In any circumstances, the arrival of this old Venetian friend would have been cause for celebration. But Giustiniana still felt so unsettled in her London surroundings that the news jolted her into a state of feverish excitement. She waited for him like a sentinel standing guard. At the end of March, she heard that Graeme was at last in town. Just as she was getting ready to pay him a visit, the old soldier suddenly appeared at the Wynnes’ and she rushed into his arms: “I truly felt as if I saw a part of myself in him as I knew he was coming from where you are. . . . I ran to embrace him and then I kissed him for you, and now it seems I cannot see enough of him. . . . I speak about you all the time. . . . I assailed him with so many questions all at once! So my Memmo still remembers me, and I hear this from someone who sees him and is with him nearly every day. . . . Graeme made me laugh by assuring me that you still love all the ladies; which means you don’t love any one of them. Giustiniana may still hope to be dear to you.”
She and the general saw each other again the following evening at Knyphausen’s and spent all their time together, catching up on Venetian gossip. They were not really free to talk there, particularly not about Andrea. Next morning, Easter Sunday, the general came by the Wynnes’ again. Giustiniana became so engrossed in their conversation that she forgot to join her mother at Easter mass. “He stayed with me from eleven until after two. . . . What a good soul! Right now he is the only man I love. . . . I would be so happy if I could have him with me at the theater tonight. And all this rapture is because I talk about you. Because all I do is think about you. I am beside myself, by God, I still love you too much.”
Her agitated ramblings with Graeme had brought Andrea back to her in such vivid colors that Knyphausen, by contrast, appeared bland. “I am afraid I shall grow bored with the baron,” she confided to Andrea. “I love him and he loves me. We see each other quietly. Our pleasures are always quiet. But though I make up worries and cause little quarrels and disputes and bring up suspicions to give us a little vivacity, I fear we are deluding ourselves.”
The general stayed only a few weeks, enough to take care of some family business and to realize that, much to his disappointment, he was unlikely ever to see any more action in the field. But the impact of his short visit on Giustiniana was considerable. It unleashed a torrent of emotions that was bound to crash into the still waters of her placid romance with Knyphausen.
Their “quiet pleasure” lasted through the spring. They shared more dinners, more assemblies, and more conversazioni. “I am certainly not lacking invitations,” Giustiniana said with more than a hint of disaffection. They still met discreetly at Knyphausen’s little annex around the corner from his house “on account of his many servants.” The weather improved and brought new distractions. A boxing match between the Irish and English champions kept tongues wagging for days. Military operations on the European front and in North America had resumed after the winter lull, bringing another string of victories for the Anglo-Prussian coalition and more calls for peace. Lord Bute, backed by the Prince of Wales, continued to strengthen his hand at the expense of Pitt. Holderness, though still secretary of state, had thrown in his lot with the rising new leader, prompting Pitt to comment with sarcasm that he was likely to become “the vortex”10 of a future Bute government. Knyphausen, on the other hand, probably realized that his own star was already dimming with that of the Great Commoner.
Giustiniana no doubt followed these developments simply by virtue of the fact that she knew so many of the participants. Yet she seldom described the political scene for Andrea even though he would surely have been very interested in it. She did not have a taste for politics. Her taste was more for observing society. In the spring of 1760 nothing captured her imagination as much as the trial of Laurence Shirley, Fourth Earl of Ferrers.
Back in January, Lord Ferrers, an eccentric old man who lived in seclusion on his vast estate in Leicestershire, had summoned his faithful steward, Mr. Johnson, ostensibly to complain about certain accounts. When the steward had entered the parlor, Lord Ferrers had locked the door behind him, ordered the poor man to his knees at gunpoint, and told him “to make his peace with God, for he never should rise again till he rose at the Resurrection.” Mr. Johnson protested that all the accounts were in order. Lord Ferrers replied that “he did not doubt his accounts, but he’d been a tyrant and he was determined to punish him” and discharged his pistol at close range.11
Lord Ferrers was brought down to London, imprisoned in the Tower, and tried for murder by his peers in the House of Lords. Giustiniana was riveted by the case. All the major newspapers and periodicals printed detailed accounts of the inquiry and long features on the streak of madness than ran through this illustrious family. Lord Ferrers begged for mercy on the grounds of insanity, not an unreasonable plea on the part of a man who, according to Gentleman’s Magazine, “was subject to causeless passions, . . . walked hastily about the room clenching his fists, grinning, biting his lips and talking to himself, . . . [was] frequently absent when spoken to, [and made] mouths in the looking glass.”12
He was nevertheless found guilty in the course of a three-day trial that attracted “all of London,” as Giustiniana put it to Andrea. She managed to get into two of the crowded sessions and came away with the sickening impression of having been to another of those elegant assemblies rather than to a murder trial. “The ladies were dressed for a gala, and the trial room, very large, was entirely draped in red and crammed with people. I have never seen such a grandiose spectacle. His lordship’s predicament was terrible, but the sheer magnificence and diversity of the scene were such that the death of that poor man was the last thing people thought about.”
Lord Ferrers, the last member of the House of Lords to be tried by his peers, was executed on the morning of May 5. It is said a silk noose was used in deference to his rank.
Now that summer was near, the evenings were warmer and Giustiniana was often invited to dine at Vauxhall, the fancy pleasure garden built on the other side of the Thames. The excursion always made her apprehensive. She did not like crossing the river on the unsteady little ferryboats. The Thames was not particularly wide at the crossing point—“no wider than the Giudecca Canal,” she explained to Andrea, referring to the waterway separating Venice proper from the Giudecca. It scared her nonetheless: “Yesterday evening . . . the tiny size of the little boat, the fact the boat-man only had one arm and was accompanied by his ten-year-old son, I think all of those things together increased my fear. Anyway, whatever the reason, everyone had a good laugh at my expense.”
Knyphausen was a reassuring presence in such circumstances. He was always tender with her, always considerate. But there was no real spark between them, no strong physical attraction. There never had been. And no matter how much Giustiniana kept telling herself what a likable man he was, how really fond she was of him, she could not bury her feelings for Andrea. They kept coming to the surface, sapping the energy she needed to stop her relationship with Knyphausen from running out of steam.
On a hot morning in early June, Giustiniana was at home, still in her nightgown, writing her weekly letter to Andrea. It was a perfectly innocent letter. She mentioned a dinner at Vauxhall, said she was glad a rumor about Voltaire having died had turned out to be false, and, with evident annoyance, promised she would send the petulant Marietta Corner an English cloak if she insisted. “But I must warn her that the cloaks here are nothing special. In fact, everyone seems to like Italian ones very much.” Only toward the end did her tone become more personal as she again touched on the vexing subject of marriage. Oh, she would find a husband, no doubt, if only she set her mind to the task: “Everyone predicts I will get myself one if I stay here.” But she did not want to remain in London much longer, not with her social position still so uncertain. What was the point? She had not come all the way to England to marry a dreary solicitor. Marriage, she insisted, was no longer a necessary part of her plans. “I mostly wish to choose a place to live in that
I will like and where I will feel free. If I manage to get an income of six to eight hundred pounds sterling a year, as I hear I may get, then I can live well anywhere. As soon as I have secured that sum I will share my plan with you and ask for your advice. You know I love you and that I have always looked up to you.”
Just as she was finishing up her letter, Knyphausen was announced. Giustiniana rushed into the next-door room to put some clothes on “and in my usual absentmindedness I left the letter on the table.” Knyphausen walked into the room and saw it lying there. The temptation was too strong: he picked it up and read it, and when Giustiniana returned to the drawing room he made a “horrible” scene. She was a “wicked” woman, he shouted at her, and “thoughtless” and “duplicitous.” He could not contain himself. “For two hours I had to withstand the assault of a man who rarely gets angry at all.” She had never seen him explode like that before.
Later in the day the tempest finally subsided, and Giustiniana and Knyphausen made peace. She held her ground, insisting she would not give up writing letters to Andrea. “You are my true friend, as he himself has accepted.” The baron, in turn, laid down his conditions: henceforth Giustiniana was to show him all their correspondence—her letters to Andrea as well as Andrea’s to her. “What can I do, dear Memmo? Will you forgive me for this too? He is such an upright man, and I owe him so much I had to give in. So please refrain from writing about him. Do not show him you know about us. . . . He would never forgive me if he knew that I had divulged this secret to you. . . . Keep our friendship alive since that is all we may count on; and forgive my weakness for a man who is really quite worthy of respect.”
She could feel her relationship with Knyphausen growing hollow even as she wrote these words.
CHAPTER Nine
Giustiniana spent much of the summer in bed. The air was hot and sticky. The marshes around the city seethed with malevolent insects, and fevers spread easily. Bouts of high temperature kept her confined to her room. Outside her window, the bustle in Dean Street had quieted. The “polite end” of London was mostly empty, its inhabitants having migrated to their country homes after the King’s birthday in June. Lady Holderness had left town as well. Word was that only poor Lady Coventry was still at home, slowly dying of lead poisoning from using too much whitening powder on her delicate skin.
It was a strange time. In late winter the end of the war had seemed so near. Then, in early spring, news had come that preliminary peace talks at The Hague had collapsed. William Pitt, still in charge of government policy, was bent on crushing France’s fleet and dismantling its overseas possessions. So the war had to go on: at sea, in North America, and on the Continental battlefields, where the exhausted Prussian Army, supported by the English Treasury, fought strenuously against France, Austria, and Russia. In London pro-German sentiment continued to be high. A poetry collection by Frederick the Great was the season’s best-seller. “Mostly odes and a poem on the art of war,” Giustiniana wrote wearily. “They read it here as if it were a reliquary.”
Some days she was worn out by fever and shifted uncomfortably under piles of damp, crumpled sheets; others she was suddenly better and enjoyed the long hours she had to herself. Propped up by a pile of cushions, she read, she wrote, she slept. During those long, sweltering days she felt her tenuous ties to London dissolve as her mind wandered dreamily back to Venice. She imagined Andrea’s life from what he told her in his letters. She saw herself floating back into his arms. The thought of returning to Italy was often in her mind, and she did not resist it.
Knyphausen hovered around her, ever solicitous. “He certainly loves me,” she told Andrea, as if registering a self-evident fact; but she added little about her own feelings. She was annoyed by his insistence that he read her correspondence and was not beyond writing a few fake letters in order to mislead him. Nor did she hand over to him everything she wrote. In a letter clearly intended to elude Knyphausen’s eye, she confessed to Andrea, “I might as well tell you, for your own glory, that I love less and less the man I should be loving more and more.”
In mid-July she was shaken out of her feverish reverie. For weeks Andrea had continued to write with the detached tone he had been asked to use in order to avoid exciting Knyphausen’s suspiciousness. In fact, he had become so adept at playing the part of the old friend—never allowing himself the slightest slip—that his coolness often made Giustiniana uneasy. The letter she now received was far more disturbing than anything he had written to her before.
Andrea confessed that he was tired of “easy, everyday gallantries.” His brief affair with Marietta was over. He wanted to organize his love life more efficiently and possibly settle down with a lover who would also be good company “during the intervals.” A woman he could talk to. A woman he could enjoy and respect at the same time. He went on and on, filling the page with justifications of every kind.
Giustiniana understood what this unpleasant letter was all about. She knew Venetian society well enough to see that Andrea was adapting to the local custom. He needed to focus on his political career, and his distracting love life would not do anymore. It was fairly common practice for a young Venetian patrician to seek a stable relationship with a married lady. Andrea had just turned thirty-one and was still a bachelor. He felt that at this point in his life it made sense to find himself an “official” lover.
Giustiniana must have half expected that this would happen one day, but the abruptness of Andrea’s announcement was the real shock—not to mention his manipulative desire to involve her in the whole process. At the end of the letter he informed her that he had already whittled down the list of candidates to three names: M., C., and B. All of them were married, he added, and all of them were more or less available. Giustiniana was overcome by a feeling of dread when she realized the preposterous nature of Andrea’s request: he wanted her to help him decide which of the three ladies was best suited for him. In her reply she accused him of using all his “accursed skill” to avoid responsibility for her “eternal downfall.”
Knyphausen laughed loudly when she explained Andrea’s predicament to him. He laughed out of relief as much as amusement. “Most of all,” she noted bitterly, “he was glad to learn from your letter that there are no more ties between us that might give him reason to be jealous.” There were moments when she thought she recognized, behind the screen of Andrea’s outrageous proposition, the smirk of the inveterate prankster. But after reading his letter several times she became “quite certain” that his intention “to seduce those three dames was not a practical joke at all.”
She was hurt, and the insidious way in which he made it sound “as if I should be thankful to you for this great token of your friendship” made it even more painful. “I still don’t understand you,” she confessed in yet another letter clearly written behind Knyphausen’s back. “Are you seeking revenge? Are you putting me to the test? . . . Why is it you can upset me so much even from so far away? Even when I am willing to love someone else? Alas, you are the only one in my heart now. And I feel you want me to renounce all my claims forever.”
Something in Andrea had changed. He was looking beyond her, looking for an attachment that would suit his life in Venice. Giustiniana understood all that, yet she also felt she had not entirely lost her place in his heart. She was going to fight for it, knowing well that if she had any chance at all of succeeding she would have to match his “accursed skill” with her own. “Besides,” she concluded dryly, “if I leave the choice to you, I run the risk that you will pick one not to my liking.”
With gritted teeth, she delineated her recommendation:
So you want to live your life openly, you want to be able to visit their house, you want to be able to be seen in their company because you are tired of all the discomforts of secret lovemaking, and you wish to see your heart involved to some extent as well as satisfy your mind. In that case I’m afraid that C. will not give you what you want. She is pretty, possibly the prettiest of the thr
ee; but if my memory is correct you were not so sure about her spirit. She also happens to have an unbearable husband who actually lives with her, and the company she keeps is not the most suitable for someone with your intelligence. B., who cannot be said to be pretty but is worth more than a few pretty ones together and who probably would flatter your vanity and excite your spirit more than the other one, lives too much of a sheltered existence to fit into your new lifestyle. Besides, I don’t know whether she keeps any company at all; whether she is free to live as she wants within the family; whether she may come and go at her pleasure; I happen to know that her parents would curse you; that her husband is not at all accommodating and would never leave you alone. As you can see, I am inclined to believe that both C. and B. would be better suited to your old lifestyle rather than the one you wish to adopt. As for M., I have other reservations. It seems to me you wish to love with a cold heart; but I can assure you that if you ever did make love to her you would fall prey to a most powerful and most inconvenient passion. She is too beautiful, has too much heart, too much grace, . . . too many devilish tricks not to get you involved little by little. The trust she has so blindly put in you for so long is another obstacle. . . . Still, I do not have the heart to criticize her and am inclined to favor her. Of these three pieces of advice, take the one that most satisfies you. If you choose the first or second, I think I will flatter myself into believing that I will not lose you forever. If you choose the last, I will pin my hopes on the strong objections you would find blocking the way. . . . I have good reason to believe that M. does not hold the best impression of you. You, however, become twice as strong when you stick obstinately to an idea. And if indeed you manage to make her succumb, you will win twice. I also happen to believe, from the portrait you draw of her and the circumstances she finds herself in, that you were inclined in her direction before asking me for my choice. . . . But do as you please, for I confess that I do not have it in me to say more.
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