Another message sped round to the Danieli. First two courses gone. Serious talk. Not much laughter. Young man drinking too fast. Pannone added it to his pile and stared moodily out to sea.
‘I can indeed remember the day,’ Powerscourt carried on sadly. ‘I don’t think you ever forget it. I don’t think you ever can.’
‘My wife died too, Lord Powerscourt. Last year. It was 14th June. I shall always remember it.’
‘I’m so sorry, so sorry,’ said Powerscourt gently, refilling Gresham’s glass with the red wine.
‘Louisa and I were so happy.’ Gresham chewed reflectively at his guinea fowl. ‘She was a Catholic too. That’s why I converted. She said her parents wouldn’t approve of our getting married unless she was marrying another Catholic. She was so beautiful, Lord Powerscourt, so beautiful. I knew the minute I saw her that I had to marry her. I knew we would be so happy together.’ Gresham drank absent-mindedly from his glass, eyes staring inward now into some private memories of his own.
‘How did you lose her? If you don’t mind my asking?’ Powerscourt spoke in his softest voice. It could all go wrong here, he thought. Terribly wrong.
‘It’s a long story. Do you mind if it’s a long story?’
Powerscourt waved his arm at the room and the view outside. Welcome to the confessional, he thought. May the Lord have mercy on your sins.
‘My dear Lord Gresham, the night is young. Time does not matter much, here in Venice. They’ve had so much of it already. Please go on.’
The young man refilled his glass.
‘Shortly before we were married, Louisa and I met Prince Eddy. I can’t remember where. It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter at all. But, anyway, he used to come and see us a lot after we were married. He’d just turn up out of the blue. Sometimes he would stay. Sometimes he would stay for days. I think he too was a little in love with Louisa. I mean, anybody would have been in love with Louisa. She was so beautiful.’
Powerscourt poured himself a glass of Chateauneuf du Pape. Did they use this wine in their services, those Popes from Avignon all those years ago? The body and blood of Christ, grown on the Pope’s own vineyards. Drink this in remembrance of me.
‘Sometimes he would call when I was away with the regiment. You know, manoeuvres, training camps, that sort of thing.’ Gresham shivered slightly. He continued his demolition work on the guinea fowl’s leg, now staring intently at the wallpaper. ‘He came to stay again last year when I was away. It took me four months to find out what happened, what really happened, I mean. You see there was only one other person in the house at the time. When it happened. The maid. And she ran away. She disappeared. She vanished right off the face of the earth as if she had never existed. I looked for her everywhere. I looked for her at her parents’ house in the little village she came from in Yorkshire. The funny thing is, she was called Louisa too. Louisa Powell. From Yorkshire.’
He stopped and stared into the fire. The audience outside in the square were very still. They’re mesmerised, thought Powerscourt. He said nothing.
‘Then I bumped into her near the Tottenham Court Road one day. Quite by chance. She’d changed her name. That wasn’t surprising. You wouldn’t want to go on being called Louisa after that. She told me the story in one of those little tea rooms they have round there. Awful cakes. Terrible tea, I remember, terrible tea. I had to promise to give her fifty pounds. Christ, I’d have given her five hundred.’
Powerscourt leaned forward and refilled Gresham’s glass in sympathy for the terrible tea. He spoke not a word.
‘This is what happened. This is Louisa’s story, Louisa Powell, Louisa from Yorkshire. Not my Louisa. Not the beautiful one. Not the girl I married. My Louisa.’
Powerscourt thought he might be going to cry. Greshams don’t cry, he remembered. They didn’t.
‘Eddy had been making advances for days. I don’t think he knew that Louisa was expecting a child. The house we lived in was built on a slope. At the back, opening out from the drawing-room, there was a great long flight of steps leading out into the garden. Louisa was very fond of gardens. She knew a lot about flowers and things like that. They had some sort of a row, Eddy and Louisa. The other Louisa heard shouting. My Louisa was saying No, very loudly, a number of times. The other Louisa came round to see if that would calm things down. Not in front of the servants, that sort of thing.
‘She saw Eddy push my Louisa quite hard. Then he pushed her again. He pushed her down the steps. She thought she heard him shouting after her. My Louisa cracked her head open at the bottom. That was that. My Louisa was dead. The baby was dead. Eddy ran away. Louisa ran away. I’ve been running away too. Ever since. Ever since Eddy killed her. “There’s no bottom, none, in his voluptuousness.” Macbeth. Malcolm in Act Four. I played him at school. I’ve changed the words to suit him better.
“. . . your wives, your daughters,
Your matrons and your maids, could not fill up
The cisterns of his lust.”
Powerscourt thought you could add the sons and husbands to Prince Eddy’s list. Droit de seigneur. Eddy had watched his father all those years. Take what you want. Come to bed with the Prince of Wales by Royal Command.
Except Eddy had men in his cistern as well.
He thought of the young Gresham on stage, like he was tonight in Venice’s grandest auditorium. He thought of Lancaster reciting Byron’s lines about the fallen at the age of twelve. Lancaster had fallen too. So many bodies.
The young man stared at Powerscourt. His eyes went wild again. He stared out of the window. Silence filled the square. Silence filled the little room with the dark blue walls, flecked with gold.
‘I’ve been followed, you know, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve been followed ever since I arrived here in Venice. There’s somebody behind that mirror above you, watching everything I do.’
Powerscourt was saved by the return of Giovanni the waiter.
‘May I clear all this away? You have enjoyed the guinea fowl? Good. Now then, gentlemen, in a few moments, some fruit, a little tiramisu? We have a very good lemon tart this evening, a speciality of the cook. And then some coffee? A little grappa with the coffee?’
‘That mirror, Lord Powerscourt.’ The waiter was still closing the doors. ‘The person watching us. I thought I saw a face in there earlier on during the fish course. Implacable eyes, it had – the face, I mean. Like it was Judgement Day.
‘They’re out there too.’ The young man rushed from the table and flung open the windows, frightening a group of pigeons into flight. ‘There’s more of them. They’re all watching me. Don’t tell me I’m imagining things, Lord Powerscourt. I’ve got a recess in my little room at the Hotel Pellegrini. There’s somebody on the far side of that too, watching, listening. I shouted at them before I came out. I don’t think it made any difference at all. They’re still there.’
God in heaven, thought Powerscourt. The poor man’s going crazy. He can’t have been feeling very stable before he got here. Pannone’s waiters are pushing him over the edge.
‘Everybody sees things in Venice, Lord Gresham. I shouldn’t worry about it. Come, let me walk you back to your hotel.’
Gresham was talking non-stop as they left, as if he couldn’t control himself. He talked about the mirror, about the faces that followed him round the streets of Venice, about the gold fleck in the wallpaper, turning into snakes, hissing at him across the room. The cold night air seemed to calm him down as they left. The great square was deserted, the Campanile soaring into the night, the four lions on top of the Basilica of St Mark preparing for a night hunt across the rooftops of the city.
Out of the corner of his eye, Powerscourt saw two of the waiters vanishing up the Mercerie and the Calle dei Fabbri on the opposite side of St Mark’s Square. Gresham shouted at the disappearing bodies.