Constance had rented her own house on Bellosguardo, Casa Brichieri-Colombi, which looked over the city and had ample space and beautiful gardens. But when Henry arrived in December, having extracted a promise from Constance and the Bootts that no one in Florence would be informed of his presence, Constance had not yet taken possession of it and was still staying in an apartment close to the Bootts, across a small square from Casa Brichieri-Colombi. She offered him the house, which lay empty, and he accepted.
Thus he found himself living in what was to be, in fact, her future home, seeing her almost every day, allowing her to direct his domestic arrangements, while none of his other friends in Florence was aware that he was in the city. The Bootts knew, but were preoccupied by the imminent birth of Lizzie’s child. This did not, however, prevent Francis Boott from ascending Bellosguardo to visit him.
Francis Boott’s exceptional cultivation was matched by his great mildness. He seemed incapable of giving or taking offence. When The Portrait of a Lady appeared and it was clear that he himself, his house and his daughter had been openly used in the book and that the cold villain of the novel had his very face, he made no protest to the author and seemed to be amused. He was an immensely proper resident of Florence, Henry knew, as he had been of Boston and Newport; as a host or guest, he was beyond reproach. He gave the impression, despite the mildness of his manners, that this extensive social propriety stood for other proprieties in which he also believed, but it appeared that he saw no reason to display his beliefs.
The old man was wrapped in a shawl as he sat on an easy chair in the main sitting room of Casa Brichieri-Colombi. Henry noticed his slow-moving feline shape, his fine long fingers and his face, which despite his interest in good food, had become oddly ascetic with the years.
‘We have loved your friend, Miss Woolson,’ he said. ‘She has a rare charm and intelligence. Lizzie and I have become very fond of her.’
‘And she has become fond of you, I believe,’ Henry said.
‘She has a gentle wit, you know, and a lovely way of leaving our company as if her life depended on it. We always want her to stay longer, but she has work, my, does she have work.’
Francis Boott’s eyes sparkled with pleasure as he spoke.
‘Of course we are fully conscious that she is merely our friend because of you. She admires you so very much. And trusts you.’
As his friend crossed his legs again, Henry noticed how beautiful his shoes were and how slender his feet. Henry wanted to bring the subject back to Lizzie and her confinement but he had already, on Francis’s arrival, asked about her. Nonetheless, he tried again.
‘You will give Lizzie my best regards,’ he said.
‘I tell her everything, as you know,’ Francis said, smiling again. ‘We both worry about Constance. There are depths which neither of us have fully explored, but we have gained a great idea of her.’
‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘ Constance is deep.’
‘And she suffers rather more perhaps than someone of her talent deserves to suffer,’ Francis said, knitting his brows. ‘But it is marvellous that she has met you and has known you. We both feel that too.’
Henry stared at him blankly.
‘We both noticed the change in her over the past few weeks when your arrival was increasingly certain. You know, she grew much happier and wore lighter colours and smiled more. It was unmistakeable.’
Francis Boott stopped and coughed and found a handkerchief and sipped the tea which had been brought for him. He gave the impression that he had said all that he had to say, that he had made himself clear. And then he suddenly spoke again, loudly at the beginning as though he were interrupting someone.
‘We wondered if you were happy here, in this house.’
‘Oh yes, I adore the house.’
‘With Constance so close and it being her house, or will be soon…’ Francis Boott let his voice taper off, but made sure that he could be heard. ‘No one knows that you are here, of course, so I don’t suppose there could be any scandal. Bellosguardo, despite everything, is a sort of bastion.’
He tapped the edge of the chair with his finger.
‘No, the problem is – what will she do when you go? This is what Lizzie and I worry about. Not about you being here and seeing so much of her, but about your not, if you get my meaning.’
‘I will do my best,’ Henry said. He knew the remark sounded weak, but as it made Francis Boott smile at him warmly, almost radiantly, he did not correct himself.
‘I have no doubt you will. That is all we can do,’ the old man said.
He finished his tea and stood up to take his leave.
IN JANUARY, once Constance took possession of Casa Brichieri-Colombi, Henry moved down to Florence. His days were idle, his afternoons and evenings taken up with the society Constance contemptuously avoided. He was bored and often irritated by the excesses of the colony, but he had learned to disguise any such feelings and eventually, in any case, one evening such feelings fled. Seeing the Countess Gamba, who, it was known, had possession of a cache of Byron letters, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, a great literary gossip, told Henry that her presence had reminded him of a story about another cache of letters. Claire Clairmont, Byron’s mistress and Shelley’s sister-in-law, had, Lee-Hamilton said, lived to be old. She had spent her declining years in seclusion in Florence with a great-niece. An American obsessed with Shelley, knowing that she had papers belonging to the two poets, laid siege to her, according to Lee-Hamilton. And on her death the man laid siege to her great-niece, a lady of fifty, until the great-niece invited the American to marry her if he wanted to see the papers.
Lee-Hamilton told the story briskly, as a well-known piece of gossip, not realizing how closely he was being attended to, how the drama of the tale affected his listener.
The implications and possibilities of this story filled Henry’s mind for some time afterwards. He took note, as soon as he went back to his quarters, of the picture of the two fascinating, poor and discredited old English women living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign city with the letters their prize possession. But as he considered the core of the drama, he saw that it lay in the hands of the American, who would come in the guise of both adventurer and scholar. The story of the three figures locked in a drama of faded memories and desperate need would take time and concentration. It could not be done in the mornings in Florence. Nor could he set his story in the city without everyone there believing that he was merely transcribing a story already known and often recounted. He would move the story to Venice, he thought, and, as more invitations came in, he decided he would move himself to Venice also, and work there on a story whose properties he came more and more to relish.
IN VENICE, he found rooms belonging to his friend Mrs Bronson in a dark, damp palazzo. The fact that Browning had once inhabited these rooms did not brighten them or rid them of cold, despite Mrs Bronson’s certainty that their history made all the difference. He took to dining alone before taking a walk through the haunted streets of the city. Once night fell and the Venetians had returned home, they did not venture out again. Venice was misty and strange and, for the first time in his life, he wondered what he was doing in the city which he loved so much. He could easily have gone to England instead. The story was now clear in his mind and he had soaked up enough of the faded palaces where his heroines would live and the sense of old secrets and heroic attachments in these shadowy, bejewelled, inhospitable buildings, once full of sweet romance and high-toned gaiety, and now repositories of gloom and cobwebs, so many of them inhabited by the unsettled and the infirm.