For my own part, I felt subdued by what I had heard. Once we were alone I could not conceal it.
“This is a bad business, Holmes, however we go about it. Once those papers have been scattered over the earth there will be no holding back the scandal. Whatever the truth, the wise world will say that there is no smoke without fire.”
He was brooding over the pages of the evening Globe and now looked up.
“I will repeat for your benefit, Watson, that the man who would kill the serpent must sever its head. That is the one sure way-and it is the one I shall follow.”
I was still not greatly reassured.
4
It was several days later when our train crossed the long railway bridge from the desolate landscape of Mestre to the enchanted island of Venice in its lagoon. Pen Browning was on the station platform to rescue us from pandemonium, briskly commanding the porters and dismissing the officials of the fever hospital, until our bags were accommodated on a launch and ourselves in his gondola.
We had declined his offer of rooms in the Palazzo Rezzonico, in favour of Danielli’s Hotel. It would be best, as Holmes put it, to remain “independent.” Moreover, Pen Browning was a gifted exponent of the female nude in painting and statuary, which was reputed to have led to domestic disagreements. Fannie Cornforth had been brought up in the strict American Puritan tradition. It would not do, Holmes remarked, to become a party to family quarrels and find ourselves obliged to take sides.
Pen and Fannie Browning had left London three days ahead of us. Since his arrival in Venice, Pen had accomplished almost everything. An inquiry from the Palazzo Rezzonico had been addressed to Signor Angelo Fiori, the notary for the Aspern estate, whose sister Margherita had by great good fortune nursed Robert Browning senior. Fiori cabled at once to Tina Bordereau, informing her that Italian law would require a valuation of the entire Aspern estate before matters could proceed further. He received his instructions within the day. After her sister’s death she had confided to him that she had never been in the least fond of Venice and had long wanted to get away from it. She was even less fond of Jeffery Aspern, though she had never met him. While it was clear that she would do nothing to help us, her attachment to Aspern’s papers remained financial rather than sentimental. Let the estate be valued as soon as possible.
While the gondola rolled side to side in the swell of the Grand Canal created by passing steam launches, we floated between marble palaces and gleams of reflected sunlight. Pen Browning described the latest unproductive negotiation with Tina Bordereau. Angelo Fiori, however, would allow Holmes to see such papers as remained in the Casa Aspern, by appointing him as “assessor” or “valuer” of the questionable material. Miss Bordereau agreed after being warned by Fiori that it would never do for her to sell as genuine what afterwards proved to be fraudulent.
“It’s as well you never had the two sisters to deal with, Mr Holmes,” said Pen Browning, “They’d have led you to your ruin, getting all your money and showing you nothing. They haggled like fishwives. They always tried to combinare, as the Italians call it, to make a special price! When that failed, they would wheedle you like stall-holders. ‘Perhaps we could find some way of treating you better,’ they would say. But you always came out of it worse! As for Aspern, he was one of those fellows at whom such women as Juanita Bordereau flung themselves-and they soon thought that he treated them very badly. I daresay he did.”
By such means we found that we had only Angelo Fiori to deal with. It was now arranged that we should visit the ‘Palazzo Aspern,’ as the dilapidated house was absurdly called by the gondoliers, whenever we wished. A housekeeper would be there to arrange whatever we needed-and, of course, to ensure that we did not steal any of the contents. However, any doubt as to our good characters was soon laid to rest, for Miss Bordereau’s benefit. At our first meeting, Signor Fiori confided to me that he acted on our behalf after receiving a testimonial to our honesty and integrity written at the request of Mr Browning by “Signor Lestrade” of Scotland Yard. The name of that famous institution was our “Open Sesame!”
The warmth of the Venetian spring was tempered by a sea breeze across the lagoon, which stirred the net curtains at the windows. Our evenings were spent eating ices or drinking coffee after dinner at Florian’s in St Mark’s Square. It was agreeable to pass the twilight away among music and chatter under the lamps, to hear smooth footfalls on polished marble, and watch an afterglow of sun touching the low domes and mosaics of the famous basilica.
On our first morning, the gondolier took us into the quiet and shaded domestic waterways, which rather recalled Amsterdam. We came to a clean quiet canal with a narrow footpath running along either bank. The front of the house was of grey and pink stucco, about two hundred years old. A stone balcony ran along its wide facade with pilasters and arches at either end. Holmes pulled at the rusty bell-wire and the summons was answered by a maid in a shawl.
We entered a long, dusty hall and followed our guide up a high stone staircase, passing fine architectural doors in a building that seemed empty and abandoned. There were brown paintings in tarnished frames. Above us the stone shields with armorial bearings still retained vestiges of the paint applied to them centuries ago. The floors were so empty and the walls so bare that it was hard to imagine anything of value in such a place. Harder still to think there could be an answer here to the riddle of Augustus Howell, unless he was alive to supply it after all.
“Surely,” I had said to Holmes in the train, “he may have announced his own death on previous occasions but he never claimed to have been murdered.”
My friend made no reply but continued to read his Baedeker.
Now we were in the upper rooms with a view of rough-tiled roof-tops and the sunlit lagoon in the distance. There was a garden below us, or rather a tangled enclosure whose stone walls hid it from the world. How could anyone, let alone the Bordereau sisters, have lived in this desolate place just a year ago? What squalor it must have been!
Our guide took out a bunch of keys and unlocked the door ahead of us. It opened on to yet another dusty room with straw-bottomed chairs and rush mats on a red-tiled floor. Its window reflected a cooler light from a northern sky. Almost the greater part of the far wall was taken up by a tall escritoire of dull mahogany, larger than many a wardrobe. Its style was that of the First Empire of Napoleon Bonaparte with brass eagles and regal ornaments. This was surely Jeffery Aspern’s famous “secretary,” containing as his famous poem Old and Young describes it, “the arid secrets of a soul’s decay.” Its tiers of locked drawers and the cupboards on either side seemed a suitable receptacle for tales of illicit passions or furtive criminality. On a writing-table, which formed the central part of its design, lay a single key to its drawers and cupboards.
“Please,” said our guide with a wave towards the writing chair, “You will sit and I will be here if you need me. The key will open all.”
I was astonished to hear her speaking in very good English, albeit with an accent.
“I was for some time a translator at the hospital,” she said with a smile, “Angelo Fiori is my cousin. The papers of Jeffery Aspern that were here have nearly been lost twice. The old Miss Bordereau hid them between the mattresses of her bed when she was dying. She called my cousin to add a clause to her will that they were to be buried with her. Perhaps she was a little ashamed of them. It was never done. The young Miss Bordereau burnt a few of them in the kitchen fire on the last night she was here but the rest are in the drawers. There are also the rare books but you will find those in the side-cupboards and on the shelves.”