The Ladies' Perambulation society is housed in an old palazzo of a long-since fallen first family, with one grand, water-logged facade facing the blue-green waters of a narrow canal and the other brooding over a narrow courtyard the opened into one of the little squares - the little campos that stud the city.
One other genuine palazzo - this one far more decayed than the Ladies' own - braces the square, along with a warren of other buildings, and of course one of the cities' ubiquitous chapels, dedicated to the martyr-saint Liliane, rose windows and terracotta rooftile and quite directly in the middle of the little campo - an elegant stone founting, the bronze-patina'd central figure a most realistic expression of Liliane's martyrdom, her body a bristling explosion of enemy spears, arching outward from the central spine, face turned to heaven, frame near-naked.
In eminently baroque style, the water falls not from the buckets she is carrying, but from the wounds themselves. Trickling down the glistening bronze surfaces to collect in the marble basin, which glows golden in sunlight and blue-white in gaslight and merely dark on these long, gloomy autumn days full of shiftless clouds and pouring rain.
So here, this slumping palazzo, half-way to glory, half-way to ruin, on a gloomy afternoon with a cold wind from the Adriatic beginning to kick up choppy little waves even in the narrowest and most protected of the city's canals, arabesque windows in rust red and deep purple wrapped in wilting black bunting that looks rather as if someone loosed a haberdasher's 'prentice boy on the home of his rival, the bunting - draped about the windows sometime in the days since the discovery of the [how does one say body in polite company?] shell of their countrywoman, drowned in the canals - bedraggled from the torrential autumnal rains. The windowboxes, with their cheerful array of pansies, have been covered over with fine black netting.
The smallest plaque, slowly weathered bronze, bolted into the cracked Venetian plaster on the pillasters framing the wrought-iron gate:
The Ladies'
Perambulation
Society
-
No one is walking today. Not with the familiar brisk steps and hushing murmur of petticoats, the bracing straightforward style the Ladies have adopted, as if the side streets and listing alleys, the labyrinthine backstreets and hidden cul-de-sacs of Venice were the no more frightening than some country Lane in Sussex, the mid-day sun in the sky, the farmers in the fields, the word of bees a humming buzz amidst the blooming hedgerows. There, in gloomy Angleland, one dreams of sun-drenched Italia. Peeling back the layers of whale-boned corsets and heavy fushine silks, the waves of tuille in exchange for some cotton nothing, not much more - perhaps even less - than an undergarment, sun setting on the Apinine hills while the rhythmic music of scythes cut through golden fields bisected by Roman roads shaded by stone pines planted - perhaps - by some long-dead, barely dressed Legionnaire himself.
And here, in romantic, water-logged Italia, one remains as Anglish as ever. So it seems.
Still - the square is deserted, where normally there might be a half-dozen women walking arm and arm around the square, determinedly not looking directly at the naked breasts of poor martyred Liliane and the water trickling down her transfixed frame.
Just a slip of a girl, with the sort of prettiness like to turn mousy as soon as she opens her mouth, shrouded in an impractical velvet cloak, followed by a mustachioed gondolier with drooping eyes and the rolling gait of someone born to water rather than dry(ish) land.
-
George - or more specifically Harmon, must talk his way past a trio of gatekeepers before the pair first set eyes on one of the ubiquitous ladies. First, a supercilious footman, who appears to be no more than a local boy dressed up in some old velvet livery and given a powdered wig from a half-century ago to add some gravitas to his appearance. Then, a slit-eyed and even more supercilious butler all in black, his receding hair shellacked to a hardness that might well protect him from missles on the battlefield, or at least from bricks tossed from behind a barricade. Barrel-chested, with a wide cumberbun and an elaborately tied cravat and no less than four timepieces on his person, each of which he consults in succession as his snears his way through their interview before he at last passes them off to Mrs. Hogsbender, the aptly named housekeeper.
Mrs. Hogsbender.
Here, at last, is an obstacle worthy of their time. For all the pomp and polish of the footman and the butler, both were easier to sap than the two-foot walls around a pleasure palace. Mrs. Hogsbender, though is a redoubtable, formidable woman, with a shelf of a bosom and a black bombazine dress like a mainsail and the brisk efficiency of the doyenne of a great house, never mind that the staff of the Society numbers no more than four or five, and half those on loan from milady's own establishment. She receives them in her sitting room belowstairs, which faces the canal proper, perhaps a half-storey above water level. The room is papered in elaborate rose damask, though there is something seamed about the application, as if it had been rescued from elsewhere before being installed here. Papered in rose damask, stuffed full of dark, heavy furniture, pine most-like, though painted and stained to have the look of dark, heavy mahoganies, the shelves positively stuffed with bric-a-brac of all sorts.
Porcelain birds and mechanical ladies, the sort that plink out the latest Viennese waltzes while stuttering above a table's surface, starched crinolines stiff and yellowing with age. Autonomic thread-winders and an old-fashioned pair of "knitting hands" clacking away at a straight line of garter stitch. Water clocks and embroidery stools and wind-up tea kettles and fine memorial pottery to commemorate the Queen's this or the Crown Prince's that or Nelson's Victory At Sea crowded up 'gainst dark little daguerrotypes of a stiff lipped man with bristling sideburns long enough that he might have combed them up and over his gleaming bald pate. Or braided them, in imitation of one of those Fierce Merican Natives that were all en vogue amongst the bluestockings.
Mr. Hogsbender, that. And all of thise, all of it wrapped about with silk or paper roses, padded with embroided rose-laden pillows, framed with dried rose petals, and Mrs. Hogsbender, all in gleaming back, perched with improbable daintiness on an elegant stool in the midst of it all frowning at them over the edge of a pair of half-spectacles gone blind with light, clucking doubtfully, inserting questions about their cleanliness and the potential for Parasites About Their Persons (which seem less personal than general. The woman Abhors a Parasite), clearly quite ready to send them off with a brisk "I am sure that madam needn't be bothered - "
When the door opens and the close confines of the room (which smells of roses, not the fresh sort, but the cloying overapplication of rosewater, as in a room where a wake is being held, and the undertaker has soaked the curtains in it in an effort to cover over the unfortunate effluvia of the recently deceased. Heavy enough that not even the brisk scent of freshly brewed tea does more than cut a lazy line of scent through the miasma) are sliced open by the re-appearance of the supercilious footman in his absurd wig, which slides forward nearly to his eyebrows as he bends to murmur something in Mrs. Hogsbender's ear and -
she looks up, mouth curling as if she had just caught wiff of the rotten potential undergirding that sweet-rose scent. "Well." Clipped and closed, the tone. "It seems that my lady is in."
Mouth pressed together around the words, the frozen expression souring by the merest degree.
"And will see you, after all."
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