Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances (90 page)

She looked into my face. “I don’t know what that means, estate or title,” she said gravely.

“Some day you will,” I said, putting my arms around her. “I only hope not too soon. Just be a little girl for as long as you can. Darling, you’re so sweet.”

I bent and kissed her. She
was
sweet. She smelt of flowers, or the warm, innocent fragrance of childhood. “And this is Nonna and Nonno’s room,” she said, leading me on, preceding me into still another bedchamber. Like her mother’s and father’s, it was a suite, with sitting room, bedroom and bath. The sitting room overlooked the gardens.

“See,” she said. “Nonno reads his paper here.” She walked over to the window. “Sometimes he falls asleep. I come in and go over to him and he wakes up. Then he sits me on his lap and we look out the window.” She giggled. “He likes to watch Pietro working, with Emilio. “Get to work, I’m watching you,” he calls down, “
Pigro imbecilles
…” And they look up and laugh.”

Mentally, I translated.
You lazy bums …

Eleanora’s face became grave suddenly. She pointed. “It was there, you see, where the signora was on the ladder.”

She put out a hand, her face wistful. “I wish she was there now, signorina. I would reach out and touch her. I would say, ‘Hey, signora, get to work.’”

She leaned on the window sill, her face on a plump little arm. Her eyes were thoughtful, and remembering. I looked at her and, after a while said, puzzled, “What do you mean, Eleanora? The signora? There? I thought she was … I mean, wasn’t she in her own garden? On the other side?”

“No, right there,” she said pensively. “I could touch her now, if she.…”

Her eyes had a faraway look. “You know, she had funny hair, like — ”

She made little squiggles with her hands.

“Curly?”

“
Si.
My fingers would get all tangled.”

I sat there and thought of what Peter had said. “The ladder, think of the ladder …”

And now I thought of the ladder, my ideas rearranging slowly. Not in the other garden, but in this one, so near to this window, where the Principe sat, that one could reach out and touch Mercedes’s hair, her face …

Or do something else …

A vivid, terrible picture sprang into my mind. The Principe sitting here at the window, reading his newspaper. Mercedes up on the ladder, only a hand-span away. He sat looking at her, thinking of his son’s gambling debts. Not only about the gambling debts. About his lost property. About his lost sovereignty. All this had once been his … and was his no longer. And the woman on the ladder, trimming away parasite vines … so near to him, so near …

He looked out, meeting her eyes.

And then, in a flash, put out a hand.

Mercedes, her own eyes unbelieving, widening.

And then her indrawn breath, as the hand touched the ladder. The ladder swaying, the vines brushing her face …

I felt dizzy, and sat down quickly in the chair by the window.

And at last I was sure. That was the way it had happened. Of course, I thought. Of course.

And that man knowing, almost instantly, that he had been seen, when Elizabeth dashed across the lawn, plunging through the gate. He knew he had been spotted. And had lived in terror ever since. Such terror that he had poisoned the little dog, in a last ditch effort to cover his traces, to frighten Elizabeth into silence.

“Do you have a headache, like Papa?” Eleanora asked, looking concerned.

“No, it’s just the heat. It’s a hot day, isn’t it?”

“I don’t mind it.”

“Let’s go down now. I have things to attend to.”

“Where is the signora?”

“I haven’t been told yet.”

“She’s dead too, isn’t she?”

“Yes, but you see, darling, she was old, perhaps she wouldn’t mind. At any rate, you’re not to think about it”

“No, and I shan’t grieve. Mama told me so.”

“That’s right. What’s done is done.” We went down the stairs together. The lawyers had left, and I made my way over to the other garden. Emilio, the son of Pietro the gardener, was weeding around some bushes. He looked up shyly as I started to pass him, and said,
“Buon giorno.”

On an impulse I stopped. “Where’s your father?” I asked.

“Not feeling well today,” he said, in labored English. “Couldn’t come.”

I stood beside him. “I’m leaving the villa,” I told him.

He ducked his head and murmured something. I didn’t quite catch it, but assumed he was telling me he was sorry. I said, “Yes, so am I. It turned out so badly.”

“Si,”
he said, shaking his head.
“Male, male.”

“Now you’ll be working for the Monteverdis.”

He shrugged. Work … he had to work. What did it matter whom he worked
for?

I said, “Emilio, when my aunt died, the Contessa, you were here, weren’t you?”

“Si.”

“The ladder was near the other house?”

“
Si
, signorina.”

“And the little girl was standing beside it?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “The little girl was at the upstairs window.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean? The signora had asked her to fetch some shears.”

“Yes,” he said. “She looked in the window and asked the little girl to go down for the shears. And then the child did, so after that she was upstairs again. I was working, and my father too, and then there was a terrible scream. The signora, you understand. My father ran, and I too, but it was too late.”

He made a sound between his teeth. “She was dead, the signora.”

He sighed. “And then they were all there. It was … I will never forget it.”

“I can certainly understand that,” I said. “Emilio, when the signora, my aunt, fell to her death, where were the others?”

He looked at me, questioning.
“Per favore?”
he asked, not quite understanding.

I was trying to set the scene, for the last and final time, in my mind. I said, “For example, where was Mrs. Wadley?”

“She was there,” he said, pointing to the garden table.

“And you and your father?”

“Over there.” He indicated a spot not far from where we were.

“And who was in the other garden? The Monteverdis’ garden?”

“No one was there,” he said. “Only when the accident occurred. They ran out of the house.”

“But when she was on the ladder, there was no one in the garden next door?”

“Only the signora,” he said. “On the ladder.”

“One more thing, Emilio. Do you have rats here?”

His eyes, astonished, looked into mine.

“Rats?”

“I mean … are there rats hereabouts?”

“But no,” he said, astounded. “Rats? Never, signorina. Maybe near the river,
posso.
But never up here. Sometimes field mice,
piccolo
, but never rats.”

“Thank you, Emilio,” I said. “I know you and your father must have wages coming to you. I’ll see what I can do about it. You won’t be cheated.”

“Grave.”

“Buona fortuna,
Emilio.”

“Buona fortuna
, signorina,” he answered and, with his shy eyes looking away quickly, bent to his weeding again.

• • •

I went into the house and, closing the door of my room, opened the package Elizabeth had left for me. As soon as I slit it open I knew why it had rattled. There were two things in there, both gold. One was a handsome watch which, when I looked closely at it, bore the engraved initials of the Principe on its back. I didn’t know his first or middle name, but the last letter, elaborately curlicued, was an M.

“You won’t find your watch,”
the Principessa had said to her husband, on my first morning at the villa.

“No, I am afraid it is gone forever …”

I put it down on the bed and looked at the other gold object. Delicate, dainty, fit for a small, childish neck … a heart-shaped locket on a slender chain.

And that was all.

I thought about it for a long, long time. Held both golden objects in my hands. And now I knew who had killed Mercedes. Or at least knew that one of them had. There had been a woman on a ladder, perhaps chatting gaily with the two persons inside the window just beyond. An old man and a little girl. And then, while she scarcely credited the evidence of her own eyes, someone had leaned out and pushed her, sent her hurtling to her death.

Reaching out, in desperation, unbelieving, her hands had seized a gold watch and a gold locket. First thin air, as she tried to steady herself and then, perhaps sobbing frantically, her grasping fingers had clutched, as if at life, whatever they came in contact with.

A man’s watch and a child’s locket.

But who had done the pushing?

The Principe? It seemed logical. Proud, deprived, emasculated … despising the woman who had disinherited him. Yes, I could picture him, in that one lightning moment, putting his hand out and —

But the child had been there too, according to Emilio. It had been from
that
vantage point that Mercedes had asked for the shears, and the child had gotten them. And then had gone upstairs again.

And the other picture came into my mind. The little hand going out, perhaps even in a spirit of fun … to touch the curly, gray hair of an old woman and then, mischievous, not knowing what she was doing, gave a shove …

Or knowing what she was doing …

I had the watch and the locket. Signifying nothing. Elizabeth had seen, but I hadn’t. And I would never know. Peter had questions, and the signores Predelli and Pineider had questions. Only Elizabeth had known what hand had sent my aunt to her death … and Elizabeth was dead too.

I remembered her words.
It
will be your decision …

I sat there until the bright day faded into dusk. I kept thinking about that beautiful, tawny-haired little girl, and hoped, against hope, that hers hadn’t been the hand that had left Mercedes, her neck broken, dead on the grass. I kept thinking that she had remembered me, whom she had never seen, and thought of me as “little Barbara,” in the same way she had almost certainly thought of the child next door as “little Eleanora.” That, perhaps because of Eleanora, she had recalled a child of her own flesh and blood, however far removed, and so had made me a legatee in her will. If she had loved that child next door, desired her as she would have desired a daughter of her own, what were her last thoughts … if Eleanora had put out that fatal hand and sent the ladder flying?

I didn’t want to dwell on it. My heart was heavy and I thought of Elizabeth, lying who knew where. Elizabeth, who in a few short days, had come to be my friend. Mercedes was an X quantity: I would never know what she was
really
like, but I had known her friend and companion and had, perhaps, come to love her.

I went out to the garden and looked down into the valley.

Down there lay a city I had begun to cherish, a city to which, perhaps, I had come home. Someone of my own blood had passionately adored that city, and the Italian ethos, and the stones that had been there for centuries. There was no possible way that Mercedes could have guessed that a girl from America would sigh and muse, as she herself had, over the glory she had found and never left. She had met a young man and woman, newly-married, had liked them, had enjoyed their company so much that their shapshot, in a gilt frame, was among countless others on the silk scarf that covered the top of the Boesendorfer grand. She might have forgotten them, in the welter of her rich life, but some stray cell in her brain, toward the end of her life, brought them to mind again, and she remembered that they had a child, as she had not, a child named Barbara.

I knew then that Elizabeth had been right, that I would never say anything. For there would be no advantage. Elizabeth had told me, when explaining why she kept her knowledge to herself, “It would hurt someone I love.”

I thought, she meant Gianni. I knew she had cared deeply for that Italian boy. And I knew that Gianni meant something quite important to me as well. I couldn’t hurt him. But it was more than that. History is made of small crimes and large ones, small greatnesses and large ones, and in the end the final arbiter is what some call God but is really the hidden writing on the unseen wall. We live with secrets, all of us, even as that beautiful child Eleanora, in our jealously-guarded wicker baskets, and the sum of every man’s life is known only to himself. We die with our pitiful misdeeds buried in our stilled hearts.

I sealed the package again, put it into my suitcase and then, remembering the dust marks of a few days ago, took it out again. No, I thought, no. Because it had suddenly come to me that
someone
next door knew of the missing items, and the terrible meaning of them … I didn’t dare leave that package about, for someone to find. I couldn’t chance it.

I peeped out of my room, didn’t see Lucrezia, and with the package under my sweater, went into the vaulted drawing room. There was a little niche, behind a bust of Dante, and I crept across the room and hid the package there. It was high up, so high that I had to stand on a chair, and I doubted that Lucrezia would cover that particular spot in a day’s dusting, especially under the sad circumstances.

It was completely hidden and I felt it was well done, that telltale package far from the sight of prying eyes. I went back to my room and, not knowing what provisions had been made for Lucrezia, made up my mind that I would tell her that she would be repaid, by myself, for her time and services, that when I came into my inheritance, I would share some of it with her. Because she had been so kind to me. I felt like giving it all away; it didn’t mean anything to me any longer.

She made a luscious supper, and we ate in the garden, early, because she couldn’t take another night off. She had a husband and children; she had a life. “You’ll be all right?” she asked, when she had washed up the dishes and was ready to leave.

“Of course,” I said, and watched her rush off on her Vespa, vanishing down the steep road. I went into the house again, all alone, leaving a trail of lights behind me as I went to my room. Peter Fox had called, saying that the Hotel Continentale had a room for me. He had wanted to take me there immediately, but I said no, just one more night at the Villa Paradiso, because after all it belonged to someone else now, and I would never set foot on it again, ever.