The implications and possibilities of this story filled Henry’s mind for some time afterwards. He took note, as soon as he went back to his quarters, of the picture of the two fascinating, poor and discredited old English women living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign city with the letters their prize possession. But as he considered the core of the drama, he saw that it lay in the hands of the American, who would come in the guise of both adventurer and scholar. The story of the three figures locked in a drama of faded memories and desperate need would take time and concentration. It could not be done in the mornings in Florence. Nor could he set his story in the city without everyone there believing that he was merely transcribing a story already known and often recounted. He would move the story to Venice, he thought, and, as more invitations came in, he decided he would move himself to Venice also, and work there on a story whose properties he came more and more to relish.
IN VENICE, he found rooms belonging to his friend Mrs Bronson in a dark, damp palazzo. The fact that Browning had once inhabited these rooms did not brighten them or rid them of cold, despite Mrs Bronson’s certainty that their history made all the difference. He took to dining alone before taking a walk through the haunted streets of the city. Once night fell and the Venetians had returned home, they did not venture out again. Venice was misty and strange and, for the first time in his life, he wondered what he was doing in the city which he loved so much. He could easily have gone to England instead. The story was now clear in his mind and he had soaked up enough of the faded palaces where his heroines would live and the sense of old secrets and heroic attachments in these shadowy, bejewelled, inhospitable buildings, once full of sweet romance and high-toned gaiety, and now repositories of gloom and cobwebs, so many of them inhabited by the unsettled and the infirm.
One evening, having passed the Frari and crossed a bridge which led towards the Grand Canal, he caught a brief glimpse of a woman in an upstairs room with her back to a lighted window. She was in conversation; something about her hair and her neck made him stand his ground in the empty street. As the talk became more animated, he could see her shrugging and gesticulating. She was, as far as he could see, younger than Constance and much darker, and her shoulders much broader, so that it was not her physical presence which brought Constance into his mind. He found, as he moved away, that he hungered to be in that room where the woman was talking, he longed to hear her voice and follow whatever it was she was saying. And slowly, as he walked through the dark streets with lives hidden away in the buildings on either side, he realized that even though his time at Bellosguardo had lasted a mere three weeks, he missed the companionship, he missed his life with Constance Fenimore Woolson. He missed the mixture of sharpness and reticence in her manners, the American life she carried with her so abundantly, the aura which her hours alone gave her, her furious ambition, her admiration for him and belief in him. He missed the few hours every day they spent together, and he missed the lovely silence which followed it and came before. He decided that he would either return to England or go back to Florence. He wrote to Constance outlining his dilemma, half-realizing that she would read his letter as an appeal of sorts.
Constance replied immediately and briskly offered him his own quarters on a lower floor of Casa Brichieri-Colombi which looked through a single door and three arches to the Duomo and the city. He could work in peace there. While all of Florence was richly and intricately displayed for the pleasure of those residing at Bellosguardo, the opposite was not the case. Bellosguardo remained apart from the city of palaces and churches and museums. Walking back there at night was, when he had moved a few streets away from the river, like walking towards any hill town in the Tuscan countryside. Constance inhabited the large apartment above him, and they shared domestic staff and the kitchen and garden. There was no one else living in the house. This time they did not even discuss the need for discretion about his presence in the city. It was known to very few that he was living under the same roof as Miss Woolson and it was mentioned to no one. Henry wrote to William merely to say that he had taken rooms on Bellosguardo. He wrote to Gosse insisting that he was alone and working. He wrote to Mrs Curtis of the beauties of Bellosguardo and his happiness at the view. He did not state that this came courtesy of Constance.
Nor did he mention to anyone that in the time he had been away, much to the Bootts’ alarm and the alarm of her doctor, Constance had entered into a deep melancholy and had taken to her bed where she had suffered, as Francis Boott told him, more than anyone could imagine. He could see signs of it when he arrived, despite her efforts to disguise it. She was happy for him to dine in Florence so that she could be alone in the evenings. Her deafness appeared to irritate her, and once they had been together a short time, she seemed compelled to withdraw.
But as the weather softened and spring came, Constance became happier. She loved her vast house and the garden that was now beginning to blossom, and she took daily pleasure in the old city beneath her without ever feeling tempted to walk much outside the confines of this small territory. Thus she guarded her privacy and respected his, and in the six weeks he stayed with her, they never appeared together in public.
He worked hard at his story of Shelley’s papers and Claire Clairmont and the American visitor. He believed that returning to this beautiful house and idyllic setting had been slightly improper, that he had appealed to Constance ’s mercy when she had none left to give. She knew, as he did, that he would leave, that this would be a respite for him, from his full solitude, or his London life, or his other travels. But for her the season, the house and his steady presence would make this time the most gratified and beguiling of her life. Her happiness, such as it was, came, he believed, from the perfect balance between the distance they kept from each other and their need for no other company. She dressed carefully, mainly in white. She paid attention to the decor of the house and the state of the garden, and watched over the kitchen with a fastidious eye.
One afternoon as they met on the terrace for tea, Casa Brichieri-Colombi was visited unexpectedly by a lady novelist of the English persuasion, Miss Rhoda Broughton, whom he had known in London for many years. She had said, in a letter sent from London, that she would call, but had not specified a date. She expressed much wonder at meeting him and embraced him warmly.
‘I knew that you were in Italy,’ she said, ‘I was told so by friends in Venice, but I did not know you were in Florence.’
Henry watched her as she settled herself into a wicker chair, having rearranged the cushions, talking all the while in her customary scatterbrained tone which could deceive the unwary into believing that she was foolish.
‘And both of you here!’ she said. ‘How lovely! I could travel in Italy for years and see neither of you and now suddenly I have you both.’
Henry smiled and nodded as the servant served Miss Broughton more tea. That she never seemed to listen to others and appeared to notice nothing save her immediate comfort was, he knew, a high pretence. She tended, in fact, to miss nothing. He presumed that she knew all along that he was living under Miss Woolson’s roof; he was determined that she should depart from Casa Brichieri-Colombi doubting the veracity of that knowledge.
They discussed various people in Venice whom Miss Broughton had seen, and then the conversation turned to the pleasure of leaving London.