Weighed in the balance - Anne Perry [57]
In the afternoons he continued to see Evelyn, except once when she arranged it before he had the opportunity, and that knowledge gave him a lift of pleasure like a bursting of wings inside him. She was beautiful, exciting, funny, and she had a gift for enjoyment unlike anyone he had known before. She was unique and wonderful. In company with others, they attended soirees and parties, they rode in barges down the Grand Canal, calling out to acquaintances, laughing at jokes, bathed in the brilliant, shifting light of a blue-and-golden autumn. Although the Fenice was closed, they attended small theaters and saw masques and dramas and musical plays.
Monk usually got to bed by about two or three in the morning, so he was delighted to remain there until ten, be served breakfast, and then choose which suit to wear for the day and begin the new adventure of discovery and entertainment. It was a way of life to which he could very easily become accustomed. It surprised him how very comfortable it was to slide into.
It was over a week through his stay when he met Florent Barberini again. It was during an intermission in a performance of a play of which Monk understood very little, since it was in Italian. He had excused himself and gone outside onto the landing to watch the boats move up and down the canal and to try to arrange his thoughts, and think about his mission there, which he was neglecting, and about his feelings for Evelyn.
He could not honestly say he loved her. He was not sure how much he even knew her. But he loved the excitement he felt in her company, the quickening of the pulse, the delicious sense of heightened enjoyment in everything from good food and good music to the humor and grace of her conversation, the envy he saw in other men’s eyes when they looked at him.
He was aware of the large, oddly perverse figure of Klaus in the background. Perhaps the risk of it, the necessity for some semblance of discretion, added a certain sharpness to the pleasure. Now and again there was a prickle of danger. Klaus was a powerful man. There was something in his face, especially caught in repose, which suggested he would be an ugly enemy.
But Monk had never been a coward.
“You seem to have taken to Venice with a will,” Florent said out of the shadows where the torchlight cast only a faint glow.
Monk had not seen him, he had been lost in his own thoughts and in the sights and sounds of night on the canal.
“Yes,” he said with a start. He found himself smiling. “There cannot be another city like it in the world.”
Florent did not answer.
Monk was suddenly aware of a sense of grief. He looked across at Florent’s dark face and saw in it not only the easy sensuality that made it so attractive to women, the dramatic widow’s peak and the fine eyes, but the loneliness of a man who played the dilettante but whose mind was unfashionably aware of the rape of his culture and the slow dying of the aching splendor of his city, as decay and despair eroded its fabric and its heart. He might have followed Friedrich’s court for whatever reason, but he was more Italian than German, and under his facile manner there lay a depth which Monk, in his prejudice, had chosen not to see.
He wondered now if Florent were, in his own way, fighting for the independence again of Venice, and what part Friedrich’s life or death might play in that. In the last few days he had heard whispers, jokes from the ignorant, of Italian unification