Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (36 page)

AUGUST 10, 1854

I was afraid to tell Allain about the destruction of the portrait he had painted. How painful it would be for him to know that Gilbert had taken out his rage on the canvas that he had worked upon so diligently. What would he say? Would I be forced to tell him what had followed? That had been humiliating to endure; it would be even worse to describe.

It was nearly a month and a half after we had reached Venice before I gathered together the nerve to speak of the subject, and even then it was almost an accident.

Allain had been out all morning. He had formed the habit of shopping for the simple meals Violet sometimes arranged for the Signora da Allori’s cook to prepare, dishes of squabs and larks, squid in ink, aubergines and mirlitons cooked with tomatoes and cheeses. Violet sometimes went with him; she enjoyed the ramble through the market, the haggling over fresh fruits and vegetables and, always, buying fresh flowers to scent their rooms. The outings, extended sometimes by visits to an antique shop or cloth warehouse, wine shop or shoe shop, and perhaps on to a sidewalk café for coffee and pastry, made the mornings fly past and provided tidbits for conversation for the rest of the day.

This morning, she had not felt well. Though the indisposition was minor, she had not liked the thought of the many raw smells in the market. Nothing was more uncomfortable than having to combat a stomach disorder while in a public place.

Allain returned carrying a painted canvas in a roll under his arm. He had found it at a junk dealer’s stand, he said. The artist was Antonio Canale, known as Canaletto. His work was out of favor because he was said to have been too commercial in his lifetime, painting hundreds of views of Venice that had been bought as souvenirs by visitors to the city, primarily the English, during the mid-eighteenth century. Allain was enthusiastic over the draftsmanship of his find, which he claimed showed training as an architect. He exclaimed over the luminosity of Canaletto’s colors and his masterly use of camera obscura that, apparently, formed the base drawing. These qualities pleased him, but that was not, he said, the reason he had bought the painting.

He looked, Violet thought, like a small boy with a secret. She smiled with love rising strong inside her as she put the question she saw she was meant to ask. “Why did you buy it then?”

Allain tapped the center of the canvas, which showed a stretch of the Grand Canal beyond the Rialto Bridge in softly brilliant shades of aqua and peach and gold, and every possible tint of blue. “This,” he said.

It was a moment before she saw it. “Ah,” she said, and smiled straight into his eyes with a brilliance to match the painting.

The scene showed the house where they were staying. It was only a partial view, it was true; the house was obscured by the walls of a palace. Still, there it was with its loggia and upper windows that opened onto the bedchamber where they slept and its walls that were still the same warm ocher with the same blue-brown water licking at its foundations.

It gave Violet a strange feeling to see it, and to know, as Allain told her, that the painting was at least a hundred years old. It did not seem right, somehow, that it had survived so many years past the life span of the man who created it.

“One day,” Allain said as they stood looking at the canvas, “I would like to have a house where this can hang in the salon to brighten a dim corner — and with your portrait over the mantel to watch over the household.”

Violet looked at him. She swallowed hard as she looked away again. Her voice quiet, she said, “It would be lovely — but it’s not possible.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, his voice tight.

“The portrait — Gilbert ruined it, slashed it. He was sorry, I think, afterward, but the damage had been done.”

“And you?” he said. “Was that when he hurt you?”

She couldn’t answer; it wasn’t possible. As he reached to tilt her chin so she must look at him, she shielded her eyes with her lashes.

He didn’t insist. Taking her in his arms, he held her to his heart while the hard breathing of his pent-up anger stirred her hair. At last he said, “I should have killed him.”

His understanding, his delicacy, and even his outrage were healing. Over the knot in her throat, she said, “He was sorry for the injury, too.”

It was long moments before he spoke again. Finally he sighed, the tension going out of his hold. “Perhaps I should pity him. I might be violent in my anger, too, if I knew I was losing you.”

She managed a small nod. “I am so sorry.”

“About the portrait? I will paint another, and finer. But it comes to me that you would not have been hurt if not for me. I share your husband’s blame.”

“Why,” she said in low, strained tones, “when all you have done is give me joy?”

“I have taken more.”

“Nothing that I did not offer, willingly.”

“Yes, of course, such a wanton as you are,” he said with an ache in the soft, laughter-edged timbre of the words.

“Yes,” she agreed seriously. “Will you take me to bed now?”

“Madame, you shock me.”

“Impossible. Will you?”

“St Mark’s own bronze horses come to life couldn’t stop me,” he answered.

Afterward, as they lay naked in the warm wind from the sea that filtered through the shutters over the windows, Allain rose and left her lying half-asleep among the twisted sheets. He returned a moment later. His weight caused the mattress to shift, then something cool and heavy was placed between the pale and gently rounded mounds of her breasts with their rosy nipples and tracery of blue veins.

She thought at first it was a pendant necklace. The chain was of heavy links with the soft rich sheen of pure gold. Attached to it was a small object that looked much like the censers for the burning of incense used in churches. It seemed to be carved from a single large amethyst and set in gold bindings that were ridged with pearls and diamonds.

She sat up, taking the piece of jewelry in her hands. The workmanship was ornate and extremely fine, with scrolls, veins, and leaves forming the gold bindings, and a design of a bird with spread wings carved into one side of the amethyst. Her fingers trembled a little as she turned it this way and that in the light, for she could see it was no ordinary trinket.

She looked up at Allain. Her voice compressed, she said, “What is this?”

“Here, permit me,” he said. Reaching for the necklace, he twisted the amethyst. A portion of one caplike end came away in his hand.

From the jewel-like bottle rose the fragrance of a perfume so lovely, so complex yet simple, rich yet refined, so dense with dreamlike images that it struck the senses with purest delight. It was the essence of a summer’s night in some exotic clime, redolent of hot breezes from hills where oranges and almonds grew. It was scent-heavy blossoms within a walled garden drenched in moonlight where could be heard the far-off whisper of the sea. It was deep kisses and moisture-dewed bodies amid crushed petals of roses. It was candied violets and roots of iris-orris and tangled fields of wild rosemary and narcissus. It was waving vetiver fans and twisting vanilla pods and snow-chilled wine. And still there was more, layer upon layer of evocative scents that rose in the mind like some ancient, half-remembered refrain.

“Cleopatra’s perfume,” Violet said, her voice quiet with wonder.

“And Joséphine’s. And Eugénie’s.”

“But how — why?”

“The perfumer in the Rue de la Paix whom I spoke of before holds the empress’s commission to make it. He risked much giving it to me, but he was indebted to me for past favors. Besides, he is a romantic, and could not refuse when he learned I wanted it for the special lady who rules my heart.”

She met his gaze, and thought she might drown with ease in the measureless depths of love she saw mirrored there. She felt chastened by it, unworthy yet exalted, and warmed, even heated, by its force.

“I will be grateful for the power it’s supposed to have,” she said, “if it will bind you to me, and me to you.”

“I pray it’s so,” he answered.

It was a vow that required a kiss, and more, to seal it. Later, as they lay with arms and legs entwined in the bed, Violet said, “I would thank you for my perfume—”

“You already have,” Allain said, a low laugh shaking his chest, so that it rumbled under her cheek.

“Wretch,” she said without heat, tugging a little at a clutch of curling hair on his chest that was tickling her nose, then immediately soothing the spot. She rested her hand on his arm, idly smoothing the tender red scar where the knife cut he had taken had healed. “I was going to say that I’m afraid I may enjoy the effects of this perfume so much that I don’t know what I’ll do when it’s all gone.”

“We’ll have some more made,” he answered comfortably.

“Isn’t that a little extravagant, sending so far for it?”

“Thank you,” he said in mock umbrage. “I see now what you think of my foresight. But, my dear love, if Napoléon brought his Joséphine the recipe for this perfume, do you suppose I would do less?”

“You have it?”

“Indeed. And you may have as much of it as you like made, enough to take a bath in, if that’s your desire.”

“My desire,” she said with a wondering shake of her head, “is for you. You are amazing.”

He hoisted himself up so that he rested on one elbow. Leaning over her so that his mouth was inches from hers, he said, “See that you remember it.”

So the days passed, fading into each other in sunny, mindless splendor. They ate and slept and made love; they sat late into the evenings on their loggia, watching the sunset colors stain the city and shimmer away into the gray of night. They added to their meager wardrobes with visits to tailors and modistes. One day Allain bought a sword cane, for use, he said, when she was not near at hand with her trusty parasol.

Sometimes they hired a boat and took a basket of food and wine to the Lido or to one of the outer islands, where they fished and waded in the water, returning sunburned and ravenous for their dinner and each other.

Allain bought oils and brushes and began to paint again, concentrating on capturing the lambent light and delicate colors of
Venice on small, easily carried canvases.

While he worked, Violet sometimes sat with him with her embroidery. Other times she visited with the widow Signora da Allori, a lady of sharp tongue and gentle heart who delighted in screaming out the window at her majordomo as he departed on his errands. Now and again Violet went shopping on her own, enjoying the freedom to come and go at no one’s behest except her own. She learned the language spoken around her, became known to the shopkeepers, and made the acquaintance of a special gondolier, a handsome boy who watched for her appearance on the quay and shot his black craft forward to meet her, risking life and limb and volleys of insults to serve her.

Slowly, the things she and Allain bought on their outings — the fragile Venetian glassware, the small pieces of antique furniture, the paintings and bits of bric-a-brac — began to crowd their room. They arranged to take the entire top floor of the Widow da Allori’s house. Spreading their possessions out in that spacious area, they hired a maid — a girl they were unsurprised to discover was the niece of the majordomo, Savio. With the slow passage of the days, the rooms began to take on the feel and look of something approaching a home.

By accident and incidental introductions, Violet and Allain met other expatriates in the city, most of them English. They began to attend dinner parties now and then, or else received an occasional visitor from among this circle. They made little effort to enlarge such contacts, however. Their own company was preferable at any given moment.

Violet was happy. There were times when her spirit sang with an ecstasy so intense she could hardly contain it. There were days so beautiful, so filled with color and laughter and pure, unrelenting grace that they brought tears.

There were also times when dread seized her with iron talons and would not let go, times when she stood staring out the window at nothing, or lay at night watching for the dawn and listening to the soft sound of Allain’s breathing.

She sat one morning watching Allain paint. He had set up his work area in the end of a spare bedchamber with tall, north-facing windows. The light spilling in over his shoulder was clear and blue-tinted. In it, his face had a look of sober concentration not at all marred by a streak of azure paint on his chin where he had rubbed it with the side of his hand. He was so intent upon what he was doing that she thought he had forgotten she was there.

She shifted in the velvet slipper chair where she sat. He glanced up at once.

“Bored with embroidery?” he said, glancing at the half-finished cushion cover lying neglected in her lap.

She shook her head. “I just like watching you. You are so involved in what you do.”

A slight flush of pleasure and something more rose to his face. “I didn’t mean to neglect you.”

“I haven’t been neglected,” she said, tilting her head slightly as she sent him a quick, smiling glance from the corners of her eyes. She went on: “But I wish sometimes that I had something, some kind of work, to absorb my time and thoughts in the same way.”