by Ray Russell
It seemed upward of an hour before they felt cool air and, shortly after, crawled out and stood upright in a place no less dark but which felt to be a specie of tunnel. They ran blindly through what proved to be a vexing, labyrinthine network of such tunnels, often colliding painfully with hard stone walls, until they heard a liquid sound and knew the maze to be a system of drains or conduits or somewhat, for soon they were splashing in filthy, stinking water up to their ankles, then to their knees, then feeling panic seize them as the icy wetness lapped their naked backsides.
An eternity of headlong splashing flight they suffered, hearing the chattering of rats and seeing their red eyes in the dark, before a pinpoint of light in the far distance brought harsh sobs of triumph from their throats and they ran toward it pell-mell, splashing, sliding, falling, scrambling to their feet again and plunging on toward the blessed beckoning spot of light, out of the noisome water that now fell to below their knees, then to their ankles, until they were running in dryness again, the light growing brighter and bigger until, with aching limbs and flaming lungs, they burst out of the tunnel and into—
The dungeon. The selfsame dungeon whence they had escaped. For there were the cages, with the doors standing open, and there was the dangling skeleton, and there was their amiable warder, a truncheon in his hand, greeting them with a gap-toothed smile.
“A trick,” the troubadour groaned, collapsing to his knees.
“Aye, lad,” the warder nodded. “A trick to pass the time and take your minds off your troubles.”
The woman shrieked, “A fiendish trick! A trick to raise our hopes and dash them down again! A gloating demon’s trick!”
“Now, now,” the warder chided, “into your little cages, the pair of you, and quick about it or I’ll be obliged to break a bone or two with this . . .” He raised the truncheon meaningfully. Taking the keyring from her hand, he locked them in the cages again.
“All wet, are you, all wet and bare and blue with cold?” the warder said, solicitously. “Take heart, there will be heat enough at dawn.” And, significantly, with broad winks, he opened a cabinet and took down a pair of branding irons which he placed upon a bench. “Aye, fire enough and heat enough,” he grinned. From the cabinet he also took two long sharp blades, like gigantic paring knives. “Fire and heat and other things as well,” he added, placing the awful knives next to the branding irons. He then closed the cabinet, squinted at the hideous equipment on the bench, and said, “That be enough. For the First Day, at least, it be enough.” Then, deliberately shaking the keyring and filling the air with its sour jangle, he walked toward the dungeon door, saying, “This time I’ll not be forgetting my keys, like a naughty knave. Good night, my lady, young sir, or rather, good morning, for dawn will break in less than an hour.”
The door clanged shut.
• • •
The Duke’s face wore an expression of shock. “Dead, you say? Both of them?”
“Aye, that they be, Your Grace,” replied the warder, “and by their own hands. Behind my back, they reached out from their cages and took the blades Your Grace bade me put upon the bench for them to look at. The Lord have mercy on their souls.”
The Duke crossed himself, dismissed the warder, and turned to the tonsured clergyman at his side. “You heard, Monsignor? Smitten by remorse, consumed by guilt, they took their own lives.”
“And, as suicides,” solemnly said the priest, “plummeted straight to the fires of Perdition—there to suffer chastisement infinitely more severe than if they had died by your command.”
“True, true, poor burning souls,” said the Duke. “I never, as you know, intended bodily harm to come to them.”
“Of course not. Such cruelty would have marred the good repute you bear among all men.”
“Those grisly tales I bade the warder tell them, those skeletons and other things, were but to harrow and humble their spirits for a night. Oh, I do repent me—”
“Of those harmless tales and bones?”
“Not they so much, Monsignor, as I repent my overtrusting nature that placed those two young people in temptation’s path. Is mine the blame? Is mine the hand that led them to depravity, discovery, and death?”
The priest spoke firmly. “No! Your Grace’s guileless goodness cannot bear the blame for the sins of others!”
“It is good of you to say it.”
“You never could foresee or wish the death of your young wife!”
“Oh, no.”
“You never could desire to yet again become a widower!”
“Heaven forbid.”
“And dwell in mournful loneliness once more!”
“O doleful day!”
“No man in all the realm can blame you.”
“I pray not.”
“The hearts of all your friends, your faithful courtiers, the meanest churls, the highest lords, His Majesty, the Church itself—all these mourn with you in this heavy hour!”
“Thank you, Reverend Father.”
“But if I may, without offense, speak of your sudden sad unmarried state, I would remind Your Grace that a certain advantageous alliance is now possible with a family whose name is so illustrious I need not give it breath . . .”
“At such a time as this,” the Duke replied, “one cannot think of marriage. But when I have composed myself, then we may have some words anent that prince to whom you have alluded, and whose sister is, I do believe, of fifteen summers now and therefore ripe for wedding. To you, Monsignor, I leave all small details of the nuptial ceremony, which must take place, I need not say, only after what is called a decent interval.”
“A decent interval, of course,” replied the priest.
The Vendetta
An undated letter, written by Lord Henry Stanton to Sir Robert Cargrave, a London physician, probably in 1876 or 1877, judging from internal evidence:
Sir Robert Cargrave
Harley Street
London, England
My dear Bobbie,
Of all the news in your last letter, the item that has struck me most forcibly is your casual mention that “telephones” have begun actually to be installed in London, and that the serenity of even your own gracious home will soon be shattered by the shrilling of that vulgar novelty. In Venice, from which I write, we are still unsullied by such encroachments.
The Byzantine domes of St. Mark’s are visible from my terrace, and with a glass I can bring them so close as to discern the cracks in the mosaics. I also can see a strip of shimmering lagoon, crowded with gondolas, and with San Giorgio rising far in the distance. Crystalline weather! Such un-English, un-clouded skies, of shamelessly vivid, unabashedly Italian blue. Morning haze; warm and starry nights. To go about in a gondola by day is jolly, but to do so by night is magical. Last night, I glided along the Grand Canal, past magnificent wraiths of fifteenth century palazzi, gaunt silent relics in the argent Venetian moonlight (yes, Venetian moonlight is like no other). No sound save that of the gondolier’s oar in the water. And then no light, either, as we turned into the Rio di San Luca and lost the moon, passing under arching bridges with feeble bracket lamps that did little more than emphasize the sudden darkness of the water, sliding beneath us like black oil.
I live here in my rented palazzo like a Renascence prince, un gran signore, sipping old wine, strolling amongst the pictures and sculpture, looking out upon the city, listening to the songs of the gondoliers and poring over old books, such as a certain crumbling volume lengthily entitled Varie avvertenze utili e necessarie agli amatori di buoni libri, written some 160 years ago by the good Father Gaetano Volpi, priest and librarian. The book is before me at this moment, and for your delectation I will copy out a few passages of his advice on the care and protection of one’s library. He warns us not to emulate the example of Magliabechi, the famous librarian of Florence, “who read during meals and was known to drop a kip
per amid the pages to mark his place . . . Nor use your library to hold meetings, for it is known that bookstalls have been found convenient—o tempora, o mores!—for gentlemen to relieve themselves . . .” Mark well and profit by those sage words, Bobbie.
And do not think this is an ordinary palazzo in which I pass my days. It enjoys the distinction of being haunted; or perhaps I should say the reputation of being haunted, for I have yet to see or hear the shade of mad Count Carlo in these halls. I have heard his tale, however, recounted by the venerable person from whom I rent this palazzo—a remarkably well-preserved morsel of decayed gentry, 85 if he is a day (possibly older), yet still fond of food and wine and blest with that stamina which spinners of elaborate stories vitally require (to say nothing of their listeners).
It was just yesterday, in the latter part of the afternoon, that he was here and I asked him about the Count. He fixed me with his still bright eyes, shook his great white-haired head in the negative; then, when I entreated him to tell, he gave a sigh, and seemed to relent, and said, in his somewhat quaint and stilted way (in Italian, of course, which I here translate): “So many tales are told, so much mendacious folly spread about, that it is good for such a one as I to loose his tongue and say such words that may (if God is good and you inclined to hear them) tell the bare, unpainted truth about those hapless folk . . .”
I nodded eagerly, offering him a chair, pouring him more wine, urging him on.
He sipped the wine, and waxed ruminative. “A single cold misgiving yet I harbor,” he said, “although I will not let it stay me. It is this: my poor, stiff words, ungarlanded by malice or invention, will yet disclose a tale more crammed with cruelty, and vile device, and dark profundity of horror, than any silly falsehoods you have heard. You wish me to go on, Lord Stanton?”
Foolish question! “Certo,” I replied.
* * *
You will be relieved to know I have no intention of setting down the good old man’s words verbatim, in their admittedly colourful but convoluted and meandering original, for few of us have time for such bedizened narratives in this modern world of “telephones” and “talking machines” (have you heard of this latter?—an American named Addison or Eddisohn has spawned a devilish device that will abolish every opera house and concert hall in the world within a decade, I predict. A frightening and barbaric race, these Yankees). No, I will paraphrase my ancient host’s tale, which, I should guess, took place in the vicinity of 1790; at any rate, some time near the end of the last century.
Count Carlo lived in this palazzo with a carefully chosen minimum of servants and retainers, and no other kin but his sister Fiammetta, who was as fair as he was plain. His skin was raddled, hers was opalescent; his nose was large and shapeless, hers was a dainty, demure, delicately modelled masterpiece; his eyes were small and piggish; hers large and dark and luminous and clear and shaded by the fine fringed canopies of her lashes. Many were the swains who came here to the palazzo to win her; who came, I say, but who were discouraged, turned away, repulsed, every one of them, by her brother the Count.
“Why may not young men pay suit to me?” she often asked her brother. “Is it your plan to make of me a nun?”
At such times, he would emit his dry cackle of a laugh. “A nun! Ah no, bella sorella—” he would repeat the phrase in a singsong, a kind of daft liturgy “—sorella bella, bella sorella! You are too fair, too fine, too rare a wine, in cloistered convent walls to pine, o matchless little sister mine!”
“Matchless is well said, since you refuse to make a match for me!” And she would weep.
Then he would calm her, and soothe her, and assure her he was but saving her for a suitor worthy of her beauty, grace and station, a mate of the proper blood.
“What is this of blood?” she would wail. “These are no churls who have sung songs at my window, begging for my hand, swearing eternal love, but highborn fellows, all. Blood, indeed!”
“Blood,” repeated the Count, and the word seemed to spur his whirling mind, to spiral it into another shower of dotty doggerel: “Sangue rosso, sangue caldo . . .” (Again I shall endeavour to render this into English.) “Blood is red and blood is hot; blood may seem what blood is not. Blood most innocent, if shed, hatred on that blood is fed . . .”
“Oh, brother, leave off with these riddling rhymes, I pray you. They are sour to my ear.”
“Sour?” And that would be enough to send him into another theme: “That which sweetest tastes of all may be changed to bitter gall. Adonis can a monster be, and songs of love—cacophony!” (Did you not tell me once, Bobbie, that there is a form of mental disorder in which the patient expresses himself exclusively in rhyme? Count Carlo seems to have been an early example.)
There came to the palazzo one fateful day a traveller from Spain, a handsome young man of good family who sued to see not Fiammetta but Carlo. The Count, apparently impressed by something in the young man’s name or mode of approach, granted him audience.
“Honoured sir,” said the Spaniard, “you see before you one whose life is dedicated to beauty. The beauty of dappled hills, of horses, of guileless children, of gleaming ripe fruits, of draperies; the sad and humbling beauty of timeworn faces; the cold beauty of silver, the warm beauty of gold; the unadorned beauty of man and woman in their perfection—all these and more I have captured upon canvas. For some time now, I have dreamt of a great picture, my dear conte—Mother Eve, alone in the Garden, in the innocence before the Fall, the world a glowing quietude around her, unblemished, undefiled. This picture I have sketched and sketched again more times than I can say—the composition and much of the detail, the trees and flowers, gossamer insects, playful tame beasts, the soft sky and gentle clouds above them. I lack but one element, without which all is nought. Eve herself escapes me—nowhere have I found her, not among living models or in the realms of my mind, and it is not for want of searching.”
Carlo said, “You fascinate me, honoured guest. Pray go on and tell the rest.”
“It was a friend of mine and sometime teacher,” the young man continued, “who put me on the scent, as it were. He is himself an artist of no small gifts, recently appointed pintor de cámara, Francisco Goya by name, and one day he said to me, ‘Ramon, when a man has painter’s ears as well as painter’s eyes, he notes things other men pass by. That talk we heard in taverns a month or two ago, and again this past week, those stories, rumours, about a young Venetian maiden named Fiammetta, whose beauty is the theme of songs and sonnets in her own land—might there not be some truth behind them? Do you not recall the ardour, the passion of the song we heard that sailor sing?—
Divina Fiammetta,
Bellissima giovinetta . . .
—is it likely the subject of his song is but a fiction? Where there is smoke, is there not likewise fire? If I, like you, were searching for an Eve; and if I, like you, were unencumbered and not saddled with a court appointment, I would get me straightway to Venice!’ So said my friend, and I am here, dear count.”
Carlo, who had thwarted all others seeking interviews with Fiammetta, seemed to succumb immediately to the Spaniard’s blandishments. Even the thought that his sister, as Eve, would be obliged to pose au naturel did not perturb him. In his words: “Though men are ruled by lechery and lust, physician, priest and painter one may trust.”
One small step had yet to be taken, of course—obtaining the permission of the lady herself.
We have all heard that “Opposites attract,” but I have found this less true than the axiom that “Like speaks to like,” that beauty seeks beauty and grace calls out to grace—and surely this was the state of things when Fiammetta for the first time beheld Don Ramon José Villardos y Manadereña. For if she was a young goddess, he was a young god, a Grecian statue, a catalogue of perfections, reflecting her own beauty lustre for lustre, even to the opal glow that lit both his skin and hers. They were fated to fall immediately and furiously in love
; lock and key seemed not more made to join together; and such elemental passions as theirs not hurricane nor holocaust, not puny Man nor Almighty God may tear in twain. Her permission, it is superfluous to say, was granted at once.
And so it was that Fiammetta was left behind closed doors with Don Ramon while he blocked out the main lineaments of the huge canvas, and painted the first brushstrokes. Days went by, and weeks, and on every day of this time save Sundays, Fiammetta spent hours under the eyes of Ramon, as innocent of raiment as the Eve she represented.
Are we to be surprised, then, that one morning Carlo stepped suddenly, unexpectedly into the room to find not only Eve, but also Adam, cleaving together not on canvas but in the living flesh? Behind them, like a fine theatrical cloth, stood the immense spectrum of colour that was the uncompleted canvas—the lush jungle of Eden, veiled in primordial mist, the leaves and grasses in every imaginable variety of green, the flowers a dazzling riot of vibrant scarlet, soft lavender, bright yellow, lush purple, the insects and birds almost audibly buzzing and chirping, the lion and the lamb asleep together; and, coiled sinuously in the branches of the focal Tree, the unblinking, watchful Serpent. The figure of Eve had hardly been touched—she remained a blurred charcoal outline—but this gaping cavity in the canvas was masked by the figures of the flesh-and-blood model and her painter who seemed to be part of the picture, but a part that stood out in breathtaking relief, like a masterly example of trompe-l’oeil.
With a cry of shock, the young lovers drew apart and reached for draperies to cover themselves withal. Fiammetta trembled at the wrath she knew would come. Ramon, when his voice returned to him, gathered about himself as much dignity as the circumstances would permit, and said: