Read The Visitant: A Venetian Ghost Story Online
Authors: Megan Chance
The Visitant: A Venetian Ghost Story
OTHER BOOKS BY MEGAN CHANCE
Inamorata
Bone River
City of Ash
Prima Donna
The Spiritualist
An Inconvenient Wife
Susannah Morrow
Y
OUNG
A
DULT
F
ICTION
The Fianna Trilogy:
The Shadows
The Web
The Veil
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Megan Chance
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-10: 1503945170
ISBN-13: 9781503945173
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
To my father, Bill Chance, and my stepmother, Alice Vermillion, with much love.
CONTENTS
It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.
—Aristotle,
Poetics
, XXV
[Venice] was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting our modern world—serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and unspeakably sad . . . a shadow within the shadow . . .
—William Dean Howells,
Venetian Life
VENICE—NOVEMBER 28, 1884
Chapter 1
Only in my dreams had I ever imagined I might come to Venice. And, given the nature of dreams, I had always pictured the city sunny and warm, with gentle, salt-tinged breezes and melting colors and a handsome gondolier to row me about and serenade me as he declared his undying love.
But I hadn’t considered November, a late train, and a storm that had buffeted the city the day before my arrival and blown refuse into every seam and doorway and alcove, where it lay in sodden, half-disintegrated blobs because the combination of the storm with high tide had filled every street and square with water. It still hadn’t quite receded from most places, and left behind a slimy accumulation of silty mud and seaweed where it had.
And it was damply, wetly cold, with a breeze that was indeed salt tinged, but not the least bit gentle, and cutting through my layers of clothing until I wished I’d worn my maroon wool gown instead of a lace-edged, sage-and-rust striped silk that I’d thought might impress a man of Samuel Farber’s status. A foolish little vanity, and how I was to impress him now, I didn’t know. I was exhausted from the two-week journey and cold, hands numb in my gloves, my hair straggling from my pins to fall lankly against my cheeks, and not looking even close to my best.
And worse, it seemed the Casa Basilio, where he was staying, was in the
sestiere
of Cannaregio. Between the ship and the trains, I’d had plenty of time to read the Baedeker guidebooks I’d brought, and I knew it was not one of the most enviable areas. Not on the Grand Canal, as I’d hoped. Not near St. Mark’s or any of the places I’d read about, the Riva or the Zattere. As the gondola made its undulating way toward the Basilio, skimming past the Grand Canal, which was gray and choppy under an overcast evening sky spitting rain, the buildings looking as if they were tossing and turning on a windswept sea and ready to tumble into it at any moment, I began to feel a creeping unease. We went into another narrower canal, and then one narrower still, with dank walls encroaching and the smells of old stone and damp and algae and mildew prickling my nose. The buildings were abandoned and boarded up, more than derelict; some had large pieces missing as if a giant had taken a huge hammer to them. The streets in some places were three inches deep with water, and all of them empty, so it sometimes seemed as if the gondolier and I were the only people alive in a flooded city occupied by ghosts.
The gondola stopped. From outside the cabin, the gondolier said in French—the only language we had in common—“Ca’ Basilio, mamzelle.”
When I looked out the levered windows, I knew I’d been right to be apprehensive.
The three-story palazzo was white stone, and so ruined I thought perhaps the gondolier had got it wrong. No one could possibly live here. It must have been elegant once, but now its white marble was stained black with mildew in great swaths. The decorative red marble medallions set here and there were cracked and missing pieces, some gone entirely. Of the six herringbone-patterned windows in the bricked white stone of the lower story, all but two were boarded. The same herringbone design carved into the thick wooden door, along with the sunburst crowning it, was nearly invisible through its layer of soot. Three balconies adorned each of the two upper floors. There was a tower cupola on the roof, tiles scattered like leaves about its base. The place looked utterly abandoned.
This
was the palazzo Samuel Farber’s noble friend had offered him?
This
was where I was to spend the next weeks? It seemed to pulse with neglect and misery. A narrow, wet stone walkway ran the length of the front, an extension of the square—
campo
, as the guidebook called it—on its right, which was barren, tiny and triangular, waterlogged and ragged. Another constricted canal bordered the left. Even in the early twilight, it showed a different color than the others, not a deep greenish gray, but a sludgy, olivey brown that looked like sewage and stank of something so tannic it burned my nostrils. I wanted nothing more than to tell the gondolier to row away.
But then I remembered my father’s strain, and my mother’s grasping hope, and I reached for the cabin door.
The gondolier opened it before I could and leaned in to offer me a hand, pulling me from the sinking leather cushions and out in one motion. He’d already settled my trunk on the edge of the walk, where the water lapped at it. The stairs were submerged, pale stone just barely visible beneath the current. I lifted my skirts to step into water that came to my ankle, the gondolier holding tight to my elbow as he gave me a small shove and boost. I fumbled in my purse for a tip, which he pocketed as he looked skeptically at the palazzo. “Should I wait, mamzelle?”
I glanced back to the forbidding black door. What if this wasn’t where Samuel Farber was staying? What if it was all a mistake?
Please, let it be.
“This is the Casa Basilio? You’re certain?”
The gondolier nodded. Well, that was it, then. Out of all the beauties in Venice, I’d landed here. I would have thought it ironic had I the strength for humor. I took a deep breath and waved the gondolier away, and then I reached for the bellpull.
I heard the ring, both far away and very near, as if it were in two places at once, the water and the wind picking up the chime and flinging it into the air, the stone capturing it and sending it into echo. It was an eerie doubling, disconcerting instead of beautiful.
There was no answer. I rang it again, my discomfort growing, and then I heard the clatter of footsteps beyond. The door handle rattled; the door dragged open, squealing as it caught against the floor, revealing a dark interior tinged with red shadows, a cracked and dipping checkerboard floor of black-and-white stone, and a pretty woman probably ten years older than my twenty-four, with so much black hair that the braided corona of it rose about two inches from her head. Her equally black eyes regarded me suspiciously.
“I’m Elena Spira,” I said in French, as I spoke no Italian and I doubted she spoke English. Papa had said that French was Venice’s second language. It had been true for the gondolier, but I was uncertain if it would be so for a servant. “M’sieur Farber’s nurse.”
Her expression did not change, and for a moment I thought this wasn’t the right house after all. Or perhaps she didn’t speak French. I fumbled for what to say as her measuring gaze swept me; obviously her assessment was not to her liking. She said coldly, in French, “You’re late.”
I was relieved that Papa had been right after all, but that I obviously belonged here and was expected was not that reassuring. “Yes, I’m sorry. The train was delayed. I hope M’sieur Basilio will not mind receiving me at this hour—”
“He is not here,” she said. “And Madame is resting now. You will have to call on her tomorrow.”
I had not understood that Mr. Basilio was married, but all I really knew about him was that he was Venetian nobility and he owned the palazzo. I was relieved, actually, that neither he nor his wife was available. I was too tired for courtesy. I wanted only to meet my patient and fall into bed.
“Then, if you could take me to M’sieur Farber,” I said.
I gestured to my trunk, and she broke into a flurry of shouted words that didn’t sound quite like the Italian I’d heard on the way here, though I wasn’t certain. Venetian, no doubt. Her calls crashed and ricocheted through the receiving court, which was walled in red marble—the reason for the blood-tinged shadows. A man bearing such a strong resemblance to the woman that he must be her brother came hurrying from a hall beyond a set of white marble stairs that looked like the entrance to a mausoleum. He threw me a smile and pushed past me to retrieve my trunk. The woman did not offer to take my coat or my hat—not that I was certain I wished to relinquish them. It was as cold inside as out.
She fingered a velvet bag at her waist with the familiarity of habit, jangling the keys obviously inside, motioning me to follow her past those marble stairs. A single candle flickered from a hanging chandelier. I’d seen streetlamps on the way here, so I knew gas was available. But I saw no evidence that the house had been piped for it. It was inconceivable in this day and age. Into what primitive place had I landed? The housekeeper took me into a corridor lined with doors. It opened onto a courtyard—perpetually opened, I realized, when I saw how the broad dark door lay at a strange angle.
The courtyard paving was cracked and uneven, littered with stones from a collapsed wall that looked as if it had been destroyed for some time, long enough for a creeping plant to have taken root among the ruins. There was a black marble wellhead, and here and there statues covered with algae and mildew.
The housekeeper sashayed—there was really no other word for it, though she was dressed as respectably as I—across the courtyard and up another set of stairs, these snaking up the outside wall of a three-storied wing. We went up the narrow, slippery stones to the third floor.
She glanced at me—quick and inscrutable—before she opened the door and gestured me inside, into a hallway that was the size of a large room, ending at balcony doors, and I felt as if I’d stumbled into a nightmare.
The speckled stone floor was skimmed with dust, studded with footprints. Twisted skeins of cobweb, laden with so much dust they were heavy hanks of fuzz, dangled from the chandeliers. Bare spots of discolored wallpaper where paintings had once obviously hung, and rough and unrepaired shallows where frescoes had been, dotted the wall. Bits of plaster scattered over the floor from the disintegrating putti and fauns peering down at us.
It looked as if no one had lived here for years.
This was not at all what I’d expected. Not this decrepitude or this isolation. “
He can be difficult
,” Papa had warned me, and I knew from the file in my trunk that it was true. I’d thought myself well prepared, but now I felt a frisson of uncertainty. What had these people seen that made them keep Samuel Farber up here?
The housekeeper turned into a smaller hallway, toward a cluster of open doors showing mostly empty rooms. She paused at one, gesturing, and I had a quick impression of a simple bedroom, a dark wood bedstead, and a window overlooking the courtyard, before she moved on. She said something; her French was difficult to understand, heavily accented, and it was a moment before I understood. “That is yours. It’s the only other furnished bedroom on this floor.”
The hall ended at a door. She stopped before it, knocking. “Samuel,”—
Samuel
, said as if her tongue could not quite manage the gathered vowels, and an inappropriate familiarity that startled me—“Your nurse is here.”
There was a mumbled sound from inside, a deep voice. She smiled; it was both baleful and gleeful. “Your patient, mamzelle.”
Then, with a nod, she left me.
Carefully, I opened the door.
The room was nothing like the rest. There was a carpet on the floor, two upholstered chairs, and a tea table bordering silk-curtained balcony doors. A plaster stove was against one wall, though it was not in use; the room was cold. A richly carved bed painted white with gilding wore bed curtains of blue velvet, and there, huddled within, was Samuel Farber.
In the month since he’d been hurt, his face had mostly healed, though the puncture wound near his temple and the laceration on his cheek would leave scars. His broken nose was still swollen into prominence. Thick, dark hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a barber in months. I smelled oil and unwashed skin and . . . and laudanum.
Laudanum.
He stared at me as if he wasn’t quite certain I was real. “My angel?” His voice was slurred and uncertain. Yes, definitely laudanum.
Damn.
I tried to smile. “No angel. I’m Elena Spira. Your nurse. My, it’s dark in here. Do you mind?” When I turned up the lamp on the bedside table, it only confirmed my suspicions. Within his deep brown eyes, his pupils were pinpricks.
“You’re the one they sent? My parents sent you?”
“Yes. My father is Dr. Spira.”
“Did they meet you?”
“Your parents? Yes, I met them once. Some time ago, but—”
He began to laugh, but it ended almost immediately on a groan. His hand went to his cracked ribs. Four of them, according to the hospital. He closed his eyes. “Christ.”
“How long have you been here?”
A pause. “Uh . . . don’ know. Days and . . . days?”
“Who’s been caring for you?”
“Giulia. Caring and caring.” Another laugh, followed by a wince.
“Who is that?”
“The housekeeper.”
“Is she the one who gave you the laudanum?”
“The doctors,” he said. “At the hospital. They sent it with me.”
I saw it now. A brown bottle on the table, beside a spoon and a glass. “How much have you been taking?”
His hand went again to his head, his face crinkling as if he found it difficult to think. “Don’ know. Not enough.”
I pocketed the bottle. He was going to hate me tomorrow. “Well, you won’t need Giulia’s care any longer. I’m here now. I’ll start you again on bromide. And no more laudanum. Or wine. No coffee and no tea. You’ll be on a special diet as well.”
“But I don’t want her to go away,” he protested weakly.
I thought of that sashaying walk, that insolent glance. I thought I understood it now. “You’re no longer Giulia’s charge, but mine.”
He mumbled something.
“What was that?” I leaned closer. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”
His voice was barely a murmur. I couldn’t understand. He stiffened. “Here she comes now.”
I looked over my shoulder. No one.
When I turned back to him, he was fast asleep, lost in opium-laced dreams.
I drew back from the bed and blew out the lamp. I was exhausted, and suddenly the day’s disappointments felt insurmountable. I wanted suddenly to be back in my safe little room at Glen Echo, though . . . I would not be there, would I? I would be on my way to Littlehaven, and a different kind of nightmare.
I reminded myself that Samuel Farber was the answer to my prayers. Redemption and salvation. There was no other choice.