A Venetian Affair (30 page)

Over the course of the winter Giustiniana’s doubts about Knyphausen gradually dissolved. “I am still enchanted by my man,” she wrote in mid-February. “He’s the most charming and the most decent one there is. We see each other; we tell each other all sorts of tender things. But are we quite sure of ourselves?” In March she was already more hopeful: “I could be happy with this man, dear Memmo, if my anxious soul would only let me enjoy the moment without all the inner turmoil. . . . He believes in me; I’m very close to believing in him. He sympathizes with me; and I do respect him. His soul is so pure! Oh, do let me tell you: he’s just like you, and God knows it’s the truth. And you do look very much alike, though I promise you are more handsome.” By early spring Giustiniana felt more confident about her feelings for Knyphausen than she ever had, and Andrea must have assumed by then that they were lovers: “My love life goes on, and it looks as if we really love each other. I have nothing much to say beyond that, except to mention that we do have our moments of scorn, our bouts of jealousy, our tantrums, our peacemaking; usual things, and of no great importance. . . . Do you think I love the Baron? I firmly believe I do.”

How far should she go? How far did Andrea want her to go? “Give me your advice, help me keep a little mistrust alive; tell me his heart is not as good as it appears to be. You are my only friend, and you will be as long as you live. . . . Oh, if only I could see you now!”

To Andrea, this longing Giustiniana had to see him, so emphatically stated even as she was meeting secretly with her new lover, sounded disingenuous. He chided her, surmising that if he were to appear suddenly in London she would receive him with much less affection than her letters suggested. Giustiniana was hurt by his sarcasm: “Oh God, you can be so unfair. Come here and see for yourself what my feelings are for you. Then you will judge me. I have hardened out of necessity, but I have remained your loving friend.”

In this Giustiniana was truthful. She could not let go of Andrea—did not want to let go of him. And her letters, while mostly about her new lover, were still filled with ambiguous references to their own relationship. Yes, she loved Knyphausen, “but not in the way I once loved you. Oh, what a difference! Oh, happy rapture! How many times I have wept over you!” And again: “You know you can always expect the most tender transport on my part.”

In a world of fantasy, she said, she would have loved both men. Had Andrea come to London to see her, had money not been an obstacle, “I would have introduced you at once to the man I respect more than anyone else after you, and who is so dear to me.” They would have been together, the three of them, in a strange and happy harmony. “I would no longer have made distinctions between my lovers, and you would have both been my friends. What happiness! What joy I would have felt to be between these two dear persons! I would have held no preference, for I would have omitted everything that might have caused it. Oh God! Why are you not here now to make me revel in this pure and perfect happiness?”

In the real world, however, Andrea was far away and not at all likely to make the journey to London. Giustiniana could tell from his letters, affectionate as they were, that he was busy building his own life in Venice, courting other women, working on his political career. In London, it was Knyphausen who kept her heart warm and her mind occupied. She noticed how her daily life seemed less tedious now. He gave her new zest. “I go out nearly every evening,” she noted to her own surprise.

By the end of the winter Knyphausen was often by her side, even in public. Officially, their liaison was still a “secret.” But rumors, as ever, had spread, thanks largely to the indiscretion of the Venetian ambassador. Giustiniana discovered with horror that “charming” Count Colombo had been reading her letters to Andrea. Including, she fumed, “the one in which I gave you a detailed summary of my love life.” In revenge, she immediately sent off “a short but strong” letter to Andrea, blasting Colombo for “his shameful behavior.” She knew it would circulate in Venice and dishonor the ambassador. “By God, he will get what he deserves,” she quipped.

One outcome of Colombo’s “shameful curiosity” was that it no longer made much sense to go to extremes in order to conceal her friendship with Knyphausen. So they went to the Opera together to hear the Italian singers, and they visited the London gambling houses—always rife with crazed addicts—to watch and comment on the crowd. Giustiniana was still untouched by the disease: “All my pleasure is in making remarks, in criticizing, in amusing myself . . . with the Baron always with me,” she wrote to Andrea, recalling their own thrilling nights at the Ridotto in Venice. The dinners and assemblies were as “insufferable” as ever, but now she had someone to laugh with during those stuffy affairs. They whispered clever remarks to each other, smiled in wry amusement. Their favorite little game consisted of “discovering a caricature in all the people we run into.”

Giustiniana was having a fine time with Knyphausen, but she was not growing any more comfortable with the English aristocracy. Quite to the contrary, she felt increasingly at odds with the people she had come to dazzle. She had lost her natural gaiety, she complained. She began to strike a pose and suffer from ennui. Her occasional pleasure in going out endured only because Knyphausen, an outsider like her, played along. Giustiniana was genuinely fond of him. She treasured his company and his camaraderie, although she never spoke of their relationship in hopeful terms, at least not in her letters to Andrea. Marriage, apparently, was never seriously discussed. If Knyphausen ever considered the possibility, he did not make a decisive move in that direction. There were the usual obstacles: the difference in religion (he was a Protestant), the difference in social standing. He also had pressing issues on his mind: he was in the middle of intense negotiations with Pitt in a frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to persuade him to send a British fleet to the Baltic Sea to protect the coast of Prussia. As for Giustiniana, her letters to Andrea consistently maintain that marriage was something she no longer wanted. In fact, her hostility to the idea of marrying anyone at all hardened during that winter despite her feelings for Knyphausen. If she talked about the subject at all, it was in the frivolous context of finding Knyphausen the best possible wife: “I’ve got it into my head to set him up, and I’ve already made my choice; but it’ll be hard because this little person I have in mind is very sly. . . . If she won’t fall in love with him it’ll be my fault; and the amount of effort I put into making him agreeable to her is the most ridiculous thing in the world.”

Even as she felt her bloom was fading, Giustiniana was determined to keep her independence, and she willfully relegated the issue of marriage to the background.

In early March Andrea sent word to Giustiniana that their old friend General Graeme was on his way to London and would call on her as soon as he got there. The news filled her with joy. It felt as though a warm, familiar breeze had suddenly blown into town, bringing back memories and stirring old yearnings.

Graeme, a prominent member of the English community in Venice, had been a good friend of the Wynnes before their departure, particularly Giustiniana. As commander in chief of the army he was also in close contact with all the ruling families of the Republic and was a coveted lunch and dinner guest at all the best Venetian houses. He had grown very fond of Andrea, and their friendship had deepened during Giustiniana’s absence despite the considerable difference in their ages. Graeme had had to sit out the war due to Venice’s neutrality. But at seventy, the energetic general still hankered for some action. He even hoped his visit to London might help him obtain a command in North America.

In any circumstances, the arrival of this old Venetian friend would have been cause for celebration. But Giustiniana still felt so unsettled in her London surroundings that the news jolted her into a state of feverish excitement. She waited for him like a sentinel standing guard. At the end of March, she heard that Graeme was at last in town. Just as she was getting ready to pay him a visit, the old soldier suddenly appeared at the Wynnes’ and she rushed into his arms: “I truly felt as if I saw a part of myself in him as I knew he was coming from where you are. . . . I ran to embrace him and then I kissed him for you, and now it seems I cannot see enough of him. . . . I speak about you all the time. . . . I assailed him with so many questions all at once! So my Memmo still remembers me, and I hear this from someone who sees him and is with him nearly every day. . . . Graeme made me laugh by assuring me that you still love all the ladies; which means you don’t love any one of them. Giustiniana may still hope to be dear to you.”

She and the general saw each other again the following evening at Knyphausen’s and spent all their time together, catching up on Venetian gossip. They were not really free to talk there, particularly not about Andrea. Next morning, Easter Sunday, the general came by the Wynnes’ again. Giustiniana became so engrossed in their conversation that she forgot to join her mother at Easter mass. “He stayed with me from eleven until after two. . . . What a good soul! Right now he is the only man I love. . . . I would be so happy if I could have him with me at the theater tonight. And all this rapture is because I talk about you. Because all I do is think about you. I am beside myself, by God, I still love you too much.”

Her agitated ramblings with Graeme had brought Andrea back to her in such vivid colors that Knyphausen, by contrast, appeared bland. “I am afraid I shall grow bored with the baron,” she confided to Andrea. “I love him and he loves me. We see each other quietly. Our pleasures are always quiet. But though I make up worries and cause little quarrels and disputes and bring up suspicions to give us a little vivacity, I fear we are deluding ourselves.”

The general stayed only a few weeks, enough to take care of some family business and to realize that, much to his disappointment, he was unlikely ever to see any more action in the field. But the impact of his short visit on Giustiniana was considerable. It unleashed a torrent of emotions that was bound to crash into the still waters of her placid romance with Knyphausen.

Their “quiet pleasure” lasted through the spring. They shared more dinners, more assemblies, and more
conversazioni.
“I am certainly not lacking invitations,” Giustiniana said with more than a hint of disaffection. They still met discreetly at Knyphausen’s little annex around the corner from his house “on account of his many servants.” The weather improved and brought new distractions. A boxing match between the Irish and English champions kept tongues wagging for days. Military operations on the European front and in North America had resumed after the winter lull, bringing another string of victories for the Anglo-Prussian coalition and more calls for peace. Lord Bute, backed by the Prince of Wales, continued to strengthen his hand at the expense of Pitt. Holderness, though still secretary of state, had thrown in his lot with the rising new leader, prompting Pitt to comment with sarcasm that he was likely to become “the vortex”
¹⁰
of a future Bute government. Knyphausen, on the other hand, probably realized that his own star was already dimming with that of the Great Commoner.

Giustiniana no doubt followed these developments simply by virtue of the fact that she knew so many of the participants. Yet she seldom described the political scene for Andrea even though he would surely have been very interested in it. She did not have a taste for politics. Her taste was more for observing society. In the spring of 1760 nothing captured her imagination as much as the trial of Laurence Shirley, Fourth Earl of Ferrers.

Back in January, Lord Ferrers, an eccentric old man who lived in seclusion on his vast estate in Leicestershire, had summoned his faithful steward, Mr. Johnson, ostensibly to complain about certain accounts. When the steward had entered the parlor, Lord Ferrers had locked the door behind him, ordered the poor man to his knees at gunpoint, and told him “to make his peace with God, for he never should rise again till he rose at the Resurrection.” Mr. Johnson protested that all the accounts were in order. Lord Ferrers replied that “he did not doubt his accounts, but he’d been a tyrant and he was determined to punish him” and discharged his pistol at close range.
¹¹

Lord Ferrers was brought down to London, imprisoned in the Tower, and tried for murder by his peers in the House of Lords. Giustiniana was riveted by the case. All the major newspapers and periodicals printed detailed accounts of the inquiry and long features on the streak of madness than ran through this illustrious family. Lord Ferrers begged for mercy on the grounds of insanity, not an unreasonable plea on the part of a man who, according to
Gentleman’s Magazine,
“was subject to causeless passions, . . . walked hastily about the room clenching his fists, grinning, biting his lips and talking to himself, . . . [was] frequently absent when spoken to, [and made] mouths in the looking glass.”
¹²

He was nevertheless found guilty in the course of a three-day trial that attracted “all of London,” as Giustiniana put it to Andrea. She managed to get into two of the crowded sessions and came away with the sickening impression of having been to another of those elegant assemblies rather than to a murder trial. “The ladies were dressed for a gala, and the trial room, very large, was entirely draped in red and crammed with people. I have never seen such a grandiose spectacle. His lordship’s predicament was terrible, but the sheer magnificence and diversity of the scene were such that the death of that poor man was the last thing people thought about.”

Lord Ferrers, the last member of the House of Lords to be tried by his peers, was executed on the morning of May 5. It is said a silk noose was used in deference to his rank.