Kissing in Italian (25 page)

What strikes me most profoundly is how accurately the necklace was depicted in the portrait. It looks exactly the same. I imagine the painter studying it with great care to make sure it was reproduced perfectly. The precision is breathtaking.

I take a couple of steps forward to look more closely at the necklace, marveling at it; Elisa sees me staring at her neck and raises a hand to her throat protectively. As if the necklace is hers, and she’s defending it from me.

Which makes me
really
angry.

Before I can think about what I’m going to say, the words burst out of my mouth.

“Take that off,
now
!” I practically command her, pointing at the necklace in a way that, looking back, I can see was over-the-top dramatic. But by now I identify with Fiammetta, with the necklace; I’m part of this family, which
means the necklace is part of my heritage. And seeing it around Elisa’s neck is the last straw for me.

There’s a moment when it could all have been averted. I see her deciding what to do. And, unfortunately for her, she makes the wrong decision. She pulls herself up to her full height, raises her hand, and hits mine away, hissing:

“Stai lontana, stronza.”

“Stay away from me, bitch.”

That is
it
. This girl’s been the bitch, not me, not any of us four foreigners. She insulted us the first day we arrived, and she hasn’t stopped since. I’ve busted her sneakily trying on the principessa’s jewelry, which I’m absolutely sure she doesn’t have permission to do, and she’s giving herself airs instead of just copping to it and taking it off, like I told her to.

Which I have a total right to do.

And
she just whacked my hand.

Before I know it, my hands are on her shoulders and I’m shaking her as if I’m trying to actually detach her head. It wobbles madly; one huge, heavy emerald earring flies off and lands on the carpet. Elisa’s hands grip mine, trying to pull them off, her nails digging in. I push against her and she staggers back with me following her, my hands closing around her neck.

I’ve gone mad, I admit it. Completely mad. I’m trying to get the necklace off her, find the clasp, undo it; crazy, because you don’t do that from the front, of course, but from the back. And naturally Elisa misunderstands. She thinks I’m trying to strangle her. She starts screaming really loudly, a hysterical, help-me-she’s-trying-to-kill-me screech, and
her hands flap and slap and pound against me in a desperate attempt to get me off. We rock backward and forward, me scrabbling for the fastening of the strand of pearls, Elisa trying to wriggle free, shrieking like a banshee, howling and wailing at a deafening pitch, but all I can think of is ripping that necklace off her.

She scrambles away, tumbles over on a heel, and tips over onto the carpet. My hands are still tangled in the necklaces and I can’t get them free in time. So I fall too, crashing down on top of her body. I will freely admit that I weigh quite a lot more than bony skinny Elisa, and my extra thirty pounds or so land on her like a ton of bricks. The breath is squashed out of her for a moment; I hear her exhale in a violent
whoosh
. My hands are trapped under the back of her neck and I’m struggling to pull them free; Elisa gets her second wind, manages to inhale, and starts the screeching again, thrashing under me, writhing around like a possessed bag of bones in a horror film.

Suddenly I feel hands close around my waist and pull me off her bodily. My fingers snag on a necklace as I’m dragged back and a strand bursts, a chain breaking with the force; it’s that or my finger. I’m being lifted up; I manage to get my feet under me on the carpet, standing up again, and for a moment I lean back against the person behind me to get my balance.

I know instantly it’s Luca. There’s a reaction that happens whenever he touches me, an electric current, fizzing and unmistakable. I catch my breath as my back presses against his chest, feeling his long fingers wrapped around my waist, my head nestling into his shoulder for a brief wonderful
moment. I hear him draw in his breath too. And then his hands drag away from me. He steps back and barks:

“Ma che cosa succede qui? Siete impazzite, voi due?”
“What’s happening here? Have you both gone mad?”

“È lei!”
Elisa screams from the carpet.
“Lei è impazzita!”

“Right,”
I say contemptuously, taking a step back so I can see them both. “I’m the crazy one.”

The sight of Luca takes my breath away. It always does when I haven’t seen him in a while. His hair’s so black, his eyes so blue, his skin so white, his mouth so red. He’s like a boy from a fairy tale, a prince from a winter country. It’s his beauty that shocks me: the fact that he’s glaring at me doesn’t faze me at all. I point down at Elisa.

“Look, Luca,” I say. “She’s wearing your mum’s jewelry. I came in here and found her trying it on.”

Elisa is quickly wrenching off the bracelets as she starts to sit up, but it’s too little too late. The strand that broke was part of another necklace, pearl and lapis lazuli, and there are pearls and dark-blue beads scattered all over her and on the carpet around her body. I’ll pick up every one, crawl over the carpet to make sure I’ve found them all.

“Luca,”
she begins, desperately looking for an excuse,
“io … guardo, la tua mamma …”

“Elisa, non ci posso credere,”
Luca says flatly, staring at her. “I can’t believe it.”

“Ma giuro—”

“I swear,” she’s saying, but he raises one hand and she falls silent, staring up at him as he switches to English, glancing at me to show that the language change is for my benefit.

“I do not believe this, Elisa,” he says, shaking his head.
“
Incredibile
. You come here to see me, I tell you I do not want to talk to you and to please go away. But you come to my mother’s room and put on her jewels! You must be mad! And no,” he cuts in as she tries to repeat what she was saying about his mother. “I know that Mamma does not tell you that you may put them on.
Mai
. Never. That is a lie. These are di Vesperi jewels, for the family women only. They wear them. Nobody else.”

He’s very pointedly avoiding looking at me now.

“Take them all off,” he says angrily. “You must be truly mad.”

Elisa’s crying as she reaches back and starts to unfasten the clasps of the various necklaces she’s wearing. I ought to feel triumphant, I suppose. This girl has tried to destabilize the four of us since we first got to Italy, make us feel fat and stupid and badly dressed compared to her skinny Italian chic-ness: here’s the ultimate victory, her complete humiliation in front of me and the boy she’s madly keen to get with.

But all I see, looking at her fumble to pull off the backing to the single earring she’s still wearing, to pick up all her borrowed treasure and put it back on the shelf, is a sad girl who is full of anger at her mum and a desire for a boy who doesn’t want her.

“She didn’t steal anything. She was just dressing up,” I say, somehow defending her now.

His shoulders rise and fall slowly under his white shirt. It makes no difference to him what Elisa’s intentions were. She’s violated his beloved mother’s dressing room, and he can’t see any extenuating circumstances at all.

Elisa’s face is absolutely wet with tears as she turns to
leave the room. She can’t look at either of us; her head’s hanging, her messed-up hair tangled into her eyes.

“We won’t tell anyone,” I say to her, and she whispers:

“Grazie, Violetta,”
in such a pathetic way that I feel even more sorry for her than I did before.

Luca and I are left alone as Elisa’s slow dragging footsteps echo away down the corridor. I look up at him, bursting with what I have to tell him. But he’s striding to the dressing table, picking up something that Elisa put there, holding it out to show me.

I gasp. It’s the pearl necklace from the portrait.

“Luca—” I begin, but he’s already crossed back to me and is placing it around my neck. The pearls are cool against my skin; his fingers, doing up the clasp, are even colder. I stare at myself in the mirror, my hand coming up to touch the cameo hanging just at the tip of my collarbone.

“Sei bellissima,”
he says so quietly that I can barely hear him. I think this is the first compliment he’s ever paid me. “Come, Violetta. I have something to show you.”

“But, Luca—”

He’s at the door, walking away, expecting me to follow him. I scurry after him, dying to tell him what I’ve come here to say; but I can’t do it on the run, trotting like this. He’s striding so fast I can barely keep up, let alone get anything out that he’ll be able to hear. Along a corridor, around a corner, along another corridor, up a flight of stairs, then another, through a door that he holds till I’ve caught up with him.

There are a lot of planks stacked against the corridor wall, which I have to navigate past, and in a window
embrasure, a pile of long nails and a claw hammer. I follow him up an unexpectedly narrow, low-ceilinged, twisting wooden staircase with creaky old treads, Luca ducking his head as he takes them two at a time.

Through another door, and into a round room with unvarnished, wide old floorboards and brick walls. A room with windows running around half its circumference, narrow turret windows with bright stunning views of the glorious sunny day outside, of vineyards rich with green leaves and cypress trees planted in lines to frame the road that twists and turns down the hillside …

My jaw drops. The words that were on my lips fade as I turn around slowly, absorbing the sight of this place where Luca has brought me. It’s the turret room in which Fiammetta di Vesperi, my look-alike, was painted centuries ago. The turret room from the portrait in London, which I didn’t know that Luca had ever seen …

I come to a halt where I began, staring at Luca, still speechless that he’s led me here, to the place where, in a way, everything began.

“You are a di Vesperi, Violetta,” he says to me gravely. “I want to show this to you, to welcome you to the family. I see you recognize where we are.”

Formally, he holds out his hand for me to shake.

“Benvenuta, sorella mia,”
he says.

“Welcome, sister.”

As I stare at Luca, I feel like Elisa just now, her mouth flapping like a fish as she frantically thought of what to say. I hate hearing him call me “sister” so seriously, with such acceptance of the situation, and I want to protest. But simultaneously, I’m so taken aback that the first thing that comes out of my mouth is:

“How did you know about—this?” I gesture around the room. “How did you know about the portrait?”

“Portrait?” He frowns, not understanding.

“Picture,” I say. “The picture of the girl in this room.”

“Her name is Fiammetta di Vesperi,” he says, walking over to the windowsill—the one on which, in the portrait, Fiammetta’s ginger cat was lying. A wide ray of golden
sunshine is streaming onto the slab of stone, warming it, just as it did centuries ago, for the cat to bask in. Luca picks up a piece of paper from the sill and hands it to me.

It’s a color photocopy of the portrait. I stare at it, taking in all the details. Before, when I’ve looked at this image, I’ve obsessed about her face, Fiammetta’s face: because it’s mine. Now that the mystery has been solved, I’m released to absorb all the other parts of the picture; the room, the view outside.…

“It’s identical,” I say, looking at the window in front of me and then back down to the photocopy. “The view. It hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.”

He shrugs.

“Why would it? We have changed nothing. We make wine now, we grow the grapes, just like always.”

“Those aren’t the same vines,” I say incredulously.

He laughs. “No, that would not be possible. But the trees are the same. The
cipressi
.”

I stare at the stone frame of the window and, through it, the cypresses marching down the hill in two lines. To think that they’re the same trees that stood there over three hundred years ago is mind-boggling. The sheer history overwhelms me for a moment, the knowledge that I’m a descendant of this family, which has owned this castle, these lands for many more than three hundred years.…

Luca lets it sink in, leaning back against the wall, propping his shoulders on the brick, crossing his legs at the ankles. The way he was standing when I first saw him, just a month and a half ago, at the Casa del Popolo. I think I fell in love with him that very moment.

“How did you know?” I eventually ask again. “That I’d seen this picture, I mean?”

“I see you come out of the library with Kelly,” he says, looking a little embarrassed. “And I am curious. What do two English girls do at an Italian library? So later I go in and I ask Sandra, who works there, what you want, and she says, ‘Oh, they do
ricerche
—’ ”

“Research,” I prompt.

“Yes. On your family, she says. And she shows me the book they have with the di Vesperi in it.” He shrugs again. “We have a copy of course, but I never look in it. But I open it and there it is. A picture of Fiammetta. Of you.”

He looks straight at me for a moment, his eyes a clear blue, filled with acceptance of what he thinks is the truth.

“And I do my own
ricerche
in my family documents, and I see that there is another picture of Fiammetta in a
museo
in London. So I understand a lot of things.” He swallows; I see his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I do not maybe understand why you did not tell me. Before we kissed. Before we start to feel …”

He breaks off, staring down at his shoes. Luca never wears sneakers; they’re navy suede loafers, very Italian dandy.

“You kissed
me
,” I remind him softly.

He wriggles like a snake pinned to a wall.

“There is no point in talking about this!” he says angrily, kicking back against the brick with the heel of one loafer and probably hurting his foot in the process.

I don’t remind him that he started it. I say instead: “So you found this room?”