Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (91 page)

He seemed to understand, said he would be there if I wanted to call him. But I didn’t want to call him. I lay in bed for a long time, listening to the night sounds, and wanted to cry. But I couldn’t. Finally I got up, took two aspirins, and went back to bed. In the morning Lucrezia would be there, would wake me up with ineffable smells … bacon sizzling, and eggs done to a turn. I didn’t lie in darkness; I couldn’t bear to. I left a small light burning on the writing table near the windows. Weary, doleful, I closed my eyes and, sighing, fell asleep. A soft breeze drifted in from the outdoors. The sheets were cool, and felt so good, so good …

My eyes opened. I lay stiffly, retreating from some dream or other. There was something my mind was trying to tell me. For a moment, I tried to recapture the dream … there had been a child, and the child had smiled up at me. But, frowning, I admitted to my waking self that the smile had been strange … and
not
childlike … but curiously adult.

Oh, I was dreaming about Eleanora, I thought, as I came out of my night stupor. What a funny smile she wore … not very nice, not at all nice …

I was by then fully awake.

Weirdly awake. There was a notion in my mind. There was something, something …

I plumped my pillows and pondered. Yes, there was something … something that bothered me.

Something nagging at me …

The lamp, whose shade I had tipped, made a warm arc, golden and comforting. I burrowed into the pillows and asked myself what it was that tried to pierce my consciousness.

And then, in a flash, I knew.

Elizabeth, in her bed, white as a ghost and dead as a doornail … from an overdose of sleeping pills.

But lying on her right side …

On her righi side …

It was all, suddenly, as clear as a bell. Of course, I thought, of course. Lying on her right side … the “bad” side. When she woke in the night, having turned, in her sopor, to that poor, crippled hip, she’d screamed. Had waked me. Screamed out in pain … and I’d rushed in to her.

Then how could it be, I asked myself, that, having taken an overdose, “despondent at having lost her lifelong friend, the Contessa,” she had swallowed the pills and settled in the bed on her right side … which meant agony for her … meant pain that brought her awake, screaming …

No, I thought. No. If she took the overdose, depressed, finally wanting to end her life, she would turn to her “good” side, perhaps say something to God, or whomever she believed in, and drift off … forever …

But she certainly wouldn’t … couldn’t … do it on her crippled side.

I was cold, and shivering. I knew it, I told myself. I knew it. Someone pushed the pills down her throat. Someone forced them into her mouth.

Someone …

I knew it all along, I said aloud, talking to myself. I knew it. There was a dark story, yes. About Mercedes, my aunt, the late Contessa, and about her “beloved enemy,” Elizabeth Wadley. Both of them. Both of them had been put to death. A Monteverdi had done it. A member of that disinherited family had done it. Killed two women, one after the other, so that the Villa Paradiso would revert to the original owners. Cruelly, with malice aforethought, one of them had slain first my aunt, then the dog, and then Elizabeth.

I must call Peter in the morning, I thought, and checked my bedside clock to set the alarm for seven. And then I turned over again, my head heavy and aching dully, pulling up the sheet to cover the glare of the lamp. I was so tired I could have cried. It had been an ordeal, and to be up to it, to get the best of it, I needed a few hours respite.

And then I fell asleep.

• • •

I woke because my hand was asleep. Ugh, I thought dimly, and started chopping away at it, not fully alert, but trying to bring the blood back to my numbed member. It felt like a lump of clay. I wrung it, trying to flex the fingers.

I was, suddenly, wide awake.

The light was out. The lamp near the windows, which I had left burning, was burning no longer.

Why, I wondered, stiffening. Why?

I lay in the darkness, my heart hammering.

Why was the light out?

I heard the furtive steps. Tensed, listening, every nerve taut. God, I thought. I was in the dark …
and someone was in this room …

For a minute or two longer I lay there, cravenly, trying not to gasp, or show that I was awake. And then, gathering my forces together, while the faint light of the half moon, raying in from outdoors, showed me the dark shadow a few steps away, I drew my legs up, as silently as possible, pushed the covers back and then, with a gargantuan effort, jumped out of bed. Barefoot, I plunged toward the open windows, stifling a scream, and in the next moment was tearing across the wet grass, my breath sobbing in my throat.

Reason made me opt for the dividing gate between the division of the villa. Because there were people there. One of them might be intent on my destruction, but the others, sleeping above, would come to my aid. I zigzagged crazily, my feet drenched with the night dew and, about to screech my lungs out, found a hand over my mouth. I froze, as if ice had formed over my heart. I was still, for seconds, feeling the cold grip of death on me, unable to move a muscle.

And then I found a sudden, superhuman strength. I writhed, trying to release myself, while the hands wound tighter around me.

“Let me go,” I sobbed, wrenching at them.

“Please …
per favore
… please …”

I knew Gianni’s voice.

“It’s me,” he said. “It’s me.”

I wrenched a hand free, drove at him, hissing like a snake. I felt like an animal at bay.
“Let me go …”

A mouth came down over mine, crashing, with opened lips, against mine. My hands scrabbled up and down, against him, trying to push him away, trying, desperately, to get free of him.

“Let me go, let me go!”

His lips left mine. With strong hands he imprisoned me. I could feel his heart beating. “No,” he said. “No. Listen to me,
listen to me.
” He bent back one of my wrists; the pain was almost unbearable. I felt the water come into my mouth, and the tears smarted my eyes.

“Please don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t hurt me.”

“Then you must be quiet,” he said inexorably.

“Yes, I will … but please don’t hurt me like that …”

His voice was rough. “I only want to love you,” he said harshly, and his mouth came down again, mashing against mine. And against all reason, with my heart beating wildly against the cage of my chest, I returned his kiss. Wound my arms around his neck. I must be utterly crazy, I thought in a daze. Crazy …

At last I broke free, whispered, pleasing. “What?” I asked. “What do you want? Please, Gianni, let me go. Please.”

He released me. “You won’t scream?” he asked anxiously.

I stood trembling. “No, I won’t scream. But what is it? Why did you come into my room? Don’t you understand how frightening it was? I’m all alone. And then the light was out …”

I felt a hand, soft, in my hair. “I didn’t want to frighten you,” he said, and his voice was like a caress. “I’m so sorry, darling.”

“Well, you nearly drove me out of my mind,” I said, tearfully. “How could you
do
that?”

“Please forgive me. I just wanted to talk to you. I
must
talk to you. There are things I must know.”

“What?” I cried, and shivered in the cool night. It was, after all, almost October, and I wore only a nightgown. I was half out of my mind. The light out … and standing here in the damp grass …

“It’s about the package,” he said.

“What package?” I snapped it out like a drill sergeant.

“The one Predelli gave you. From the signora Wadley.”

“What about it?”

“Because,” he said, “my mother and father were upset. It had something to do with that, the package.”

He grasped my arm. “What was it?”

“None of your business,” I said, angrily.

“It is my business,” he said quietly. “Yes. Because I know there is something wrong. Crazy thoughts? Possibly. I am sensitive to emotions, to faces, particularly those of my own family. Listen, I saw them, my mother and father, when you said to signore Predelli about the package from the signora. You understand? But no, how could you? My father is a child. My mother his mother. Yes, she loves her sons, I am sure, but she adores Papa, she worries so about him. Not really about Benedetto, who lives a truly dangerous life. Me? In her mind I am like little Eleanora. A boy, a child. Just that, no more. But my father — ”

He held my hand, but not brutally, and I felt his breath on my cheek. “Barbara, listen,” he said. “I could see that she was very concerned about him, right after the lawyers left. They went upstairs, and were there all of the day. Now you must tell me what it means.”

“I can’t.”

“But you
must.
”

“I’m sorry. I can’t. It’s their life. Just let it go. It doesn’t concern you.”

“If it concerns you, then it concerns me,” he said, “that package, I want to know what it was.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“But why, but why?”

“Because I can’t.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, passionately. “You put your mouth against mine … your arms around me … and then refuse to — ”

“Will you leave me
alone?
”

I pounded at him. “Leave me alone!”

And then I screamed it.

“Leave me alone, let me go!”

A light sprang on, up above. Someone said, thickly,
“Che cosa?”

And then another light lit the darkness.

“Now you see what you’ve done,” I said shakily. “Now they’re awake … now are you satisfied?”

His arms fell away. His voice, almost a whisper, sounded defeated. “So go,” he said, low. “Then go. I thought — ”

“I don’t know what you thought, but look what you’ve done! They’ve heard us … can’t you see it won’t do any good?”

I sprang away, raced across the sodden grass, gained my room again. My God, I thought, my God. In the middle of the night … in the middle of the night …

I turned on the lamp again, sat on the edge of my bed and, laying a finger across my lips, remembered. I’m terribly in love with him, I whimpered to myself. I’m so terribly in love with Gianni. But how could he have frightened me like that?

I jumped up and started packing. Frantically, I threw garments into my suitcase. Trembling, I stuffed cosmetics into my Elizabeth Arden valise.
Ave
, I thought, mumbling it to myself.
Ave atque vale.
My Aunt Mercedes had been luckier. She had found peace and beauty here.

I had found sadness, terror, cruelty, and a phantasmagoria of riddles. There would be no smile on my face when I left the Villa Paradiso. I was a whipped dog.

How horribly it had turned out …

Peter called in the morning.

“Are you packed?”

“Yes, everything’s done.”

“I’ll pick you up at around noon.”

“Please don’t. I’ll call a taxi.”

“But why? I want to — ”

“Don’t press it,” I said. “I’m going by taxi. If you don’t mind, Peter.”

“Whatever you say,” he answered, and rang off.

And I didn’t leave. I stayed there the whole day, looking at the photographs on the Boesendorfer, wandering through the empty rooms, sitting in the garden, aching, aching, for what I was leaving behind. The hours went by and still I stayed, listening to the voices next door, at
aperitivi
time, and then through their dinner hour, with the laughter and the camaraderie and the family close, close … clannish, alien to me. Once, I thought, this property belonged to Mercedes, the late Contessa; it had been hers, she had loved and cherished it, and now it was theirs, the Monteverdis. I hated them, briefly, and when they went into the house, because of mosquitoes, told myself good riddance, and sat there in the silence.

I was only an intruder now.

I went inside again, got out the package with the watch and the locket. I knew what I was going to do with it. I was going to bury it. Beside Paolo. I thought it was fitting. I even said, as I held it in my hands, “La
commedia e finita …
”

And then I went out, in the cool of the evening, to the twisted pine tree. I felt very lonely. It was the last dusky evening I would spend here. I had gone to the shed, in the courtyard, for a spade, and I walked across the grass to the dwarfed tree.

I knelt on the ground, which was a little damp and, turning over the earth with the spade, I dug a hole. The rich soil, yielding a few startled worms, sifted through my fingers. When the hole was deep enough, I pulled the watch and the locket out of my pocket. I held them for a moment. Ten years from now, perhaps a hundred, these trinkets might be found.

Blinded suddenly by tears, because it had turned out in this unexpected, sad way, I fondled the watch, crushed the tiny locket to my breast, and because of the tears did not see the figure that stood beside me. “In a permanent dark dream of a forest of firs,” I was thinking, bereft and lonely with no one to witness this final, inexorable act, I almost lost my balance when I heard the voice.

“Signorina,” someone said, and almost at once, as I blinked rapidly, I knew that voice.

“Principessa?” I asked, using the forbidden title, and looked up.

She was standing there, in half silhouette, framed by the house lights, the brilliant illumination from the valley below, and the half moon. She looked down at me, with a kind of stern curiosity and said, “What are you doing, signorina?”

I dropped the watch and locket, which I had slipped into its envelope again, into the hole.

“Something I have to do,” I said.

“I want to know.”

“It doesn’t concern you,” I said, and started to push back the earth to cover the envelope.

“I think it does.”

“May I remind you that you’re on my property,” I said, trembling.

“No,” she said. “Not your property. Mine. Ours.”

She was suddenly on her knees beside me. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me aside. And then, scrabbling in the earth, she drew out the envelope. I did my best to take it away from her, but she was a strong woman, and she wrested my hands away. She ripped open the envelope, shaking the dust from it, and pulled out the watch and the heart-shaped locket Calmly, she examined both and looked long at the watch. Her face softened for a moment and then crumpled shockingly.