Season of Storms by Susanna Kearsley Read Free Book Online Page B

these old buildings, and many owners simply can’t afford to do the work. Cheaper to clear out and leave the house empty.”
    Not entirely empty, I thought. There were ghosts here. From behind the black window I felt the eyes watching me, silently following, as our gondolier called out an echoing “Oi!” and we slipped round another corner in the canal, leaving the decaying pink Casetta Fiorita alone and softly dreaming of the grandeur it had known.

 
    It was noon when he reached the Piazza San Marco.
    The midday sun had bleached the square and cast a haze across the piazzetta, so that even the statues of San Teodoro and San Marco’s winged lion, they who had for these eight centuries stood vigilant, their eyes fixed ever eastward over the serene lagoon, appeared today to slumber on their columns while below them at the edge of the canal the water barely swelled beneath the waiting row of gondolas.
    He turned his back upon the gleaming pinnacles and domes of the basilica and searched among the faces in the strolling crowd for hers. No easy task, that. All of Venice seemed to be here, standing idly sharing gossip in the shadow of the bell-tower, or lunching at café tables by the Moorish colonnades. Music rose and met from either side of the piazza where the orchestras competed for attention from beneath their café awnings, a cultivated duel of rival melodies and rhythm that yet managed to produce a pleasing harmony.
    “Maître!” a delighted voice behind him cried and, turning, he recognized the oldest of the waiters from the café on his right, a sun-creased man from Corsica whose thick French accent clung to every word. “Maître, what a joy to see you here again. You must sit here, where all who pass can see you and pay tribute to your talent.”
    He hesitated . . . he had not meant to stop here, but rather, like one of his own hounds, to keep to the chase, to find the scent and pursue it, relentless . . . but the waiter’s words, the blatant adoration, moved him suddenly. He sat. What did it matter, he thought, if he paused for a meal? Did not his own hounds hunt the better when they were refreshed?
    He ate and drank deliberately, in honour of the watching eyes.
    A scraping of chairs at the table behind him announced the arrival of a new party, young, gay with laughter. A man in English said: “Oh no, but it really was too bad of you, John, not to stop the boat and let her have a go. She might have done it.”
    “Nonsense. From what I’ve heard, nobody gets in to see him. That man of his guards him like a Gurkha.”
    And then a woman, in amusement, said: “I fancy Celia’s a match for any man’s man. Aren’t you, darling?”
    Still with his back to their table he froze, his glass half-lifted to his lips, as something wonderful and warm began to tingle all along his spine. Fighting the impulse to leap to his feet at that moment and face her, he felt in his pockets for pencil and paper. Their meeting, this first meeting, mustn’t be ordinary. It must be creative, it must have appropriate drama. He wrote quickly, and signalled the waiter.
    “Yes, maître?”
    Keeping his voice hushed he urged the man closer, conspiring. “Behind me—the blonde at the table behind me . . .”
    A glance flickered over his head and then back again. “Yes, maître?”
    “There is only one blonde?”
    “There is, maître.”
    “Excellent. When I am gone, you will give her this note,” he said, folding the paper and pressing it into the waiter’s hand. “You will give it to her privately, pretending it is something she has dropped, perhaps. Do this for me, and I will be forever in your debt.”
    The waiter bowed his head and left.
    Once more the laughter of the English party rang out close behind him, and he raised his glass and drank the sweetness of the wine and smiled.

vii
    I had seen the Piazza San Marco in films.
    I had known that it would be the most enormous public square I’d ever seen, alive with