Martha Grimes - The Old Silent

… Aubrey had thought that his harlequin disguise would have helped him to elude his shadowy pursuers, but he realized, as he neared the Rialto Bridge, that this was not the case. The bell in the campanile sounded its ominous gong… .

Why was it, wondered Melrose, that the bells of St. Rules just made their dissonant metallic clatter rather than bonging ominously? Probably because St. Rules overlooked Betty Ball's bakery instead of Saint Mark's Square. As he diligently returned to this dismal chase, the voice of his aunt seeped through:

"… and we decided that the Old Swan is more convenient to the center of things. Besides, it's much nearer the Stray…"

"Charming place," said Melrose, who didn't know what she was talking about.

Suppressing the rising feeling of terror, Aubrey pushed his way through the crowd…

"What is keeping Ruthven? Must I sit here all afternoon just to get one or two brandy snaps?"

"I hope not."

… pushed his way through the Crowd flowing across the bridge. Grotesque masks, powdered and painted faces, costumes of scarlet, orange, blue-licked about like tongues of flame and were reflected grotesquely in the black water of the canal below like some vision of hell… .

"It's so wonderful to have all of those acres of green parkland right in the center of the city; Teddy and I shall be able to walk and talk for hours."

Talk about a vision of hell, thought Melrose.

Finally, when they reached the palazzo facing the Grand Canal, the revellers dispersed, flying off in small groups, the trains of the gowns streaming, the capes flowing out…

Melrose yawned. If he himself felt exhausted from all of this hectic running about and suffocating crush, what must old Aubrey feel? He certainly must be thinking about a place to put his feet up… Ah, there it was, of course. The Gritti Palace. Everyone finally fetched up at the Gritti Palace. He decided to make it a point, if Vivian were really determined to go through with this harebrained marriage and he were invited to the festivities, to look out some ratty old pension and leave the Gritti Palace to Aubrey, who had already passed and made a tortuous journey through "nightmarishly twisting streets" to the Accademia. Here he was in another crush of carnival-revellers.

He had, thank God, finally escaped. Aubrey ran down the steps where he saw a vaporetto marked for the Lido. It was about to shove off, and he jumped aboard just as the attendant swung the rope to the dock and pushed away.

Safe.

Making his way to the stern, he stopped dead.

Orsina Luna - mask or no - he was sure it was she whom he had left behind in the palace of the doge .

As the vaporetto picked up speed, the wind tangled her coppery hair and he looked away. The Grand Canal was a tunnel of darkness…

Melrose looked up from the page, glad that Agatha had taken herself off in search of cakes and cucumbers. He could not understand how such drivel (pardon me, dear Polly) could touch something in himself. His eye traveled the length of his drawing room, dim and shadowy in the last of the sun, as if it were that Venetian canal that bore Polly's hero along with the copper-haired woman who was going to end up killing the doge in self-defense and marrying Aubrey.

Well, he was so bored he read the last few pages so that he could give Polly the advantage of some varnished lie about her prowess as a mystery writer. She was, really, considerably better than this lot of codswollop demonstrated.

At least it hadn't yet been published (and Polly probably knew why). Unable to stand it any longer, Melrose flipped the manuscript closed and stuffed it back down between cushion and chair arm, wishing old Aubrey's "sinking feeling" would drop him right in the Grand Canal.

Unfortunately, as Melrose reached for his sherry he was aware of a hollowness in his stomach as the face of the Signora Orsina Luna with her coppery, wind-tangled hair was suddenly replaced by the face of Vivian Rivington with her coppery, shoulder-length bob.

… a sinking feeling was the only way he could describe it.

Surely such tarnished prose could not call forth something akin to empathy for old Aubrey as he stood poised on the edge of some hectic-

Oh, for God's sakes, he was beginning to sound like old Aubrey. Or old Polly. Melrose belted back his sherry and slid down in his chair. With both hands he massaged his hair until it stood up in spikes and licks, hoping to work some sense into himself. That was the trouble with all of this maudlin sentiment; it began to suck you in.

His hand tightened on the leather chair arm as he thought of Aubrey's own hand grasping the metal rail of the vaporetto as he stared into the hazel eyes of the signora… No, it was Vivian's that were hazel.

And then the images of Vivian started flowing past him as if she too had been painted on the pages of a book: Vivian in her twin-set in the Jack and Hammer today; Vivian looking serene and silky in Stratford-upon-Avon; Vivian in a tatty old bathrobe in that country house in Durham; Vivian over tea, over drinks, over dinner-

His eyes widening as if he'd come upon a houseful of ghosts, Melrose wondered if he had made some dreadful miscalculation…

"Why on earth are you pulling that long face, Melrose?" asked Agatha, who had thumped back into the room carrying her dish of rum balls. "You'd think you lost your last- what's that ?"

The racket made by the brass door knocker was violent enough to make the chandelier shudder.

"I don't see why these dreadful children can't stick to the village if they must go about playing pranks, nor why you can't have Ruthven stand down there at the driveway entrance and simply turn them away-"

"Generally, we set out steel-jaw traps," said Melrose, as he heard some commotion and raised voices out in the entrance room and then the deliberate rap, rap, rap of heels across the marble.

Vivian appeared in the doorway.

"It's Miss Rivington, sir," Ruthven said with whatever formality he could muster, but as he followed in her wake like a hound brought to heel, the announcement was superfluous.

Melrose got up quickly, bestowing upon his visitor an absolutely wonderful smile. For once in his life, he believed not in coincidence, but in Destiny. "Vivian!"

Vivian Rivington stood there in a wet raincoat, her hair a mess of rainsoaked tangles, holding out a large pasteboard cut-out.

"Just what in the hell is this ?"

"Wherever you see smokestacks, you know it's shut down," was the cabdriver's brief and bleak commentary on the West Riding mills, once a center of the wool trade. The taxi had dropped him at a car-hire place, and after the sooty valley of Bradford, the monotonous rows of slate rooftops and chimneys marching up and down hills like stairsteps, coming so suddenly upon the open expanse of the moors should have been a grateful escape. Perhaps it was the season; perhaps it was his mood. But Jury saw little to relieve that mood in the endlessness of the moors, the distant hills brown with old bracken and heather, gray with snow and granite.

The Citrine house sat within its own wood of oak, boxwood trees, and tangled vines on the border of Keighley or Oakworth Moor. It was hard to tell where one left off and the other began. The sound of Jury's car lifted pheasant from the dead and nearly knee-high bracken as he drove up the narrow road to the house. He had passed a small stone cottage, perhaps once a caretaker's, but unoccupied now, given the build-up of filmy dirt on its windows. It did not seem the sort of grounds one would bother to "keep up," at any rate. The undergrowth, the dead branches, the moss and vines would simply take over again.