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.”
“Thank you so much, signora,” said Holmes with a gracious half-bow, “You have also met Mr Howell, I believe?”
She smiled but there was a hint of concern in her eyes.
“He was here more than a month ago. He went back to England. I did not see him again.”
“He left no message of any kind?”
“I do not think so.”
She went out without closing the door and we could hear her busying herself in the next room.
Despite the first heat of the Venetian spring, Sherlock Holmes was still dressed in his formal suit. From the waistcoat of this he now drew a powerful lens, laid it on the writing desk and set to work. Using the key, he opened the lower drawers. The first contained nothing but dust and chips of wood. The second yielded a few scraps of paper of the most ordinary kind.
He tried the lowest and deepest of the main drawers. Then, with a muttered syllable of satisfaction, he lifted out a decayed olive green portmanteau, which nonetheless looked as though it had been dusted in the past few months-possibly by Tina Bordereau. Underneath this was a folio correspondence box, cased in leather and stamped in gold with Aspern’s name.
Holmes sprung the two catches and brought out its contents. He also opened the cupboards to either side of the escritoire, revealing shelves lined with volumes that were almost new and, at the worst, only a little worn. I was not surprised that there should be notebooks and folders of papers. What I had not expected was that so much of the treasure would consist of printed books, most of them of comparatively recent date and in multiple copies. It was a little like a publisher’s stockroom. They were still rarities, of course, first printings often inscribed by their authors. I noticed Dante Rossetti’s Verses printed as late as 1881. The bulk of the volumes were the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, Algernon Charles Swinburne as well as Rossetti. There were three rare printings of Robert Browning’s poems. Two were inscribed by the poet to Jeffery Aspern, dating from the 1850s. The third, Gold Hair, published after Aspern’s death, was inscribed to Juanita Bordereau. How much had the author disliked her after all?
Holmes opened the gold-stamped and leather-bound correspondence box. Here, if our information was correct, lay Jeffery Aspern’s letters from Lord Byron, Robert Browning, William Beckford, as well as other literary treasures. The papers had been neatly arranged in portfolios and I would have said this had been done recently, for the covers appeared much newer than their contents. Those papers that I could see looked tarnished by time but the black ink was far less “rusty” than I had expected.
Holmes stood up, walked to the window and held a paper to the north light.
“I believe that the usual iron-gall ink of the 1820s has been adulterated by indigo to make the script darker. So far as that goes, what we have appears genuine and is not contradicted by any date in the watermark.
“What is the writing?”
“A corrected page from the manuscript of Canto 6 of Don Juan. John Pierpont Morgan would pay a small fortune to add the complete work to his library, in the author’s own manuscript. According to the list of papers it is in Byron’s own hand. Notice the date at the top, “1822.” The formation of the first ‘2’ makes it look almost like “1892,” does it not?
“Very like.”
“A forger would have taken care to make both figures ‘2’ look alike. None of us signs a name or writes a line in the same way twice. A perfect forgery may be too consistent, too perfect, as if it has been drawn rather than written. Here you will see in the first line Byron has written, ”There is a Tide…” The letter T in both cases has a loop at either end of its cross-piece. Each letter in the line has a gap before the next one. That is almost too consistent, a cause for suspicion. By the fourth line, however, the poet’s pen is flowing freely, rather than hesitating. Every T is joined to the following letter, lacking the loops but sprouting a confidant tail.”