Death in the Palazzo (24 page)

Her voice faded in and out like some distant, poorly received station on an old wireless. She took several shallow breaths, all the while peering at him with her small dark eyes. The expression on the tiny patch of face visible between the lace head-covering and the high neck of her dress was pained and determined. No doubt she was willing her voice to be steady, and as she continued, the success of her efforts was immediately apparent.

“Yes, my daughter died in the same room. A bubble in her brain or a defective heart. All this poking and Renata's life ran its natural course. A happy life, despite her husband's death. Happier than mine, than Bambina's. A mother doesn't expect her children to die before her, but what can be done? You are listening to me, aren't you, Signor Macintyre?”

She glowered at him and her hand tightened around her cane. She seemed completely capable of striking out at him with it—and with considerable force.

“I didn't want to interrupt you, signora.”

“I see,” she said, relaxing her grip on the cane. “You'd rather have me run on until I tire myself out, is that it? Then what good will I be to you?” She pressed a shriveled hand against her breast and shook her head slowly. “I can only do so much with this body of mine. Better to ask your questions. I'll either answer them or not.”

Urbino rapidly considered all the things he would like to ask her. He then looked very hard at her as he said, “Tell me about Dido.”

There followed a brief silence. Mamma Zeno took several shallow breaths and dropped the lids of her eyes partway.

“Dido? Testing an old woman's education? That isn't very cavalier of you. I thought that Barbara had smoothed away most of your hard American edges.” She gave several quick little choking sounds that might have been laughter or something more pathological. “Dido was some barbarian queen who killed herself for the love of Aeneas. Burned herself to death, wasn't it?”

“I wasn't asking about Virgil's Dido, signora, but your daughter Bambina's cat.”

“She had so many.”

“Dido was the one who died a few months before Renata did. On the last evening of her life, Renata mentioned Dido's death. She said that Bambina was unlucky in things that she loved.”

“How do you know these things? Not from Bambina!” The old woman's frailty seemed to fall away from her like some rotted garment. “If it was Luigi—!”

Her hands, gripping the arms of the chair, looked as hard and tense as the rococo carvings.

“It was neither Bambina nor Luigi, signora.”

Urbino thought it best not to tell her that he knew it—and more—from Alvise's account.

“That stupid, meddling woman! How did
she
know?”

Since Molly was beyond danger now, Urbino encouraged Mamma Zeno's mistake by saying, “Signora Wybrow mentioned Dido last night. She said that she had suffered a lot. Bambina got very upset.”

“Sentimental fool! Yes, I remember Dido. Long white fur that flew all over the house. She would let Gemma carry her around like a doll. I think Gemma cried more over that cat than over her own mother. What else did that woman tell you?”

Urbino decided to take full advantage of Mamma Zeno's misconception, if this was what it was.

“She said that Andrew Lydgate had no intention of marrying Renata. That he was going to marry Bambina.”

Mamma Zeno's reaction to this fabrication was to twist her thin lips into a smile.

“Now I know the woman was an idiot! Lydgate not marry Renata? He was mad about her.”

“But I heard that he was originally interested in Bambina.”

“That woman again? Well, even an idiot can hit the mark sometimes. Lydgate and Bambina came to nothing.”

“Once Renata became available, you mean.”

“He was mad for her, I said, and a good thing he was. I made it clear to Bambina. A woman with another man's child doesn't have an easy time finding a husband. Marry Bambina when there was Renata needing a good husband? I wouldn't have had it! I had a plan for my family.”

“But after Renata died? What about Bambina's chances then?”

“Lydgate was never free of Renata. Never! You see the power that Renata has even over you, who never knew her! Unless that mad woman convinced you that you knew her in a former life! Did she tell you that you—”

She didn't continue but stared at him with an almost scornful smile.

“That I resemble Lydgate? Is that what you were going to say?”

“What does it matter? I once resembled Renata. Many people took us for sisters back then. But, yes, you do look like Lydgate. I wouldn't advise you to try to make much of it, though. The resemblance is only skin deep.” She paused, then added: “He wasn't a man of particular intelligence.”

Urbino didn't know what to take more note of in what she had said: the implied compliment or the distant warning. He looked into what he could see of her face, and tried to bridge the years between now and when that wrinkled face had resembled Renata's. He couldn't do it. It wasn't that his imagination failed him, but that something in the old woman made the effort futile.

Mamma Zeno, despite her frail physical condition, was a strong woman, perhaps stronger than any of the other guests isolated this weekend at the Ca' da Capo. Urbino thought it unlikely that she had ever done anything she didn't want to do. It was therefore perfectly consistent with his thinking that he now asked her why she had decided to come to the Contessa's house party.

“For Gemma's sake” was her answer. It was when she apparently felt the need to clarify that he sensed she wasn't telling the truth. “Because of the portrait.”

“She urged you to come?”

She nodded.

“She wanted Bambina and me to be here for the unveiling. And Luigi,” she added, anticipating his next question. “He's been like a father—an uncle—to her.”

“So she obviously wanted all four of you to be here again together after all these years.”

Mamma Zeno stared at him coldly.

“Don't you think you should say that it was Barbara who wanted us all here?”

He felt the need to shock the old woman.

“Suppose I told you that I believe Molly didn't die in an accident, signora?”

“I would say that you're as insane as she was and not as intelligent as I thought! I don't think that you are qualified to give a professional opinion. We have a physician in the house. I'm sure he didn't say anything of the kind.”

“I find it interesting that you're so certain of what Dr. Vasco did or didn't say to me about Molly's death.”

“I don't know what you mean by that statement, and I'm not even going to try to—”

“Oh, Mamma, excuse me” came Bambina's voice from the door. “I didn't know that you had a guest. Signor Urbino, what a surprise!”

Bambina started to flutter nervously around the room, making it obvious that she was looking for something.

“I seem to have misplaced my copy of
Gente
. I wanted to read it before dinner. Have you seen it, Mamma?”

“It's not here. Leave!”

She raised her cane threateningly.

Bambina came to a quick halt in her movements around the room and, with an embarrassed look at Urbino, she retreated with almost comical rapidity.

Mamma Zeno waited until the door had closed behind Bambina before she said to Urbino with an unmistakable valedictory air:

“My family's affairs are private, signore, even if you are Barbara's intimate friend. And remember that she herself isn't a Da Capo-Zendrini, certainly not a Zeno! I am a Zeno not only by marriage but by blood! By blood! It would be much better for you to devote your time to figuring out ways for Barbara to make this drafty building safe for a person to walk and sleep in. She and she alone is responsible for what has happened under this roof!”

9

Immediately after leaving Mamma Zeno, Urbino went to see the Contessa in her boudoir.

“What's the matter?” she asked. “You're not even dressed for dinner yet.”

She, however, was—in a silk dress printed with designs inspired by San Marco's mosaics.

“Nothing's the matter,” he said. “I just stopped by to be sure that you weren't having any second thoughts.”

“Second and third and fourth! I hope you know what you're doing! What you're asking!”

He put his arms around her and kissed her forehead.

“You'll be fine. You'll see.” As he said it, all he could think of was what she was going to have to go through before everything was all over. He looked down into her frightened gray eyes.

“I take full responsibility—for you and everyone else,” he reassured her. “Just remember that I don't want you to sit down at the table until I already have. Everyone will be there, as we agreed, won't they?”

“Yes.” She disengaged herself from his arms and looked at herself in a mirror. She trifled uneasily and unnecessarily with her hair. “Even Oriana, although much help she'll be! All she keeps moaning about now is that the ‘curse of the Ca' da Capo' must have followed Filippo. Ridiculous, isn't it?”

She turned to Urbino with a worried, quizzical look.

The only comfort he could give her—and a cold one at that—was “Ridiculous, yes. No one has left the Ca' da Capo but Filippo himself.”

10

His hair still damp from a quick, cold shower, Urbino slipped into his accustomed seat at the end of the dinner table as the last gong sounded. Everyone was down except for the Contessa.

Urbino's entrance had made no interruption in the rhythm of Sebastian's patter. Sebastian had either sobered up considerably or was in that transitional stage before the total oblivion of inebriation descended on him. For the time being, however, he was functioning very well, except for less than precise pronunciation and more violent gestures than were called for.

The other guests, with varying degrees of bored or irritated expressions—or, in the case of Bambina and Angelica, uneasy ones—seemed content to let him run on as long as they weren't expected to join in.

“… and so I said to the fellow, if you really believe this is a Raphael, then it's time for you to close your shop and take up another trade. It made me wonder what other fakes he had all over the place, and I was going to help him out by poking around and telling him, but Viola dragged me out. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was in another shop, this one in New Bond Street, and I took one look at a painting that everyone was
ooh
-ing and
aah
-ing over—a Rubens, they all thought—”

He broke off as the Contessa swept into the room, murmuring apologies. The peacock brooch was pinned to the front of her dress, its gold work and colored stones a perfect complement to the tones and shapes of the mosaic-print of her dress.

If her smile was a bit tight and her voice strained, no one needed any more explanation than the ones already at hand. One guest was lying dead upstairs, another was unconscious, and a third was somewhere out in the storm, possibly incapacitated.

Only Urbino and the Contessa knew that she was feeling like an actress whose imminent performance risked more than just jeers and scathing reviews. But what Urbino hadn't told her was that, in order to get as true a performance as possible from her, he had been obliged to keep her in the dark about some essential points.

The Contessa seated herself, not risking a look at Urbino. Mamma Zeno, on Urbino's immediate left, gave a gasp as she noticed the brooch.

Bambina's and Vasco's attention was also riveted on it. Bambina pulled her eyes away to stare at her mother, and suppressed what sounded like a nervous giggle.

“It's the brooch from some of the portraits in the gallery!” Viola said. She was sitting to Urbino's immediate right next to Bambina, and had most of her hair artfully wrapped in a piece of Fortuny fabric. “Where have you been hiding it?”

“In some deep coffer,” Sebastian immediately jumped in to say. “Ha, ha! She probably has so many bijous she has to rotate them like the V & A. She won't get around to this particular bauble again until the next millennium.”

Angelica, who had been staring at the brooch with unusually keen interest, said, “Is it art nouveau?”

“Can't you tell, my dear?” Oriana said. “It's older than that.”

“A lot older,” said Bambina. “It's from ancient Constantinople.”

“Ancient Constantinople?” Sebastian repeated with a grin. “‘Hammered gold and gold enamelling' done by Grecian goldsmiths to keep a drowsy emperor awake? Ah yes, ‘an aged man is but a paltry thing,'” he went on, quoting Yeats but completely mystifying Bambina and most of the others. “Set there on the golden bough of Barbara's bosom”—here he hiccuped—“singing to us lords and ladies of Venice of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

He rewarded himself after this effusion by draining his wineglass and reaching for the carafe to refill it. He almost upset one of the candelabra.

“Yes, it belonged to an emperor!” Bambina burst out with almost evident relief, apparently seizing on the one thing she had understood in what Sebastian had said. All it earned her, however, was a glare from her mother.

“I have an idea,” Sebastian said. “Let's chase away our fears and blues and have Barbara tell us the story of the brooch!”

“The Conte's memoir!” Viola said softly. “Someone told a story about a brooch back then.”

No one but Urbino seemed to hear her. Sebastian was hitting his water glass with a spoon.

“Here, here, Barbara! The story. We insist.”

“I—I'd rather not,” the Contessa said. She looked at Urbino, then away, as if she wasn't quite sure this was what she should have said.

“Oh, let me!” piped up Bambina as she pushed her dish of shrimp away. Her mother stared at her silently but nonetheless thunderously from her beady eyes. “It's really a Zeno story as much as a Da Capo-Zendrini one. Excuse me, Barbara, but you're not really a Da Capo-Zendrini—not a blood relation—even though you have the brooch.”