A Venetian Affair (31 page)

Now that summer was near, the evenings were warmer and Giustiniana was often invited to dine at Vauxhall, the fancy pleasure garden built on the other side of the Thames. The excursion always made her apprehensive. She did not like crossing the river on the unsteady little ferryboats. The Thames was not particularly wide at the crossing point—“no wider than the Giudecca Canal,” she explained to Andrea, referring to the waterway separating Venice proper from the Giudecca. It scared her nonetheless: “Yesterday evening . . . the tiny size of the little boat, the fact the boat-man only had one arm and was accompanied by his ten-year-old son, I think all of those things together increased my fear. Anyway, whatever the reason, everyone had a good laugh at my expense.”

Knyphausen was a reassuring presence in such circumstances. He was always tender with her, always considerate. But there was no real spark between them, no strong physical attraction. There never had been. And no matter how much Giustiniana kept telling herself what a likable man he was, how really fond she was of him, she could not bury her feelings for Andrea. They kept coming to the surface, sapping the energy she needed to stop her relationship with Knyphausen from running out of steam.

On a hot morning in early June, Giustiniana was at home, still in her nightgown, writing her weekly letter to Andrea. It was a perfectly innocent letter. She mentioned a dinner at Vauxhall, said she was glad a rumor about Voltaire having died had turned out to be false, and, with evident annoyance, promised she would send the petulant Marietta Corner an English cloak if she insisted. “But I must warn her that the cloaks here are nothing special. In fact, everyone seems to like Italian ones very much.” Only toward the end did her tone become more personal as she again touched on the vexing subject of marriage. Oh, she would find a husband, no doubt, if only she set her mind to the task: “Everyone predicts I will get myself one if I stay here.” But she did not want to remain in London much longer, not with her social position still so uncertain. What was the point? She had not come all the way to England to marry a dreary solicitor. Marriage, she insisted, was no longer a necessary part of her plans. “I mostly wish to choose a place to live in that I will like and where I will feel free. If I manage to get an income of six to eight hundred pounds sterling a year, as I hear I may get, then I can live well anywhere. As soon as I have secured that sum I will share my plan with you and ask for your advice. You know I love you and that I have always looked up to you.”

Just as she was finishing up her letter, Knyphausen was announced. Giustiniana rushed into the next-door room to put some clothes on “and in my usual absentmindedness I left the letter on the table.” Knyphausen walked into the room and saw it lying there. The temptation was too strong: he picked it up and read it, and when Giustiniana returned to the drawing room he made a “horrible” scene. She was a “wicked” woman, he shouted at her, and “thoughtless” and “duplicitous.” He could not contain himself. “For two hours I had to withstand the assault of a man who rarely gets angry at all.” She had never seen him explode like that before.

Later in the day the tempest finally subsided, and Giustiniana and Knyphausen made peace. She held her ground, insisting she would not give up writing letters to Andrea. “You are my true friend, as he himself has accepted.” The baron, in turn, laid down his conditions: henceforth Giustiniana was to show him all their correspondence—her letters to Andrea as well as Andrea’s to her. “What can I do, dear Memmo? Will you forgive me for this too? He is such an upright man, and I owe him so much I had to give in. So please refrain from writing about him. Do not show him you know about us. . . . He would never forgive me if he knew that I had divulged this secret to you. . . . Keep our friendship alive since that is all we may count on; and forgive my weakness for a man who is really quite worthy of respect.”

She could feel her relationship with Knyphausen growing hollow even as she wrote these words.

CHAPTER Nine

Giustiniana spent much of the summer in bed. The air was hot and sticky. The marshes around the city seethed with malevolent insects, and fevers spread easily. Bouts of high temperature kept her confined to her room. Outside her window, the bustle in Dean Street had quieted. The “polite end” of London was mostly empty, its inhabitants having migrated to their country homes after the King’s birthday in June. Lady Holderness had left town as well. Word was that only poor Lady Coventry was still at home, slowly dying of lead poisoning from using too much whitening powder on her delicate skin.

It was a strange time. In late winter the end of the war had seemed so near. Then, in early spring, news had come that preliminary peace talks at The Hague had collapsed. William Pitt, still in charge of government policy, was bent on crushing France’s fleet and dismantling its overseas possessions. So the war had to go on: at sea, in North America, and on the Continental battlefields, where the exhausted Prussian Army, supported by the English Treasury, fought strenuously against France, Austria, and Russia. In London pro-German sentiment continued to be high. A poetry collection by Frederick the Great was the season’s best-seller. “Mostly odes and a poem on the art of war,” Giustiniana wrote wearily. “They read it here as if it were a reliquary.”

Some days she was worn out by fever and shifted uncomfortably under piles of damp, crumpled sheets; others she was suddenly better and enjoyed the long hours she had to herself. Propped up by a pile of cushions, she read, she wrote, she slept. During those long, sweltering days she felt her tenuous ties to London dissolve as her mind wandered dreamily back to Venice. She imagined Andrea’s life from what he told her in his letters. She saw herself floating back into his arms. The thought of returning to Italy was often in her mind, and she did not resist it.

Knyphausen hovered around her, ever solicitous. “He certainly loves me,” she told Andrea, as if registering a self-evident fact; but she added little about her own feelings. She was annoyed by his insistence that he read her correspondence and was not beyond writing a few fake letters in order to mislead him. Nor did she hand over to him everything she wrote. In a letter clearly intended to elude Knyphausen’s eye, she confessed to Andrea, “I might as well tell you, for your own glory, that I love less and less the man I should be loving more and more.”

In mid-July she was shaken out of her feverish reverie. For weeks Andrea had continued to write with the detached tone he had been asked to use in order to avoid exciting Knyphausen’s suspiciousness. In fact, he had become so adept at playing the part of the old friend—never allowing himself the slightest slip—that his coolness often made Giustiniana uneasy. The letter she now received was far more disturbing than anything he had written to her before.

Andrea confessed that he was tired of “easy, everyday gallantries.” His brief affair with Marietta was over. He wanted to organize his love life more efficiently and possibly settle down with a lover who would also be good company “during the intervals.” A woman he could talk to. A woman he could enjoy and respect at the same time. He went on and on, filling the page with justifications of every kind.

Giustiniana understood what this unpleasant letter was all about. She knew Venetian society well enough to see that Andrea was adapting to the local custom. He needed to focus on his political career, and his distracting love life would not do anymore. It was fairly common practice for a young Venetian patrician to seek a stable relationship with a married lady. Andrea had just turned thirty-one and was still a bachelor. He felt that at this point in his life it made sense to find himself an “official” lover.

Giustiniana must have half expected that this would happen one day, but the abruptness of Andrea’s announcement was the real shock—not to mention his manipulative desire to involve her in the whole process. At the end of the letter he informed her that he had already whittled down the list of candidates to three names: M., C., and B. All of them were married, he added, and all of them were more or less available. Giustiniana was overcome by a feeling of dread when she realized the preposterous nature of Andrea’s request: he wanted her to help him decide which of the three ladies was best suited for him. In her reply she accused him of using all his “accursed skill” to avoid responsibility for her “eternal downfall.”

Knyphausen laughed loudly when she explained Andrea’s predicament to him. He laughed out of relief as much as amusement. “Most of all,” she noted bitterly, “he was glad to learn from your letter that there are no more ties between us that might give him reason to be jealous.” There were moments when she thought she recognized, behind the screen of Andrea’s outrageous proposition, the smirk of the inveterate prankster. But after reading his letter several times she became “quite certain” that his intention “to seduce those three dames was not a practical joke at all.”

She was hurt, and the insidious way in which he made it sound “as if I should be thankful to you for this great token of your friendship” made it even more painful. “I still don’t understand you,” she confessed in yet another letter clearly written behind Knyphausen’s back. “Are you seeking revenge? Are you putting me to the test? . . . Why is it you can upset me so much even from so far away? Even when I am willing to love someone else? Alas, you are the only one in my heart now. And I feel you want me to renounce all my claims forever.”

Something in Andrea had changed. He was looking beyond her, looking for an attachment that would suit his life in Venice. Giustiniana understood all that, yet she also felt she had not entirely lost her place in his heart. She was going to fight for it, knowing well that if she had any chance at all of succeeding she would have to match his “accursed skill” with her own. “Besides,” she concluded dryly, “if I leave the choice to you, I run the risk that you will pick one not to my liking.”

With gritted teeth, she delineated her recommendation:

So you want to live your life openly, you want to be able to
visit their house, you want to be able to be seen in their company
because you are tired of all the discomforts of secret lovemaking,
and you wish to see your heart involved to some extent as well as
satisfy your mind. In that case I’m afraid that C. will not give
you what you want. She is pretty, possibly the prettiest of the
three; but if my memory is correct you were not so sure about her
spirit. She also happens to have an unbearable husband who actually lives with her, and the company she keeps is not the most
suitable for someone with your intelligence. B., who cannot be
said to be pretty but is worth more than a few pretty ones together
and who probably would flatter your vanity and excite your spirit
more than the other one, lives too much of a sheltered existence to
fit into your new lifestyle. Besides, I don’t know whether she keeps
any company at all; whether she is free to live as she wants within
the family; whether she may come and go at her pleasure; I happen to know that her parents would curse you; that her husband is
not at all accommodating and would never leave you alone. As
you can see, I am inclined to believe that both C. and B. would be
better suited to your old lifestyle rather than the one you wish to
adopt. As for M., I have other reservations. It seems to me you
wish to love with a cold heart; but I can assure you that if you ever
did make love to her you would fall prey to a most powerful and
most inconvenient passion. She is too beautiful, has too much
heart, too much grace, . . . too many devilish tricks not to get you
involved little by little. The trust she has so blindly put in you for
so long is another obstacle. . . . Still, I do not have the heart to
criticize her and am inclined to favor her. Of these three pieces of
advice, take the one that most satisfies you. If you choose the first
or second, I think I will flatter myself into believing that I will not
lose you forever. If you choose the last, I will pin my hopes on the
strong objections you would find blocking the way. . . . I have
good reason to believe that M. does not hold the best impression of
you. You, however, become twice as strong when you stick obstinately to an idea. And if indeed you manage to make her succumb, you will win twice. I also happen to believe, from the
portrait you draw of her and the circumstances she finds herself
in, that you were inclined in her direction before asking me for my
choice. . . . But do as you please, for I confess that I do not have it
in me to say more.

Giustiniana felt so close to Andrea and knew him so well that she could not stifle a generous impulse toward him even in a matter so obviously painful for her. Besides, she knew she had no right to ask Andrea to remain faithful to her—certainly not as long as she lived in London and Knyphausen was lurking in the background. In a way she was conceding this to him by stoically supplying the advice on the three young ladies that he had requested. Yet she also thought that circumstances might conceivably change and that, from a purely rational perspective, it was a mistake to give Andrea the impression that she actively approved his plan. London had turned into quite a disappointment, and it was beginning to look as if they might not stay on for long after all. Was he not thinking at all of the possibility that they might be together again soon? “It’s true that for some time now I have stopped expecting tenderness from you, but if I should come back to Venice one day—which is not impossible—I will be coming to you as a new person, changed in my ways as well as my physical appearance, and in that case I might well expect some of that tenderness again. Who knows?”

This was the first time Giustiniana had mentioned to Andrea the possibility she might soon return to Venice. In the past two years she had often entreated him to join her—in Paris, in Brussels, and lately even in London—but it had been little more than wishful banter. She knew he didn’t have the money for the journey and was too proud to accept it from others. In any case, she had always imagined Andrea traveling to her—wherever she happened to be at that time. Now she said she might be coming back to him. This was not just a ploy to distract him from pursuing M., C., and B.; she was speaking in earnest.

In late spring, when Holderness’s disaffection for the Wynnes had reached a critical point and hopes for a presentation to Court had all but vanished, Mrs. Anna had quietly contacted the Venetian authorities through Ambassador Colombo, seeking permission to return to Venice with her children. She did not feel at home in London and was increasingly nostalgic for her familiar Venetian life. Once financial arrangements related to the children’s estate were worked out (the matter was apparently settled, though Giustiniana does not spell out the details), there was no compelling reason for the family to stay in London as far as she was concerned. On the whole, the children did not disagree. The girls were growing bored of living in a social limbo, and the boys, having returned to Dean Street for the summer holidays after a short trial period at Cambridge, were knocking around the house in the heat with little to do. The truth was that all of them missed Italy.

If Giustiniana had not raised the possibility of her return with Andrea before, it was partly because she had been less than certain that her mother’s petition to the Venetian authorities would be accepted. The Wynne imbroglio had not been forgotten in Venice, and, furthermore, unflattering news about Giustiniana’s antics in Paris had continued to reach the authorities there long after she had left the city. Yet the Wynnes were not seeking to return so that Giustiniana could marry Andrea—that much was clear. So it was not unreasonable to hope the Republic might prove lenient toward a family that had always considered Venice its home and whose connections there still counted for something. Giustiniana would probably have preferred to remain silent on the topic while the papers went back and forth between London and Venice, but Andrea’s letter had upset her enough that she broached the subject of her return to test his reaction and possibly to delay his plan to seduce a new lover.

As the summer advanced, Giustiniana’s health did not improve. She was under strict orders not to tire herself excessively by writing letters, but this was not the time for a lull in their correspondence. “Despite having been told not to, I cannot resist sending you a tender farewell from my bed. I continue to sweat profusely, which is a good sign. My God! If you were here at my side, keeping me company, I would not feel my illness at all. In fact, your presence would make me fond of it. But it is best I leave you now in the hope that I will be able to give you better news of my health.”

A week later she gave Andrea a more detailed description of her condition:

I write to you from my bed, where I have been confined for the
past six weeks. My illness started with a violent fever for which I
was bled several times. It then turned into scarlet fever, and my
skin was covered with red spots and pustules. When that was over
I developed tertian fever, with such seizures that for the first time I
feared for my life. Imagine: I felt my heart freezing over, and
then the same sensation moving to my bones. I was increasingly
short of breath, my limbs were hot as coals, and my trembling
body was covered with big drops of sweat. These fits happen in the
evening and often last more than two hours. While they last, I
imagine I am dying, for surely this must be what one feels when it
happens. . . . If I get up from bed I am immediately seized by the
illness, which doctors look upon with great fear. As for me, I can
say that it is the worst ailment that has ever befallen me, and
whenever I have an attack I feel like calling the confessor as well
as the surgeon. Yesterday evening I had a seizure that lasted all
night. I have not recovered even as I write, and the deep chill
inside me has not subsided. I don’t know what will happen.