A Rich Full Death by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online

solely his age (although I’ll lay he wasn’t born this century), nor even the fact that he hails from Philadelphia, but rather his marked, his so painfully evident and unashamed fascination with Money.
    Not—as with her —the spending of it on a million madcap projects and celebrations of every nature—no, Mr Joseph Eakin is one of Mammon’s truest and purest believers, worshipping Cash not obliquely, as a means of exchange, but for itself. Despite the fortune he has amassed by the manufacture of some product without which the human race is either unable or unwilling to do, he is meticulous in counting his change when buying a cup of coffee, while ‘How much did that cost?’ is the question most frequently on his lips.
    In short, then, I had no reason to love Mr Joseph Eakin, and so when Mr Browning asked me if I would be prepared to go to Siena that afternoon and make some discreet enquiries concerning Mr Eakin’s whereabouts at the time of Isabel’s death, I found myself quite agreeably disposed to the idea.
    ‘You are intimate with the Eakins’ circle,’ Mr Browning explained, ‘and can easily find some pretext for asking the necessary questions without giving offence. Besides, I can ill spare the time, for there are one or two urgent matters which I must follow up here in Florence.’
    Well, to be brief, I agreed, and it was with no small thrill that I handed Mr Robert Browning my card, and received in return his assurance of a personal visit the following afternoon to hear the results of my enquiries! That interview in Doney’s had left me more impressed than ever with his masterful manner, his sharp intelligence and knowledge of human nature, and that piquant and quirky manner of expressing himself—which I have endeavoured to set down verbatim in so far as I can recall it.
    Indeed, there is even the glimmer of a notion stirring somewhere in the back of my mind …
    But of that another time, if at all, for I am grown as cautious as an old fox. Enough to say that I went that very morning to the English bookshop, which is but two steps from Doney’s, and asked if they could supply me with any of his works. I knew vaguely that he had written plays, though I had never read any of them—or indeed seen a single copy. I was therefore both surprised and delighted when the assistant cried ‘But of course!’, and returned in a few moments carrying an armful of volumes which I seized avidly—only to discover that their author, although indeed of the genus Browning, was not the rare Robert but rather the common Elizabeth Barrett variety. I tried to explain the mistake, but the assistant was now engaged in selling someone a modern prose version of Dante’s Inferno , and merely waved me towards the shelves at the back of the shop, where after much searching I eventually unearthed—like uncut raw diamond—a single volume of verses by Mr Robert Browning, entitled Dramatic Romances and Lyrics , of which I promptly possessed myself.
    As the weather bid fair to continue fine, I decided to eschew the advantages of modern civilisation—in the form of the railroad, the first in Italy, which the Englishman Stephenson has built the Duke—and drive to Siena along the old highway, not yet fallen into complete disuse, through the Chianti hills.
    The road is of some forty miles, but steep in places, and the horse attached to the gig I had hired proved as weak as hireling beasts usually are. Moreover I was late leaving, having a number of matters to attend to in town, and compounded this by making a detour out by way of Bellosguardo and then stopping at an inn on the road for a country repast of bean soup, tough bread and roasted songbirds washed down with black wine, accompanied by the howling of a mad dog and the sullen prattle of the peasantry. The result was that by the time I reached Siena it was growing late, and I drove directly out to the villa where Mr Eakin’s ailing relative lives, on the hills to the west of