The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy by Elizabeth Aston

Author:Elizabeth Aston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2005-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

The palazzo must once have been a most magnificent building, but it had been sadly neglected.

“French, and then Austrian troops were quartered here,” said Harry. The gondolier made the boat fast and Titus sprang on to the steps of the palazzo.

“Savages,” he said, looking up at the facade.

“Venice was crumbling from within, before ever Napoleon arrived.” Harry gave instructions to his gondolier and then joined Titus on the steps. “We do not enter here, we need to walk round into the piazza.”

As they turned the corner, Titus stiffened. He stopped, and drew back into the doorway of a building.

“What is it?” said Harry. “What’s amiss?”

“Just someone I know and whom I don’t wish to be seen by.”

“That man in the blue coat. Why, it’s George Warren. He’s been in to see Delancourt. Wait, here comes one of my men.”

A suave servant, out of livery, came up to Harry and bowed before making his report. This was the English gentleman’s first visit to the art dealer. Yesterday he had taken coffee at Florian’s, visited a house in the Grand Canal where an Englishman and his wife presently lived, friends of the poet Lord Byron. He had spent the evening at the gaming tables.

“Let’s see if we can worm out of this Delancourt what Warren is interested in.”

“Fat chance,” said Harry as they knocked at the dilapidated wooden door. “You couldn’t worm the time of day out of Delancourt.”

The dinginess and decrepitude of the palazzo from outside gave no hint of the glories within. Titus caught his breath as he spun round on his heels to scan the wide, marbled room they were led into.

Women’s faces gazed out on him from every side. There, the beautiful, serene face of a Madonna, here, the lascivious eyes of a peachy beauty painted by Giorgione. He noticed the knowing look of a crone, peering from the corner of a vast canvas by a Venetian painter he couldn’t at once identify, the languid gaze of a Canova—surely that was a very modern work to be among these other pieces? A Roman matron drooping over an urn had, he thought, a pleased look to her grief. Happiness is widowhood, as a friend of his had once remarked.

An altar-piece was propped up in glowing splendour on a worm-eaten chest, with two Marys kneeling before the cross, one in blue, one in red, one looking stricken, the other with an air of anger about her. Which was mere fancy, Titus knew. Paintings of that time did not depict emotion of that sort.

Worse than all these varied aspects of the feminine, he had an uneasy feeling that Emily’s eyes were looking out at him from canvas after canvas, through the sightless stare of a classical bust, from the blue orbs of Diana clad in no more than a wisp of clothing and her virtue among a pack of hounds, from the satisfied expression of a middle-aged noblewoman in a green gown.

Titus shut his eyes for a moment. How dare

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