The Dark Heart of Florence Tasha Alexander (novels for beginners .TXT) 📖

“Darius is living like a pauper,” I said. “His lodgings are appalling, not at all what I would expect for someone who has five estates in England and a hunting lodge in Scotland.”

“Didn’t he come here from his family’s villa in Lake Garda?”

“Yes, I forgot about that. So why is he living in a space that a girl working as a maid would find barely acceptable?”

“He wouldn’t be the first gentleman to have run through his inheritance,” Cécile said.

“Let’s go up to my study. If Colin and Darius return, I don’t want them to find us with this.” We stopped in the kitchen on the way. The cook was stirring something on the stove—I’d told her she should take the rest of the day off, but she insisted that cooking was the only distraction that soothed her—while Signora Orlandi and Tessa were sitting at the table. I asked Tessa to come with us.

Once in my study, I showed her the scarf. She blanched and clutched her throat. “It’s his. The man from the funeral. I didn’t see his face, but I remember that scarf. Where did you find it? Do you think he had something to do with the murders?”

“We do,” I said.

She crossed herself. “He will deserve the punishment he gets in the seventh circle of hell, where he’ll spend eternity in a river of boiling blood.”

It was easy to forget how seriously the Florentines took Dante. Here, his work was still a living, breathing entity, part of everyday life. “Have the gentlemen been back to the house?” I asked.

“No, signora,” she said.

“Very good. Return to your colleagues, and, please, don’t any of you try to work. You must give yourselves time to grieve.”

“I cannot do as you ask.” The expression on her face, grim and determined, told me she would not be deterred. “Fredo was my friend. I will not stand by while his killer continues his spree. You’ve already figured out that I have more specialized training than the average maid. Let me help you.”

“All right.” There was no time to argue, and she might prove useful. “I think we must assume Darius is our murderer,” I said. “He’s bankrupt, or nearly so. All the things we suspected Marzo of doing for money could be true of Darius instead. His work gives him access to sensitive data, data that he could sell for a fortune.”

“But he is an Englishman,” Cécile said, “and surely not the sort of person who would turn traitor.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, but can you offer another explanation? Think back to this morning. We were all convinced the investigation was over. The gentlemen were planning an excursion, but Signore Bastieri’s arrival delayed their departure. What did he tell us?”

“That he found the coat of arms on buildings.”

“Colin and Darius left,” I said. “An hour or so later, you discovered Fredo, Tessa.”

“Surely Monsieur Benton-Smith could not have murdered him without drawing the attention of Monsieur Hargreaves.”

“If he is responsible for all the murders, he is a cunning assassin, capable of deceiving even Colin, who would never have suspected his colleague of slipping off to do something so vile. We can figure out the details later; but for now we must assume that Signore Bastieri’s revelations spurred Darius to kill again. Why? So far as we can tell, the location of the arms didn’t reveal anything telling. What are we missing?”

“If he needs money, Signore Benton-Smith would want the treasure,” Tessa said, “and he’d have to make sure no one finds it before him.”

“He directed Signore Bastieri and me to go back and look at each of the houses that bear the coat of arms,” I said. “That tells me something about them made him fear exposure.”

“If he had not sent you out to the houses, what would you have done?” Cécile asked.

“I would have looked at the graffiti again, not my translations, but the originals. It had to have been placed deliberately to mimic the pattern of the buildings, which had already been built by Savonarola’s time. There must be something hidden in it.”

“Then let us find out what it is,” Tessa said.

We started on the landing, with the first graffito I’d found, collecting Signore Tazzera and Signore Bastieri en route. I scrutinized the words, but they provided no illumination. Signore Tazzera stood next to me, using a magnifying glass.

“There’s nothing strange about it at all,” he said. “Whoever wrote it possessed a fine hand and scored a horizontal line on the wall to ensure his work would be straight. That suggests that the writer was likely a copyist or a scribe. Few others would have such beautiful handwriting, and a scribe would be in the habit of ruling a page before writing on it.”

“I don’t see the line,” I said, leaning closer. The librarian gave me his glass. Peering through it, I could just make it out, a faint line scraped into the plaster. “Ah … yes … I can spot it now. And there’s something else.”

The text read Quod nequeunt oculis rerum primordia cerni. Below the line under each of the Cs were two impossibly small dots that looked like they’d been made by pricking the plaster with the sharp point of a knife.

I went into the Sale Madornale and applied the magnifying glass to its graffito, the others following me. There, below the line, were dots under each of ten letter As. From there, we examined the rest, and found dots corresponding with one L, two Os, seven Us, and four Ps. I wrote the letters in my notebook.

“The layout may tell us how to decode the message,” Cécile said. “What are the addresses of the buildings? Put them in numerical order and we will know the order of the letters.”

“There are twenty-six marked letters,” Signore Tazzera said. “Could that be significant?”

“I think we’re making things overcomplicated,” I said and turned my notebook toward them to reveal the word I’d made from the letters. “CUPOLA.”

“Whatever they hid, they put it in