The Master

CHAPTER NINE

NOTHING CAME TO HIM simply now. Nothing he saw and heard in this, his first journey out of England in five years, came as new and fresh experience to be wondered at and treasured. In Paris he met Rosina and Bay Emmet, the daughters of Ellen Temple, Minny’s sister. Both had been born after Minny’s death and had known her merely from the few photographs which had been taken and as a shadowy absence. The girls were not alike. Rosina was prettier and more outspoken; Bay was small and somewhat stocky, more quietly confiding and trusting than her sister. Her ambition as a painter was already clear from her keen observation of the work in the galleries and the life in the street, the latter seeming to both girls to rival the former for its artfulness and beauty.

Sometimes when they spoke he heard Minny Temple ’s voice. He envied them their lack of self-consciousness, their unawareness that their American voices, so filled with enthusiasm, were not as original as they imagined, nor as uncomplicated by history as they supposed.

He was old enough at fifty-six to be able to deplore things with full conviction, and Bay Emmet playfully insisted that he was imitating Dr Sloper from Washington Square on his tour of Europe with his unfortunate and ill-educated daughter. He deplored the girls’ accents and corrected them regularly as they moved from one museum to another. When Rosina, for example, admired the jewels in a Parisian shop window, Henry immediately corrected her.

‘Jew-el, not jool.’

And when she agreed that American girls did not nowadays speak out their vowels distinctly, he replied:

‘Vow-els, not vowls, Rosina.’

Soon, both sisters, obviously enjoying their cousin’s reprimands, began to find new outrages to commit against his fastidious ear. They reminded him now, more than at any other time, of the dead aunt who loved such an encounter and would relish the response a new remark could cause. The girls managed to stand their ground not by arguing with him, but by mocking him gently, dropping any consonant which came their way and using a modern idiom certain to irritate him. When Bay announced one morning that she needed to go upstairs to fix her hair, Henry asked her, ‘To fix it to what, or with what?’

Paris was more splendid than he had ever seen it, but he sensed something behind the splendour of which he disapproved. He was careful not to discuss this with the Emmet girls. He loved how innocently alert they were to colours and vistas and textures; he enjoyed how they pointed out details to him and to each other, and how happily they bathed in the city’s grandeur. A few times, when Bay Emmet grew silent and took no further part in jokes, and seemed to be absorbing the scene in a sort of reverie, and could grow easily irritated at any interruption, he felt the ghost of Constance Fenimore Woolson tugging at the air around them, serene and inward-looking, as sensitive to suggestion and shadow as Minny Temple had been to flourish and light.

His cousins thus brought ancient memories to life. Sometimes, so fascinated were they by their surroundings, they did not notice his darkening memories. He found their indifference to him charming, a relief, and he wondered if some of his old friends, who demanded his attention too much and monitored too closely what he said and did, might be encouraged to follow the example of the Emmet sisters.

He realized, as he travelled south, having left the girls to their European tour, that he could live easily without many of his friends. He would enjoy irregular correspondence, and, indeed, would treasure hearing of their lives and activities. But as he spent a night in Marseilles, knowing that the next day he would be in their grasp, he recognized that he could quite blissfully have passed by the abode of Paul and Minnie Bourget and not have seen his friends at all. The height of fame and wealth had given Bourget a twenty-five-acre estate on the Riviera on a terraced mountainside with a park of dense pine and cedar, complete with magnificent views. It had also given him an inordinate interest in his own opinions which, exacerbated by anti-Semitism, had become unpleasantly rigid and authoritarian.

There was another guest on the estate, a minor French novelist. Henry did everything he could, in the early days of his stay, not to discuss Zola or the Dreyfus case with Paul or Minnie Bourget or their guest, feeling that his own views on the matter would diverge from those of his hosts. His support for Zola and, indeed, for Dreyfus, was sufficiently strong not to wish to hear the Bourgets’ prejudices on the matter. He could sense that the Bourgets’ luxury and exquisite taste and the superior nature of their daily routine were connected with the hardness and hatreds of their illiberal politics. The English, he thought, were softer in their views, more ambiguous in the connections between their personal circumstances and their political convictions.

He knew Bourget, he felt, as though he had made him. He knew his nature and his culture, his race and his type, his vanity and his snobbery, his interest in ideas and his ambition. But these were small matters compared with the overall effect of the man, and the core of selfhood which he so easily revealed. This was richer and more likeable and more complicated than anyone supposed.

In return for all Henry’s attention, he knew, Bourget noticed nothing. His list of Henry’s attributes, were he to make one, would be simple and clear and inaccurate. He did not observe the concealed self, nor, Henry imagined, did the idea interest him. And this, as his stay with the Bourgets came to an end, pleased him. Remaining invisible, becoming skilled in the art of self-effacement, even to someone whom he had known so long, gave him satisfaction. He was ready to listen, always ready to do that, but not prepared to reveal the mind at work, the imagination, or the depth of feeling. At times, he knew, the blankness was much more than a mask. It made its way inwards as well as outwards, so that, having left the Bourgets’ estate, and travelling on towards Venice, the possibility of future meetings with his former hosts had quickly become a subject of indifference to him.

HE HAD NOT forgotten how much he loved Italy, but he feared that he had grown too old and stale to be captured once more by it, or that Italy, under pressure of time and tourism, had lost its golden charm. He sat still in the train carriage during the three-hour delay at Ventimiglia, watching the stuffy, scrambling, complaining crowd, led by a party of affluent Germans. He would have given a great deal to have stood up and walked sturdily over the border, his baggage coming behind him on a wheelbarrow pushed by Burgess Noakes. He felt an immense impatience to leave France behind him and be brushed now by the wings of Italy. The manners in Italy were open and fresh; all the refinement was hidden and taken for granted. When finally he found himself sitting in an armchair close to the window of his hotel in Genoa basking in the Italian air and the revival of Italian memories, he felt relieved and happy.

ONCE HE HAD arrived in Venice and night fell, he knew that neither tourism nor time had harmed the city’s mixture of sadness and splendour. He made his way from the railway station to the Palazzo Barbaro along side-canals by gondola, swerving and twisting through the dimly recognized waterways. These journeys had a gravity attached to them, as though the passenger were being led theatrically to his doom. But then, as the vessel was let float softly and slacken in pace, and gently bumped against a mooring post, the other side of Venice appeared – the raw sumptuousness, the shameless glitter, the spaces so out of scale with actual need.

Venice was laden down with old voices, old echoes and images; it was the refuge of endless strange secrets, broken fortunes and wounded hearts. Five years earlier, having sorted out the affairs of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, he had left the city believing that he would not return. It was as if both he and Constance had risked too much in their gamble with Venice, and she had lost everything while he had lost her. Venice ’s resonance for him now was no longer vague and historical; the violence and cruelty which matched the beauty and grandeur were no longer abstract. They were represented by the violent death of his friend. As guest of his hosts the Curtises in Palazzo Barbaro, he worked on a new story in one of the rooms at the back, with a pompous painted ceiling and walls of ancient pale green damask slightly shredded and patched. He knew that just a few rooms away glowed the Grand Canal. If he stood on the balcony, as he had done so many times, he could study the domes and scrolls and scalloped buttresses and statues forming the crown of the Salute, the wide steps like the train of a robe. He could look up to the left and allow himself to be dazzled by Palazzo Dario covered with the loveliest marble plates and sculptured circles, exquisite and compact and delicate.

In that turning of his head from the Salute to Palazzo Dario, his eye was caught each time by the gloomy Gothic windows of Casa Semitecolo and this was when Venice ceased to be spectacle for him, when it abandoned its guise as vast pageant and became real and hard and filled with horror. It was from the second story of this building, five years earlier, that Constance Fenimore Woolson had flung herself onto the pavement.

HE HAD FIRST met her early in 1880 in Florence when he was writing The Portrait of a Lady. He was thirty-seven; she was forty. She had had a letter of introduction from Minny Temple ’s sister Henrietta. While she had read everything he had written, he had read nothing by her. He had met many American women travelling in Europe with letters of introduction to him. Such letters, if gathered together, he thought, would produce a hefty volume, but they would not be as tedious as many of their bearers, who included a number of lady novelists who wished that they had written Daisy Miller and were anxious to tell him that they were on the point of doing something quite as good.

Constance ’s deafness in one ear interested him as much as it seemed to irritate her. It pointed to something he might otherwise not have noticed so quickly. She possessed an extraordinary amount of reserve and self-sufficiency and seemed anxious neither to please him nor impress him. She lived, to a degree which he believed unusual, in her own mind. He was not surprised, as he showed her the sights, that she wished to avoid tourists, but he was fascinated by her lack of interest in Anglo-American society in Florence and her refusal to be introduced to his friends and associates in the higher echelons of Florentine society. She needed her evenings to herself, she said flatly; she could not happily absorb the company of so many people, no matter how rich and important they were.

He was unable to tell whether her responses to churches and frescoes and paintings were truly original. Nonetheless, the freshness of her intelligence, her likes and dislikes, and her ability to be puzzled and confused, made him interested in accompanying her through the city in the mornings. Two years later, when she read The Portrait of a Lady, she noticed, she intimated to him softly, his skill at displaying an American woman full of openness and curiosity and ideas of her own in Italy for the first time being quietly but firmly directed by a connoisseur, a man of slender means who had studied beauty. He had used that sense of her, attached it, as it were, to his other prior claimants, and written it sometimes on the very same day that he wandered in the city with his new American friend. So that Isabel Archer saw what Constance Fenimore Woolson saw and may indeed have felt what she felt, if only he could have fully divined what Constance felt.

She teased him about the tameness of his background; his being a native of the James family caused her much amusement, as did Newport and Boston and his European wanderings. She, the grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, had access to an America he would never know. Both in Ohio and Florida, she told him, she had been on familiar terms with the wilderness. And just in case, she smiled at him menacingly, he thought that she was a roughneck, she should point out that, while he was the first of his family to set foot in Italy, her great-uncle had lived in Florence and written a book about it.

Added to her background was her strange and busy independence. She saw him in the mornings, but in the afternoons she walked in the hills above Florence for hours, and at night she wrote and read. Each day, when they met, she had a new perspective on the city, a new experience to recount, and a fresh eye with which to view what he had arranged for her to see.

He did not mention her in letters to his parents or his sister Alice or brother William. In those years, they were all too ready to respond to the slightest hint of an amorous adventure which might lead him to marriage. He knew that every line of his letters was carefully analysed in case some clue might be offered about where his heart lay. For his relatives in Boston, hungry for news, his heart remained as hard as he could make it.

Constance and Henry met when their paths crossed in Rome and then in Paris. They corresponded over the next few years and read each other’s work. Sometimes, he was preoccupied with his own writing or with other correspondents, but often when he had written her a letter he discovered that his old enjoyment of her company had been stirred again; he found himself writing another letter to her before he received a reply. He feared that she was confused by this sudden interest after a long silence and he knew that she was wary. She had become his most intelligent reader and, after he had extracted a promise that she would destroy his letters, a most trusted and sharp-witted confidante. And when she came to London, as she did when they had known one another for more than three years, she became his steadfast and self-contained and secret best friend.

Neither of them spoke about their private lives, their hidden selves. He spoke to her about his work and his family and she made observations which were personal in that they belonged to a very particular mind; they seemed like confidences no matter how general or vague the subject. She did not talk about her work to him, but he learned by implication and accident that the completion of each of her books brought with it a nervous collapse of which she lived in dread. The winters were not kind to her; dark days and low temperatures made her depressed so that there were times when she could not get out of bed, could not see him or anybody else, could not work, and could, as far as he could discover, see no hope, although she was desperate for him not to know the scale and depth of her suffering. She, who had been ready for his friendship and company, could be silent and withdrawn. He had never met anyone who shared to such a degree this readiness and its very opposite. He knew that he could trust her, that he could remain close to her while becoming distant, if he needed. She had a way of abruptly leaving his side as though she feared he was about to dismiss her and could not tolerate the pain and the humiliation of that. Nothing she did with him was simple; he was amazed and often concerned that he did not fully know her, could not fathom if these brisk gestures at parting were aspects of her vulnerability or her need to be alone, or her fear, or all of these things.

ONE EVENING in London in February 1884, Henry went with Mrs Kemble to see the Italian actor Salvini in Othello. It was a fashionable evening and a fashionable production and there were people there who were richer than Mrs Kemble and her escort, with titles and also beauty, neither of which Mrs Kemble nor her escort possessed, but there was no couple more fashionable in the audience, more noticed and observed, than the great actress accompanied by the author of The Portrait of a Lady.

Mrs Kemble was imperious with him, and he complimented her regularly on her wit, and listened to her with admiring attention, having seen her first on the stage when he was a mere youth. She knew that everyone around them wished to hear what she was saying and thus she alternated between a raised voice and a whisper. She nodded to some people and spoke briefly to others, but she stopped for nobody. Instead she proceeded through the throng to their box, making it clear from the manner of her gaze that no one was free to join them.

In the moments before the lights were dimmed, Henry saw Constance Fenimore Woolson take her seat. It was typical of her not to mention to him, although he had seen her a few days earlier, that she planned to come to the theatre. In the time that she had been in London, they had never once ventured into this world together. Her sortie into fashionable London life, when no one else was alone, took him aback. Constance looked worn and preoccupied, not like a distinguished bestselling novelist from an old American family who had travelled the world. Viewed from his box, she could have been a lady’s companion or a governess. He did not know if she had seen him.

As he watched the tale of jealousy and treachery unfold on the stage, more intimate versions of the same matters came to him sharply. He could easily pretend that he had not seen her. But if she had seen him – and she generally, he felt, missed nothing – and if she had even the slightest intimation that he had sought to ignore her, he knew how deeply wounded she would be, and how private and hidden the hurt would remain, and how skilled she would be at silently nursing it over the London winter.

At the interval, he excused himself to Mrs Kemble and made his way through the crowd, finding Constance in her seat checking the text of Othello. In that one instant as he stood above her and she glanced up, he saw that she did not know what to do, and when he spoke, he realized that she could not hear him. He smiled and signalled to her to follow him. He knew, as they made their way towards the box, that Mrs Kemble was directing a hostile gaze at him and his companion.

As he introduced her, Constance seemed even more forlorn than when he had seen her taking her seat. What he caught now, as she tried to speak to Mrs Kemble, was what he caught before the play began – a loneliness and melancholy which seemed to outweigh the other qualities she was at pains to emphasize. Mrs Kemble, on the other hand, had never suffered from loneliness, and, as soon as she saw that Henry planned to invite his friend into their box, she turned rudely away from them, staring at a point in the far distance with the help of her glasses.

HE CONTINUED to meet Constance over the next two years as she lived outside London and to correspond with her. He watched her, especially after his sister Alice had arrived in England, going to great lengths not to be a burden, not to depend on him for anything, and to make regular mention of her plans for travel and work, her famous independence. He was not allowed to pity her, nor was he allowed to know her fully, except as a set of passionate contradictions underlined by two essential truths: she was immensely clever and she was lonely.

Her hearing deteriorated and when he spoke, she had to study his face and watch his lips so that she could follow what he was saying. Her face took on a worried gravity, and this became intense if he ever mentioned plans, where he might go soon, when he might travel. In these years, he most often planned to go to Italy. He would look forward to the time when he had finished a book or a group of stories and he would be free. These plans were so much a part of his existence that he forgot them, changed them, remade them without consultation or hesitation. Slowly, he became aware that when he told her of his intentions, she went home and brooded about them. A few times, he noticed her surprise and mild irritation when she discovered that he had changed his mind and not discussed the change with her. He came to understand that his presence was powerful for her, and that everything he said and wrote was contemplated by her at length in private. To her he was a mystery, even more so than she was to him, but she put more thought and energy, he believed, into solving the mystery, or at least attempting to divine its properties, than he ever did.

When she began to arrange to leave England and return to Florence, he convinced her that she should know some people there, friends of his, and enter into society, however limited, in the city. She smiled and shook her head.

‘I have seen enough Americans in America,’ she said, ‘and enough English in England, and I do not believe that the Italians will take much interest in me. No, I would rather work than take tea, would rather walk in the hills than dress in the evening.’

‘There are two charming and very serious people I should like you to meet,’ he said, ‘people who do not themselves enter very freely into society. I do not wish you to live at the mercy of the entire Anglo-American colony.’

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I long for nothing more than to meet your friends.’

In writing to ask his friends to administer some social comfort to Miss Woolson on her return to Florence, Henry was taking a risk he had not taken before, having introduced her to no one in England. He understood that his old friend Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie had brought a private income and the best of Boston reserve and refinement to Bellosguardo above Florence. In their tastes and habits they were simple people. Had they been less simple, he believed, the father’s talent as a composer and the daughter’s as a painter might have lifted them to great heights. They lacked the steel of ambition and dedication and they replaced it with exquisite taste and select hospitality. He knew that they would warm to an American novelist with the manners and pedigree Constance possessed.

The chance that they would not like each other was small. Lizzie, now aged forty, had recently married a bohemian painter, Frank Duveneck, and thus Francis Boott, who had been devoted to his daughter, would have time and energy to dedicate to a new friend. The real risk he incurred in introducing Constance to the Bootts was that they would like each other more than they liked him, that they would, as evening settled over Bellosguardo, discuss his case, and come to conclusions about him that would require further discussion, until he became one of the subjects which bound them together.

He did not flatter himself. He knew how careful Constance would be at first, how reticent and cautious, and he knew how much old Francis Boott would like conversation with a new friend to be general, confining himself if he could to rare old coins and old damask and long-forgotten Italian composers. Nonetheless, he knew that Lizzie Boott, whom he had first met in Newport twenty-five years earlier, had longed for him to marry and had conveyed her wishes to him and to his sister Alice, with whom she regularly corresponded, as her father corresponded with William. Once Constance had arrived in Florence, Henry realized, and been sent into their care, the Bootts would know what no one else knew: how much he had seen of Constance and how significant a presence she was for him; and they would wonder at how strange it was, considering their closeness to Henry and his family, that no one had mentioned this previously. It was not impossible that they might wish to discuss this with Constance.

WHEN SHE HAD settled in Florence and had, as he learned, seen a great deal of Francis Boott and his daughter Lizzie, he received a letter from Constance which surprised him in its frankness, its personal tone. Being with the Bootts, she said, in their quarters in Bellosguardo, was delightful yet, on the third or fourth visit something had struck her, however, and stayed with her; she had to wait until she had unpacked her books before she could finally be sure about it. The rooms in the house on Bellosguardo, she wrote, were precisely described in The Portrait of a Lady. The chamber in which she was regularly entertained was, indeed, brimming with arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and contained the hangings and tapestries, chests and cabinets and pictures, brass and pottery, not to speak of the deep and well-padded chairs, which filled the main reception room of Gilbert Osmond in that novel.

And not only that, she wrote half-accusingly, but the old man himself had been perfectly described in the book. He had, indeed, a fine, narrow and extremely modelled and composed face, and yes, its only fault was that it ran a trifle too much to points, which were emphasized by the shape of his beard. Sometimes, she said, when the father and daughter spoke it was as though Gilbert Osmond and his daughter Pansy were having a conversation. ‘You have introduced me to two of the characters from your books,’ she wrote, ‘and I am grateful to you, but I wonder if you have plans to include me in the sequel.’

He did not reply for some weeks, and when he did, he failed to mention her observations about his novel and the Bootts. He ended his letter coldly, being certain that she would not fail to notice it, and believing that this, coupled with his delay in writing, might remove the discussion of sources for his novels to the realm of the unspoken, where he and she normally wandered freely as treasured citizens.

He remained deeply curious, however, about her relationship with the Bootts and Frank Duveneck. An idea came into his mind about an elderly American gentleman of private means and cultivated manners in Europe with his daughter. Both of them would, in his story, marry; the daughter first and the father some time later out of loneliness. Their partners, it came to him, could be two people who have secretly known each other, or have come to know each other now. He was doing, he understood, what Constance had suggested – placing her close to his other characters, the father and daughter from The Portrait of a Lady, to see what would happen. He put the idea for the story aside, not wishing to satisfy her speculation as to why he might have introduced her to the Bootts, and also believing that what he saw when he travelled to Florence might be more interesting than anything he might imagine.

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.

One evening, having passed the Frari and crossed a bridge which led towards the Grand Canal, he caught a brief glimpse of a woman in an upstairs room with her back to a lighted window. She was in conversation; something about her hair and her neck made him stand his ground in the empty street. As the talk became more animated, he could see her shrugging and gesticulating. She was, as far as he could see, younger than Constance and much darker, and her shoulders much broader, so that it was not her physical presence which brought Constance into his mind. He found, as he moved away, that he hungered to be in that room where the woman was talking, he longed to hear her voice and follow whatever it was she was saying. And slowly, as he walked through the dark streets with lives hidden away in the buildings on either side, he realized that even though his time at Bellosguardo had lasted a mere three weeks, he missed the companionship, he missed his life with Constance Fenimore Woolson. He missed the mixture of sharpness and reticence in her manners, the American life she carried with her so abundantly, the aura which her hours alone gave her, her furious ambition, her admiration for him and belief in him. He missed the few hours every day they spent together, and he missed the lovely silence which followed it and came before. He decided that he would either return to England or go back to Florence. He wrote to Constance outlining his dilemma, half-realizing that she would read his letter as an appeal of sorts.

Constance replied immediately and briskly offered him his own quarters on a lower floor of Casa Brichieri-Colombi which looked through a single door and three arches to the Duomo and the city. He could work in peace there. While all of Florence was richly and intricately displayed for the pleasure of those residing at Bellosguardo, the opposite was not the case. Bellosguardo remained apart from the city of palaces and churches and museums. Walking back there at night was, when he had moved a few streets away from the river, like walking towards any hill town in the Tuscan countryside. Constance inhabited the large apartment above him, and they shared domestic staff and the kitchen and garden. There was no one else living in the house. This time they did not even discuss the need for discretion about his presence in the city. It was known to very few that he was living under the same roof as Miss Woolson and it was mentioned to no one. Henry wrote to William merely to say that he had taken rooms on Bellosguardo. He wrote to Gosse insisting that he was alone and working. He wrote to Mrs Curtis of the beauties of Bellosguardo and his happiness at the view. He did not state that this came courtesy of Constance.

Nor did he mention to anyone that in the time he had been away, much to the Bootts’ alarm and the alarm of her doctor, Constance had entered into a deep melancholy and had taken to her bed where she had suffered, as Francis Boott told him, more than anyone could imagine. He could see signs of it when he arrived, despite her efforts to disguise it. She was happy for him to dine in Florence so that she could be alone in the evenings. Her deafness appeared to irritate her, and once they had been together a short time, she seemed compelled to withdraw.

But as the weather softened and spring came, Constance became happier. She loved her vast house and the garden that was now beginning to blossom, and she took daily pleasure in the old city beneath her without ever feeling tempted to walk much outside the confines of this small territory. Thus she guarded her privacy and respected his, and in the six weeks he stayed with her, they never appeared together in public.

He worked hard at his story of Shelley’s papers and Claire Clairmont and the American visitor. He believed that returning to this beautiful house and idyllic setting had been slightly improper, that he had appealed to Constance ’s mercy when she had none left to give. She knew, as he did, that he would leave, that this would be a respite for him, from his full solitude, or his London life, or his other travels. But for her the season, the house and his steady presence would make this time the most gratified and beguiling of her life. Her happiness, such as it was, came, he believed, from the perfect balance between the distance they kept from each other and their need for no other company. She dressed carefully, mainly in white. She paid attention to the decor of the house and the state of the garden, and watched over the kitchen with a fastidious eye.

One afternoon as they met on the terrace for tea, Casa Brichieri-Colombi was visited unexpectedly by a lady novelist of the English persuasion, Miss Rhoda Broughton, whom he had known in London for many years. She had said, in a letter sent from London, that she would call, but had not specified a date. She expressed much wonder at meeting him and embraced him warmly.

‘I knew that you were in Italy,’ she said, ‘I was told so by friends in Venice, but I did not know you were in Florence.’

Henry watched her as she settled herself into a wicker chair, having rearranged the cushions, talking all the while in her customary scatterbrained tone which could deceive the unwary into believing that she was foolish.

‘And both of you here!’ she said. ‘How lovely! I could travel in Italy for years and see neither of you and now suddenly I have you both.’

Henry smiled and nodded as the servant served Miss Broughton more tea. That she never seemed to listen to others and appeared to notice nothing save her immediate comfort was, he knew, a high pretence. She tended, in fact, to miss nothing. He presumed that she knew all along that he was living under Miss Woolson’s roof; he was determined that she should depart from Casa Brichieri-Colombi doubting the veracity of that knowledge.

They discussed various people in Venice whom Miss Broughton had seen, and then the conversation turned to the pleasure of leaving London.

‘I always dreamed of living in Florence,’ Constance said.

‘And now you do,’ Miss Broughton said. ‘And now you do. How lucky you both are to have such a beautiful house.’

Miss Broughton sipped her tea as Constance stared sharply into the distance. Henry wished he were writing now, feeling that he would be able, in the privacy of his room, to come up with a proper reply. He needed to think quickly and did not know if he could manage a complete denial.

‘Of course, Miss Broughton, I am merely visiting just as you are. Miss Woolson is the lucky one.’

When he looked at Constance, he saw that his remark did not seem to have interested her.

‘Where are you staying?’ Rhoda Broughton asked.

‘Oh, I’ve been wandering a great deal,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Venice, as you know, and may go on to Rome. Florence is marvellous, but there is too much society for a poor writer.’

‘I was not even aware that you had come to Florence,’ Rhoda Broughton said again.

Henry thought that she sounded even less convincing the second time and felt that they had discussed the topic of his whereabouts quite enough. Miss Broughton had now, fortunately, left him an opening. By bowing to her drily he was able to intimate that her not being aware may have, in fact, been part of his plan. As she was absorbing the implications of this, Constance changed the subject.

SINCE HE did not wish his new story to be read directly as the story of Claire Clairmont and her great-niece, and did not feel that moving the scene from Florence to Venice was sufficient, he made the dead writer American, one of the pioneers of American writing. He knew as he set this down that he could have been referring to James Fenimore Cooper, and as he concentrated on his American adventurer, he realized that he was using moments of his own return visit to Florence, his own intrusion, also. He began to understand, as he drafted the story, the irony of the case. If he were looking for an exiled spinster who kept papers and was related to a pioneer of American writing, then he had one upstairs, albeit one of great independence.

He wondered what would happen if he abandoned the spinster’s offer of marriage, if he could make the story’s denouement true to the strange, nuanced, open-ended and infinitely interesting life he was sharing now with Constance Fenimore Woolson, if he could make his adventurer begin to need, or half-need, the domestic life of a lodger with an intelligent and reserved woman who was lonely, but not willing to be preyed upon. She would ask him for nothing as obvious as marriage; what she wanted was a close and satisfying and, if necessary, unconventional attachment with loyalty and care and affection as well as solitude and distance.

ONE MORNING in Florence, when the maid had come, and he had opened a letter from Katherine Loring about the health and general welfare of his sister Alice, he began to discuss Alice with Constance.

‘Life has been difficult for her,’ he said. ‘Life itself seems to be the root of her malady.’

‘I think it’s difficult for all of us. The gap is so wide,’ Constance said.

‘You mean between her imagination and her confines?’ Henry asked.

‘I mean between using our intelligence as women to the full and the social consequences of that,’ Constance said. ‘ Alice has done what she had to do, and I admire her.’

‘She really has done nothing except stay in bed,’ Henry said.

‘That’s precisely what I mean,’ Constance replied.

‘I do not understand,’ he said.

‘I mean that the consequences get into the marrow of your soul.’

She smiled at him softly as though she had uttered a pleasantry.

‘I’m sure she would agree with you,’ he said. ‘She is blessed in having Miss Loring.’

‘She seems to be a ministering angel,’ Constance said.

‘Yes, we all need a Miss Loring,’ Henry said.

As soon as he made the last remark, he regretted it. The very sound of the name Miss Loring suggested a spinster skilled only in the art of caring for others. He had meant it as a joke, or a sign of gratitude, or a way of reducing the intensity of their exchange, but he knew, as it hung in the air, that it had come out as a flippant expression of his own need, as though that was what he required from Constance. He turned to her now, preparing a statement which would take the harm out of what he had just said, but he observed that she did not seem to have noticed it, or taken it on board. He was sure, nonetheless, that she had heard him. She remained placid as she resumed the conversation.

BETWEEN HIS departure from Florence and her death, they continued to correspond and meet. Once when they were both staying in Geneva, living on opposite sides of the lake but meeting daily, Alice James began to detect their familiarity. Henry is somewhere on the continent, she wrote to William, flirting with Constance. When he returned, he found his sister more truculent than usual, difficult, almost angry, accusing him of neglecting her while he gallivanted with a she-novelist.

Constance left Florence, having found, or so she said, the interruptions and invasions of Florentine society too much for her. She moved to London once more where she established herself with her customary zeal, placing solitude and hard work high on her list of needs. She travelled in the east with spirit and independence and sent him regular accounts of herself, using a tone both playfully ironic and distant. When she returned to England to live in Cheltenham and subsequently in Oxford, her power of lonely industry, Henry wrote to Francis Boott, was as remarkable and admirable as ever.

They remained close, aware always of each other’s whereabouts and preoccupations. When Alice James began to die and Constance was in Oxford, Henry kept her in touch with news of his sister’s condition. Both ladies, in the early months of 1892, sent one another short, brittle, witty messages. Constance stayed in England for a year after Alice ’s death before finally deciding to return to Italy and live in Venice.

By that time, the two novelists had developed a strange, unstructured and contented way of remaining close. They became connoisseurs of the twenty-four-hour meeting in provincial English places, staying in separate small hotels, taking walks together and having supper with each other. She could, on these occasions, be brilliantly difficult and combative, begging to differ with him on books of the day or sights they had seen, and ready to tease him about his addiction to refinements. He wondered if they were to be studied by a disinterested spectator how they would emerge. They were both Americans who had been away from America for many years. Neither of them had known the compromises which marriage brought, or the cares of parenthood. Neither of them had attended to a child crying in the night. They might, he felt, be mistaken for a brother and sister. But then he watched her delighting herself with the workings of her own wit, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories into which she pigeon-holed her fellow mortals, and whole buildings and cities, and her memories and his observations. And he knew, as she smiled at him, that nobody would imagine that his friend, so darkly ebullient now and funny and charming, was in the company of her brother. Just as they were a mystery to each other, he felt, they would remain a mystery to the thin slice of society that managed to notice them.

Henry met her in Paris as she moved with her belongings from Oxford to Venice. Packing and preparing to leave had taken her months. She was tired and bewildered, and a pain in her left ear was causing her immense misery. She made clear, on her arrival, that she would not be able to see a great deal of him. He could do the city alone, she said, and perhaps she could spend some time with him in the evening. But she was not sure, she added, that she would be able to see him at all.

Despite her warnings, on the second of these evenings Constance seemed well enough to dine with him. He noticed that her movements were slow. She was forced to incline her right ear towards him when he spoke so that she could hear him.

‘I had a letter from Francis Boott,’ she said, ‘who knew you were coming to Paris, but was under the impression that you were coming alone and that we had not been in contact for some time.’

‘Oh yes,’ Henry said, ‘I wrote to him about my plans which were vague at the time.’

‘He was amused, I think,’ Constance said, ‘because I told him that we were going to meet here for a few days, and in the same group of letters came yours which stated that you were going to Paris alone. He asked me if you could be alone and in my company at the same time.’

‘Dear Francis,’ Henry said.

‘I shall tell him that being partly invisible is merely a small aspect of my charm.’

She sounded slightly bitter, almost irritated.

‘ Venice, of course,’ he said, ‘will be beautiful. Once you are established there, it will be a dream.’

She sighed and then nodded.

‘The hard part is the moving, but maybe staying can be harder,’ she said.

‘The great pity is that there are no hills aboveVenice,’ he said. ‘One has to be there, or not there. The advantage is that one can more easily find beautiful quarters than in Florence.’

‘I dread going there now. I don’t know why,’ she said.

‘I have always thought,’ he said, ‘that I would like to spend some of each winter there, the quiet times when none of our compatriots blocks one’s path, and have my own haunts there, my own routines, and not be anyone’s guest.’

‘It’s a dream,’ Constance said, ‘which everyone who goes to Venice has.’

‘Since the death of my sister,’ Henry said, ‘my financial problems have greatly decreased. So it would not be impossible.’

‘To lease a floor in Venice, a pied-à-terre?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps two pieds,’ he said.

She smiled and for the first time seemed relaxed, almost animated.

‘I don’t imagine you on the Grand Canal,’ she said.

‘No. Somewhere hidden,’ he said. ‘It does not matter quite where, as long as it is difficult to find, with many blind alleys on the way.’

‘ Venice frightens me sometimes,’ Constance said. ‘The uncertainty of it, the possibility that I might lose my way every time I emerge.’

‘We will all do what we can to guide you,’ Henry said.

IN THE FEW years before he purchased the lease on Lamb House his London winters were easy; his routines when no one visited from the United States, when the Londoners whom he knew respected his habits, suited him and made him unwilling to travel. There was something in the distant, throbbing energy of the city which made him cling to London, even if it was a London whose news came to him second hand.

He loved the fixities of the morning, the familiar books, the hours alone fruitfully used, the afternoon slipping beautifully by. In London he dined out a few nights a week and spent the rest of his evenings alone, weary and oddly restless after a certain hour, but slowly learning to manage the quietness and the silence and his own company.

The letters from Constance, who was now established in Venice, suggested that she was changing her habits. She wrote about the Venetian lagoon and her exploration of the outer islands and small wayward places, hidden from the tourists, her journeys by gondola. But she also began to write about the people whom she was meeting,mentioning the names of friends of his in Venice – Mrs Curtis and Mrs Bronson, for example – and adding the names of others, such as Lady Layard, suggesting that she was part of their circle, or at least regularly invited to their houses and quite pleased to accept their hospitality.

Thus he began to believe that his old friend, whom he admired so much for her distance from things and her self-sufficiency, seemed to have entered willingly into the life of the Anglo-American colony in Venice, having allowed herself to be taken up by its richest and most socially ambitious hostesses. When she wrote to him to say that she and Mrs Curtis had been dutifully searching for a pied-à-terre for him, he became alarmed. He minded dreadfully that Constance was discussing his plans with people whom she did not know as well as he did. The tone of her letters and a letter he received from Mrs Curtis suggested that Constance had come close to making clear how well she knew him and how much she had seen of him in the past decade. He knew how easily and quickly this would be misconstrued.

As far as possible, he had lived an undisturbed life. He neither gave offence, he believed, nor took it easily. Publishers irritated him, and there was a theatre producer called Augustin Daly whose dealings had enraged him, and magazine editors required constant patience which often ran out; also, a payment not coming and being promised and still not arriving, or a book not printed in time, or a book not selling at all, or his work being maliciously handled in the newspapers, these could prey on his mind especially when night fell. But once a measure of time had passed, they became minor matters which took up very little time or energy. He forgot about them and did not harbour grudges.

Now, the idea of Constance in Venice, spending her evenings in the palazzi of the Grand Canal and discussing him freely, despite the stubborn reticence on which she prided herself, began to prey on his mind. A further letter from her describing her fellow lodgers at Casa Biondetti, including Lily Norton whose father and aunt were close friends of Henry and William, filled him with foreboding. He worked on his play and lived, he enjoyed telling Constance, the life of a hermit in London. He did not mention going to Venice or taking rooms there until he was pressed to confirm his interest by both Constance and Mrs Curtis, who now seemed to him to be working in tandem.

Twice, with the help of Constance, he had managed to inhabit the hill above Florence with almost no one knowing he was there. The road to Bellosguardo was steep and narrow and winding, and those who wished to visit would have to make an effort and have precise directions. It seemed that Constance had other ideas for him in Venice. It was not that he had ever imagined the possibility of living there in secret, but now that his association with Constance had been made public he foresaw a social round in which they would both be included. He imagined her listening with barely disguised impatience with her good ear to the oft-told tales of Daniel Curtis, or Mrs Bronson’s accounts of her exploits with Browning. He imagined her turning to him and in a single, biting glance hinting at her contempt for the company. She would also, and this was what concerned him most, be ready to conspire on his behalf with his old friends now that she had joined their society. These conspiracies would be well intentioned, but they would interfere crucially with his inviolable need to make his own arrangements and do as he pleased. Slowly, in the weeks after he received the news that she and Mrs Curtis had been searching for an apartment on his behalf, he felt a powerlessness that he had not felt since he was a child.

In July he wrote to Mrs Curtis to correct Miss Woolson’s misconception that he was looking for a flat in Venice. He realized, he said, that he had been toying with the affections of the watery city, but wondered if he had expressed himself clumsily to Miss Woolson in appearing to intimate that he might come to live in Venice. In fact, he had no plans to do so, he wrote, needing to live in London for all sorts of practical reasons. Every time he came to Venice, he said, and no doubt the next time would be the same, he cherished the dream of having a modest pied-á-terre, the dream being more vivid, he wrote, when he was on the spot, fading once he had returned home. He thanked Mrs Curtis for all her trouble, adding that while he had the fondest hope of going to Italy that winter, he had learned by stern experience not to make hard and fast plans.

He knew that his letter would be shown to Constance and he imagined her response. In England, they had come, in strange and subtle ways, to depend on each other. Even though there were matters which they never discussed, other things, including what they were writing and their relationships to editors and publishers, were shared. He knew how much she loved his confidences, such as they were, and later in solitude went over, he imagined, every detail he had told her. She would know now that he did not intend to take a place in Venice, but also that he seemed inclined not to visit in the coming winter, despite his promises to her that he would. She was to be left to her own devices in Venice among people, especially the idle rich, whom he knew she would come to despise.

Perhaps they could meet in the spring, he thought, in Geneva or Paris, but he did not think he would come to Venice. He had an image of her studying him critically as he arrived at the salon of Mrs Curtis and alluding sharply later to his charming behaviour as he enjoyed the hospitality of the Anglo-American society there, whose members viewed him as a valuable prize.

He did not hear from her as summer went into autumn. He presumed that she was offended and he imagined also that she was working, as he was. With all his correspondents, he allowed for large intervals in which he did not write to them. But the silence between Kensington and Venice was of a different order. Eventually in late September she wrote, but the tone was distant and chilly, the letter merely informing him that she had moved from Casa Biondetti, where she had been very well looked after, to more private quarters, where she could be alone, in Casa Semitecolo nearby. She mentioned almost in passing that she was exhausted, having written and re-written her latest novel, and hoped for nothing now except a bookless winter. Affectionately yours, she wrote, and then signed her name. He read the letter over, knowing that she would have chosen every word carefully. He looked at the mention of the bookless winter and considered it, but it was only later that he understood its ominous implications.

HE SPENT December in further dispute with the theatre producer Augustin Daly, who had behaved insolently and returned his play Mrs Jaspar. There was much correspondence about the matter, and for a number of weeks near Christmas the row with Daly filled a good deal of his waking life. His Christmas and New Year in London, however, were quiet and reflective as he rewrote his play.

One afternoon in January he was working quietly when Smith put a telegram on the mantelpiece. Henry must, he later thought, have left it there without looking at it for an hour or more, being engrossed in his writing. It was only when he broke for tea that he moved absent-mindedly to the fireplace and opened the envelope. The telegram informed him that Constance was dead. His first response was to go to Smith and ask him calmly for tea; he then returned to his study and, closing the door and sitting at his desk, he studied the telegram which had come from Constance’s sister, Clara Benedict, in the United States. He knew that he would have to go to Venice and wondered now from whom he should enquire about the details of her death. He drank the tea when it was brought, and then he went to the window and frantically studied the street outside as though some distant detail there, some movement, a sound even, might help him to a full realization of what had happened or might erase such a realization as it slowly dawned.

How had she died? What occurred to him now and caused him suddenly to freeze was the suspicion that she had not died of any illness. She was strong, he thought, and perfectly healthy and he could not imagine her succumbing to an ailment. She had finished her book, and that would have left her, as it always did, forlorn. He knew that she hated the winter, and the winter in Venice could be especially dark and severe. He thought in cold fright about his own refusal to come to Venice and his not letting her know this directly. He was sure that his not having made arrangements to see her must have depressed her deeply. And thus, as he stood at the window, it struck him that she might have killed herself. And that was when he began to shake and had to move towards an armchair in his study, where he sat frozen, making himself go over and over the facts of her existence during the previous year.

Some time later he was interrupted by Smith with a second telegram. He opened it hastily. It was from Constance’s niece, who, having been in Munich when she heard the news, had now arrived in Venice. She confirmed the news. As he put the telegram aside, he made the decision that he would not now go to Venice. He would be helpless there, and the idea of her inert body, the physical fact of her corpse, and her dead face masking and unmasking its own history as the light allowed, filled him with horror. He did not want to see her body, or to be close to her coffin, which was, the telegram told him, to be interred a week later in the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

He remained in his flat all day and told no one what had happened. He wrote to Constance’s doctor, who was also a friend, in Italy, expressing his shock, still not sure how she had died. It was all, he said, ghastly amazement and distress. He had not even known she was sick, he said, and had a dismal, dreadful image of her being alone and unfriended at the last, someone who had had intrinsically one of the saddest and least happy natures he had ever met. As he finished the letter, an image of her face in all its complex life, her eyes shining, her expression brilliantly intelligent and receptive came to him. He allowed himself to cry before going to the window again and staring down at the scene below, at people who meant nothing to him moving on the street.

In the morning he knew that, although he had not dreamed about her, her spirit, the questing essence of who she was, had made itself known to him during the night, and he wanted, as soon as he woke, to close his eyes and go back to sleep to avoid the cold fact of her extinction. No one whom he knew had read his work as carefully, had tried to know him as clearly. No one had her mixture of ambition and sharpness, vulnerability and melancholy, unpredictability and bravery. No one had her great sympathy, and it became a heavy burden in the hollow of himself to imagine that sympathy coming to the end of its endurance.

He received no further news, and as every hour went by, he imagined a different scenario, following its path and working out its implications. He began to veer between definitely not going to Rome for the funeral and setting off immediately; several times he sent Smith to book and unbook a passage to Italy. And then, having prevaricated for several days, he opened The Times to find the news that Constance had jumped to her death from the window of the house where she lived in Venice. It was, the paper said, suicide. At once, he began to reassure himself that he was not at fault. He had owed her nothing, he thought, he had made her no promises that were binding. They had not been lovers; they were not related by blood. He owed her only his friendship, just as he owed it to many others, he told himself, and all of the others knew that when a book was being written, his blinds were down, he was not available. All of his friends knew not to make demands on him, and Constance knew that too.

Henry wrote to John Hay, a mutual friend who was already in Rome. He told Hay that he had, in fact, been ready to travel, to stand by her grave in the Protestant cemetery, but once the nature of her death had been confirmed, he had collapsed before the pity and the horror of it, he wrote, and he could not travel now. She had always been, he added, a woman so little formed for positive happiness that half one’s affection for her was, in its essence, a kind of anxiety.

He resisted the thought that came to him when he had written the letter and was alone. It had a heavy crushing force, and he held it from him for as long as he could. He allowed himself to think that Constance had not lightly taken up his time, nor had she lightly allowed her own emotions to become so focussed. She had been subtle enough and nervous enough to make her demands silently, but they were all the clearer and more emphatic for that. He now had to face the idea that he, in turn, had sent her powerful and subtle signals of his need for her. And each time it became apparent to him what effect they were having, he retreated into the locked room of himself, a place whose safety he needed as desperately as he needed her involvement with him.

She had been caught, as it were, in a large misunderstanding, not only in the snare of his solitary, sedentary exile, but also in the idea that he was a man who did not, and would not ever, desire a wife. Her intelligence surely should have warned her that he would, under the slightest pressure, even out of fear, pull back; but her need and the quality of her sympathy came to outpace her intelligence, he thought. Nonetheless, she had been careful: she had acknowledged his needs and his reticence and was ready to make space for them, but when she moved too close, became too public, he rejected her.

He had his reasons for choosing to remain alone; his imagination, however, had stretched merely as far as his fears and not beyond. He had exerted control; what he had done made him shudder. Had he gone to Venice that winter, he knew, she would not have killed herself. If she had appealed to him to visit and he had refused, it might be easier for him now to feel simple guilt. But her appeals were all over and they would be for ever. He had let her down. He did not know if her friends in Venice, and friends of his, understood that this was the case and discussed it in the days after her death.

He could not face the idea that Constance ’s suicide had been planned for a long time. He wrote to others, to Rhoda Broughton, to Francis Boott, to William, saying to each in turn that Constance ’s last act had been rash, a form of madness, a demented moment. He did not fully believe what he wrote, although each time he set it down, it seemed to become more plausible and definitive. He did not express to anyone his reservations about this version of how she ended. However, as some part of her spirit brushed through his rooms in the weeks after her death, he had a sense of her as the only person he had ever known who was fully skilled at deciphering the unsaid and the unspoken. There was no need even to whisper the words, or let them form fully in his mind; her fresh ghost understood that he knew, he knew well that she was not given to moments of insanity or sudden abrupt gestures, no matter what the pressures. She was a woman of great determination who made decisions carefully and rationally. She had an abiding dislike for shrillness and theatricality.

Once night fell and the fire was blazing and the lamps glowing and he was alone, he came face to face with what had happened to his friend. She had planned her own death, he came to believe, having calculated for some time the possibilities. Her novel was finished and he knew that often, when she had completed a book,she did not think that she would write again. The winter was sad and damp in Venice where she moved between dark solitude and people she could easily begin to dislike.

And for the sake of something hidden within his own soul which resisted her, and because of his respect for convention and social decorum, he had abandoned her there. He was the person who could have rescued her, had he sent her a sign.

She planned her death, he thought, as she would plan a book, full of uncertainty and nerves, but also with ambition and a relentless physical courage. The influenza she suffered in those weeks, which he heard about from her doctor, would merely have added to her strength of will. She had decided, he knew, that she would be happier at rest, and she was prepared to do extreme violence to herself, to smash her bones and her head against the hard ground, to achieve her aim. Her restless curiosity, the pure honesty of her response, the practical nature of her imagination, all these came to him now, as what she had been powerfully visited him in the London winter, when her death had ceased to be news, until he knew that he would have to go to Venice where she died and from there travel to Rome where her broken body lay in the ground.

She came to him forcefully, palpably, in the days before he travelled. The woman he had kept at arm’s length was replaced by a woman of possibilities, a phantom he dreamed about. His parents were dead, his sister had been dead two years; William was far away, and he cared very little about the London society to which he had once paid so much attention. He could do as he pleased; he could have lived at Bellosguardo sharing a household with Constance, or he could have encouraged her to find adjoining houses for them in some English coastal town.

Now he thought about her dead body, and the rooms she had filled with the passion of her aura, her books, her mementoes, her clothes, her papers. She preferred these rooms to most people; rooms were her sacred spaces. He began to imagine her rooms in Venice, at Casa Biondetti, and those at Casa Semitecolo, and her rooms at Oxford before she left England. He longed now for those spaces as though he had known them and had reason to miss them. He saw her figure, so tidy in its movements, flitting across these rooms, and as he did so, he came to understand something of his initial resistance to going to Venice when she died, or going to Rome for her funeral. He would have had to walk away from her, he would have had to enact their separation. From a relationship that had been so tentative and full of possibility, he would have had to face her absence in all its finality. She had no further use for him.

This feeling that he had been brusquely and violently rejected somehow brought him closer to her. Now the prospect of seeing her rooms in Venice, looking at her papers, staying in the atmosphere she had created, began to intrigue him. He longed for her company and wondered, as the day of his departure for Italy came near, if he had always longed for it, but if only now, when it had no implications, could he allow himself fully to indulge the idea.

In Genoa, as he waited for Constance’s sister Clara Benedict, he wrote to Kay Bronson and asked her to secure for him the rooms which Constance had occupied the previous summer at Casa Biondetti at the same terms. He wished also that the padrone would cook for him as he had for Miss Woolson, remembering how happy his friend had been with the fare. He was not surprised when he received word that the rooms were free. Somehow, with Constance guiding him, he had been sure all along that they would be. She was now two months dead.

THE AMERICAN consul came with them to break the seal which the authorities had put on her apartment at the time of her death. Tito, who had been her gondolier, waited below for them. Mrs Benedict and her daughter stood in silence as the door into the house of death was unlocked. They seemed to Henry hesitant about stepping in. He stood behind them, trying to believe that her spirit was not in these abandoned rooms, merely her papers, her belongings, her left-overs, her gatherings, for she had been a collector of objects. He felt more sharply now that she had planned it all and foreseen it. In her love of detail, she would have been able to predict the arrival of the consul to break the seal, the boat waiting below, and she would have been able to imagine also the three others waiting to enter her room – her sister Clara Benedict, her niece Clare and her friend Henry James.

This, he thought, was her last novel. They all played their assigned roles. He watched as the American women stood in her bedroom afraid to approach the window to the small balcony from which she had jumped. Constance would have been able to conjure up their stricken faces and would have known, too, that Henry James would have studied the women, observing them with cold sympathy. She would have smiled to herself at his ability to keep his own feelings at a great distance from himself, careful to say nothing. Thus the scene taking place in this room, each breath they took, the very expression on their faces, each word they left said and unsaid, all of it belonged to Constance. It was pictured by her with wry interest during the time when she knew she would die, Henry believed. They were her characters; she had written the script for them. And she knew that Henry would recognize her art in these scenes. His very recognition was part of her dream. No matter where he looked or what he thought, he felt the sharpness of her plans and a sort of sad laughter at how easy it was to manipulate her sister and her niece and how delicious to direct the actions of her friend the novelist who, it seemed, had wished to be free of her.

The Benedicts did not know what to do; they employed Tito to ferry them from one part of the city to another; soon they spoke of him fondly. They sought comfort in Constance ’s friends; but when they heard that she had been found alive when she fell, that she had moaned as she lay dying, they were inconsolable. They cried each time they entered her rooms until Henry felt that if Constance could witness this, or if she had included it in her imagined vision, she would regret what she had done. She would never have been so hard.

Her sister and her niece remained helpless in the face of the practical. At first they did not wish to disturb Constance’s papers and seemed happy to leave everything in situ. They appeared not to believe that she was dead; and touching her things, they thought, would be a way of consigning the woman who had possessed them to oblivion.

After several days, when all had been grief and confusion, softened by the ministering of Constance’s circle of friends, with many lunches and dinners and gatherings to distract and console the sister and niece, Henry arranged to meet them at the apartment, to which he had now been given a key. Constance had kept a great deal of paper, half-finished and unpublished work, letters, fragments, notes. He had touched nothing on his early visits to the apartment, but he made a mental map of the terrain. He knew that should there be a battle between him and the Benedicts over what should be kept and what should be destroyed, he would lose the battle. As he waited for them, he determined to avoid even the slightest skirmish.

When he heard their key being turned, he shivered. Their voices seemed like interruptions. This was the first time he had heard an ordinary conversation between them which did not centre on Constance’s suicide and their own shock and sadness. Once they entered the bedroom where they found him standing at the window they became silent and serious.

‘I meant to ask you if your quarters are comfortable,’ Mrs Benedict said.

‘The apartment is pleasant,’ he said, ‘and its atmosphere is appropriately full of the presence of Miss Woolson.’

‘I do not think that I could bear to sleep there,’ Clare said. ‘Nor here indeed.’

‘This apartment is very cold,’ Mrs Benedict said. ‘It is the coldest place.’

She sighed and he felt that at any moment she was going to cry again. Both he and Clare watched her, however, as she seemed to gain strength. There was, he saw now, a toughness in her nature which matched that of her dead sister. In that moment, as she willed herself to speak, she could have been Constance.

‘We must make arrangements,’ she said.‘We have not been able to find a will, it may be buried among her papers. And we must begin to take care of practical matters.’

‘Constance was a writer of significance,’ Henry said, ‘a very singular figure in American letters. Thus her papers must be treated with care. There may be unpublished manuscripts, a story or two that she did not finish or did not send to an editor. I believe these must be carefully preserved.’

‘We should be so glad,’ Mrs Benedict said, ‘if you would look at her papers for us. Neither of us could bear it, I think, or have the concentration it would require. I think this room is the saddest place I have ever been.’

IT WAS ORDERED that fires be lit each morning in Constance’s study and in her bedroom and that they should be maintained by a servant until the early evening. The Benedicts came and went in Tito’s gondola, being kept busy by the American colony, and on each visit Henry had something to show them, an unpublished story, a number of poems, an interesting letter. They agreed that even fragments should be preserved, perhaps carried back to America and looked after in her memory.

He himself wanted merely one memento of her. Having viewed the general collection of her objects with sorrow and indecision, he eventually chose a small painting. It was a scene from the wild untamed American landscape she had loved. When he showed it to her sister and niece, they told him he must have it.

He remained at her desk from morning until darkness fell. Each time the Benedicts left the apartment he went to the window and watched them as they stepped into the gondola, observing their growing animation, and then he returned to her desk and found papers he had saved and brought some of them to the fire in the bedroom and others to the fire in the study. He consigned them to the flames and stood looking at them as they burned. And when they were ash, he made sure that they could not be noticed among the embers.

He did not want the strange, cryptic and bitter notes from his sister Alice to Miss Woolson to be part of some cache of papers that would be open to others to read. He did not even wish to read them all himself. As he went through the papers and spotted his sister’s handwriting, he put the letter aside, coldly and methodically, making sure that it lay under other papers and could not be seen by the Benedicts should they chance to arrive unexpectedly. He also found some letters of his own, and as soon as he saw the handwriting, he put them aside. He had no interest in rereading them. He wished them destroyed. He could find no diary and no will.

Among her papers, however, he found a recent letter from her doctor discussing her various illnesses and her melancholy. He read until he found his own name. He placed the letter carefully into the pile to be burned without reading any further. All of her literary manuscripts including drafts, he put aside for the Benedicts to take home.

MOST EVENINGS he dined with the Benedicts, making sure always that someone else was present so that the conversation could range over more general matters, not confined to the reason for their presence in Venice. He preferred the party to be large, thus making it more difficult for them to discuss with him once more the task he was performing and the arrangements they were making. Slowly, it became clear that they were tiring of Venice; the empty days, the rainy weather, the greyness of the light and the monotony of the company began to make them feel that they should prepare to depart. Also, he noted that their presence, as each day passed, was of less interest to Constance’s friends and the wider colony whose sympathy had, at the beginning, been intense, but whose invitations grew less insistent now that the Benedicts had been a month in Venice.

On these evenings, he liked to rise early from the table, it being understood by all that he was involved in onerous work and thus was not confined by the normal rules. The Benedicts put Tito at his disposal if the distance to his lodgings was too great. Although the lower floors of Casa Biondetti contained some Americans, including Lily Norton, he was surprised at how easy it was to reach his quarters on the top floor without having to see them. Each evening, he found a fire lit and one lamp by his bed and another on a table close to an easy chair. The rooms were not opulent, but in this light they were rich in their colouring, and because the apartment was neither on the scale of a palace nor the quarters inhabited by servants, and because the landlord, who had been fond of Miss Woolson, made every effort, Henry found his room comforting and welcoming. The high soft bed offered him at first a deep and dreamless sleep from which he woke each morning refreshed and ready for the day’s work.

He looked forward to the night. He longed to return to his quarters at Casa Biondetti not because he was tired, or bored by the company, but because the rooms themselves offered him a glow of warmth which lasted through the night.

Tito was always waiting. Like anyone who had worked for Constance, he loved her and wished to look after her sister and niece. He remained respectful and silent as he ferried Henry to his quarters, but he made clear, since he had not met him before, and since Henry was not a member of the family, that Henry’s position was almost that of an outsider. Henry knew that should he want the most accurate account of Constance’s state of mind during the last months of her life, Tito was most likely to possess such knowledge. As he became acquainted with Tito, however,he understood how unlikely he was ever to part with it.

Only once in Henry’s presence did Tito speak of her. One night, as they waited for her daughter, Mrs Benedict asked Henry to compliment Tito on his dexterity, especially on corners and small canals. When Henry translated her remarks, Tito bowed solemnly to her and then said that Miss Woolson had sought him out not for the dexterity she had mentioned, which all the gondoliers had, but because he knew the lagoon, the open water, and could navigate safely there. Miss Woolson always preferred to move out from the city, out into the lagoon, he said. Many Americans, he said, love the Grand Canal and want to travel up and down it all day. But not Miss Woolson. She liked the Grand Canal because it led out to the lonely open water, where you would meet no one. Even in the winter, she had loved it, he said. Even in the bad weather. As far out as you could go. She had her favourite places there, he said.

Henry wanted to ask him if she had taken such journeys right until the end, but he knew from the way that Tito had finished his speech that no more information would be forthcoming unless Mrs Benedict were to ask a question. Once Henry had translated for her, however, she smiled at the gondolier distractedly, and asked Henry what he thought her daughter might be doing to keep them waiting so long.

AFTER A WHILE he began to wake in the night; the worried thoughts which came disturbed him, and in the morning there remained a residue of the night’s unease. After a time, however, his waking was merely an interlude in his sleeping, another aspect of the night’s deep rest rather than a disturbance; he felt no fear, and no worried thoughts came into his mind, but rather a sense of abiding warmth. In this period, he did not feel Constance’s presence at all. He felt instead a nameless and numinous presence. As time passed, the glow on entering these rooms, and when he woke in the night, took on a more particular intensity. He found himself all day looking forward to this, and wondering if, when he left here and returned to London, such ease and sweet goodwill could follow him.

It was not a ghost, not anything unsettled and haunting, but rather it was a figure hovering gently, the shadow movements of his mother’s protecting aura coming to him now in the night, pure and exquisite in its female tenderness, gentle and enclosing, cajoling him back to sleep in those rooms which had so recently been inhabited by his friend, whose death still filled him with guilt and whose sad, impassive spirit looked on at his determination each day, as he sat at her desk quietly setting aside letters from her doctor and from Alice’s friend Miss Loring and, when the coast was clear, putting them into the fire.

AFTER MUCH negotiation with the American consul about their relative’s estate, and much fussing and prevarication, the Benedicts oversaw the packing of her papers and the wrapping of her paintings and mementoes which they placed in the consul’s care until legal matters were sorted out to his satisfaction. The month of April had been rainy and chilly and both of the women had caught colds and been confined to quarters. By the time they emerged again Venice had changed; the days were longer and the wind had died down and many of their acquaintances had also, for one reason or another, left the city. Thus their farewell dinner was desultory and badly attended with Henry eager to stand up from the table before nine, as usual, and shake their hands, and kiss them if they should need kissing, and look into their eyes, promising that, as he still had a key to her apartment at Casa Semitecolo, he would oversee the final clearing out of her effects and the return of the key to the landlord.

In the morning when the Benedicts had left the city Henry discovered that they had made no arrangements to dispose of Constance’s clothes. They must have known, he realized, that her wardrobe and dressing tables were full because they had searched for her will there. He wondered if they had discussed the matter, or if it had evoked too much sadness for them to deal with, and then, at the end, they were too embarrassed to mention it. In any case, they had, it seemed, left him to deal with Constance’s wardrobe and personal effects. He waited for several days in case one of their Venetian friends made contact to arrange the removal of the clothes. As no one did, he became certain that the Benedicts had taken advantage of his support and had fled leaving wardrobes full of dresses and cupboards full of shoes, underclothes and other items, that appeared not to have been disturbed.

He wanted no further discussions about Constance’s estate, and therefore did not wish to contact any of her friends who would, he knew, quickly spread the news that her clothes had been left in the apartment, thus offering the freedom to visit and snoop as they pleased, asking for the key at will, and invading the privacy he had guarded for her in the time after her death. When he had pictured her planning each scene in which he and her relatives took part, this aspect of her demise was far from his mind. The throwing away, or giving away, of her clothes had not been, he was sure, part of her dream afterlife. While he had felt her deep displeasure as he burned the letters, now he felt a dull sadness and the grim weight of her absence as he contemplated the clearing-out of her wardrobe.

He confided in no one except Tito who, he felt, would be willing, under his supervision, to transport what was left of his friend’s worldly goods. Tito, he believed, would know what to do with them. But when Henry showed him the mass of clothes in the wardrobe and the shoes and then the underclothes, Tito merely shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He repeated these gestures when Henry suggested that perhaps one of the convents might be interested in old clothes. Not the clothes of the dead, Tito told him, no one will want the clothes of the dead.

For one moment, Henry wished he had handed the key to the landlord and left the city, but he knew that it would not have been long before he received letters about the clothes, asking what should be done with them, not only from the landlord himself, but from members of the colony.

Tito, in the meantime, stood in what had been Constance’s bedroom watching him fiercely.

‘What can we do with them?’ Henry asked him.

His shrug this time was almost contemptuous. Henry held his gaze and sternly insisted that the clothes would have to be moved.

‘We cannot leave them here,’ he said.

Tito did not reply. Henry knew that his boat was waiting, he knew that together they would have to carry these clothes and place them in the gondola.

‘Can you burn them?’ Henry asked.

Tito shook his head. He was intensely studying the wardrobe, as though he were guarding its contents. Henry felt that if he made to empty the wardrobe, Tito would rush at him to prevent his interfering with his mistress’s clothes. He sighed and kept his eyes down, hoping that the impasse at which they had arrived would cause Tito to speak or make a suggestion. As the silence between them lingered, Henry opened the windows and went to the balcony and looked at the building across the way and the ground onto which Constance had fallen.

On turning and catching Tito’s eye, he saw that Tito wanted to say something. He gestured to him in encouragement. All of this, Tito said, should have been taken to America. Henry nodded in agreement and then said that it was too late now.

Tito shrugged again.

Henry opened one of the cupboard drawers and then another. Tito, when he turned, was watching him with an interest bordering on alarm. Henry stood and faced him.

Did he know, he asked him, the place in the lagoon to which he had ferried her regularly? The one he had told Henry about? Where there was nothing?

Tito nodded. He waited for Henry to speak again, but Henry merely gazed at him as he considered what had just been said. Tito seemed worried. Several times he made as though to speak, but sighed instead. Finally, as though someone were in the next room, he pointed surreptitiously to the clothes and then in the direction of the door and then in the direction of the far lagoon. They could, he silently asserted, take the clothes there and bury them in the water. Henry nodded in agreement, but still neither of them moved until Tito lifted his right hand and stretched out the fingers.

Five o’clock, he whispered. Here.

At five Tito was waiting at the door. Neither of them spoke as they entered the apartment. Henry had wondered if Tito would bring a companion and if they both could be trusted to take Constance’s clothes and bury them in the lagoon without any further questions or hesitations. But Tito came alone. He managed to suggest that the work of moving the goods from the apartment to the gondola should be done now and quickly and by both of them.

Tito took the first bundle of dresses and coats and skirts and motioned to Henry to take the second bundle and follow him. As soon as he held the dresses in his arms, Henry caught a powerful smell, which sharply evoked the memory of his mother and his Aunt Kate. It was a smell so redolent of them, their busy lives around their dressing rooms and wardrobes, their preparations for travel, the folding and protecting and packing which they did themselves no matter where they were. And then as he crossed the room carrying the bundle he caught another smell which belonged to Constance only, some perfume of hers, something she had used in all the years when he knew her, which mixed in now with the other smell as he carried the dresses down the stairs and deposited them in the waiting gondola.

In their journeys from her bedroom to the boat, their movements fast and watchful as though they were doing something illegal, they slowly emptied the wardrobes. They carried her shoes and stockings and then, careful not even to glance at each other, her white underwear which they hid beneath the dresses and coats in the gondola so that it could not be seen. They were both out of breath as they went one last time to see if everything had been cleared. The smell had brought her so close to him that he would not have been surprised if, at that moment, he had found her standing in the bare room. He almost felt free to speak to her, and looking around the room one more time, after Tito had descended to the gondola, he sensed that she was there, an absolute presence, her old practical self glad that the task had been completed, that nothing of her remained; the room did not seem to him full of dust and air as much as filled with the sense that should he wish to linger she would be ready to outstare him.

As the light began to fade over the city, and a pink glow mixed with the pale and rich colours of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, and the water reflected the sky which was tinged with shades of red and pink, they set out towards the lagoon. They were relaxed now, although neither spoke nor acknowledged the other’s existence. Henry took in the light and the buildings, glancing back at the Salute, feeling a strange contentment. He was tired, but he was also curious to know where exactly Tito would take him.

It was, he thought, like meeting her again, away from their friends and family and the social whirl, connecting in calm places. This was how they had known each other. No one would ever discover that he had come here; it was unlikely that Tito would ever volunteer this information to any of their friends. The only person watching them was Constance herself as Tito steered them out beyond the Lido into waters into which Henry had never before ventured. They moved out until soon they had merely the seabirds and the setting sun for company.

At first Henry believed that Tito was searching for a precise place, but he soon realized that, by moving at random back and forth, he was postponing the action they would now have to take. When they caught each other’s eye and Tito intimated that Henry should begin their grim task, Henry shook his head. They might as well have been carrying her body, he thought, to lift her and drop her from the boat, let her sink into the water. Tito continued to circle a small area, and on seeing that Henry would not move, he smiled in mild rebuke and exasperation and laid down the pole until the gondola began to rock gently in the calm water. Before he reached for the first dress, Tito blessed himself and then he laid the garment flat on the water as though the water were a bed, as though the dress’s owner were preparing for an outing and would shortly come into the room. Both men watched as the colour of the material darkened and then the dress began to sink. Tito placed a second and then a third, each time tenderly, on the water, and then continued working with a slow set of peaceful gestures, shaking his head as they floated away each time, and moving his lips at intervals in prayer. Henry watched but did not move.

The gondola swayed so gently that Henry was not aware of moving in any direction, merely staying still. As her underclothes sank, he imagined that the consignment lay directly beneath them, falling slowly to the ocean bed.

It was only when Tito reached to lift the pole that both of them at the same time caught sight of a black shape in the water less than ten yards away and Tito cried out.

In the gathering dusk it appeared as though a seal or some dark, rounded object from the deep had appeared on the surface of the water. Tito took the pole in both hands as if to defend himself. And then Henry saw what it was. Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted, their arms and bellies bloated with water. As they turned the boat, Henry noticed that a greyness had set in over Venice. Soon a mist would settle over the lagoon. Tito had already moved the gondola towards the buoyant material; Henry watched as he worked at it with the pole, pushing the ballooning dress under the surface and holding it there and then moving his attention to another dress which had partially resurfaced, pushing that under again, working with ferocious strength and determination. He did not cease pushing, prodding, sinking each dress and then moving to another. Finally, he scanned the water to make certain that no more had reappeared, but all of them seemed to have remained under the surface of the dark water. Then one swelled up suddenly some feet from them.

‘Leave it!’ Henry shouted.

But Tito moved towards it, and blessing himself once more, he found its centre with the pole and pushed down, nodding to Henry as he held it there as if to say that their work was done; it was hard, but it was done. And then he lifted the pole and took up his position at the prow of the gondola. It was time to go back. He began to move them slowly and skilfully across the lagoon to the city which lay almost in darkness.