The Master (33 page)

W
HEN SHE HAD
settled in Florence and had, as he learned, seen a great deal of Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie, he received a letter from Constance
which surprised him in its frankness, its personal tone. Being with the Bootts, she said, in their quarters in Bellosguardo, was delightful yet, on the third or fourth visit something had struck
her, however, and stayed with her; she had to wait until she had unpacked her books before she could finally be sure about it. The rooms in the house on Bellosguardo, she wrote, were precisely
described in
The Portrait of a Lady
. The chamber in which she was regularly entertained was, indeed, brimming with arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and
contained the hangings and tapestries, chests and cabinets and pictures, brass and pottery, not to speak of the deep and well-padded chairs, which filled the main reception room of Gilbert Osmond
in that novel.

And not only that, she wrote half-accusingly, but the old man himself had been perfectly described in the book. He had, indeed, a fine, narrow and extremely modelled and composed face, and yes,
its only fault was that it ran a trifle too much to points, which were emphasized by the shape of his beard. Sometimes, she said, when the father and daughter spoke it was as though Gilbert Osmond
and his daughter Pansy were having a conversation. ‘You have introduced me to two of the characters from your books,’ she wrote, ‘and I am grateful to you, but I wonder if you
have plans to include me in the sequel.’

He did not reply for some weeks, and when he did, he failed to mention her observations about his novel and the Bootts. He ended his letter coldly, being certain that she would not fail to
notice it, and believing that this, coupled with his delay in writing, might remove the discussion of sources for his novels to the realm of the unspoken, where he and she normally wandered freely
as treasured citizens.

He remained deeply curious, however, about her relationship with the Bootts and Frank Duveneck. An idea came into his mind about an elderly American gentleman of private means and cultivated
manners in Europe with his daughter. Both of them would, in his story, marry; the daughter first and the father some time later out of loneliness. Their partners, it came to him, could be two
people who have secretly known each other, or have come to know each other now. He was doing, he understood, what Constance had suggested – placing her close to his other characters, the
father and daughter from
The Portrait of a Lady
, to see what would happen. He put the idea for the story aside, not wishing to satisfy her speculation as to why he might have introduced her
to the Bootts, and also believing that what he saw when he travelled to Florence might be more interesting than anything he might imagine.

Constance had rented her own house on Bellosguardo, Casa Brichieri-Colombi, which looked over the city and had ample space and beautiful gardens. But when Henry arrived in December, having
extracted a promise from Constance and the Bootts that no one in Florence would be informed of his presence, Constance had not yet taken possession of it and was still staying in an apartment close
to the Bootts, across a small square from Casa Brichieri-Colombi. She offered him the house, which lay empty, and he accepted.

Thus he found himself living in what was to be, in fact, her future home, seeing her almost every day, allowing her to direct his domestic arrangements, while none of his other friends in
Florence was aware that he was in the city. The Bootts knew, but were preoccupied by the imminent birth of Lizzie’s child. This did not, however, prevent Francis Boott from ascending
Bellosguardo to visit him.

Francis Boott’s exceptional cultivation was matched by his great mildness. He seemed incapable of giving or taking offence. When
The Portrait of a Lady
appeared and it was clear
that he himself, his house and his daughter had been openly used in the book and that the cold villain of the novel had his very face, he made no protest to the author and seemed to be amused. He
was an immensely proper resident of Florence, Henry knew, as he had been of Boston and Newport; as a host or guest, he was beyond reproach. He gave the impression, despite the mildness of his
manners, that this extensive social propriety stood for other proprieties in which he also believed, but it appeared that he saw no reason to display his beliefs.

The old man was wrapped in a shawl as he sat on an easy chair in the main sitting room of Casa Brichieri-Colombi. Henry noticed his slow-moving feline shape, his fine long fingers and his face,
which despite his interest in good food, had become oddly ascetic with the years.

‘We have loved your friend, Miss Woolson,’ he said. ‘She has a rare charm and intelligence. Lizzie and I have become very fond of her.’

‘And she has become fond of you, I believe,’ Henry said.

‘She has a gentle wit, you know, and a lovely way of leaving our company as if her life depended on it. We always want her to stay longer, but she has work, my, does she have
work.’

Francis Boott’s eyes sparkled with pleasure as he spoke.

‘Of course we are fully conscious that she is merely our friend because of you. She admires you so very much. And trusts you.’

As his friend crossed his legs again, Henry noticed how beautiful his shoes were and how slender his feet. Henry wanted to bring the subject back to Lizzie and her confinement but he had
already, on Francis’s arrival, asked about her. Nonetheless, he tried again.

‘You will give Lizzie my best regards,’ he said.

‘I tell her everything, as you know,’ Francis said, smiling again. ‘We both worry about Constance. There are depths which neither of us have fully explored, but we have gained
a great idea of her.’

‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘Constance is deep.’

‘And she suffers rather more perhaps than someone of her talent deserves to suffer,’ Francis said, knitting his brows. ‘But it is marvellous that she has met you and has known
you. We both feel that too.’

Henry stared at him blankly.

‘We both noticed the change in her over the past few weeks when your arrival was increasingly certain. You know, she grew much happier and wore lighter colours and smiled more. It was
unmistakeable.’

Francis Boott stopped and coughed and found a handkerchief and sipped the tea which had been brought for him. He gave the impression that he had said all that he had to say, that he had made
himself clear. And then he suddenly spoke again, loudly at the beginning as though he were interrupting someone.

‘We wondered if you were happy here, in this house.’

‘Oh yes, I adore the house.’

‘With Constance so close and it being her house, or will be soon …’ Francis Boott let his voice taper off, but made sure that he could be heard. ‘No one knows that you
are here, of course, so I don’t suppose there could be any scandal. Bellosguardo, despite everything, is a sort of bastion.’

He tapped the edge of the chair with his finger.

‘No, the problem is – what will she do when you go? This is what Lizzie and I worry about. Not about you being here and seeing so much of her, but about your not, if you get my
meaning.’

‘I will do my best,’ Henry said. He knew the remark sounded weak, but as it made Francis Boott smile at him warmly, almost radiantly, he did not correct himself.

‘I have no doubt you will. That is all we can do,’ the old man said.

He finished his tea and stood up to take his leave.

I
N
J
ANUARY
, once Constance took possession of Casa Brichieri-Colombi, Henry moved down to Florence. His days were idle, his afternoons and evenings
taken up with the society Constance contemptuously avoided. He was bored and often irritated by the excesses of the colony, but he had learned to disguise any such feelings and eventually, in any
case, one evening such feelings fled. Seeing the Countess Gamba, who, it was known, had possession of a cache of Byron letters, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a great literary gossip, told Henry that her
presence had reminded him of a story about another cache of letters. Claire Clairmont, Byron’s mistress and Shelley’s sister-in-law, had, Lee-Hamilton said, lived to be old. She had
spent her declining years in seclusion in Florence with a great-niece. An American obsessed with Shelley, knowing that she had papers belonging to the two poets, laid siege to her, according to
Lee-Hamilton. And on her death the man laid siege to her great-niece, a lady of fifty, until the great-niece invited the American to marry her if he wanted to see the papers.

Lee-Hamilton told the story briskly, as a well-known piece of gossip, not realizing how closely he was being attended to, how the drama of the tale affected his listener.

The implications and possibilities of this story filled Henry’s mind for some time afterwards. He took note, as soon as he went back to his quarters, of the picture of the two fascinating,
poor and discredited old English women living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign city with the letters their prize possession. But as he considered the core of the
drama, he saw that it lay in the hands of the American, who would come in the guise of both adventurer and scholar. The story of the three figures locked in a drama of faded memories and desperate
need would take time and concentration. It could not be done in the mornings in Florence. Nor could he set his story in the city without everyone there believing that he was merely transcribing a
story already known and often recounted. He would move the story to Venice, he thought, and, as more invitations came in, he decided he would move himself to Venice also, and work there on a story
whose properties he came more and more to relish.

I
N
V
ENICE
, he found rooms belonging to his friend Mrs Bronson in a dark, damp palazzo. The fact that Browning had once inhabited these rooms did not
brighten them or rid them of cold, despite Mrs Bronson’s certainty that their history made all the difference. He took to dining alone before taking a walk through the haunted streets of the
city. Once night fell and the Venetians had returned home, they did not venture out again. Venice was misty and strange and, for the first time in his life, he wondered what he was doing in the
city which he loved so much. He could easily have gone to England instead. The story was now clear in his mind and he had soaked up enough of the faded palaces where his heroines would live and the
sense of old secrets and heroic attachments in these shadowy, bejewelled, inhospitable buildings, once full of sweet romance and high-toned gaiety, and now repositories of gloom and cobwebs, so
many of them inhabited by the unsettled and the infirm.

One evening, having passed the Frari and crossed a bridge which led towards the Grand Canal, he caught a brief glimpse of a woman in an upstairs room with her back to a lighted window. She was
in conversation; something about her hair and her neck made him stand his ground in the empty street. As the talk became more animated, he could see her shrugging and gesticulating. She was, as far
as he could see, younger than Constance and much darker, and her shoulders much broader, so that it was not her physical presence which brought Constance into his mind. He found, as he moved away,
that he hungered to be in that room where the woman was talking, he longed to hear her voice and follow whatever it was she was saying. And slowly, as he walked through the dark streets with lives
hidden away in the buildings on either side, he realized that even though his time at Bellosguardo had lasted a mere three weeks, he missed the companionship, he missed his life with Constance
Fenimore Woolson. He missed the mixture of sharpness and reticence in her manners, the American life she carried with her so abundantly, the aura which her hours alone gave her, her furious
ambition, her admiration for him and belief in him. He missed the few hours every day they spent together, and he missed the lovely silence which followed it and came before. He decided that he
would either return to England or go back to Florence. He wrote to Constance outlining his dilemma, half-realizing that she would read his letter as an appeal of sorts.

Constance replied immediately and briskly offered him his own quarters on a lower floor of Casa Brichieri-Colombi which looked through a single door and three arches to the Duomo and the city.
He could work in peace there. While all of Florence was richly and intricately displayed for the pleasure of those residing at Bellosguardo, the opposite was not the case. Bellosguardo remained
apart from the city of palaces and churches and museums. Walking back there at night was, when he had moved a few streets away from the river, like walking towards any hill town in the Tuscan
countryside. Constance inhabited the large apartment above him, and they shared domestic staff and the kitchen and garden. There was no one else living in the house. This time they did not even
discuss the need for discretion about his presence in the city. It was known to very few that he was living under the same roof as Miss Woolson and it was mentioned to no one. Henry wrote to
William merely to say that he had taken rooms on Bellosguardo. He wrote to Gosse insisting that he was alone and working. He wrote to Mrs Curtis of the beauties of Bellosguardo and his happiness at
the view. He did not state that this came courtesy of Constance.

Nor did he mention to anyone that in the time he had been away, much to the Bootts’ alarm and the alarm of her doctor, Constance had entered into a deep melancholy and had taken to her bed
where she had suffered, as Francis Boott told him, more than anyone could imagine. He could see signs of it when he arrived, despite her efforts to disguise it. She was happy for him to dine in
Florence so that she could be alone in the evenings. Her deafness appeared to irritate her, and once they had been together a short time, she seemed compelled to withdraw.

But as the weather softened and spring came, Constance became happier. She loved her vast house and the garden that was now beginning to blossom, and she took daily pleasure in the old city
beneath her without ever feeling tempted to walk much outside the confines of this small territory. Thus she guarded her privacy and respected his, and in the six weeks he stayed with her, they
never appeared together in public.