The Venetians

Eve Marchant

Eve Marchant is Colonel Marchant's motherless daughter, raised in social disgrace among four sisters and an impossible father, yet never less than a lady. Jack Vansittart loves her for her plain honesty, but his county family sees only the liabilities she brings: no fortune, no accomplishments, a dishonoured name. Her frankness, mistaken for flirtation by village gossips, and the shadowy Venetian history attached to her brother Harold make her the pivot on which the novel's questions of love, class, and reputation turn.

Jack Vansittart

Jack Vansittart is master of a handsome estate and three or four thousand a year, answerable to no one but his devoted, county-proud mother. He proposes to Eve Marchant within days of meeting her, dismissing the corvée of her disreputable father and four sisters as quartz to be dug through for gold. Yet he keeps one secret from his mother — a night in Venice — and that buried episode, together with his impulsive generosity toward strangers, will test whether his romantic certainties can survive contact with the truth.

Lisa Vivanti

Lisa Vivanti, eldest of a swarm of children, escapes a brutal father and a life of being one mouth too many when Vansittart installs her and her aunt in a furnished London flat under the name Smith. She is impulsive, uneducated, and rapturously grateful — qualities Vansittart counts on and quietly condescends to. Her musical gifts and her connection to a man who once lodged in the Campo Goldoni as Smith make her a living thread between the Venetian past and the English present.

Mr. Sefton

Mr. Sefton is the kind of old acquaintance whose word carries weight and whose connections reach further than anyone expects. He vouches for Ferrari, the tireless courier who once pulled Sefton's own father from the Grand Canal, and through him sets in motion the tracing of Harold Marchant's movements across two continents. His loyalty to the Vansittarts and his willingness to let uncomfortable facts surface make him a catalyst rather than a bystander in the unraveling of the past.

Sophy Marchant

Sophy Marchant is one of Eve's four sisters, the one noted for tact in a household where tact is scarce and their father's conduct makes every social encounter a hazard. She belongs to the awkward cluster of dependents — four sisters and an impossible father — that Vansittart's relations regard as the price of his romantic choice. Her diplomacy matters because it holds the Marchant family together at the edges of a story that keeps threatening to expose them.

Peggy

Peggy is the youngest-seeming of the Marchant sisters, addressed with the affectionate diminutives — dear Miss Peggy, poor little Peggy — that signal both fondness and fragility. She lives inside the same shabby household as Eve, subject to the same father and the same social disadvantage, but with less of her sister's defiant frankness to shield her. Her fate and her small chances matter because they measure what the Marchant sisters stand to gain or lose from Eve's marriage.