Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [97]
A week after the disappearance, a letter arrived from Pressburg, a hundred miles east of Vienna. In it, Vérand begged Alvise for his forgiveness. In the stolen purse, he explained, was a letter from his parents explaining they would not be able to help him repay his debt. On the morning he had walked out of the house on his way to the post office he had seen a man by the Danube with his stolen papers, so he had run after him. That was it: Vérand did not explain what had happened next, nor did he give a clue as to his whereabouts.
Two weeks later, a Capuchin friar whom Alvise and Lucia happened to know found Vérand wandering in the streets of Pressburg. He was hungry, poorly clad and with no money. The friar helped him find some food and a shelter, then he informed Alvise, who immediately sent Vérand a hundred florins, not without remarking that it was “quite a sum for the twenty hours he spent under our roof.”29 It turned out to be money well spent. Vérand came back to Vienna, was forgiven for disappearing, and welcomed back into the Mocenigo household. But not as Alvisetto’s preceptor. Alvise, impressed by his integrity and his language skills, took him on as his personal assistant. In mid April 1805 he headed back to Venice with his new secretary in tow.
The surprise dénouement of the Vérand affair forced Lucia to resume her role as her son’s teacher, which did not make her happy. It was one thing to read a story to Alvisetto or to practise spelling with him or to impart to him the occasional geography lesson, but quite another to be responsible for his formal education. And not so much because she would have preferred to spend her time differently, but because she felt she was not up to the task. She hired Herr Gartner to give Alvisetto German lessons, and he made rapid progress. But he lagged behind in Italian, French and arithmetic, which were Lucia’s responsibility. His penmanship, too, was still poor, “but then my own letters are even more crooked than his. He’s not learning from the best.”30
Alvise had insisted, upon leaving Vienna with Vérand, that during his absence Lucia apply for the Order of the Starred Cross, one of the most prestigious distinctions granted by the Habsburg Court, and one which he thought would nicely complete Lucia’s rise in Austrian society. At first she had been reluctant, fearing that such a request would needlessly attract attention and risk exposing her to an embarrassing refusal on the part of the court. But she gradually changed her mind as she learnt that a number of patrician ladies in Venice—including her mother-in-law, Chiara, with whom relations had cooled after the scandal of her love affair with Colonel Plunkett and the birth of Alvisetto—had applied to receive the order. “I feel that at this point I cannot put off making a request myself, all the more so since, unlike most of our Venetian friends, I have actually lived in Vienna for the past few years,” she explained to Paolina, begging her “not to say a word” about her step. “The order only proves you are born a patrician…though I hear it can be useful if one’s children run for offices that require patents of nobility.”31
Lucia was told by people knowledgeable about these matters that her request would probably be refused the first time around, and accepted the second—it was the usual practice. There was nothing for her to do but wait.
Paolina was hardly in a condition to appreciate the politics of Vienna etiquette. She had never really recovered since the death of Lucietta, and now she suffered from chronic fatigue and diarrhoea, and