2008 - Recipes for Cherubs (34 page)

Catrin looked wide-eyed at Nonna, trying to decide whether she was having her leg pulled.

Nonna continued, “The great bell is swinging. Dong, dong. And bits of the priest is swinging too, if you see what I mean.”

Catrin blushed and was glad Nonna couldn’t see her face.

“Luigi say that the mothers cover the eyes of the little children who watch. One woman with two little girls faints and he has to carry her all way home. And she a big lump for young man to carry.”

“Who got the priest down?”

“I don’t know, but somebody. But you know what?”

“What?”

“That wicked priest, Father Rimaldi, was never seen again in that place.” Nonna rocked back and forth, and laughed until her eyes ran with tears.

Catrin watched her in astonishment, her mind racing. “How do you know that he was called Father Rimaldi?”

“Because Luigi tell me. His name was famous far and wide after that.”

“That’s only half the story,” Tony said, opening another bottle of wine with a resounding pop.

Catrin thought how happy he looked, how handsome in the flickering candlelight.

“How you mean, half the story?” Norma asked.

“Ah, see, you don’t know everything, Nonna,” he declared, filling her glass to the brim and winking.

“Tell us, then,” Catrin begged.

“Ah, well, you see, I happen to know this from a very good source.”

“What do you know?” Catrin urged.

“Well, do you remember Benito, Nonna, the student who came here one summer and camped in Blind Man’s Lookout?”

“
Si
, I remember. Very handsome boy who got into a bit of trouble.”

“He was a nice lad,” Ella said. “He did some building work on the tower, and he used to spend hours talking to Alice.”

“That’s him. Anyhow, you want this story or not?”

“Yes.” Catrin nodded impatiently.

“Well, Benito was an art student at the university in Rome, but one summer holiday he was working as a labourer, doing up an old villa which had been abandoned for years.”

“What’s that got to do with the priest?” Catrin demanded.

“Hang on the bell, Nell. While he was working at the villa, some builders who were restoring the old priest’s house opposite ripped out some old plaster and came across a skeleton.”

“Ugh!” Catrin exclaimed, dropping her fork with a clatter.

“It gave them a hell of a shock. The police were called and they had to stop work for weeks.”

“Antonio, you going to put me off my pudding with these stories?”

“Ah, go away with you. Nothing puts you off your food, Norma.”

“Well, when they examined the remains they discovered that it was the skeleton of a young woman, who had had her skull bashed in.”

“Who was she?”

“It was impossible for them to tell, because she’d been there for such a long time and there was no way of finding out.”

“Oh.” Catrin’s voice was flat with disappointment.

“They only knew that she’d recently had a child.”

Catrin sat up very straight, eyes shining with anticipation.

“There was one other clue about how long she’d been there.”

“And what was that?”

“Beside the body was a bag of money.”

“What did that prove?”

“The coins were eighteenth-century, so they guessed she’d been there since then.”

“Did they find the skeleton of the baby, too?”

Tony shook his head and Catrin sighed with disappointment.

“But Benito was intrigued and did a little digging.”

“Did he dig up more skeletons?”

“Not digging like that, but asking around.”

“What did he find out?”

“There was an old convent just along from the priest’s house, and the nuns looked out the ledgers going back hundreds of years, and he found out something very interesting.”

“What?” Catrin could barely contain her excitement.

“In 1751 there was a child abandoned, put into a tub outside the convent, a child nobody ever came to claim.”

“It wasn’t a tub, it was an olive jar, actually,” Catrin said.

“Come again?”

“The baby was left in an olive jar, put there by the priest.”

“In the ledger it said that the priest at the time, one Father Rimaldi, found the baby wrapped in an old blanket and took the baby to the nuns. The Last Rites were given, because the baby was deformed and wasn’t expected to live.”

“He wasn’t deformed, he was just a dwarf,” Catrin said, in a faraway voice.

“But the child lived?” Ella asked.

“Oh yes, and the nuns christened him,” Tony continued.

“Bindo!” Catrin exclaimed.

Tony gaped at her.

“What was the child called really?” Ella asked.

“Catrin’s right, he was called Bindo. I thought it a funny name.”

“Funnily enough, years ago Queenie Probert, one of the old cockle pickers from Aberderi, had a donkey called Bindo,” Ella said.

“I remember her, she live in house called the Shambles,” said Norma.

“That’s her,” Ella said and then added, “How did you know the baby’s name, Catrin?”

“I don’t know, it kind of just came to me out of the blue,” she lied. She looked away from their bewildered faces and took a gulp of wine.

“But they couldn’t be sure that Father Rimaldi had murdered the woman?” Ella said.

Catrin said nothing. If they’d seen the portrait of Father Rimaldi, they’d know that he was a man capable of anything.

“No,” said Tony, “but it’s more than likely, if you think about it. A priest living alone has the opportunity to do something like that. Maybe he did the mother in and then left the baby outside the convent for the nuns to find.”

“But why would he murder the woman?”

“That will always remain a mystery, I’m afraid.” Catrin’s mind was still racing. She was pretty damned sure who the woman was. It was the woman in the Piero di Bardi painting, the woman who was carrying Piero di Bardi’s child. Maybe she had arrived in Santa Rosa that snowy winter’s night with her baby, looking for Piero. Had she come across Father Rimaldi, and had he offered to help her and then double-crossed her? If there had been a struggle, her scarf might have come off and blown round the neck of the little cherub. Then what had happened? Had he murdered her and given the baby to the nuns?

She thought of the painting of Father Rimaldi, the hawklike nose and the eyes with the murderous glint, and she shivered. “Anyone for pudding?” Tony asked.

M
aria was hard at work preparing for the evening meal. She worked without her usual enthusiasm, chopping vegetables angrily, cursing when she nicked her finger with a knife, stemming the trickle of blood on the sleeve of her old dress
.

Ismelda was shut up in her bedroom in disgrace, because Signor Bisotti had caught her sitting up in the pomegranate tree this morning. What a fuss just because a child was tempted to climb a tree. He had taken on as if she were some kind of monster. Then the miserable old bastard had confiscated her box of treasures. Mother of God! How awful was it to stash a pile of childish keepsakes in a box? Hadn’t he ever been a child himself? He was probably born a wizened little shitpot. Whatever had his wife seen in him? She had been a good-looking woman with a sunny temperament. Mind you, there had been some gossip that she’d been betrothed to the wood carver who lived in the alleyway behind the church, but Signor Bisotti had paid her parents handsomely for her hand in marriage
.

Marie finished preparing the vegetables for the minestrone and began to make the
strangolapreti.
Later, Luca was coming to help her make some
gelato.
He, bless him, was full of himself these days with his plans for opening a shop in Naples selling this icy
gelato
and making his fortune
.

She had her work cut out today: after all the cooking, she must serve at the table tonight – it would stick in her craw to fetch and carry for the likes of the widow Zanelli and her simpering daughters. As for Father Rimaldi, maybe the
strangolapreti
would do the trick and strangle the bastard
.

She crossed herself hastily. It wasn’t right to think ill of a man of the cloth, but these days he was strutting around Santa Rosa as if he were some kind of prince. He was puffed up with his own importance, telling everyone that soon he would be the guardian of a church which boasted a painting of feasting cherubs by the famous Piero di Bardi. No doubt he would line his pockets with the offerings from people who came from far and wide to look at the great man’s work
.

She had been back to the house in the Via Dante several times, on the pretext of passing messages to Luca. Each time she had taken Piero a little offering, morello cherries steeped in wine, a fish stew or a walnut cake. He was filling out a little, but he wasn’t at all well and she’d noticed that sometimes he stumbled into the furniture as if he hadn’t seen it. She was worried because, despite the animation in his eyes, he looked gaunt and exhausted. They spoke little, apart from polite pleasantries, but she was comfortable in his company and he in hers, and sometimes he looked at her in a way which made her heart feel as if it had turned to
panecotta.

All day long and half the night Piero was working on his masterpiece. Signor Bisotti constantly bemoaned the fact that he hadn’t seen the picture yet, but Piero was adamant on that point. No one was going to see it until it was finished; no one, that is, except Bindo. Maria knew he’d seen it – he and Piero had struck up quite a friendship in the last few weeks
.

Maria sighed. Life would change for ever when that awful woman came here to live. She was driving the whole village mad, waylaying all and sundry and bragging about the fact that her daughters were soon to be immortalised in paint
.

In a few weeks she would be wed, would become the new Signora Bisotti and move into the Villa Rosso. Maria smiled ruefully. Signor Bisotti had been searching high and low for the wedding ring that had belonged to his first wife, because the old skinflint wasn’t willing to have a new one made. He hadn’t found it yet, and she was damn sure that Ismelda had something to do with its disappearance though she’d flatly denied it
.

C
atrin and Tony were sitting on the step of the Café Romana watching a huge moon rising. The breeze was cool, with a hint of rain in the air, and somewhere far off a bell clanged dolefully.

“Why is that bell ringing non-stop?”

“That’s the Waiting bell in Aberderi,” Tony said.

“What does it mean?”

“Someone’s ill and not expected to live through the night. They’ll ring the bell all night long until first light.”

Catrin shivered and Tony put his arm round her and hugged her.

She said, “Don’t let’s talk about dying. That was a lovely meal, Tony, You know you really should open a restaurant somewhere – you’d be great at it.”

“Ah, chance would be a fine thing.”

“You know earlier when you were talking about Benito? Norma said that he got into some trouble here. What did he do?”

Tony drew heavily on his cigarette, and it was a while before he spoke. “He was accused of stealing something from the tower.”

“In the castle?”

“Yes. You know where the old nursery is?”

“I’ve never been up there.”

“Well, sometimes when Shrimp’s was full they used the tower as an overflow. Guests stayed there and walked up to Shrimp’s for their meals.”

“So if it was raining while they stayed here, they’d get soaked?”

“I suppose so.”

Catrin grinned. That was one mystery solved. Arthur Campbell must have stayed in the tower, and that’s why he’d written the comment about getting soaked.

“Go on, tell me the rest.”

“Benito was in the tower, doing some painting and repairs, and one of the guests accused him of stealing. She said that she caught him going through her bags.”

“And was he?”

“I never believed a word of it.”

“What happened to him?”

“The police were called and PC Idwal, the local bobby at the time, who was a bit of an idiot, locked him in the tower while they waited for a police car to arrive from Swansea, but he did a Houdini and escaped.”

“How could he do that?”

“God knows, but he did.”

Tony threw down his cigarette in a shower of sparks. “I got a postcard from him a few weeks later from Italy.”

Catrin gave him a sideways glance and said softly, “The Napoli cherub postcard?”

“That’s right,” he said. “He was mad about cherubs, always going on about finding some long-lost painting by an Italian fellow – as if there was any chance of finding it here in Kilvenny!”

“He came here to look for it?” Catrin asked incredulously.

“He’d met a woman in London, another nut case who was just as mad about this artist, and she had a picture which she was convinced was a di Bardi. She said she’d found it between the pages of an old book when she was staying in Kilvenny. Very far-fetched, if you ask me.”

“A picture of an ugly cat without any teeth?”

“How the heck did you know that?”

“I just have a good imagination, that’s all.”

They were silent for a while. Catrin was convinced that she knew who the woman was: Sister Matilde in the days before she had become a nun. Sister had stayed here and had taken the book on Piero out of the library and never returned it.

“And Benito went away and you never saw him again?”

“That’s right. He just disappeared into the sunset and left a lot of unhappy people behind him.”

Catrin fell silent again, staring up at the map of stars above and the huge, milky moon that drifted above Gwartney’s Wood. Over in Aberderi the Waiting bell continued to toll.

I
t was gone midnight by the time Catrin got back to the castle and climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She was still a little tipsy from all the wine. She undressed and crawled into bed but, though she was physically exhausted, her brain would not let her rest and she kept going over and over what Tony had told her.

“Benito just disappeared into the sunset and left a lot of unhappy people behind him.”