The Sin of Cynara (17 page)

  'You !' she exclaimed. 'I can't imagine you, signore, being nervous of anything, least of all a mere girl.'

  'Yes, how very young you look, Carol, as you must have looked on the morning you went to church with my brother. Then it was sposalizio della vergine, was it not?'

  'Yes,' she said faintly, for that was the only truth about her marriage to Vincenzo. She had been very young and unawakened, and because of an inner loneliness so prepared to share her heart with a good-looking charmer whose irresponsibility had revealed itself even before her wedding day was over. Added to the pain of that memory was the knowledge that he had been a bigamist, with a wife in Italy, and she felt that it was rather cruel of Rudolph to remind her of that far-off morning when she had faced a happy day which had ended in tears in her single bed.

  He wasn't to know that, of course. He thought her a woman who had experienced lovemaking, and pregnancy, and the bringing into the world of a baby boy.

  That band of terror seemed to lock itself around Carol's throat and she stood there in the full sunlight, looking petrified.

  'Oh, there's no need for such a display of bridal jitters,' he said, jeeringly. 'You and I know our wedding score, don't we?'

  'Please—' But the words wouldn't come, locked in her throat by the twin keys of her fear of him. A man who was being tricked into marriage, unaware that Teri had been abandoned by his real mother. A man who disturbed Carol in such a physical way that some nights she lay sleepless and restless, as if the thick mattress of her bed was stuffed with pins.

  'It's too late for either of us to back out,' he told her, almost harshly. 'The people of my island are all set for a celebration, and you have signed documents that already make me the father of your son. Che sarà, sarà!'

  'What will be, will be,' she echoed, and she stood there with her hands gripping the parapet rail, feeling as if she were about to launch herself into the unknown, with a man who in every way was still unknown to her.

  'Bella donna,' he mocked, 'please, in church don't look as if I plan to beat you each day. The people of the isola are expecting a radiant bride who has made a good marriage — at least try and look as if you're en amoured of my money even if you feel cold shivers instead of warm thrills when you look at me.'

  Already emotionally torn in two as she was, his words shattered her and the tears filled her eyes and hung there glistening before breaking on her cheeks,

  'I - I shall marry you without any illusions, shan't I?' She spoke stormily and wished she could hate him; if she hated him it would somehow be easier to marry him, for it wouldn't matter that she had lied to him and signed her name to a false declaration that Teri was her son.

  Her sister Cynara had only to change her mind about wanting Teri and the atmosphere would be filled with the blistering heat of the baróne's anger. Carol shrank visibly from what she envisioned, and his sharp eyes saw and taunted her for that shrinking motion.

  'Now you can run away, but no further than your bedroom. Later you will have to put on a brave and lovely face, my bride -I insist on it. Anyway, I shall be sending you something which should assist you ir making a quick recoveiy from your loss of composure For now, arrivederci.'

  With a motion of his riding whip he cantered off towards the stables, a line of white-painted doors beyond an archway draped in morning glory. Carol listened until the hoofbeats died away, but still there was a soft drumming and it came from her heart. Her foolish heart had led her into this, and there was no going back to the dreary normality of life at Chalkleigh. She could only hope and pray that the Aunts having been told that she was to marry the baróne, wouldn't contact Cynara in America and wake some latent maternal instinct in her sister ... the bells still pealed as Carol went back into her room, and now there seemed a note of warning in them.

  Teri was seated crosslegged on her bed, playing with the Action Man toy which she had brought him from Rome. His hair was tousled, and he was still in his pyjamas, looking very lovable and vulnerable, so that Carol couldn't resist pulling him into her arms and giving an assortment of those kisses from his babyhood.

  'You want me to marry your Uncle Rudi, don't you, darling?' she asked. 'You really want to stay here on the island with him?'

  'If you do, Cally,' he said, giving her a solemn look. 'He's different from those others—'

  'What do you mean, Buster?'

  'Those other men who look at you.' The boy put a hand against her cheek. 'You know, Cally.'

  'My silly boy—'

  'I'm not silly.' His fingers caught at her thick braid. Tio Rudi is different from them because he doesn't speak to me as if I'm in his way. He helped me to catch a real live fish and he took the hook out so its mouth didn't bleed, and I had it for nursery supper when you were away buying your dresses. It was cooked with tomatoes and I ate every bit.'

  'Bones and all?' She grinned at him. 'You're happier with your own kin, and that's one good thing about all this.'

  'Better than the Aunts,' he muttered, and sat his

  Action Man on the motor-cycle and sidecar, once again losing himself in that world of childish imagination that Carol envied. How she wished she could close her mind to reality, but there was no chance of it, because when the maid brought in her breakfast tray there was a package on it beside the silver coffee pot, from the signor baróne, the girl told her, with that half-curious smile that everyone seems to give a bride on her wedding morning.

  'Grazie.' Carol moved the package about in her fingers and delayed opening it until she had fortified herself with a strong cup of coffee and a brioche. She knew that he had sent her an item of jewellery and he would expect her to wear it at the ceremony that should be a holy and tender ritual between two people who saw no way to be happy unless they were joined in the sacred bonds of matrimony.

  Her fingers were unsteady as she opened the jewel-case, and she could feel her heart beating in her throat as she stared at the lovely knot brooch composed of rubies and pearls. The gems and the gold were intricately woven together with a pendant in which a large single ruby glowed like a drop of heart's blood.

  The tiger rubies, which the bride of each successive baróne was dowered with as a matter of course rather than the indulgence of a man who wanted his future wife to feel cherished beyond all other women. The brooch seemed to Carol to signify passion and tears, and she would wear it on the lapel of her blue wedding dress, so simple in design and yet made of the purest silk and like no other dress she had owned in her life.

  Gena came to her room at eleven o'clock in order to help her get ready. Teri went off with Flavia, who would look after him during the course of the wedding and the celebration that would follow. Buffet tables and barbecues had been set up in the patios of the palazzo, and Carol could hear the guests arriving even as Gena helped her with her coiffure and drew from its box the wide-brimmed hat that she had chosen to wear, to the brim of which was attached a single silk rose.

  At last she was ready and Gena stood back to give her a long and rather critical look. 'Yes,' she murmured, 'you were not only wise to choose blue for your dress, but you were cunning. That colour and that material are perfect on you - my brother will find you beautiful, and I'm glad about that. Everyone will think you quite stunning and people will say again that Rudi hasn't lost his touch when it comes to choosing a woman.

  'Oh hell,' a look of pain crossed Gena's face, 'I wish he still had his own fabulous looks. There was no one — no other man to hold a candle to him ! You might have thought Vince a good-looking specimen, but he never had Rudi's look of pride and power. Why he won't have surgery on his face I'll never know. It could be done. In America there are some wizards at that kind of thing, but he's so darned obstinate and endures those fearful scars. Can you bear them, Carol? Especially when he kisses you !'

  'Strangely enough,' Carol's fingers played with the ruby pendant of his brooch, T sometimes don't even notice them. His pride and power are still the greater part of him, for the way we look is transient, isn't it?'

  'Maybe it is,' Gena said drily, 'but all the same it's nice for a girl to be pretty, and I bet you can't look in that mirror and say you aren't glad that you look good enough for a man to eat. I quite envy your creamy English skin and the mystery of your blue eyes shaded by the brim of that romantic hat, and I'm frankly delighted that Rudi has a dish like you to enjoy — even if Vince did have first bite of the apple.'

  Carol winced. 'No one would take you for a subtle Latin,' she said. 'You use American phrases as if born to them.'

  'My dear girl, I've known too many Americans not to have absorbed some of their ways of speaking and thinking. Does it shock you that I'm such a liberated Latin woman?'

  'I don't sit in judgment on people, Gena. I'm no angel myself.' No, thought Carol, I'm a barefaced liar and a fraud, and I'm already scared stiff that the baróne is going to find out about me.

  Gena stared at her, as if seeing a hint of this fear in her face. 'You look as they painted the gothic angels,' she said, 'as if pursued by a secret devil. That ruby brooch is perfect against the silk of your dress; tears and kisses, eh?'

  'Marriage is made of them.' Carol's fingers crept to the pendant of the brooch yet again, a sure sign that she was nervous. She'd be glad when it was all over and she was committed to the baróne for better or worse.

  'Rudi won't be the same type of lover as Vince, but I think you realize it, don't you, Carol? There's no boy in him ; he's all man.'

  'Yes, I know.' Carol, said it with a catch of her breath. 'That's why his scars don't matter.'

  'You must be terribly in love with him!' Gena widened her eyes as if with a sense of shock. 'Did you know how you felt about him? My dear, you look quite white and stunned, and I'd better get you a glass of champagne and a chicken sandwich. We don't want you passing out at the altar.'

  Gena left the room for a few minutes and Carol heard her speaking to someone. She guessed it was Saul, and she was right, for it was he who brought the tray with three brimming glasses on it, and a plate of sandwiches.

  'Hi there !' He smiled at Carol as he came into her room. 'Say, you really look a blue angel, don't you? If all brides look as good as you do, then I might give up being a bachelor.' He held out the tray to Carol, while Gena gave a scoffing laugh.

  'I don't think you're the marrying type, Saul.' She took her glass of champagne and gave him a mocking look. 'Some are like the hummingbird and they have this insatiable urge to sip nectar from a variety of flowers. My brother Vince had your kind of disposition, and look what he did to Carol.'

  Saul glanced again at Carol and he raised his glass to her. 'Carol doesn't look too much of a wreck to me,' he drawled. 'Her nectar looks almost undisturbed from where I'm standing.'

  Gena shot a look at Carol. 'It must be those fair looks,' she said. 'They give her that illusion of being a mere girt on the threshold of experience, but there's a bouncing boy of five to prove that Carol isn't a virginal innocent. All the same, viva la rosa. It's quite an asset, my dear, to look as if you've been coming to bloom behind a hedge of thorns, and that only Rudi has really dared to pluck you free of them.5

  Carol sipped her champagne with a desperate, inward urge to find some measure of courage. Gena and Saul didn't mean any harm in speaking in this way, for it was the conversation of their kind of world. They were sophisticates who believed in being unconventional. That a girl should have a baby from a bigamous marriage didn't shock them, but they'd be less understanding of a girl who took on the illegitimate child of her bigamous husband and passed him off as her own. They'd regard that kind of behaviour as outrageously quixotic, and think her a bit of a fool.

  She didn't really care what they thought - there was only one person whose opinion mattered, and when the moment came for her to proceed to the chapel to join him, her head swam from nerves and champagne (a sandwich would have stuck in her throat). Her fingers clenched the small bouquet of rare white orchids with a shadow of violet-blue on their curled-in petals, nested in sprigs of green fern. She felt she was killing the flowers as her nerves were killing her. Her heart beat intolerably fast as she walked along the aisle of the crowded chapel, so filled with people and flowers that it was like a scented hothouse. The colours in the peaked windows swam in front of her eyes, and then she felt a hand on her wrist, lean fingers pressing against her rapid pulse, and she looked upwards into tawny eyes and they seemed to guess at all she was feeling, and though he didn't smile she felt strangely reassured.

  He drew her to his side and an excited sort of gasp seemed to emerge in concert from the crowded pews. It had been accepted for a long time that the baróne wouldn't marry on account of his disfigurement, caused as everyone knew by a woman. But today he stood at the altar with a girl in blue, and there was a perceptible air of drama to this marriage. No one was prepared to believe that this pretty creature was marrying the pad-rone, so tall, stem and fearfully scarred, because she had given her heart to him. There was more to it than that! The whispers ran back and forth as the white-robed priest appeared, his prayer book in hand. There was the boy - the brother's son whom this slim, fair, trembling girl had brought to the ìsola. It was for the child's sake that these two took their vows today, and everyone knew it.

  Most of the ceremony was conducted in Latin, and Carol went through it in a kind of dream, there beside Rudolph in a pearl-grey suit of impeccable styling, possessed, she felt, of a quality of emotion held in steel bands. With a hand as steady as a rock he held hers and slid on to her finger the wide gold band chased with a Florentine motif of lily-flowers - symbol of love, and yet no more than a striking design on the ring that sealed their bargain. Teri was now his son ... the palazzo was now her home.