Death in the Floating City by Tasha Alexander

Author:Tasha Alexander [Alexander, Tasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781250011039
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Of course I was disappointed to lose Donata. It is always preferable to have a like-minded individual as a companion in work. Even so, I didn’t regret it entirely. It would be a great help to have her doing research, and the wisdom of having her in this role became apparent in almost no time. She had discovered, in the famous memoirs of an eighteenth-century lady, reference to love letters found in a palazzo. Letters addressed to a man called Nicolò and signed by a lady called Besina. Furthermore, property records showed the palazzo in question had been owned, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by the Vitturi family, who were wealthy merchants before they were wiped out by the great plague of 1630.

Vitturi with a V.

In the sixteenth century, the head of the family was a man called Nicolò. He must have been Besina’s N.V. That much was obvious.

I know now that I had fallen prey to the overconfidence of youth. It did not occur to me that there could very well be a different N.V. and that he, not Nicolò Vitturi, was the gentleman with whom Besina corresponded. At that moment, all I cared about was reading the letters.

It was an amateur mistake.

Donata pleaded with her father to let her search for them, but he refused. She was not, he said, to risk going into a house unknown to her and begging favors from a family about whom he knew nothing. In fact, there was no family from whom to beg anything. They’d died out centuries ago. A fashionable hotel now occupied the former Vitturi family seat. This information worked no influence on her father, whose inclination was to lock his indignant daughter in her room if that was what was necessary to keep her safe. I could not fault him for his concern, frustrating though it was for Donata.

The majordomo of the hotel was familiar with the memoir in question. Charles Morgandy, a handsome and capable man, didn’t recall references to Renaissance love letters but assured me his guests were captivated by the lurid descriptions of the authoress’s many indiscretions, most of them having taken place in the palazzo. It was scandalous fun, he assured me, and he pressed into my hands one of the copies of the book the owners of the hotel had printed so that they might put one in every room.

I showed him a list of names. “Would it be possible to determine if any of these individuals have recently stayed with you?”

“I will set a clerk to the task at once,” he said. “Do you know the dates?”

I frowned. “Sometime in the past year or so, I’d think.”

“It may take a while. Would you care for something to drink while you wait?” Signor Morgandy asked. “Or would you prefer I send word to you when we have an answer?”

“Would it be possible to see your attics instead?”

He balked at the request but agreed to it in the end, accustomed, I suppose, to the eccentric demands of English tourists.

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