and eventually into the sea. If Susan Field
had
come exploring it was possible that she had slipped into this oubliette and drowned, her body being swept away. There were marks on the
slippery green paving stones but it was difficult to say when they had been made.

Hadley had turned his attention to the staircase at the junction of the two buildings. He called Susan and her name reverberated between the high walls. Who lived in the Palazzo Castell-Giordano? Signora Ruffino knew of the aged Contessa and a few servants. The room at the top of the staircase had been the antechamber to an old altana or roof terrace where the ladies went, in former times, to bleach their hair in the sun.

At last Hadley made the ascent as quickly as he could and held his lamp for the Signora, gamely following. The door at the top of the stairs had a broken catch and yielded to his touch. He held up his light on the threshold: the room was empty. He stepped in gingerly hoping for footprints in the dust but the room was not especially dusty. It was not a bedroom but it had the quality of a boudoir, a particularly feminine room, old and long disused.

Hadley set down his lamp on a commode; the Signora brought hers to a higher shelf and opened the door to the roof terrace revealing stone urns for plants and old wooden cages from which the birds had flown. In silence they looked about for clues and stared apprehensively at the inner door. Hadley noticed the lions’ heads: there they were, repeated on this side of the wall, quite low down in the low-ceilinged room. They could be reached by standing on a chair. Absently he drew open the drawers of the commode and found in one a few sheets of writing paper . . . the wrong shade.

“Signor Hadley . . .” said the Signora quietly.

She had picked from the velvet surface of a chair two or three long golden hairs tangled with a scrap of black thread. It was all they ever found and there was nothing to say that the hair had not come from the head of some long-dead lady of the Castell-Giordano household.

Then light appeared under the inner door and Hadley dared to knock. The door was opened by an old man in antique servant’s dress of solemn black. He was Baldassare, the Major Domo; the female servants had heard noises and sent him to investigate. He heard their urgent appeal but shook his head. No, a young English girl had not been seen. The palazzo was in mourning; the Contessa Giordano had at last given up the ghost.

They apologized again and Baldassare watched them negotiate the difficult staircase. The alarm was raised. In the course of the search the police went through the palazzo and questioned the servants, all without result. Yet Hadley was secretly convinced beyond all reason and beyond all doubt that Susan Field
had
been up there in that musky forgotten chamber.

She had been there . . . so ran his obsession . . . and she had passed through the door into the palazzo. Her fate was bound up in his mind, from the first, with the rejection and neglect she appeared to have suffered. In those first night hours he and the Signora rushed into the girl’s bedroom . . . neat, virginal; later a lamp appeared to be missing. On the dressing table lay the purse of white leather that Hadley remembered but the “evidence” she had shown him was all gone. There was nothing but a letter which he read at once and found quite remarkably cruel. After that he measured the good-natured Jamie against that old brute, Field the Elder, who withdrew his paternity after fourteen years and consigned Susan to social oblivion.

He stayed on after James, his poor friend, had left, but Venice, which he had loved, became threatening. Terrible enough if Susan Field was dead, but if she were still alive? He began to see visions, in fact to look out for them. A young woman in deep mourning, heavily veiled, riding in a gondola towards the cemetery islands. An old man—was it Baldassare?—buying postcards on the Piazza? In a dream he saw a young girl dressed unequivocally as a courtesan; her mask was a death’s head. She said, “Oh, much curiouser than that, Mr Hadley!” and under the mask it was Susan, unscathed, bright-eyed.

He kept her secret; it had become his own. The girl, abandoned,
had
been seduced . . . lured away and by a Lady. In his despair, in the writing room, he stared again at an expensive but hideous tapestry panel, woven after some detail of a larger painting. Guardi of course or “school of Guardi”. What could the scene be called?
The House of Assignation
or even
The Procuress
. A wordly older woman in a mask urged a young girl towards a palace while other dubious masquers leered from a bridge.

Hadley went so far as to question Monsignore Venier concerning the Palazzo Castell-Giordano and its inhabitants. Yes, in one respect the family was almost unique. As a reward for doing the state some service the title and the depleted estate might devolve upon the female line. No hint of scandal in recent times but in the fifteenth century a notorious accusation of witchcraft, a Contessa who remained young and beautiful for so long that it became embarrassing. But in the end she too grew old and it was whispered that her demon would leave her. Possession? Yes, certainly, there was still some belief in such things. One scholar—a Venetian, of course—had suggested that the condition of being possessed need not be unpleasant or destructive. The Monsignore quoted, smiling:

“Who has not wished for a twin soul?”

Sixteen years later, Hadley, grey-haired and wearing his medals, took his young wife to a performance of
The Tales of Hoffmann
at the Paris Opera. He became impatient with the second act and left the
box to stretch his legs. The lovely melody of the Venetian baccarole pursued him into the marble halls. A tall woman in an enveloping evening cloak brushed past him then stood still until he caught up with her. She was serene, beautiful, her hair, cut short, stood out in a stiff golden aureole around her head. She smiled, looking deep into his eyes.