Authors: Juliana Gray
The two exchanged a few words, and then the young man stepped forward and spoke in halting English. “We have make the blessing of the downstairs. Now is time for blessing of the upstairs.”
“Oh, right-ho.” Alexandra gestured to the doorway and the great hall beyond. “Sprinkle away. I’ve no objection whatsoever.”
Abigail whispered in her ear. “I think he means us to accompany him.”
“For heaven’s sake, Abigail, does he not realize we’re Protestants?”
“It seems the polite thing,” Abigail insisted, and Alexandra, heaving a great sigh, tucked her headscarf more closely behind her ears and turned to follow the priest and his server in stately procession through the great hall and up the main staircase. A small rank of maids and gardeners fell in behind them, giving Alexandra the uncomfortable sensation that she was performing in a play for which she had no script.
Or even, come to think of it, any basic notion of the plot.
“Are you quite certain this is all right?” she hissed at Abigail.
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t we be excommunicated for this sort of thing? Condemned to eternal purgatory and whatnot?”
“Oh, rot,” said Abigail. “In any case, who’s to know?”
“Well, the Almighty, for one. I daresay we can’t disguise it all from him.” Alexandra tucked again at her headscarf and rounded the corner of the staircase, nearly bumping her nose into the dark vestments of the handsome young server. “I shall either be damned as a Protestant for encouraging a papist ceremony, or else damned as a heathen for pretending to be Catholic.”
“I think it’s a beautiful tradition, whichever side one’s on. The renewal of life each spring is an ancient rite, dating well before Christianity or even classical pantheistic religion. It’s . . .”
Don Pietro had stopped and turned to the server, who held out the vessel of holy water with deep reverence. Dipping his fingers into the water, the priest began to murmur in Latin, and went to the first room on the right. Lady Somerton’s room.
Alexandra turned to Abigail. “Where’s Lilibet?”
Abigail shrugged. “She and Philip went off this morning with a picnic. I expect they’re not back yet.”
The priest emerged from the bedroom and moved on down the hall, followed by the server. Alexandra bowed her head in feigned supplication and glanced out the narrow window to the gardens and fields and vineyards beyond. A glorious view, really, all the way down to the valley and the village nestled at its bottom, surrounded by olive groves and terraces, by fruit blossoms and the newly plowed earth. Nature reawakening, sending out shoots of hopeful green into an uncertain world.
Somewhere in that mass of expectant life lay Finn’s little cottage, and his automobile, and Finn himself.
With mechanical steps she followed Don Pietro down the hallways, past the bedrooms, and then on into the other wing, where the men’s bedrooms were located. Alexandra hadn’t been down this particular corridor in weeks, not since that first afternoon at the castle, making up the beds in the cold, musty March air and doing rather a poor job of it. She watched each door as Don Pietro opened it and stepped inside, letting her eyes rest on the interior of the sunlit room beyond as the priest performed his offices.
She didn’t mean to look, exactly. The Dowager Marchioness of Morley did not snoop. But if, in the course of one’s ordinary and perfectly legitimate activities, one chanced to notice a detail or two, quite inadvertently—well, that was hardly snooping, was it?
Such details, for example, as a newly washed mechanic’s smock, folded neatly on the shelf by the window, clean and white, with a shaft of sunlight casting a diagonal shadow across the top.
That particular shelf belonged to the last room in the corridor, set off by itself near the corner, where a back staircase stretched down to the scullery.
Not that any of those details were of the slightest interest or usefulness to the Dowager Marchioness of Morley.
They arrived downstairs again half an hour later. “And now the eggs,” Abigail said gleefully, as they passed through the doorway back into the dining room.
“The eggs?” Alexandra inquired.
Abigail nudged her elbow. “On the table.”
Sure enough, a small bowl of eggs sat in the center of the large wooden table, covered by a neat white linen cloth. (“Freshly laid, just this morning,” whispered Abigail with pride. “I gathered them myself.”) The entire household filed into the room to stand respectfully by the walls; Alexandra saw Signorina Morini’s neat, round figure between the two servant girls, Maria and Francesca, watching the priest with adoration.
Don Pietro advanced to the table and drew the bowl toward him, his crooked old fingers shaking alarmingly, setting the eggshells to rattle against one another in a dangerous fashion.
The entire room seemed to hold its breath.
How pagan
, Alexandra thought, wanting to dismiss it all, but there was something about the reverent way in which Don Pietro’s hands moved above the eggs, stilling them, it seemed, with his gesture. She could almost have sworn that the eggs tilted toward those fingers, listened to the murmured Latin words, and sighed with ecstasy as the droplets of holy water trickled down their delicate shells.
Which was rubbish, of course.
Don Pietro stepped away from the eggs, and the staff exhaled in unison, smiling broadly at the priest and at Alexandra, as if she were somehow to be congratulated. As if she had laid the silly eggs herself.
“Er, thanks ever so much,” she said, feeling something should be said to mark the occasion, whatever it was.
Don Pietro wiped his hands on the linen cloth held out by his assistant and turned to bestow a polite nod on Alexandra, before addressing Abigail. “What did he say?” Alexandra whispered, when the priest turned away to greet the servants, all of whom seemed on deeply familiar terms with him.
“Oh, he’s just invited himself to lunch, of course!” Abigail patted the knot of hair at the back of her head, beneath her modest scarf, and sighed. “I do hope his assistant stays, too. Do you expect I shall burn in hell for it?”
“Yes, a very particular circle of hell, reserved for young Protestant girls who lure innocent Catholic priestly chaps away from their callings. Really, Abigail. I don’t think I understood a bit of that. Do you mean to say they do it every year?” She backed up to the wall, as the maids began scurrying about, setting the table for luncheon. The eggs were covered with a cloth and whisked away, like a chest of gold doubloons.
“Well, one can’t be too careful, after all, with a cursed castle,” Abigail said.
She said it so calmly, Alexandra thought for a moment she’d misheard.
“A
what
? What did you say?”
Abigail turned to her. “The castle’s cursed, of course. Isn’t it delicious? Morini told me all about it the other day.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Abigail. What nonsense.” She folded her arms.
“It isn’t nonsense! It’s a historical fact. Something to do with an Englishman who visited the place a few centuries ago and got the signore’s daughter with child. Hideously careless of him, of course, but that’s a man for you. In any case, the signore caught them in the very act of eloping, and of course the Englishman was too honorable to duel the father, but somehow pistols got involved anyway—honestly,
men
—and the signore was delivered a mortal wound. And before he died, he laid down a curse upon the Englishman, and his daughter, and the occupants of the castle, and I suppose his own childhood nurse for good measure. As was proper, under the circumstances; you can’t expect a wronged Italian father not to go flinging curses about, willy-nilly, while he bleeds to death on the flagstones. I’d be disappointed if he hadn’t, frankly.”
Alexandra began to laugh. “Abigail, this is all superstitious rubbish. The castle’s not cursed. Look around you. Everyone’s absolutely shimmering with health.”
“Oh, but it is. Ask Morini. Frightful history. And until it’s lifted, ill fortune will dog the footsteps of those who . . .”
“Abigail!”
“Which I suppose explains why we got such a good price on the lease . . .”
“Abigail!”
“What?”
“For goodness’ sake, my dear. Remember yourself. You’ve good, sensible British blood running through your veins—in theory, at least—and I expect a little more phlegm from you.” She brushed at her sleeve and watched the progress of the roasted lamb as it entered the room on a broad platter and came to rest at the head of the table. From her belly arose a growl of appreciation, which her folded arms hardly muffled at all. “Curses, forsooth.”
“Well, all right.” Abigail’s voice turned sulky. She moved forward and placed her hands on the back of her chair, her eyes following the food as it appeared on the table. “But don’t blame me if disaster strikes.”
Alexandra joined her. “I won’t,” she muttered. “It appears I’m perfectly capable of creating disaster on my own.”
ELEVEN
I
must thank you for the excellent tea,” said Delmonico, rising at last and taking his hat. “I cannot help but feel that I was very much what I believe the French call
de trop
.”
“Not at all.” Finn rose as well and gathered the cups from the table. “Lady Morley was on the point of leaving.” His fingers tingled, remembering the way the small horn buttons nestled along the long, supple length of her back, the ease with which he might have slipped them free.
“I am sure of it.” Delmonico hesitated, swinging his hat between his elegant fingers. “You have progressed a great deal in recent months. You are to be congratulated.”
“Not nearly so much as you, from what I hear.”
Her soft lips moving against his. The delicate brush of her tongue.
He carried the cups to the sink and set them inside, before turning around to regard the Italian. “The papers speak of nothing else.”
Delmonico shrugged. “Ah, Rome. My friends at the newspapers, they have difficulty containing their enthusiasm. You are wise, my friend, very wise, to hide yourself here in the hills.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand.
“Not so very well hidden.” Finn leaned back against the long table and crossed his arms.
Her hands at the back of his neck, her thumbs stroking his skin. Her low, throaty voice, saying his name.
“You found me readily enough.”
Delmonico spread out his hands. “We have friends in common. I was on my way to Florence and thought, I shall stop and see my good friend Burke.”
“Hardly in your way at all, really. Quite out of it, in fact. I’m deeply flattered.”
The erotic press of her breasts against his ribs, round and lush and promising. Far too copious, in his expert judgment, for one hand: he should have to use both, and his mouth . . .
“Your company is worth any trouble.” Delmonico glanced at the automobile and nodded. “A fine machine. Perhaps you may change my mind about electric motors. I look forward to seeing her in July.”
“As I look forward to seeing yours.” Finn straightened and uncrossed his arms. “Do you know your way back to the road?”
“Ah yes! Do not trouble yourself.” Delmonico tapped his finger against his forehead and smiled broadly. “I have a good head for direction. Your groundskeeper was most helpful in pointing the way down.”
“Giacomo! Of course, Giacomo. What a chap. I must have a word with him, to thank him for all his trouble this morning. He’s sent a veritable legion of followers my way.”
Had she felt the stiffening of his flesh against hers? Thank God for the mechanic’s smock, for all her layers of apron and dress and petticoat and . . .
Delmonico’s mouth twitched. “Perhaps he felt you were lonely.”
“No doubt at all.”
Oh God, had she been wearing the same corset he’d glimpsed in March, with the delicate white lace lying against her flushed skin . . . ?
“But I can see your mind is elsewhere,” said Delmonico, settling his hat upon his head. “Struggling, I do not doubt, with the technical challenge of your electric battery. I wish you much luck and success with it.”
Finn smiled. “But not too much, of course.”
“Ha-ha. Of course, not too much.”
Finn. Darling, marvelous Finn.
Had she meant it?
He walked Delmonico to the door, shook his hand, said the usual farewells. When the Italian had reached a decent distance, his brown-suited figure ascending to the vineyard terrace above, he shut the door and turned the lock.
For a moment he stood there, leaning against the doorjamb, listening to the expectant rustle of the leaves against the roof, letting the deep tranquility of the Italian afternoon steal over him.
Alone at last, and yet alone no longer. His gaze, traveling around the room, saw her everywhere. Her image had stained itself indelibly: under the automobile, in the cabinet, at the worktable, standing there in the middle of the floor and looking at him as though he held some essential key to the universe.
In his arms, kissing him like a Parisian opera dancer.
He had never met anyone like her. His acquaintance with women had always been limited. A lonely youth, with a strong dislike for clichés, he had resisted the ritual deflowering by the dairymaid in his youth and remained chaste until the middle of his first year at Cambridge. There he had met a sort of bohemian intellectual, a Girton woman, who smoked cigarettes and made a point of ignoring sexual morality, and who for a very short time had appeared to him as the very zenith of desirable womanhood. A month or two of her company had put him off both cigarettes and bohemian intellectuals for life.
There had been a few others: a willing widow whose husband had been a professor at the university; the nymphomaniac landlady of his local Cambridge pub, who put him off nymphomaniacs for life, though luckily not pubs. After university, the occasional discreet liaison, at home and abroad. In none of these affairs, except perhaps for a small degree in the first, had his heart been particularly committed.
But though he was no monk, he was no libertine, either. Until a short while ago, he had always been able to exercise a cast-iron control over his sexual impulses. Even at the eruptive age of fifteen, when confronted unexpectedly by the dairymaid’s enormous naked breasts, he had managed (after heroic effort) to walk away and silence the
rut-rut-rut
in his brain. He had never been overtaken by ill-thought passion, never woken up the next day to self-recrimination. He could look back over the entirety of his experience and feel nothing but satisfaction.
Well, that had all gone to hell.
His eyes traveled across the room to the long table against the wall and came to rest on the thick, expensive weight of the envelope propped behind the stack of reference books at the end. He’d read it yesterday evening, just before heading into the castle for dinner, when dusk had fallen and the lamp cast a golden pool against the grainy surface of his worktable, scattered with bits of wire and tools and his battery in the middle.
Getting news from his mother was rather like receiving dispatches from the front of war: brilliant victories, stunning reverses; plans and strategies without number; conflicting accounts of battlefield action; and, of course, the endless logistics of the supply train, keeping the whole enterprise in motion. Even now, even after he’d settled a fortune on her, she remained essentially herself, charming and beautiful, with the God-given ability to drive men mad.
Darling Phineas
, the letter read,
I do desperately hope you are well, for I heard the most shocking things about Italian winters from the Colonel last night, who tells me that the annual mountain thaw . . .
Last night.
His mother liked to convey her little facts that way, in clauses and conditions, so as not to embarrass her son with anything so vulgar as an outright admission. It seemed the Colonel was ascendant, at the moment, which was hardly surprising, considering the elegance of the diamond earbobs he’d bestowed on her at Christmas.
He went on, scanning most of it, not really wanting to parse the words for further meaning. As a boy, he’d paid as little attention as possible to the gentlemen progressing, one by one, each in his own pattern of ascent and plateau and inevitable descent, through his mother’s parlor and, presumably, beyond. He hadn’t understood until much later—embarrassingly later, really, for who wanted to think such things about his own mother?—that the parlor itself, and everything in it, and the kitchens and servants and food and clothing and school fees, were all paid for by this succession of gentlemen.
He might, indeed, have continued in this state of studied ignorance, had the unvarnished truth not been presented to his face, as might be expected, by another boy at Eton.
The young heir, as it happened, to the dukedom of Wallingford.
He’d split the boy’s lip, of course, and blackened his eye, and then gone on to become fast friends with him. And Wallingford had never again mentioned the shameful facts of Finn’s case. The two of them were, in the laws of schoolboys, square.
. . . and you know that I love you above everything, my dearest boy, and am so deeply and passionately proud of you. Do take the most scrupulous care of yourself, darling, and return home whole and victorious to your loving mama . . .
Return home.
How long had it been since he’d presented himself at his mother’s door? He’d missed his annual Christmas visit this year, his train having been thankfully snowbound in the Alps for a week, and he’d felt so guilty at his relief at the sight of the enormous white drifts covering the tracks ahead that he’d cabled her a particularly affectionate Christmas message:
AT SPITTAL FROM 20TH STOP TRAIN BURIED IN SNOW STOP FURTHER STORM EXPECTED TONIGHT MAKING CHRISTMAS ARRIVAL IMPOSSIBLE STOP EXPECT PRESENCE SHALL NOT BE MISSED AMONG YOUR MANY ADMIRERS STOP ALL BEST LOVE AND WISHES FOR HAPPY CHRISTMAS
He’d made arrangements for a mink-lined dressing robe to be wrapped and delivered to her house in Richmond (his first and more practical idea—a patented dry-earth closet for the disposal of bodily waste, far more sanitary than the modern water closet—had been discarded after mature consideration) and it had proven a splendid success. Gifts of discreet luxury were always welcome to Marianne Burke.
They’d met for tea at Fortnum’s in London a few weeks later, which had proceeded exactly as it always did. Marianne had appeared in an elegant rose silk tea dress, with a modest bustle and an equally modest necklace lying atop her unpowdered bosom. Her hair was gathered on her nape in a fiery ginger knot. She had held her teacup in one gloved hand and a cucumber sandwich in another, the last finger of each hand extended in a gentle curl, and had gone on at length about herself and her admirers and their gifts to her, Finn making noises of approval and dismay at the appropriate intervals. A final question about his doings just as he was helping her into her fox-trimmed coat, which he’d answered in the most general terms possible, and then Finn had kissed her moist cheek and gone away with the relieved satisfaction of having discharged his duty.
What would Lady Morley think of Marianne Burke?
Finn straightened from the doorjamb, as if stung by the disloyal thought, by the possibility it suggested. What did it matter? What did it matter what Lady Morley thought about anything? She’d kissed him without thought, after the high drama of the Penhallow menace, out of relief and gratefulness and perhaps a touch of loneliness. But it wouldn’t happen again. She was unlikely to repeat such an unguarded action, unlikely even to visit the cottage again.
When the sun slipped down behind the rounded tips of the mountain to the west, he would return to the castle for dinner. Lady Morley would sit primly in her chair, avoiding his gaze, and he would avoid hers with equal perseverance. They would eat roasted lamb and small white beans and stewed artichokes, served by a pair of stern-faced young maids, and Lady Morley’s sister would discuss the merits of sheep and Socrates, and Wallingford would thunder on about the unsuitability of classical languages for the female mind, and that would be that.
He ran both hands through his hair, until the short, fine strands stood up in shock like an animal’s pelt. With renewed determination he walked back to his worktable and sat down on the chair, the wood hard and unforgiving beneath his legs, and finished reassembling his new battery design.
* * *
B
ut when Finn presented himself at the dining room at the usual hour, neatly scrubbed, having gone to the extraordinary trouble of both combing his hair
and
changing his shirt, he found it deserted.
“Hullo!” he called out, straightening his collar.
No answer.
Alarm filled Finn’s belly, an easy thing for alarm to do, because the belly in question was otherwise quite empty. He’d had nothing but tea and honey since breakfast. The prospect of now losing dinner quite eclipsed all other concerns, from the reassembly of his automobile to his dread of begging Lady Morley to pass the sex when he really meant to ask for the salt.
He started off immediately in the direction of the kitchens.
After a false start down a dark corridor smelling ominously of ripening cheese, Finn glimpsed an open hearth through a doorway and plunged through, though not before smacking his forehead on the wooden frame.
“Bloody hell,” he grunted, rubbing his skull.
“Signore!” A woman straightened up from the hearth, wiping her hands on her apron.
“No, no. As you were.” He glanced at his fingers. No blood, at least. The last thing his forehead needed was another scar from a height-related accident.
She looked at him quizzically. Her hands still worked away at her apron. “
Che cosa
, signore?”
He switched to Italian. “Your pardon, signorina. The dining room is empty. Am I late for dinner?”
Her pretty young hands went to her cheeks. “Oh, signore! We had the luncheon today, for the priest, for the Easter blessing. It is all finished now. You did not come for the luncheon?”
“No.” His brain swirled with the dull stench of disappointment. That, or he had just concussed himself. “Nobody told me, I fear. Is anything left over?”
“Yes, certainly, signore. We have lamb and bread and other things . . .” She turned to the larder and drew open the door and began pulling objects out from the shelves. “You are very hungry, no?”
“Very hungry.” He dropped himself into an empty chair at the large wooden table in the center of the room.
“Oh, be careful!” she exclaimed, and then checked herself.
“Be careful?”
“The chair, signore.” She set a plate down on the table before him. “It has . . . it has a weak leg.”
He tested it, rocking back and forth. “It seems strong,” he said, “if a little small.”
“The chair is not small, signore.” She flashed him a dimple. “It is you who are so tall, Signore . . . ?” The word trailed expectantly.
“Burke,” he supplied.
“Signore Burke.” She took a knife and began to slice a half loaf of crusty bread. Finn’s eyes followed the movement, watching the tiny flakes of crust fly away from the blade, the soft white bread fall like a pillow to the tabletop. The scent wafted toward him, rich and yeasty. He swallowed.