An Appetite for Violets (41 page)

It was near ten o’clock on Christmas night when Renzo and I sat down in our dining room. The day had been a success, and even Renzo was quizzing me about my receipt for minc’d pies. The children were long abed, and we were toasting the year with the best Malvasia wine. I took deep draughts that night, for I longed to forget Kitt’s words, whether in liquor or in hard work, either salve would do.

‘So what is this kissing bough for?’ Renzo said, affecting puzzlement. He led me to the crown of greenery where candles burned low and barely half a dozen berries stood unpicked.

My Renzo. He took me in his strong arms and kissed me as if he might eat me alive. I know I do rattle him, but in truth he is my entire life. What I have recollected this last season, daft article that I am, is what a good man he is. Virtuous, Strong, Companionable: the perfect husband.

‘What say you to making more babies tonight?’ he murmured as we stripped the bough of its last berries, one for every kiss. I smiled and pressed myself to him, feeling the fiery spell catch between us. It was a pleasure indeed to leave all the clearing to the servants.

*   *   *

It was not yet dawn when the nurse woke me. Leaving Renzo naked in our tangled sheets I slipped a shawl around my shift.

‘Signor Tyrone is leaving us,’ she whispered as I followed her candle down the stairs.

‘Have you sent for the physician?’

‘More likely a priest, Signora Cellini.’

I sat by the window as Kitt was given his last rites by a minister of the English Church. Outside the window the moon hung like a curved knife, shining silently amongst the stars. I shivered as I stared at the great snow-rimed palaces rising from the river. I believe Kitt may have been sensible when he took the last sacrament, and I know the papists would say he was shriven. But I do not know if he was, we shall none of us know till our final hour has come. Later I sat with him, but he did not know me; the rattle was shaking him by the throat. ‘He is only five and twenty,’ I sobbed into my clasped hand. As a heavy grey dawn approached I saw it was not sleep that blessed him with stillness. His face was more skull than flesh. Uncaring of what the priest or nurse might say, I kissed his lips and they were dead.

*   *   *

He was buried on a new plot set apart for the English of Florence. Every few months Evelina and I throw on our lace veils and take a carriage across the city. We take violets for remembrance, for the scent is not like any other flower. There is something of burned blackened sugar, of overcooked sweetness in their pulsing fragrance. Now I believe that by being abandoned together, brother and sister were trapped in a terrible love. A strange love it must have been, as unsettling as that charred scent of violets. What good fortune it is, that so many of us are spared such unholy love.

Evelina arranges the nodding purple flowers on Kitt’s grave and I watch her, admiring her grace as she turns to smile at me. She will always know me as her mother, and is her papa’s darling too. The secret of her birth is bound strong within the iron bands of my will. Not another soul will ever know it.

*   *   *

The pawnbroker’s ticket led me to a dark wooden shop near the marketplace. The broker shot me a shrewd glance as he read it, then calculated a price based on my gown and jewels.

‘Five hundred gold
lire,
’ he spat out, and pulled his dark beard. I paid without hesitation, for the Hotel is a veritable money mill now. It did not surprise me when that vast sum was redeemed for a dusty leather bag no larger than my fist.

I waited until my return to open it, and sat with Renzo at the long table in our dining room. I dangled it from my fingers, and the Mawton Rose spun and sparkled on its gold chain in the bright winter light.

‘Oh, it is beautiful,’ Renzo cried, trying to catch it as it turned by its own weight. It felt heavier than ever, as heavy as a convict’s ball and chain.

‘We don’t need it,’ I said. ‘It is not a lucky stone.’

Renzo grasped it in his large fist and held it up to the sunlit window. Flashes of scarlet lit the room, like blood splashes spoiling our frescoed walls. ‘You say he wanted Evelina to have it?’

‘That was his wish.’

They are strange these commands from the dead. We feel they watch us from above, observing as we carry out their wishes. I could see my husband was bewitched, staring into the jewel’s fiery core.

‘Then Evelina must have it. She will marry exceeding well with a fortune like this. It was very good of her uncle to think of her. And you are rewarded for your charity.’ I turned away. Of course Carinna’s daughter should marry well. However slow her wits, with a dowry like the Rose she will join the highest rank of society.

‘Very well,’ I agreed, sliding the jewel back into the darkness of its pouch. ‘Only we must lock it away in a bank vault. I want no one tempted by that stone again.’

XXXX

The Queen of England, Florence

Being The Feast of San Lorenzo, 1778
Signora Bibiana Cellini, her journal

To Make A Globe Spun With Sugar

Beat your sugar till well refined and sift through a hair sieve. Put on a silver salver and set it aslant before a moderate fire. Set close by two china dishes in shape like half globes with the mouths set downwards. When the sugar runs clear like water, take a clean knife and take up as much syrup as you can and a fine thread will come from the point which you must draw backward and forward as quick as possible and spin around your china mould. Then dip your knife again and take up more syrup, keeping spinning your web until it is done. Put inside your web sprigs of small flowers, turn one web on the other to form a globe, and spin a little more to bind the two together.

A most remarkable dessert for a grand table, Bibiana Cellini, Florence 1777

And now there is not so much paper left in my book for my ramblings. The letter from England arrived last week and it did not surprise me, only skewered my heart as I read it. How long it had been passed from hand to hand I do not know, for it was travel-stained and crumpled from many weeks stuffed in the post boy’s bag. It came from the Montechino post house, bearing a message scribed by our former message boy, who now styled himself the Post House Clerk. He must have remembered our little coins and kindnesses, and directed it to Renzo’s Florence address. I stared a long time at the writing; it was an awkward secretive hand, I thought, and not one used to corresponding:

To Biddy Leigh

Villa Ombrosa

Italy

I know not if this should find you Biddy but ’tis sad news I write. Must be two year back, after a sad decline Mrs Garland died in her bed at Mawton Hall. There having been no news of you all so long we have given up I am sure. When Sir Geoffrey died at the end of ’73 the parson did tell us we must wait on Lady Carinna coming home but you never did come back did you so now the magistrate has taken charge. He said that with her brother also gone away, it were a right mess as the uncle also claimed the right to Mawton. So all Sir Geoffrey’s affairs be snarled up in the courts of London and not much hope of sorting them for years.

One black day the whole place were stripped by the bailiffs and all Sir Geoffrey’s fine old stuff loaded up on carts to be sold. After that me and Jem were sent off packing, which was a scandal and disgrace. As dwelling place we have called squatters rights over Reade Cottage down at Pars Fold. It is a leaky rattling place but Jem is trying to mend the roof, for we have no money spare now I am delivered of four naughty bairns forever mithering at my skirts.

Some say Mawton Hall has turned bad and will not wander there, but me and Jem go over the fence betimes to fetch them sweet fruits from the garden that’s all grown to riot. ’Tis not a place to linger, the kitchen windows being all broke and the floors turned mouldy from a flooding. ’Tis all rack and ruin, even that old stillroom blows empty for all the fancy glass were took out and sold. A blessing it were Mrs Garland never saw the sorry end of it.

If this should find you, ’tis to tell you Mrs Garland did leave a testament which is here enfolded as all was carried out proper for we saw her buried with a headstone all paid up in Mawton churchyard. I am sending the Testament for she writes of you but spite us all looking there was no book as she talks of. We have done our duty Jem and me and we have no obligation to you that be the end of this business.

Mrs Teg Burdett

Within the letter lay a paper wrapped in oilskin, raggedly written in my old friend’s well-remembered hand.

Martha Garland of Mawton in the county of Cheshire who departed her life makes her last Will in the manner following that is to say that her Will is that she be decently and handsomely buried at Mawton Churchyard and to each of her fellow servants she gives a pair of white mourning gloves and when her funeral expenses be satisfied and paid her Will be that the remainder should be distributed to the poor of the parish of Mawton aforesaid, only save one thing being her Cookery Book that she wrote in be given to her Friend Biddy Leigh as a remembrance of her happiest years of industry shared.

All these matters aforesaid witnessed here unto my hand this 2nd day of January 1775.

Martha Garland

I said this news was long expected. For a while I have wondered who
The Cook’s Jewel
is for. I sit at my ivory desk and gaze out of clear glass windows, watching our riverman steer his cargo of lemons into our watergate. I hear Evelina chatter to her tutor in the next room, his bass rumble murmuring in reply. Jack is jumping up and down the stairs in a noisy clatter, and baby Renzo shrieking joyfully as Ugo barks. All about me the house chunners and hums. I grasp at the question again, for it is a hard one. Who did I write all this down for, I ask myself? To say I wrote for Mrs Garland, that is the simplest answer. Yet she was never likely to read these pages. When I kissed her soft cheek I knew it was the last time. Sighing, I wipe my eyes, for I will never kiss that cheek again.

I leaf through the older parts of the book. All those receipts and remedies, caudles and possets. Why collect them at all? That band of women stretching back in time, each giving their best pleasures scratched in precious ink. Men, they say, make wars, but women are more generous. Lifting that butter-stained scrap that bears Mrs Garland’s taffety tart, she is conjured right before my eyes. When I hold the cinnamon smears to my nose I am back in that sunny kitchen at Mawton, lining up blue-glazed pots on the knife-scarred table. I could eat that paper, so much do I long to be there again.

I think of Mrs Garland’s box of scraps, scribbled down like beacons against the coming darkness. Those women made their perfect dishes, then wrote them in forget-me-not words so we might taste them. My understanding glows, like the hollowed fruits Renzo fills with candles at his midnight feasts. What are receipts but messages from the dead, saying ‘Taste me’. I am minded that when we eat, we eat a dish of love.

So did I write this great journal all for me? I have long suspected Mrs Garland gave me this task to help me on my way. What better method to help me forget my cares than to call up each day as it passed and write it down by rushlight. Yet as I tuck my handkerchief back in my flowered pocket and watch the light grow dim on the river I have an odd thought. Who am I now? Am I still that Biddy Leigh who set off six years past? Am I still that raw-tongued clod-hopping chit with a brain bursting with old receipts? No, I am Signora Bibiana Cellini. I would scarcely know myself, for my jewelled fingers are pale and neat from my dresser’s attentions, my face powdered, and my waist grows thick as another childbed approaches. I search for a thread that leads from that day when I crimped those taffety tarts at Mawton, to today as I tuck my diamond-buckled shoes beneath my desk. The thread is as thin and brittle as spun sugar. For now I am loved, I am as whole as two half sugar globes spun back together as one. I have made life in my dear little children. I have tasted life. And I have touched the rotting chill of death.

So Mawton stands empty; our kitchen invaded by wind and rain, the tall windows shattered, its brick carcass rotting. Even Sir Geoffrey’s ancient paintings and furnishings are sold and scattered like the wind. I wonder if that tale has come to pass, of a white lady who walks the dark plantation path to her ruined stillroom. I understand more of Lady Maria’s tragic history now, her husband poxed near to madness, the numberless babes conceived and lost, her passion for herblore hiding a darker quest. Here in
The Cook’s Jewel
I’ve found pages of Remedies against Contagion: the sassafras oil, the cordials of henbane and wormwood. Pitiful Lady Maria, the curse she carried to Mawton was surely the love and avarice she stirred in young Humphrey Pars.

How far away I feel from rain-washed England, from Mawton and its mossy churchyard. ’Tis a pity I cannot visit my dear friend’s grave, though I fear if I did I might fall sobbing on the ground. It reminds me of another graveyard too, back at Ombrosa. Outside, the sun has dropped below the roofs and brings the golden hour of sunset. The sky blazes like polished copper and our riverman is but a silhouette of black in the gloom.

The sun must be setting there too, on that lonely headstone at Ombrosa. It must be setting on the long white road to the villa, and on the faces of the statues that watch on the lawn with unseeing stony eyes. The sun must be leaching too, from the cypress trees, casting black spikes against the violet sky. The inscription may have faded, grown mossy in the barren ground. ‘Obedience Leigh’, it says. Obedience Leigh is dead, I think. Yet not so dead as the poor bones that lie there, coupled by greed, unvisited by any.