At Midnight in Venice Read online

  AT MIDNIGHT IN VENICE

  Charles Dickens Investigations

  Book Five

  J C Briggs

  Table of Contents

  PART I: PICTURES FROM ITALY, 1844

  PART II: DEATH BY WATER, LONDON, 1850

  1: Strange Meeting

  2: Hemlock Court

  3: To Chelsea

  4: At Mrs Carlyle’s

  5: At Osnaburgh Terrace

  6: Dry Bones

  7: Can These Bones Speak?

  8: The Raven is Hoarse

  9: Anguish

  10: An Invitation

  11: Sour Grapes

  12: The Goldfish Bowl

  13: Of Coals and Coffins

  14: Time’s Curtain Parted

  15: Superintendent Jones Asks Questions

  16: A Secret Told

  17: A Midnight Visitor

  18: Mariana in the Moated Grange

  19. A Divided Duty

  20: A Wandering Minstrel

  21: The Forlorn Hope

  22: Tales Told

  23: A Death in Ferrara

  24: Queen of Spades

  25: Reading the Signs

  26: Ace of Hearts

  27: Knave of Spades

  28: Betrayal

  29: Behind Bars

  30: Old News

  31: A Lilac Gown

  32: Daughters of the House

  33: Watcher

  34: On an Amateur Beat

  35: The Night Bird

  36: Cold Water

  37: Vanishing Act

  38: A Woman in Black

  39: The Mourning Girl

  40: A Pauper’s Grave

  41: A Most Dreadful Face

  42: A Signal

  43: Ordeal by Touch

  PART III: THE PLEA OF INSANITY

  44: The Inquest and Trial

  45: Mr Needle and Mr Craft

  46: The Evidence of Doctor Forbes Benignus Winslow

  47: The Needle’s Point

  48: Dying Breath

  Finale: What’s in a Name?

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  ALSO BY J C BRIGGS

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  CHARACTERS IN THE SERIES

  Love, in the universal opinion of wise men, is nothing but madness … what clearer sign of lunacy than to lose yourself pining for another?

  Orlando Furioso, Ludovico Ariosto of Ferrara (1516)

  Our life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world,

  A boundary between the things misnamed

  Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,

  And a wild realm of wild reality…

  ‘The Dream’, Lord Byron

  PART I: PICTURES FROM ITALY, 1844

  Sunday 10th, November 1844

  Ferrara

  To John Forster

  At sunset when I was walking alone, I arrived upon a little scene which seemed perfectly familiar to me, and yet I had never been in this place, in this life.

  In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the wind, upon its margin a few trees. In the foreground, a group of silent peasant girls were leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, and looking down into the water; in the distance sounded a deep bell; the shade of approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there, in some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood.

  What an unreal and spectral place is this Ferrara — a city of the dead. Pestilence might have ravaged the streets. In one part there is a prodigious castle, with a moat about it, a sullen city in itself. You remember Byron’s poem, ‘Parisina’ — of Parisina Malatesta who fell in love with her stepson, Ugo? I saw the very black dungeons of this castle where legend says they were imprisoned and then beheaded on the orders of the cruel Marquis, her husband. Byron tells that Parisina went mad. Perhaps she did and was locked away in some dread vault like Mr Poe’s Madeline Usher. Whatever the truth, their names have outlived their agony for they are written in smoke on the ceiling of Ugo’s cell. I saw them.

  The red light stained the outside castle walls as they have, many a time, been stained within, in old days; but for any sign of life they gave, the castle and the city might have been avoided by all human creatures from the moment when the axe went down on the last of those two lovers…

  Two nights later, Dickens lay in his bed in Venice, dreaming.

  That same monk — the one he had imagined in the prison cell under the Doge’s Palace. A monk, dark-robed and hooded, ghastly in the day and the free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope’s extinguisher, and Murder’s herald. He had had his foot upon the spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled.

  That had been a dream conjured by the awful stone cell within its guilty door deep below the water, a dream half lit by the winking torch he carried. But this?

  In a phantom street, the houses rising on both sides from the water, the black boat glided soundlessly past open doors, decayed and rotten from long steeping in the wet, past figures coming through a gloomy archway, into shadows and the deep silence that follows the cracked tocsin that sounds midnight.

  A lamp flickering at a corner. Laughter. The sound of music. A sudden light spilling from a casement. Then a wild cry. That same monk — a fleeting glimpse of a face turned to him as the hood fell back. A glimpse of white bone and eye socket.

  A girl’s face, too. An open mouth and a necklace with a cross at its end being drawn tight about a slender white neck.

  The black boat slid under a bridge so low and close that it seemed ready to fall down and crush him. A corner turned. The monk and his victim gone — fled as the dream in the morning. And the water. Only the black water creeping noiseless and watchful, winding round and round in the city’s many folds, like an old serpent. The water knew.

  Tuesday, 12th November1844,

  Hotel Danieli, Venice

  To John Forster

  I never saw the thing before that I should be afraid to describe. But I saw it here this very night in Venice — a curious and unsettling thing among the many strangenesses I have encountered in my travels about this country of ancient ghostly castles, gloomy catacombs, and leaning towers where long-untrodden steps moulder to dust.

  I wrote to you the other day of that brown-hooded monk I dreamed in that old dungeon under the Doge’s palace. I fancied I saw him again, his hood fallen away to reveal the skull beneath and his hands pulling at a necklace about the neck of a girl — a necklace hung with a jewelled cross which caught the light from a half-open casement. Then my gondola glided under a low bridge. The figures were blotted out instantly. When I looked back the vision was gone…

  The next morning, Charles Dickens stood at his window at the Hotel Danieli to look across the shining lagoon to the dreamy brightness of the island of St Giorgio Maggiore. There, perhaps? He watched the red and orange sails of a fishing boat, and further away the topi used by the sardellanti, and he saw the great ships sailing with stately indolence to far-off lands. Nearer, there were groups of sailors working at cargoes, bales and casks, merchandise of many kinds. Looking down, he saw that his gondolier, Francisco, was waiting. Free, he thought, free to go anywhere. Across to the Lido to walk on the sand, or to Murano to look at the glass makers. Out of doors, surely, on this bracing day.

  Yet, in the dark place where his sleep had been disturbed by fragments of dreams in which he was lost in sinister alleys, trapped in impossibly dark cells, or drowning in soundless water, there was the sense of something unfinished. That dream of drowning had woken him. He had slept again, this time drifting along serpentine waters in a gondola in which there was no boatman. His first sig
ht of the blue morning had dispelled the dream, but he had not forgotten what he had seen before the bridge had swallowed him under its black arch.

  How long had it taken him to glide from the scene of the crime — if indeed, there had been a crime — to his hotel? It hadn’t seemed long, but then time in Venice was not like time anywhere else. In some little courtyard with its well, its cracked doorways, its faded green shutters, and its silence, you felt that time had stood still. Even when there were people, the old women in their black dresses gossiping in their impenetrable dialect might have been there since the days of Othello — perhaps they had chattered about the black general and the beautiful young wife whom he had married in secret. He had seen Desdemona lean down through a latticed blind to pluck a flower.

  And you sometimes saw a masked figure in a swirling cloak who might have stepped from a Renaissance painting, and there were faces from the pictures he had seen. There the speaking silent face of a girl with the face of the very one who stared out from Tintoretto’s ‘Assembly of the Blessed’, and that bearded young man, he had seen his likeness in Titian’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin’. Old Shylock, too, surely he had seen him passing to and fro upon a bridge. There might be rags, or fustian breeches, or drab dresses, but the faces were the same as those he had seen in portraits where velvets purred, silks sighed, and satins rustled like fallen leaves.

  He thought of the monk and the maiden. Had that been a dream, or had he stepped out of Time? If Time’s curtain had parted in that spellbound night, then he, Charles Dickens, had seen the past alive for a few moments and had felt that same chill feeling he had experienced in Ferrara by that melancholy water at sunset where he had remembered something that could never have been.

  He had heard the chimes at midnight. At the Danieli, he had looked at his watch. It had been quarter past the hour. He wanted to see that open window. He wanted to know who had held that torch which had illuminated the monk’s ghastly face. He could walk, but where? He remembered Francisco taking him under the Bridge of Sighs, and he remembered thinking of the prisoners who crossed it and for whom the doors were closed on life and hope. The blind prisoners in perpetual darkness. After that, it had been a dream.

  Francisco was smiling hopefully. Dickens descended into the gondola.

  ‘Where we were, Francisco, last night, I should like to see it all in daylight.’

  ‘Certo, as it pleases the signore.’

  Francisco wove his way through the painted poles, giving the cry ‘Premi’ to tell a fellow boatman to pass on the right and ‘Stali’ to another who must pass on the left. He turned to glide under the Bridge of Sighs again. Occasionally, he called out a greeting to another gondolier or to a man guiding a barge loaded with vegetables from Chioggia, or glassware from Murano.

  A black-draped gondola passed them, a drum beating a solemn tattoo. After it the funeral barge went by on its way to St Michele, the island of the dead, its bier hung with black. Francisco crossed himself and Dickens bowed his head. When he looked up, he saw his bridge, the wrought iron one. He remembered it for there were few bridges topped with iron. He called to Francisco to stop and they glided to the steps at the top of which Dickens stood to look at the palazzo.

  He looked up to where he thought a window had been open so that the light spilled out, but the windows were boarded up. In fact, the place was nearly a ruin. Yet the building he had seen was on a corner. He remembered the little canal going down the side where a water gate might be. Ah, he remembered the lamp on the corner of the building. It had been lit, he was certain. Dickens’s memory was exact. He could remember faces vividly; he could recall the texture of hair, the colour of eyes, a wart on a nose. He closed his eyes and saw again the monk’s face of white bone and the glint of jewels round the white neck. He opened his eyes. It had happened here, he was sure, but it could not have. No one lived in that crumbling palace.

  He crossed the bridge to see if there were a window that might have opened. At the end of the bridge, he saw that the lamp he had thought alight was broken, and there was no possibility that a casement had been thrown open to let out the torchlight. He saw how the ochre plaster had peeled off in great flakes. The lower windows were darkened with rusty bands of iron.

  Perhaps it was the wrong place. He and Francisco could go on. There might be somewhere else. He was about to turn back across the bridge when he saw that what he had taken for a bundle of rags in a doorway near the entrance to the little canal seemed to stir. An arm emerged from the bundle and then a head. Dickens stared at a bearded face and a pair of sleepy brown eyes.

  ‘Scusi, signor,’ Dickens began.

  The eyes laughed and the mouth yawned. ‘The English, so polite,’ a wry voice said. The accent was Italian, but the words were in English. ‘Permit me to rise.’ He stood up and offered a bow. The ragged sacking fell away and Dickens saw that he had once been well-dressed. His suit was an old one, much rubbed about the knees and elbows, and he wore some kind of black opera cloak, patched in places and torn at the hem. His shoes were the remnants of evening pumps, very scuffed, and far too flimsy for the winter.

  Dickens bowed back. ‘The palazzo,’ he said, pointing, ‘no one lives there?’

  ‘You want to buy it?’ the man laughed.

  ‘No, I thought I saw a light — last night.’

  ‘Someone like me, perhaps, lodging there. I prefer the open air.’

  ‘Could be. I thought I heard music and laughter.’

  ‘I doubt it, signor, even if someone lodges, I do not think they play music in the night.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. It’s just that I thought I saw…’ Dickens did not know how to go on. It was too fantastical. No one would believe such a thing.

  The ragged man waited, his warm eyes amused. ‘Una bella signorina! You fall in love, and now you pursue your dream. Venice, she does that. There are beautiful women at every window, but not here, I think.’

  Dickens laughed. He rather wished that he had seen a beautiful woman; that he had fallen in love. ‘Alas, no, but there was a monk —’

  ‘Monaco? Not impossible.’

  ‘He was with a young woman.’

  The dark eyes gleamed. ‘Again, not impossible. A father confessor, perhaps?’

  ‘He had his hands at her neck — there were jewels. I thought — I thought he was murdering her.’ There, he had said it, and it did sound ridiculous. He looked at the man.

  ‘Not impossible,’ he smiled at Dickens, ‘that is Venice for you. Beauty and wickedness are bedfellows here. Perhaps he was placing the jewels round her beautiful neck — it was beautiful?’

  ‘I suppose it was — I don’t remember that, but he looked wicked. A hideous face in the light from that window —’

  ‘The window which is boarded up. I think not, signor, a dream, a masquerade, a carnival.’

  ‘I know. It is very easy to imagine anything in the enchanted night. A dream, I daresay, so many dreams I have had here. I thought I saw Desdemona leaning from a window — a vision, of course.’

  ‘You wish to see inside the palazzo? I know the way in. I can show you if…’

  ‘Might I pay you for your trouble?’ Dickens asked, not wanting to offend, but knowing that here was a man in need. At least he could see if there were any signs that someone had been in the palazzo. Doubtful, of course, but a ruined house, a lovely woman and a devilish monk? One might make a story out of that.

  The man bowed. ‘As you see I am a fallen man. The casino — ruined. You are not a gambler, signor, I think.’

  ‘Not in that sense. I have too many responsibilities.’

  ‘But you are here alone, dreaming of a beautiful woman.’

  ‘Not exactly. I came to see and what I have seen is beyond all my expectations. Venice is a wonder of the world.’

  ‘Unless you are a fallen man. Then Venice is a cruel mistress. And she loves her wealth as much now in her days of oppression.’

  ‘The Austrians?’

  ‘Our
cold masters — their cruelty is ice. At least the cruelty of Venice has passion. Now, Signor —?’

  ‘Dickens.’

  ‘From London?’

  ‘Yes, and may I know your name, sir?’

  ‘Aurelio Paladini, sometime courier and guide to rich tourists, now a beggar, but I will be your guide in the palazzo. We see if your beauty resides within.’

  ‘There was no beauty at the window— only the light spilling out.’

  ‘You have the gondoliere?’

  ‘Yes, Francisco, he is waiting at the steps.’

  Aurelio Paladini gave a piercing whistle and Francisco stood to see his customer with a ragged fellow who looked as if he hadn’t a lira to his name. He frowned, recognising the man who slept in the doorway. He knew him of old.

  ‘He knows you?’ asked Dickens.

  ‘We are not friends. I sometimes assume the role of gazzero — I use my hook to draw the gondola up to the steps. One can earn a couple of centessimi that way from the passengers, more from the tourists, but, let us say, I am unofficial. Gazzeri are employed by the state. Francisco does not like me.’

  Dickens signalled to Francisco to wait and he and Aurelio crossed the bridge where Aurelio spoke in the Venetian dialect. From what Dickens could gather, Aurelio was telling him that the Signor wanted to see the palazzo and that they would go down the little canal to the water gate.

  Francisco looked doubtful. ‘If the signor pleases.’

  Not exactly, thought Dickens, wondering if it was a good idea after all, but there was something engaging about Aurelio Paladini, and he certainly needed the money. He and Aurelio went down into the gondola.

  ‘We go another way,’ Francisco said.

  After a few twist and turns, the gondola entered the narrow canal at the other end and arrived at the water gate. One gate had rotted away giving them room to slide into the tunnel and come to rest by a narrow ledge. It was dark as ink and reeked of dank water and decay. Dickens thought again of those cells beneath the Doge’s palace in which the prisoners stood waist deep in water. He heard a sickening plop as of something dropped into the silent water and imagined rats. What a fool he was.