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“I see.” West frowned. “Well. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Please speak to the housekeeper, and tell her to speak to the housemaids. The duchess is not mad. And anyone who gossips about her will be dismissed.”

“Of course, your grace. Immediately.” He bowed and left the study.

West sat fuming. Of course Pomona was not mad. And the servants ought to know that idle chatter about the family was unacceptable.

And yet… What was she doing? Was it coincidence that this had started after he’d told her that there were no cliffs in Venice? She’d seemed to be close to tears. Yet that made no sense. She must simply have had too much sun. There could be absolutely no reason to cry over the information that Venice was supported by wooden pilings driven into mud.

On the other hand… what about the many odd questions that she’d asked about tunnels? What about the time that she'd said that sand dunes would never do?

There had to be a logical explanation. But he couldn’t begin to guess what it was. They’d been married for some three months, and she was more of a stranger to him now than she’d ever been. Pomona had changed—or been changed. The spirited, animated, questioning girl that she’d been was still inside her. He caught glimpses of her still. But now she was… armored. And possibly he was deluding himself, but he didn’t think that all the bitterness that he glimpsed was because of their forced marriage.

From the little that he’d been able to gather, she’d been blamed for a scandal that had had nothing to do with her. And that had been Townley’s doing. And yet she refused to speak of Townley at all—as though speaking of him would somehow give him power.

And now there was this. Another secret. Yet… whatever she was up to, it was something that she’d planned. After all, her first concern had been to extract a promise from him that he wouldn’t question the time that she spent writing—or look at her papers. So she’d known in advance that she would be occupied with it.

Was she in some sort of trouble or danger? Could it be something to do with her family? Surely she didn’t expect him to sit by while she struggled on her own. He frowned.

The Keynsham siblings had been raised by parents who’d made it clear to their children that they were not to trouble them. Charles was now the sort of man who wouldn’t ask for help even when he needed it, and who’d struggled through the financial wreckage left by his father on his own. And Pomona, West was beginning to see, might be very much the same.

The arras moved again, as though a draft had stirred it. Yet there was no draft in the corridor. Not a window was open. The flame of the candle she held was almost perfectly steady. Violetta glanced left and right. She had not been followed… had she? The sensation of eyes upon her, making her skin crawl, remained. Yet she must be imagining it. No one could be there.

Her heart was racing. She reached for a corner of the dusty tapestry, and before her courage could fail her… twitched it aside! And behind it… she saw nothing but darkness! As she feared, it concealed a secret passageway, where anyone—or anything!—might be lurking.

Her knees shook. She raised the candle higher—only to reveal that instead of a passageway, a set of narrow stairs led downard—downward—downward!—into a stygian blackness! Half insensible with terror, she forced herself to take a step toward them. The light of the candle revealed rough stone walls. And then, from far below, came a long, despairing, blood-chilling wail.

She was too frightened even to scream. And in that very moment, she heard the worst sound possible behind her: the sound of a hand upon the door to the corridor. There was no choice now. She placed her slipper-shod foot upon the top step, and⁠—

Pomona dropped the paper onto the table in disgust. Here was yet another scene that would have to be cut. Violetta couldn’t possibly flee into a dungeon… in a city in which there were no dungeons! How many days, weeks and months had she spent writing a book set in Venice that couldn’t possibly take place in Venice?

She was an idiot.

And what was worse was that as she read over what she’d written, she realized that it wasn’t good. She’d been so intimidated by the idea of having to set her book in Venice—and by having to compete directly with The Prisoner of San Severino—that she seemed to have unconsciously decided that the safest course was to heap together all the most sensational scenes stored away in her mind from every other gothic novel that she’d read… and hope that some sort of story emerged from them.

And so now she was sorting everything that she’d written into piles. She made a pile for work that might still be usable, a pile for scenes that would have to be drastically re-written, and a pile for scenes that she might as well burn. Which included every impossible scene set in catacombs, tunnels, dungeons or caves. Which... was at least half of what she’d written.

Sometimes she moved a scene from the rewrite pile into the burn pile. Less frequently, she moved one back. But after several days of this activity, she could confidently say that she wasn’t the slightest bit closer to knowing how to fix her book.

She suspected that she'd failed. And failure had a heavy, hollow feeling. It sat in her chest, aching in a way that was all too familiar. It felt like heartbreak. It felt like the despair that she’d felt when she’d realized that West wouldn’t arrive at the door of Alford House to defy her parents and claim her as his bride. It felt like the emptiness that she’d felt aboard the ship to Ostend, being sent away to stay with a great aunt that she’d never met, in a country where she’d never been.

No. This was a... a setback. There had to be a way for her to salvage the book. Perhaps she ought to draft an outline. She could make a list of scenes to replace, and a schedule for getting them rewritten. After all, there was little time left before she must get the manuscript to Mr. Wynde. Her ordinarily haphazard writing methods wouldn’t do now.

But when she pulled out a fresh sheet of paper to write even a plan, her brain simply refused to cooperate. Her mind was as blank as the paper before her—as blank as though she’d never so much as read a book—let alone written one.

On the other side of the shutters Venice was a languid late-spring dream. The air was a haze of melting sunshine and the mingled scents of trailing wisteria and jasmine. Far into the night barges full of musicians and partygoers drifted down the Grand Canal, lit by strings of colored lanterns swaying above their decks. The whole city seemed to be devoting itself to pleasure, while she sat inside, hunched over the ink-blotched pages of her disastrous manuscript. She was supposed to be on honeymoon, and she’d barely managed to enjoy herself at all.

She’d never in her life been able to make a schedule or an outline. She was exhausted. The small stack of scenes that might be salvageable amounted to almost nothing. And she’d run out of inspiration. And enthusiasm. And stamina. In fact, she didn't know what had ever made her think that she could do this in the first place. She wasn’t even a real authoress.

There was only one logical use for this sheet of paper: She would write a letter to Mr. Wynde, and admit to him that she'd failed. The book was unpublishable, and she couldn't finish it. In fact, she might as well also tell him that she was giving up writing altogether.

There was a knock on the library door. She jumped up. “Perdone! I have given instructions that… Oh. It is you.”

That tall, broad-shouldered silhouette could only be West. He peered into the room. “Good God! Why is it so dark in here? What on earth are you doing?”

She began scooping up her papers and cramming them into her writing desk. He couldn’t see them--especially not now! The last thing she wanted was for him to know how badly she’d failed. If he found out that she’d been trying to write a book—at the very moment when she’d finally realized that her work was dreadful, and that she was delusional—she didn’t think that she could bear it.

He strolled toward her looking looked cool and handsome in his navy linen jacket. “Well. I am about to go for a walk. I wondered if you might care to join me.” He reached past her and opened one of the shutters. “At least have some fresh air.”

She blinked crossly. Across the canal, the golden early evening light illuminated the pink marble facade of another palazzo. For all that she'd managed to accomplish, she could have been simply wandering around sightseeing and enjoying herself. “The housemaids do not like it when I open the shutters. They say that the sun fades the carpets and the books.”