“This is Venice,” Rossi sighed. “No place for innocence. Do you have children, Madame Branscombe?”
Francesca bit back on the gnawing sorrow that had followed her from London. There was something about the Contessa’s bluntness that drew her in, after the mannered parties and dull dinners her husband liked her to attend. There was something about Venice, too, all that jewelled finery and the easy grace of her people.
“We did,” she said. “But . . . ”
She gestured, and Rossi nodded her understanding.
“Lost,” the Contessa said. “So many lost. Mothers waking to stillness. Do you know, children have been snatched from Italy for many years.”
“But, why?”
“To serve evil masters as slaves and street peddlers. Some go as far as England, even the Americas. You might have seen them in London?”
“Perhaps.” Francesca nodded.
She’d seen those sad, unsmiling children, dark-haired ghosts obscured by layers of grime from the streets. She’d had them beg her for coins and offer to play incongruous melodies on harps and horns and violins that were bent and old, tucked beneath the points of their small chins. The sight of them had made her cry. Even before her own lost child.
“It is the scandal of Italy,” the Contessa continued. “Garibaldi and his man, this Generalissimo—”
“Menabrea?”
“Si, they shall have to deal with it if they are to build a united Italy.”
“Will they, do you think? Deal with the children, I mean.”
Contessa Rossi shrugged and gestured to the heavens hidden behind her dark ceiling. “What is the future of Italy without gli bambini?”
When Francesca’s baby had been lost, it had left something behind. She could feel it, restless, tugging at her. Sometimes when she was alone, she thought the child spoke to her.
She tried never to be alone.
The Contessa must have caught in her expression some of the grief she felt.
“Yes, yes,” Rossi said in her deep, brooding tone. “I understand.”
The Contessa seemed to forget Francesca was there for a moment, her gaze lost to the patterned walls.
“The house?” Francesca prompted her.
“Oui?”
“You were saying it was not appropriate?”
“Ah! The Lombardi have several other houses, it is the height of rudeness to put you in such a place.”
“It is close to the Ponte di Rialto,” Francesca replied. “I thought it quite fashionable.”
“The fashion of the Lombardi is not in doubt.” Rossi was almost crooning, waving her thick, silk fan in front of her, the tassel bouncing against her forearm. “It is because we are French, you see? And foreign, they give us the dreadful places. Venice is so unforgiving.”
Francesca couldn’t think what to say, so she stayed silent and rocked in her oversized chair and tried not to look at the Rossi family portraits that hung sternly above her. The salons of Venice, Francesca was finding, were at least as dangerous as the streets.
“It is better for me,” Rossi continued. “At least I married an Italian.”
“That must be a relief,” Francesca muttered, more to herself.
“And to think! The Italians, they took Venice from Austria in this war of theirs. I ask you, why? Other cities would do better.”
“Contessa,” Francesca interrupted, “If it is not the fashion of the Lombardi house that is at issue, then what?”
“Oh, ma chère, ma chère petite.” Rossi’s fan thumped the heavy air. “It is because of the child who haunts it.”
* * *
Francesca rose from the sheets, heavy linens twisted with sweat and sleeplessness.
There was, she thought, a terrible energy in the house tonight. The dark chewed through everything. It turned the red of the rugs to black and made the marble fireplace gape like a maw.
The heavy magenta curtains were held back from the windows in the hope of breeze, but whatever breeze was out there only travelled along the canal this evening and not up.
In the gloom, she tripped on the brocade bed cover they had kicked to the ground. She stumbled and stifled a cry.
Francis’ voice was clear. “Have you hurt yourself, mon amour?”
“My pride, only,” she muttered. “I thought you were asleep.”
Francis sighed and stirred and kicked off the thick sheets. “I might never have slept. I feel I might not have slept in my entire life.”
“You exaggerate so,” she replied.
“It is the continental way,” Francis replied. “I’m just fitting in.”
The air was damp with canal water. Strands of hair stuck to Francesca’s neck and forehead.
She pulled at her long nightgown. The lacemaker had assured her it was wrong for the season, but the lacework was so delicate—like rosebuds against spider’s web—that she’d declared she must have it. And the lacemaker, shrugging, had wrapped it for her and then tried to sell her others that were, he proclaimed, just as fine. Nightgowns, he declared, you would be proud to wear even to your grave.
Francesca had thanked him sourly. But now she saw fit to curse him. Lace fell like a rash along her chest and lace clamped wetly around her wrists.
“Why did you agree to purchase this wretched nightgown?” she asked.
Francis twisted to look at her. “You insisted—”
“Cette m’ennuie,” she cut him off.
“I think it was this stifling Venetian air, it does things to one’s mind.”
“How is your fever?”
“Still as wretched as ever.”
Francesca sighed. She crossed to the tall, arched window and stood side-on against the curtain, wrapping it around herself like a shroud.
Outside, Venice hung with its spires reaching towards Heaven, its colours like a muted carnival, all pink and grey and blue with cascades of flowers that were, by daylight, bright yellow and red.
There was still a buzz of activity, even this late. People were walking along the embankments, moving slowly, the best to show off their evening finery. The gondole that populated il Canalaso fluttered like black moths on the water. If she pressed the side of her face to the cool window glass, she could just catch a glimpse of Venice’s most famous bridge: il Ponte di Rialto.
“It’s only April,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Already so warm. What will July be like?”
“Warmer, I should think.” His tone was flat.
She rubbed her wet cheek on the sleeve of her nightgown. “There are still people outside.”
“What are they doing?”
She gestured, the heavy lace dripping from her wrist. “Walking, mostly.”
“Well, this is Venice.”
She turned from the window and faced him. The moonlight gave him a ghostly pallor and his shadowed eyes seemed sunken in his head.
“You say that like it explains things. What does it explain?”
Francis sat up from the crumpled bed. He sighed. “They sleep in the afternoons. In the evenings, loro fanno una passeggiata. They walk.”
She turned back to the window. “Contessa Rossi says I should have married an Italian.”
“I don’t see why, half the people in Venice aren’t Italian.”
“When are we leaving, Francis?”
“The house? Or the city?”
“The house would do,” Francesca replied. “I can’t sleep here.”
“The heat will be the same all over the city.”
“It’s not the heat, it’s the ghost.”
“Ah,” Francis sighed. “That foolish Rossi woman, she tells you stories of make-believe for what reason? Perhaps she despises the Lombardi and seeks to get back at them—”
Rossi was an old woman, and bored, and perhaps she had invented the stories to save herself from more boredom. But Francesca didn’t believe it.
“You weren’t there,” Francesca said. “She was convincing.”
“You were convinced, you mean,” he corrected her. “You do love these sordid stories the locals tell. You listen and then you let your imagination run away with you. And then you don’t sleep. This Rossi, she sounds grotesque.”
“She is quite macabre,” Francesca replied, with feeling. “And honest, in her way. I like her. And anyhow, what about those drawings I found? The ones the servant Marzio snatched away.”
The servants were so forbidding that Francesca had taken to spending her time in the rooms assigned to her for sleeping and dressing.
It was in those rooms where she’d been admiring the furniture, running her hands along the deep, lacquered wood, pulling out drawers and opening wardrobes. They were all empty and she assumed the rooms had been unoccupied a long time. The Lombardi, it was said, hardly ever returned to Venice. There was a sense of wilting to those rooms, too, and the kind of the neglect that comes from a too-long empty space.
She’d noticed, too, that the servants hadn’t bothered to clean the rooms for their arrival. Now and then she’d find a scattering of dust and the marks where covers had been left on furniture haphazardly, exposing a corner to the thick air.
It was the wardrobe she’d been inspecting when she’d found the drawings. They were pressed up against a back corner, as if they’d been wedged there behind something else that had since been removed. Boxes, perhaps.
Francesca had reached for them and found two pages in a child’s hand. Thick, colourful pencil traced the outlines of smiling figures in what appeared to be pink gowns and lace caps.
Images of Venice, she’d realized, the broad buildings behind the figures unmistakable with their repetition of windows, the doors so vast that smaller doors had to be cut into them so a person could come and go without three others to help open the door. The buildings in the drawings sat not on the ground but seemed to float on the dark, blue water that ate into their foundations. They were cheerful images, except for the consuming waves.
The pages were yellowed on one page, but the other, having fallen behind its partner, had remained better protected.
Francis said, “So you assume the drawings you found were done by a child who died, but you base that on nothing.”
“You assume,” she said, “that the drawings were not made by that child. But why else hide them away in a wardrobe?”
“If they were hidden,” Francis sighed. His face was ashen with fatigue. “If they weren’t, perhaps, simply forgotten. And this ghost, this child died how?”
“The Contessa wouldn’t say.”
“She didn’t know.”
Francesca shrugged and pulled back her wet hair. “Quite possibly. She doesn’t seem the kind to hold back a detail like that.”
“I should think she’s not the kind to hold back any detail.”
“She’s been kind to me, in her way. She’s invited me to her house. She’s the only one.”
“Give it time.”
“Do you think we’ll find somewhere to live as grand as the Lombardi’s house?” she asked.
“We might find it, but we couldn’t possibly afford it. I have heard of a modest place nearer the university.”
“Beside il Canalaso?”
“I’m afraid not. But possibly there is some place other than the Grand Canal to take your heart away from me.”
She smiled. “Is it far from the Rialto Bridge, then?”
“Nowhere is far in Venice,” he said.
“Will there be other people there? Foreigners, like us?”
“Ah, you’re lonely, my dear. That’s all.”
He held out a hand and she crossed to him, moving through the dark and the light of the window. She sat with her back to a bedpost and pulled her feet up under her.
“I didn’t expect it to be so . . . different,” she said.
“To France?” he scolded.
“Yes, to France, to home.”
“Ma chere, all of Europe seems different to me, from England. And different, again, each city from every other.” He clasped her hand with both of his. “Soon enough the offers from other Venetian ladies will arrive, the calls to private salons, the exhibitions, the . . . well, whatever it is you’ll find to be of interest. There is music, art. The glass and the lace—”
“Come for a walk with me,” she said.
“At this hour?”
“Why not? All of Venice is doing it. We may as well fit in.”
She didn’t add, and get outside this accursed house.
Francis raised a weary hand. “I have a meeting in the morning with il Generalissimo.”
“Bien sûr, sleep, then, if you can.” Francesca got to her feet. She pressed the back of her hand to his temple to feel the heat of his skin. Beneath her wrist, his eyes were heavy and dark. “Perhaps I’ll see if there’s any cool water to be had in the kitchen,”
“Don’t fetch it yourself,” he said roughly. “If you want something, call for one of the servants.”
Francesca snorted. Her husband liked to pretend—if he had not forgotten—that it was not long ago she was a servant herself, and a scandalous woman for stealing a Lord’s heart.
“I don’t want to wake them,” she said.
“You think they’re sleeping?” Francis lay back on the bed. “They’re probably all outside, taking the continental walk.”
* * *
Francesca tiptoed into the hallway with her dressing gown pulled tight around her, lending heat and weight to her progress.
The house was huge, designed for a large family and all their attendant servants. A hall ran its length, rising through two stories, so that Francesca could grasp the balcony outside her bedroom and gaze down to the marble floor that led to the front door. She liked the unfamiliar openness of the place. But even here the air was stifling and clammy and the marble balustrades shone wetly in the gloom.
She left the hallway and crossed to the room adjoining the bedroom, where her trunk had been deposited. The servants hadn’t unpacked it, but rather left it standing on its end with its contents crowded and falling. The dress she’d travelled in two days earlier was still laid on the bed where she’d left it. In the gloom it looked like someone had fallen there, angled across the bed in an attitude of neglect.
She moved to the trunk and pulled out a simple, grey gown. But she decided it was too heavy for the climate, even this late at night. She swapped it for a lighter gown in green, where the sleeves finished at her elbows. She dressed by candlelight and then slipped from the room towards the stairs.
She wouldn’t go far, she promised herself. She would stand with her back to the front door and watch the people who walked the embankments.
She would take in the air that ran the length of il Canalaso.
All the way down the stairs she had to steel herself against the sound of her stiff silk dress and the whispers she was sure filled the air. She thought the stones of the building were talking amongst themselves. When one step creaked, she fancied she could hear soft crying.
She moved forward, through the dense air and the noises of sorrow.
The closer she got to the bottom of the stairs, the worse the whispering became. It was almost chanting, a soft susurration of noise that rose and fell, holding her up and bearing her down. Her heart thudded in unison. She felt she might be enclosed in the lungs of something warm and wet and alive.
She would have turned and run back to the room where Francis lay, probably still awake and fitful, except then she would have to explain to him her dress and why she’d been heading outside alone.
In the end it seemed the darkness at her back was worse than the gloom of the hall in front of her, so she kept moving. Though her hand stiffened on the railing and she had to drag herself forward.
Just above the well of darkness at the bottom of the staircase, she hesitated. The chanting had stopped, fallen away with a choking noise.
Instead, a sound hung in the air around her, a kind of hushing, hissing noise. More than a rush of wind through a half-cl
osed window or the ocean against stone foundations.
The skin of her temple prickled and something seemed to crawl
up her spine.
Something watched her in the dark.
She spun, fast enough that the candle she was holding faltered and almost went out.
“Hello?”
Her voice was sharp and too loud. In the cavernous space of the central hall she heard it echo.
No answer.
She waited with her heart pounding, hoping Francis wouldn’t rise and find her in the wide hallway, dressed as if she intended to leave.
“Who’s there?” she whispered hoarsely.
A face caught on the edge of the candle’s light. “Scusa, Signora.”
It was impertinent to use the familiar to address her. But it was a familiar impertinence.
“Marzio?” she said.
Only one of the servants, after all. She felt the relief roll from her temple to her toes, though her heart seemed to beat all the harder.
He loomed out of the darkness and stepped towards her. “Prego.”
“Why are you here in the dark?”
But it wasn’t quite dark. As he moved, she glimpsed a triangle of light behind him. It was coming from one of the sitting rooms, where a heavy brocade curtain had been pulled aside.
“Who gave you permission to light the lamps in that room, Marzio?” she asked. “That is not for servants.”
She moved to go around him and Marzio blocked her.
“Pardon!” she cried. “You do not dictate where I may go in this house.”
Marzio sneered and for a moment Francesca quailed and might have turned away, back towards the relative safety of the stairs. But then behind her she heard a door open and Francis’ voice calling.
She turned, humiliated, and watched him come down the stairs in his nightshirt and dressing gown. His hair was untidy and he looked as far from a lord of any manor as she had seen. But she was glad he was there.
“What the devil?” he asked. “And who are those people in the sitting room?”
Francesca realized he was right, there were people in the room. Seven of them, wedged together around a dining table, their hands linked, their skin shining from the light of the lamps.
She recognized one of them—another servant, Knaus, a young man with pale skin and dark eyes. The rest were strangers. An old couple caught her eye, their skin the deep olive of the south. The woman’s face was red and puffy with tears that still stained her cheeks.
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013 Page 42