The Visitant: A Venetian Ghost Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

cavorting with Astors and Van Cortlandts.”
    “You don’t really believe that.”
    “You have no idea what I believe. Or what I am. Or what I’ll do .” The look he gave me was uncomfortably assessing. “How foolish they were to send you.”
    “My father trained me for this himself, Mr. Farber. I’m very capable.”
    He laughed slightly. “Oh, I’m certain you are.”
    Derision, again, but something more than that too. Amusement and a knowing that made me feel soiled and prickly. “We’ll have you recovered in no time. But you must promise to do as I ask. Your regimen requires abstinence, which you know. Your parents expect your return at the end of January. If you want to be well by then, I must have your promise that you will send Giulia away when she visits.”
    “Why?” he asked. “Why does it matter to you? It can hardly make an ounce of difference to you whether or not my parents can keep the secret of my affliction from my fiancée.”
    I couldn’t tell him how much depended on it.
    He must have seen it in my face. His expression tightened. “What have they promised you besides money?”
    “The contract is between my father and your parents,” I said stiffly. “I cannot reveal—”
    “What’s your stake in it?” he insisted. “There must be one. I can see it in your face. What are you, a friend of my fiancée’s? Does it matter so much to her?”
    “I don’t know her at all. I don’t even know who she is.”
    “Neither do I.” His expression was darkly resentful, and any hope I’d had for a quick resolution died abruptly.
    Whatever other problems I had expected to encounter, I had not thought fighting Samuel Farber himself would be one of them. He had been at Glen Echo often enough over the years that I had assumed he wanted to gain control of his suffering; who would not? He was the only heir to his parents’ self-made fortune; why shouldn’t he want whatever normal life they might contract for him?
    I had not realized he’d been admitted involuntarily. His file had not said it. The one time I’d met his parents, they had implied that he was desperate to control his seizures. But now I knew that when Papa said that Mr. Farber might be difficult, he was not just talking about how much Samuel Farber disliked the treatments, but of something more crucial still: the fact that he had no desire at all to change the way he lived his life. It meant that I would have to use no small amount of persuasion to win his cooperation. But I would not be dissuaded. I did have a stake in this. However Samuel Farber might wish to ruin his own life, I did not intend to let him ruin mine.

Chapter 3
    It was one thing to make the resolution, and quite another to carry it out. Over the next few days, Samuel Farber was resentful and intractable. I knew what had helped him in the past, and my father and I had discussed every detail of the plan to help him now, but I could not start right away. Though his injuries were healing, his reliance on the laudanum had made him too sensitive. I had to wait until he had withdrawn enough from the drug that every touch didn’t cause him pain, which meant that I had a great deal of time on my hands. I was bored and restless, too many hours to think, to remember everything that had brought me here.
    I had nearly memorized his file already; reading it again was no distraction. I’d thumbed so often through my Baedeker guides, imagining myself in each of the magical places they described, that my longing to be done with this, to have my reward, was uncomfortably constant, and delay only made me irritable and short. I found myself wandering the floor, going from room to empty, deteriorating room, trying to ignore that sense of enduring watchfulness. I did not like the hallways especially, with the plaster carvings whose empty eyes seemed to note and judge and measure. Sometimes I felt myself racing down the hall before I realized I was trying to escape the weight of that