Holiday With Violence by Pargeter Edith

Author:Pargeter, Edith [Pargeter, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Crime
ISBN: 9781480443877
Amazon: 1480443875
Goodreads: 28581422
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 1952-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

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On that first trip Mab scarcely saw the Grand Canal, she was so intent upon Monfalcone’s elegant back. She had a confused impression of endless riches of soft pastel colours, palace after palace in tints of rose and amber and pearl dyeing the waters of the canal, and dappling the shadows with broken images of their ogival window-frames and fretted loggias. She saw in the drowned shade of the little waterways, narrow between high palace walls, the occasional green of trees looking out from secret gardens, in a city where all the rest of the spectrum was spilt recklessly, but green was jealously hoarded. All down the reversed S of the Grand Canal, from the single steep span of the Rialto Bridge, with its double row of shops, to the Academy, from the Academy to the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, with its dome wreathed in excited whorls of stone, and the little squat Abbey of San Gregorio tucked under its flaunting shade, she ached to use her senses, and could not spare them for Venice.

She could not even gaze as she would have liked when the canal opened out beyond the Salute into the great shining floor of the Basin of San Marco, and beyond the cool stone outlines of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore the soft, glimmering water stretched away into melting distances where sky and islands and lagoon all dissolved in one vaporous trembling of lavender and iris light. For suddenly her quarry was moving regretfully away from the rail with his chin on his shoulder, and his eyes on that seductive vanishing point where water and air become one element. The vaporetto was drawing in to a stop on the left, and Monfalcone was preparing to go ashore.

So were a considerable number of other people, luckily. Mab craned between their heads, and caught her first glimpse of the Ducal Palace and the Piazzetta, with its two white columns rearing into the evening light above long, long ranks of gondolas, and the beautiful, rosy palace-front stretching away beyond, looking over the wide silver bowl of the lagoon towards the Adriatic. A crazy building, with its heaviest storey at the top and its lightest at the bottom, just to show that in Venice there were no rules which could not be broken; its vast pale forehead freckled pink and white, its open arcades below tapering away into the ground in columns without bases, as the mooring poles tapered away into the water. And as he stepped ashore at the landing-stage – which he did in the manner of true-born Venetians, stepping off with apparent carelessness into the blue while the boat was a yard and a half from the stage, and arriving neatly on the edge with its inward swing – Teodoro Monfalcone suddenly looked up at San Teodoro on the top of his pale granite column, and smiled, and raised his hat in salute. Mab liked him all over again for that. That was the

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