53

Urbino didn’t return directly to the boat landing. Instead he walked down to the beach to the shuttered Grand Hotel des Bains, closed until April. He seated himself on the stone steps of the verandah.

Ghostlike ships drifted slowly along the horizon. A small plane droned over the water toward the low line of the Euganean Hills in the far distance. Bicycles and tandems passed in the road, and a mother posed behind a stroller while her husband took a picture of her and the baby. Two young couples were walking hand in hand on the hotel’s private strip of beach.

Usually when he came to the Grand Hotel des Bains, his thoughts were full of Thomas Mann, for it was here that Aschenbach had fallen desperately in love with his Polish boy and had died in the snare of his obsession. But today Byron dominated his thoughts, Byron who had ridden along this same stretch of beach long before it became a bathing resort. Byron who may have written unpublished poems that were in Possle’s possession. And the same Byron who fascinated Hilda.

He riffled through Hilda’s volume of poetry. The pages had already been cut. Ten poems, most no longer than twenty lines, haunted the pages in their Gothic script. He began to read. The German didn’t give him too much difficulty, although some words and phrases were unfamiliar.

Not only did Byron inspire all of them, as the title said, but they also had a Venetian theme, taking as their subject some place or activity associated with Byron’s Venice years. The Bridge of Sighs figured prominently, as did his swim from the Lido up the Grand Canal and his love affair with La Fornarina.

Hilda’s talent had the ability to create vivid, if derivative, word pictures, clouded by rich, suggestive allusions that made Urbino feel as if he were looking through a smoky glass into a more vital and meaningful past. A current of emotion, albeit muted and therefore all the more powerful in his opinion, ran from one poem to another.

He sat there reading them, part of his mind searching for some connection between Hilda, the poems, and the strange events at the Ca’ Pozza, another part caught up in their spell regardless of their relevance to his present case.