Original Sin by P. D. James Read Free Book Online Page A

the tour guide’s booming commentary loud enough to be heard by every boat on the river.
    “And here, coming up on our left, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most interesting buildings on the Thames: InnocentHouse, built in 1830 for Sir Francis Peverell, a noted publisher of the day. Sir Francis had visited Venice and had been very impressed by the Ca’ d’Oro, the Golden House on the Grand Canal. Those of you who have had holidays in Venice have probably seen it. So he hit on the idea of building his own golden house on the Thames. Pity he couldn’t import Venetian weather.” He paused briefly for the expected laughter. “Today it is the headquarters of a publishing firm, the Peverell Press, so it’s still in the family. There’s an interesting story about Innocent House. Apparently Sir Francis was so absorbed by it that he neglected his young wife whose money had helped him to build it, and she threw herself from the top balcony and was instantly killed. The legend has it that you can still see the stain of her blood on the marble which can’t be cleaned away. It’s said that Sir Francis went mad with remorse in his old age and used to go out alone at night trying to get rid of that tell-tale spot. It’s his ghost that people claim to see, still scrubbing away at the stain. There are some watermen who don’t like sailing too close to Innocent House after dark.”
    All eyes on deck had been docilely turned to the house but now, intrigued by this story of blood, the passengers moved to hang over the rail; voices murmured and heads craned as if the legendary stain might still be visible. Eight-year-old Adam’s over-vivid imagination had pictured a white-clad woman, blonde hair flying, flinging herself from the balcony like some demented storybook heroine, had heard the final thud and seen the trickle of blood creeping and starting across the marble to drip into the Thames. For years afterwards the house had continued to fascinate him with a potent amalgam of beauty and terror.
    The tour guide had been inaccurate about one fact; it was possible that the suicide story had also been embellished oruntrue. He knew now that Sir Francis had been enchanted, not by the Ca’ d’Oro which, despite the intricacies of its fine tracings and carvings, he had found, or so he had written to his architect, too asymmetrical for his taste, but by the Palace of Doge Francesco Foscari, and it was the Ca’ Foscari which his architect had been instructed to build for him on this cold, tidal river. It should have looked incongruous, a folly, unmistakably Venetian and Venetian of the mid-fifteenth century. And yet it looked as if no other city, no other site would have been right for it. Dalgliesh still found it difficult to understand why it should be so successful, this unashamed borrowing from another age, another country, a softer, warmer air. The proportions had been changed and surely that alone should have rendered Sir Francis’s dream an impracticable presumption, but the reduction in scale had been brilliantly carried out and the dignity of the original somehow maintained. There were six great central window arches instead of eight behind the finely carved balconies of the first and second floors, but the marble columns with their decorated pinnules were almost exact copies of the Venetian palace and the central arcades here, as there, were balanced by tall single windows, giving the façade its unity and grace. The great curved door fronted a marble patio leading to a landing stage and a flight of steps to the river. On either side of the house two brick-built Regency town houses with small balconies, presumably built to house coachmen or other servants, stood like humble sentries of the central magnificence. He had seen it from the river many times since that eighth birthday celebration but had never been inside. He recalled having read that there was a fine Matthew Cotes Wyatt ceiling in the central hall and rather