A Rich Full Death by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online Page A

the city.
    If chronic invalidism should ever prove to be your lot, Siena has much to recommend it. Florence may have had its day, but that era seems almost contemporary with our own compared to that of its ancient rival. Here life and hope and striving are notions so long extinct that the Siennese turn up their noses at the mere words. The only really well-bred thing to do here is to expire gracefully, like the city itself, by exquisite degrees; which is precisely what Joseph Eakin’s aunt, along with many others of her sex and nation, is single-mindedly engaged in doing.
    I was received not by this lady herself, who was ‘indisposed’, but by a youngish man whose relationship to her—as indeed his name, race and other details—remained nebulous. I introduced myself as a friend of Mr Eakin’s, who had been the subject of a bizarre and disturbing experience which I hoped my visit could resolve. I had been strolling past the Cathedral in Florence (I said) at about five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, when I caught sight of my old friend Joseph Eakin walking towards me. Much surprised—for I had believed him to be in Siena for the weekend—I hastened to greet him. To my astonishment and chagrin he had cut me dead, walking on without so much as pausing in his stride, as though I were a complete and utter stranger! I was quite naturally astounded and hurt by this behaviour, but above all anxious to learn the reason for it. Had I unwittingly done or said something to offend him? Had someone been spreading malicious gossip? Having learned that he was now in Siena, I was come thither in hopes of finding him and resolving this misunderstanding.
    The young man replied with slightly insolent politeness, in an accent I could not quite place, that Mr Eakin had unfortunately returned to Florence by the midday train. However, he assured me that I must have been mistaken, since he could vouch for the fact that on the afternoon in question Joseph Eakin had not been in Florence, but sitting in the very room in which we were presently talking—a gesture indicated the chair which had supported the plutocratic posterior during this period.
    This seemed final, but to ensure that there was no mistake I pressed the point. Was my informant really quite certain? The resemblance had been quite astonishing; I scarcely thought it possible that I could have been mistaken. Was it not possible that Mr Eakin had absented himself for a few hours and returned to Florence? But the young man was not to be shaken: Eakin had spent the whole of Sunday afternoon at the villa, first with his aunt and subsequently with her personal doctor, one McPherson.
    There was nothing more to be done that evening, so I put up at an inn which Murray’s Guide accurately described as ‘very indifferent’, where I fell asleep over Mr Browning’s verses—this implies no criticism of the latter, which pleased me, but I was exhausted from my long drive and all the shocks these last days had sprung upon me.
    This morning I was up betimes, and in an hour was on the road back to Florence, having verified Mr Eakin’s alibi by applying to Doctor Alistair McPherson: a lean sliver of upright Aberdeen morality as out of place in these accommodating climes as an Italian cupola astride a Presbyterian kirk. Here was a man whose every feature proclaimed his utter probity, and when he assured me that he had been with Joseph Eakin at the hour in question, then I knew that Mr Browning’s convenient theory would no longer serve.
    The weather at this time of the year is notoriously capricious, and by the time I arrived back in Florence early this afternoon the wind was rising and the sky streaky with clouds. As I drove at a snail’s pace through the town, where twice as many carriages as in Boston are crammed into streets that are less than half the size, I heard myself hailed, looked around, and saw none other than the man who had formed a shadowy third with Browning and me the night