Miss Garnet's Angel Read Free Page B

almost as if the boy had picked up a stone from the dusty floor of the
campo
and hurled it deliberately at her. The laughing and chattering of the locals had about it the sharp ring of exclusion. It was not, she was sure, that they intended to exclude her—the few days Miss Garnet had already spent were sufficient to establish that these were not excluding people—but that she was entirely ignorant of what was of real importance to them. The event that had passed so vividly over the bridge had some meaning, to be sure, but what that meaning was remained a blank to her.
    There was no refuge in a return to the soft, sagging bed from which she had recently awakened. She had slept too much already and the heavy-limbed lethargy, which had become familiar and acceptable, was replaced by a different quality of heaviness. Unpractised at introspection Miss Garnet nevertheless began to suspect she might be missing Harriet. The faint insight stirred a desire for physical activity.
    Miss Garnet, who had been enjoying what Harriet would have called ‘pottering about’, had so far not ventured beyond the area around the Campo Angelo Raffaele. But now she felt it was time to assert her position as visitor. It was naive to pretend, as she had been doing, that in so short a space of time she had somehow ‘fitted in’. She was a foreigner, after all, and here principally to see and learn about the historic sights of Venice.
    The light afternoon was filled with mist, and Miss Garnet hesitated a moment before taking down Harriet’s hat. ‘A third of body heat is lost through the head,’ her father, a fund of proverbial wisdoms, had used to say. It was cold and Harriet’s hat, with its veil, might, after all, prove serviceable. Glancing at the looking-glass in the tall yellow wardrobe she gained a fleet impression of someone unknown: the black-spotted veil falling from the sleek crown acted as a kind of tonic to her herringbone tweed. The once unfashionably long coat, bridging the gap between one well-booted and one veiled extremity, had somehow acquired a sense of the stylish rather than the haphazard.
    Miss Garnet was the reverse of vain but the sight of herselfframed in the speckled looking-glass boosted her spirits. She felt more fortified against the sudden sweeping sense of strangeness which had assailed her. Taking from the bureau drawer the map of Venice she had purchased along with the Reverend Crystal, she unfolded it to plot a route.
    But where to start? The glint of introspection which had just been ignited began to illuminate an insecurity: her parochial tendencies had been born of timidity, rather than a natural aptitude with the new locality. For all its apparent clarity she found the map bewildering. One location alone had any resonance for her: the Piazza San Marco, Venice’s focal point. At least she knew about that from her teaching of history. She would go to the Piazza, from where the doges had once set out to wed the seas with rings.
    *    *    *
    Miss Garnet had chosen one of the further reaches of the almost-island-which-is-Venice to stay in and from this remoter quarter the walk to the Piazza San Marco takes time. Despite Signora Mignelli’s instructions Miss Garnet did not yet feel equal to experimenting with the
vaporetti
and besides, exercise, she felt, was what was called for. She walked purposefully along the narrow
calle
which led down to the Accademia (where, the Reverend Crystal promised, a wealth of artistic treasure awaited her). At the wooden Accademia bridge she halted. Ahead of her, like a vast soap bubble formed out of the circling, dove-coloured mists, stood Santa Maria della Salute, the church which breasts the entrance to Venice’s Grand Canal.
    â€˜Oh!’ cried Miss Garnet. She caught at her throat and then at Harriet’s veil, scrabbling it back from her eyes to see more clearly. And oh, the light! ‘Lord, Lord,’