Donna Leon - A noble radiance

A Noble Radiance

'A splendid series ... with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smellif Sunday Telegraph

'One of the pleasuresoffered by crime fiction is the sense of a place evoked ... for Donna Leon, the scene is Venice and she offers afresh exhilarating take on that ambiguous city ... Leon evokes memorably La Serenissima's unsettling mixtureof faded beauty and fecund corruption' SundayTimes

'This series hasbecome one of the adornments of current crime fiction ... a gem' TheScotsman

'Donna Leon's crimenovels have everything going for them. A Venice backdrop beautifully observed,a dazzling, page-turning writing style, a central character, in CommissarioBrunetti, who deserves to be as famous as Maigret, and a wife who deservescanonisation' Daily Post

'Leon gets better andbetter' Express on Sunday

Donna Leon has livedin Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland, Iran, SaudiArabia and China where she was a teacher. She now combines writing withteaching English Literature at a university near Venice. Her novels featuringCommissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed and regularly top thebestseller lists in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and the UK.

Donna Leon

A Noble Radiance

Published in theUnited Kingdom in 1999 by Arrow Books

7 9 10 8

Copyright DonnaLeon and Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich 1998

The right of DonnaLeon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her inaccordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

This book is soldsubject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, belent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's priorconsent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it ispublished and without a similar condition including this condition beingimposed on the subsequent purchaser.

First published inthe United Kingdom in 1998 by William Heinemann

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La nobilita ha dipinta negli occhi lonesta

The nobility hashonesty painted in its eyes

Don Giovanni

Mozart

There was nothingmuch to notice about the field, a hundred-metre square of dry grass below asmall village in the foothills of the Dolomites. It lay at the bottom of aslope covered with hardwood trees which could easily be culled for firewood,and that was used as an argument to increase the price when the land and thetwo-hundred-year-old house upon it came to be sold. Off to the north aslant-faced mountain loomed over the small town of Ponte nelle Alpi; a hundredkilometres to the south lay Venice, too far away to influence the politics orcustoms of the area. People in the villages spoke Italian with somereluctance, felt more at home in Bellunese dialect.

The field had lainunfilled for almost half a century, and the stone house had sat empty. The immenseslates that made up the roof had shifted

with age and suddenchanges in temperature, perhaps even with the occasional earthquake that hadstruck the area during the centuries the roof had protected the house from rainand snow, and so it no longer did that, for many of the slates had crashed toearth, leaving the upper rooms exposed to the elements. Because the house andproperty lay at the heart of a contested will, none of the eight heirs hadbothered to repair the leaks, fearful that they would never get back the fewhundred thousand lire the repairs would cost. So the rain and snow dripped,then flowed, in, nibbling away at plaster and floorboards, and each year theroof tilted more drunkenly towards the earth.

The field, too, hadbeen abandoned for the same reasons. None of the presumptive heirs wanted toexpend either time or money working the land, nor did they want to weaken theirlegal position by being seen to make unpaid use of the property. Weedsflourished, made all the more vital by the fact that the last people tocultivate the land had for decades manured it with the droppings of theirrabbits.

It was the scent offoreign money that settled the dispute about the will: two days after a retiredGerman doctor made an offer for the house and land, the eight heirs met at thehome of the eldest. Before the end of the evening, they had arrived at aunanimous decision to sell the house and land; their subsequent decision wasnot to sell until the foreigner had doubled his offer, which would bring theselling price to four times what any local resident would - or could - pay.

Three weeks after thedeal was completed, scaffolding went up, and the centuries-old, hand-cutslates were hurled down to shatter in the courtyard below. The art of laying theslates had died with the artisans who knew how to cut them, and so they werereplaced with moulded rectangles of prefabricated cement that had a vagueresemblance to terra cotta tiles. Because the doctor had hired the oldest ofthe heirs to serve as his foreman, work progressed quickly; because this wasthe Province of Belluno, it was done honestly and well. By the middle of thespring, the restoration of the house was almost complete, and with the approachof the first warm days, the new owner, who had spent his professional lifeenclosed in brightly lit operating rooms and who was conducting therestorations by phone and fax from Munich, turned his thoughts to the creationof the garden he had dreamed about for years.

Village memory islong, and it recalled that the old garden had run alongside the row of walnuttrees out behind the house, so it was there that Egidio Buschetti, the foreman,decided to plough. The land hadn't been worked for most of his own lifetime, soBuschetti estimated that his tractor would have to pass over the land twice,once to cut through the metre-high weeds, and then once again to disc up therich soil lying underneath.

At first Buschettithought it was a horse - he remembered that the old owners had kept two - andso he continued with his tractor all the way to what he had established a s theend of the field. Pulling at the broad wheel, he swung the tractor around andheaded back, proud of the razor-straightness of the furrows, glad to be out inthe sun again, happy at the sound and the feel of the work, sure now thatspring had come. He saw the bone sticking up crookedly from the furrow he hadjust ploughed, the white length of it sharply visible against the nearly blackearth. No, not long enough to be a horse, but he didn't remember that anyonehad ever kept sheep here. Curious, he slowed the tractor, somehow reluctant toride over the bone and shatter it.

He shifted intoneutral and drew to a stop. Pulling on the hand brake, he climbed down from hishigh metal seat and walked over towards the cantilevered bone that jutted uptowards the sky. He bent and reached out to shove it away from the path of thetractor, but a sudden reluctance pulled him upright again, and he prodded at itwith the toe of his heavy boot, hoping thus to dislodge it. It refused to move,so Buschetti turned towards the tractor, where he kept a shovel clamped in backof his seat. As he turned, his eyes fell upon a gleaming white oval a bitfarther along the bottom of the furrow. No horse, no sheep had ever gazed outfrom so round a skull, nor would they leer up at him through the sharpenedcarnivore teeth so frighteningly like his own.