Weighed in the Balance Page 12

  He felt guilt at traveling in a manner he could not possibly have afforded on his own means. He was going to a country he had never been to before, so far as he knew, and on what he sincerely believed would be a hopeless quest, and doing it at Zorah’s expense. Perhaps honor should have dictated that he tell her directly that he did not know what he was looking for and thought there was only the slightest chance he could learn anything that would help her cause. In her interest, the best advice would be to apologize quickly and withdraw the allegation. Surely Rathbone must have said that to her?

  The rhythmic rattle of the wheels over the rails and the slight sway of the carriage were almost mesmeric. The seat was most comfortable.

  What if Rathbone withdrew his services? Then the Countess would have to find someone else to represent her, and that might be extremely difficult to do, perhaps sufficiently so to deter her altogether.

  But Rathbone was too stubborn for that. He had given his word, and his pride would not let him admit he had made a mistake, and he could not accomplish the task—because it was not possible. The man was a fool!

  But he was also, in some respects, Monk’s friend as well as his employer, so there was no alternative but to continue on this excellent train journey all the way to Venice, pretending to be a gentleman, and play the courtier to what was left of the exiled royalty and learn what he could.

  He approached Venice by the new land bridge, arriving late in the afternoon as the light was fading. Stephan met him at the station, which teemed with people of extraordinary variety, fair skins and dark, Persians, Egyptians, Levantines and Jews as well as emperors of a dozen countries. A Babel of languages he did not begin to recognize sounded around him, and costumes of all manner of cut and color surged past him. Alien smells of spice, garlic and aromatic oils mixed with steam, coal smuts and salt wind and sewage. He remembered with a jolt how far east Venice was; it was the place where the trade of Europe met the silk roads and spice trails of the Orient. To the west lay Europe, to the south Egypt and Africa beyond, to the east Byzantium and the ancient world, and beyond that, India and even China.

  Stephan welcomed him enthusiastically. A servant a couple of steps behind him took Monk’s cases and, shouldering them easily, forced a way through the crowd.

  Within twenty minutes they were in a gondola moving gently along a narrow canal. High above them, the sun lit the marble faces of the buildings close in on either side, but down where they were, the shadows were dark across the water. Everything seemed to shift or waver, reflecting wave patterns on walls. The sounds of slurping and whispering came from every side, and the smells of damp, of salt, of effluent and wet stone were thick in the nose.

  Monk stared to one side and then the other, fascinated. This place was unlike anything he had even dreamed. A flight of stone steps rose from the water and disappeared between buildings. Another mounted to a landing and an archway beyond which glimmered a door. Torches were reflected in shivered fire on the broken surface of the water. Other boats jostled up and down, bumping together gently where they were moored at long poles.

  Monk was enthralled. He had not known what to expect. He had been too occupied with what he hoped to learn, and how he was going to go about it, to think of the city itself. He had heard tales of Venice’s glory—and its ruin. He knew it was an ancient and corrupt republic which was the seafaring gateway east and west of European trade, an immense power at its height, before the decadence which had brought about its fall. This was the Pearl of the Adriatic, the Bride of the Sea, where the Doge ceremonially cast a wedding ring into the lagoon as a symbol of their union.

  He had also heard of its evil, its perversions, its stagnant beauty sliding inevitably into the waters, waiting for destruction. He also knew that it had been conquered and occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and he would find Austrian officials in government and Austrian soldiers on such streets as there were.

  But as the sun set in a flaming sky, daubing the fretted roofs of the palaces in fire, and he heard the calls of the boatmen echoing across the water and the hollow sound of the tide sucking under the stone foundations, all he could think of was the eerie beauty of the place and its utter and total uniqueness.

  Without having spoken of more than necessities, they reached a small private landing and stepped ashore. The landing was the rear entrance of a small palace whose principal facade faced a main canal to the south. A liveried attendant emerged almost immediately carrying a torch which shed an orange light on the damp stones and for a moment showed the dark surface of the water almost green. He recognized Stephan and held the torch aloft to show them the way over the flagged stones to the steps up to a narrow wooden door which was half open.

  Monk was cold only because he was tired, but he was glad to go up into the warmth and brightness of a wide entrance hall, marble floored but with thick Eastern carpets giving it a luxury and sense of immediate comfort.

  Stephan followed him up, and the servant could be heard calling for a footman to fetch the cases.

  Monk was shown his room in Stephan’s house, which was palatial, high-ceilinged, hung with dramatic tapestries now faded to earth tones of great beauty. Deep windows looked south onto the larger canal, where the light still played on the water, sending reflected waves rippling across the ceiling.

  He walked straight over, ignoring the bed and the chairs, and leaned out as far as he could through the stone embrasure, staring down. There were still at least a score of barges and gondolas plying their slow way up and down the canal. On the far side, the carved and pillared facades were lit by torchflare, making the marble look rose and rust and the windows black sockets through which someone else might be staring, just as he was, from a darkened room, utterly enthralled.

  Over dinner in a larger chamber, looking onto the Ca’ Grande, he forced his mind to the purpose for which he was there.

  “I need to know a great deal more about the political alliances and interests of the people who were at the Wellboroughs’ when Friedrich died,” he said to Stephan.

  “Of course,” Stephan agreed. “I can tell you, but I imagine you need to observe for yourself. My word is hardly evidence, and certainly not my opinion.” He leaned back and touched his napkin to his lips after the shellfish of the first course. “Fortunately, there are all sorts of occasions within the next few days to which I can take you and where you will meet the sort of people you need to.” His voice was full of optimism, but there was anxiety shadowing his eyes.

  Again Monk wondered why he was so loyal to Zorah and what he knew of Friedrich’s death that moved him to take so much trouble trying to prove it had been murder. Was he part of the story or only an onlooker? What were his own loyalties? What would he lose or gain if Gisela were proved guilty—or if Zorah were? Perhaps Monk had been rash to have taken Stephan so completely at his word. It was a mistake he did not often make.

  “Thank you,” he accepted. “I should be grateful for your advice and your opinion. You know these people far better than I ever will. And while certainly your view is not evidence, it may be the wisest counsel I shall have and the best guide towards finding proof other people will be obliged to believe, however much they may prefer not to.”

  Stephan said nothing for quite some time. He looked at Monk at first with surprise, and then curiosity, and finally with a certain amusement, as if at last he had some measure of him in his mind.

  “Of course,” he conceded.

  “What do you believe happened?” Monk said bluntly.

  The light was almost gone from the sky outside. There was only the occasional reflection of a drifting torch on the windows, and then more dimly on the water and back again on the glass. The air smelled of damp and salt, and in the background to everything there was always the constant murmur of the tide.

  “I believe the atmosphere was right for murder,” Stephan said guardedly, watching Monk’s face as he spoke. “There was much to win or lose. People can convince themselves of all sorts
of moralities where patriotism is concerned.”

  A servant brought a dish of baked fish and vegetables, and Monk accepted a generous portion.

  “Ordinary values of life or death can be set aside,” Stephan went on. “Almost as they can in war. You say to yourself, ’This is for my country, for my people. I commit a lesser evil that a greater good may be obtained.’ ” He was still watching Monk closely. “All through history people have done that, and depending on the outcome, they are either crowned or hanged. And history afterwards will call them hero one day and traitor another. Success is the common judge. It takes a rare man to set his values on other standards.”

  Monk was caught by surprise. He had thought Stephan shallower, less thoughtful of the motives of those he seemed to treat with such casual friendship. His eye was keener than Monk had supposed. Again, he should not have been so quick to judge.

  “Then I had better learn a great deal more,” Monk replied. “But a political murder does not help the Countess Rostova’s case. Or is her motive more subtly political than I imagined?”

  Stephan drew in his breath to make an instant reply, then changed his mind. He laughed slightly, spearing a piece of fish and putting it into his mouth. “I was going to answer that with absolute certainty,” he replied. “Then the fact that you asked the question made me think about it. Perhaps I was mistaken. I would have denied it. She hated Gisela for entirely personal reasons and thought the Princess behaved from immediate, personal motives: pride, ambition, love of glamour, attention, luxury, status among her peers, envy, revenge for love wasted or betrayed, all the things that have nothing to do with patriotism or matters of state, simply humanity. But perhaps I was wrong. I don’t think I knew Zorah as well as I had assumed.”

  His face became very serious, his eyes steady on Monk’s. “But I would lay my life that she is no hypocrite. Whatever her cause, there is no lie in it.”

  Monk believed him. He was less sure that Zorah had not been used, but he had as yet no idea by whom. It was one of the things he might learn in Venice.

  The next day Stephan took him to explore a little of the city, drifting gently down one waterway after another until they found themselves on the Grand Canal, and Stephan pointed out the palaces one after another, telling Monk of their history and sometimes of the present occupants. He pointed to the magnificent Gothic Palazzo Cavalli.

  “Henry the Fifth of France lives there,” Stephan said with a smile.

  Monk was lost. “Henry the Fifth of France?” He thought he knew there was no king of France, never had been for well over half a century.

  “Monsieur le Comte de Chambord,” Stephan said with a laugh, leaning back on one elbow in an oddly graceful gesture of comfort. “Grandson of Charles the Tenth, and king if there were a throne in France, a fact many people here prefer to overlook. His mother, the Duchesse de Berry, married a penniless Italian nobleman and lives in good style in the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi. She bought it in 1844, practically for a song: pictures, furniture and everything. Venice used to be terribly cheap then. You know, in ’51 John Ruskin paid only twenty-six pounds a year for an apartment here on the Grand Canal, and for years before that Robert and Elizabeth Browning paid only twenty-six pounds a year for a suite at the Casa Guidi in Florence. But Mr. James, the British consul here, is paying one hundred sixty pounds a year for one floor in the Palazzo Foscolo. Everything is terribly expensive now.”

  They rocked slightly in the wake of a larger barge, and the sound of laughter drifted across the water from a closed gondola a hundred feet away.

  “The Comte de Montmoulin lives here too,” Stephan went on. “In the Palazzo Loredan, at San Vio.”

  “And what is he king of?” Monk asked, catching the flavor but far more interested in the mention of poets and critics such as Ruskin.

  “Spain,” Stephan replied. “Or so he would believe. There are all sorts of artists and poets and invalids, social and political exiles, some of marvelous color, others of utter tediousness.”

  It seemed eminently the right place for Friedrich and Gisela, and those who chose to follow them, for whatever reason.

  An hour later they sat in a small piazza eating luncheon. Passersby strolled across the square, talking idly. Monk heard the chatter of half a dozen different languages. Here and there soldiers in Austrian uniform lounged around, guns hanging, half ready if there should be any resistance or unpleasantness. It was a startling reminder that this was an occupied city. The native Venetians were not in control. They must obey or suffer the consequences.

  The streets and canals were quieter than he had expected. He was used to the noise and ebullience of London, the constant bustle of life. The contrast between the teeming capital of an empire, with its opulence and squalor, the bursting confidence of its trade and the tide of wealth and expansion, its poor and its oppressed in ever-growing slums, had an utterly different air from this glorious ruin sinking into a gentle despair under foreign domination. The past was all around as an aching memory filled with beauty that crumbled. Visitors like Monk and Stephan sat in the autumn sunlight on marble pavements and watched over wanderers and expatriates talking in hushed tones, while Venetians went about their daily business, outwardly docile, seemingly apathetic. Austrians strolled with casual arrogance around the streets and squares of a city they did not love.

  “Did Zorah come here often?” Monk asked. He needed to know more of the accuser in order to understand the charge. He had neglected her until now.

  “Yes, at least once a year,” Stephan answered, stabbing his fork into a stuffed tomato. “Why do you ask? She did know Friedrich and Gisela well, over many years, if that is what you are wondering.”

  “Why? She was not in exile, was she?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Was it because of Friedrich?” Had he asked too bluntly to get an honest answer?

  A Greek and a Levantine strolled past, and the breeze carried a perfume of spikenard and bay leaves. They were engaged in heated conversation in some language Monk did not recognize.

  Stephan laughed. “Was she in love with him? You don’t know much about Zorah if you can even ask that. She might have been, a long time ago, but she would never waste her passion or her pride on a man whom she couldn’t win.” He leaned back a little in his chair, the sunlight on his face.

  “She’s had many lovers over the years. I think Friedrich was probably one of them, before Gisela, but there have been several since, I assure you. There was a Turkish brigand, whom she loved for over two years, and there was a musician in Paris, but I don’t think that lasted long. He was too devoted to his music to be much fun. There was someone in Rome, but I don’t know who, and there was an American. He lasted quite a while, but she wouldn’t marry him.” He was still smiling. He had to raise his voice a little to be heard above the rising sound of chatter around him. “She loved to explore frontiers, but she didn’t want to live on one. And there was an Englishman. He entertained her hugely, and I think she really cared for him a great deal. And, of course, there was a Venetian, hence many of her visits here. I think he lasted rather a long time, and perhaps she returned here to see him.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “No, I’m afraid he died. I think he was older than she.”

  “Who is it at the moment?”

  “I don’t know. I rather think it may be Florent Barberini, but then again, it may not.”

  “He spoke warmly of Gisela.”

  Stephan’s face tightened. “I know. Perhaps I am anticipating or even simply wrong.” He sipped his white wine. “Shall I tell you something about the party tonight?”

  “Yes, please.” Monk’s stomach knotted with apprehension. Would Venetian society be as formal as English society, and would he feel as monstrously out of place, as obviously not one of the small, closed elite?

  “There will be about eighty of us,” Stephan said thoughtfully. “I chose this number because I thought you could meet a lot of the people w
ho knew both Zorah and Gisela—and, of course, Friedrich. And there will be many Venetians as well. Perhaps you will understand a little of exile life. It is very gay on the surface, extravagant and sophisticated. But underneath there is a lack of purpose.” His face was soft with a weary compassion. “Many dream of returning home, even talk about it as if it were imminent, but they all know in the morning that it will never happen. Their own people do not want them. The places they were born for are filled by others.”

  Monk had a sharp vision of alienation, the same sense of being apart that he had experienced with such loneliness in the earliest months after his accident. He had known no one, not even himself. He had been a man who belonged nowhere, without purpose or identity, a man divorced from his roots.

  “Did Friedrich regret his choice?” he said suddenly.

  Stephan’s eyes narrowed a little. “I don’t think so. He didn’t seem to miss Felzburg. Wherever Gisela was was home for him. She was everything he really needed or relied on.” A gust of wind blew across the pavement, something of salt and effluent.

  “I am not sure how much he even really wished to be king,” Stephan went on. “The glamour was wonderful, the adulation, and he could do all that very well. People loved him. But he didn’t like the discipline.”

  Monk was surprised. “Discipline?” It was the last thing he had thought of.

  Stephan sipped his wine again. Behind him, Monk saw two women walk by, their heads close together, talking in French and laughing, skirts billowing around them.

  “You think kings do whatever they want?” Stephan said, shaking his head. “Did you notice the Austrian soldiers in the piazza?”

  “Of course.”

  “Believe me, they are an undisciplined rabble compared with Queen Ulrike. I’ve seen her rise at half past six in the morning, order her household for the parties and the banquets of the day, write letters, receive visitors. Then she’ll spend time with the King, encouraging him, advising him, persuading him. She’ll spend all afternoon entertaining the ladies she wishes to influence. She’ll dress magnificently for dinner and outshine every other woman in the room, and be present at a banquet until midnight, never once allowing herself to appear tired or bored. And then do the same again the following day.”