Death Among the Ruins (14 page)

Terranova’s three monks stood behind him, watching with attentive reverence. Behind
them,
Signora Terranova had settled herself into a large armchair, so as not to miss a single word of her son’s speech. And in the next room, Osvaldo was going through Belinda’s undergarments, handling and sniffing the dainty shifts with enormous satisfaction.

But why are we wasting our time in here? Osvaldo is not very interesting. Let us instead join the enraptured crowd outside. Perhaps they will make room for us in the front row. Oh, look! Here are Charles and Mr. Kendrick, returned from town! They will let us in, surely. That’s better! Now we can see and hear Father Terranova perfectly well. You don’t speak Italian? Never mind—it is not so much
what
the man is saying as
how
. He is very animated, is he not? And mark the occasional phrases to which he gives particular emphasis. You don’t? Oh, that’s right. Well, my Italian is not very good, either, but I can understand a bit. Shall I translate for you? Let’s see . . . “Courage in the face of tyranny . . .” something-something, “. . . resist to the last ounce of our strength.” And . . . “fight the oppressors.” Peculiar expressions for a baptism! And those expansive gestures he’s making! They seem very emphatic, very explicit, don’t they? Well, after all, this is not just a foreign language, but a foreign culture. We should not expect it to make complete sense to us.

His speech would appear to be drawing to its close now. And look there! Our satisfied little party of professor and ladies has just crested the hill!

 

“But she must eat
something!
” cried Kendrick. He was much distressed by Arabella’s reaction at finding the priest on her balcony. She had refused to come down to dinner, refused to speak to anyone, and at this moment, was upstairs packing her trunks in a blind rage.

“Have you tried to talk to her, Miss Belinda?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes, I tried. But Arabella cannot be reasoned with when she is in this mood. I am afraid we shall just have to wait for time to take its course.”

To tell the truth, Belinda had not tried so
very
hard, because just now her thoughts were chiefly occupied with her amorous encounter of that afternoon, and with Bergamini. Bergamini! He was hideous! Old! Doddering! And yet, in the dark, he had been
very
far from feeble. Still, how was it possible that she was feeling this way about him now? How
was
she feeling about him now? He had those horrid, death’s head spectacles. And that dry, gray hair, liberally sprinkled with flecks of dried epidermis. And wrinkles! He was covered in wrinkles, and he wore that huge, silly hat, and those pretentious scholarly robes! She wanted to see him again, as soon as possible. She did not know how she would make it through the night without him.

“Whatever can it be ailing this sweet Signorina Belinda?” asked Osvaldo, having watched her spoon pesto onto her cannoli.

They were just four to dinner: Renilde, her mother, and her aunt had had trays sent to their suite. Father Terranova and his monkish retinue had been swept off to dine at the home of a local official. And Arabella, packing her trunks, was using language that was not fit for the dinner table in any case.

Speaking of the dinner table, the astute reader may wonder what the cannoli were doing there, during the meal. The answer is an interesting one. Signora Fiorello, having apprehended her guests’ antipathy for one another, had wisely discontinued the tradition of after-dinner coffee in the
salotto,
and was henceforth determined to serve everything—antipasto, pasta, salad, entree, dessert, and cheese—all at once, higgledy-piggledy, so as to get the meals over with as quickly as possible. With the strange presentation, and so many empty places, dinner was proving a rather unsettling occasion. Kendrick had to ask Belinda to pass the Parmesan grater not twice but thrice before she responded.

“If I didn’t know better, I should say the wench had fallen in love,” muttered Charles.

Osvaldo was most gratified to hear this, for it doubtless meant that she had already discovered the note that he had left beneath her pillow after fondling her underclothes.

“If you didn’t know better?” he asked of Charles. “How do you mean?”

“Only that Belinda happens to have spent the day in the company of our sister and Professor ‘Buggermini.’ She has been nowhere else, to my knowledge. Not even up to her room.”

It was true. Belinda had sat about the parlor in a daze ever since her return, not bothering to change for dinner. But now, at Charles’s epithet, she was suddenly bristling like a boar.

“ ‘Buggermini!’ How dare you, sir? I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when you’re talking about . . .
no! I forbid
you to talk about that great man
at all!
You are not fit to lick his shoe!”

“Well, well!” said Charles quietly. “Kendrick, I fear we must bid adieu to ‘Professor Fly-eyes’ and ‘Buggermini,’ and usher in ‘That Great Man.’ ”

Belinda dropped her fork upon her plate. “I am no longer hungry,” she said, rising from her chair with blazing cheeks.

“No?” asked Charles, raising an eyebrow. “Won’t you even finish your pudding? It’s all covered in lovely pesto!”

“Your slimy insinuations have put me off pudding!” she cried. And without further ado she ran from the room, her eyes smarting with tears.

“Insinuations?” Charles inquired of the others. “I never made any insinuations. I merely said ‘Bugg—’ Oh!”

Osvaldo, who could not have been termed a bright man, smiled inside his gigantic collar, thinking that all this had something to do with himself. He had failed to comprehend that Charles’s earlier remark about Belinda having not been up to her room meant that she could not have found his note. Nor had he grasped the import of the sudden silence that followed the utterance of half of Bergamini’s name. That silence was prolonged for a time, whilst the three gentlemen pursued three different trains of thought, and yet all of them concerned the fair sex.

“I say, Kendrick,” said Charles, having regained his composure and poured himself another glass of canary. “This is an unexpected turn of events, is it not? What do you make of it?”

“I think I’ll just take a tray up to Miss Beaumont,” mumbled Kendrick, who had been as deaf to the conversation as had Osvaldo. “She really must be persuaded to eat
something!
”

 

 

“I
understand how angry you must feel,” said Belinda, who was having another go at smoothing her sister’s feathers, “and you are perfectly justified, of course, but you must remember, Bell: We are in a foreign country.”

“To think,” cried Arabella, slamming a pile of books into her trunk. “To
think
that that . . .
hideous
man should have invaded this room!
My
room! Against my expressed wishes, and with the complicity of the landlords! It is . . . it is beyond anything! This isn’t my room at all, it seems! It belongs to the whole world!”

“I repeat,” said Belinda. “We are in a foreign country. The ways of these people are not our ways, and religion is very important here. In fact, it is more important than anything else. You are a woman, with no husband or father standing behind you, and you are a foreigner. The Italians have actually shown great forbearance toward you—toward us, coming to their country, or whatever this is, and demanding our ‘rights.’ We
have
no rights, here. John Locke’s idea is merely a relic we have brought with us. Can you not see how absurd we must look to them?”

Arabella plumped down on the bed. “I suppose I had not thought of it in that light,” she admitted.

“Besides,” said Belinda, pursuing her advantage. “If we leave now, where shall we go? Home? Without what we came for? You will make us all unhappy if you do that. You will not have your statue, Charles has not finished fleecing the local populace, and Mr. Kendrick . . . oh. He will be happy enough, I suppose.”

“But you hate it here, Bunny! Only this morning you were trying to convince me to take you home!”

“I know I was,” said Belinda. “But that was this morning. I want to stay . . . now.”

Is it possible, dear reader, that a single amorous encounter in a lightless, underground vault can awaken a young woman to love? Love with an elderly man, whom she has held in abhorrence up to the hour preceding her sublime moment?

The subject of improbable attachment is truly one that requires meditation—not on the grounds of possibility, for such things frequently happen, and Belinda was genuinely in love with Professor Bergamini—but for the sheer strangeness of it. Such a pointless expenditure of emotion, veering wide of any clear biological objective! Yet, people do not always fall in love with viable procreational partners. They may fall in love with pug dogs, or ships, or even statues. As for Belinda, she had learnt an important lesson: Love is not necessarily blind, but it does, sometimes, wear dark spectacles.

“You are perfectly right, Bunny,” said Arabella, coming over to kiss the top of her head. “I have been foolish. But at least I appreciate good sense when I hear it. And you are the most sensible little person that ever was!”

“Miss Beaumont,” called Kendrick from without. “I have brought you a tray. Will you not try to take a little something?”

“By all means!” she cried, throwing open the door. “I am quite ravenous! How very good of you, Mr. Kendrick!”

“Oh!” said he. “I thought that you were . . . were . . .”

“I was. But I am over it now.”

“You mean, we are not going to leave?” he asked.

“Why, no. I have not got my statue, have I?”

“This is splendid, Mr. Kendrick!” cried Belinda, inspecting the tray. “An extra-large helping of pudding! Bell, do you really want it? Because I was obliged to leave my own downstairs, and I’m sure they’ll have given it to the goat by now.”

At this point, Kendrick would have left the tray and retired to some place of seclusion, to ponder the changeability of the feminine temperament. But the sisters insisted that he stay. They fed him titbits from the plate and draped him with laces and ribbons, laughing uproariously the meanwhile, as they unpacked Arabella’s things again.

“Miss Beaumont,” said Kendrick, looking perfectly darling in a mohair shawl, which Belinda had thrown over his head and shoulders. And a bonnet, which Arabella had jammed over the top of it. And a golden tiara, set with amber stones and lapis lazuli, which Belinda had added as a whimsical afterthought. “I have formed a theory about what occurred here today.”

“Please! Let us speak no more about it!”

“But this might have some bearing on the mystery! Well, it is highly mysterious, at any rate.”

She made an exasperated noise, signifying at once her frustration with his obstinacy and her consent that he should proceed.

“Before your arrival, I was watching Father Terranova give the blessing.”

“You were! Yet you made no attempt to evict him from our rooms?!”

“The crowd about the hotel was too dense to break through. It would not have been possible. But even supposing it were, what would you have had me do, then? Force the priest from your balcony, in full sight of a thousand people who wished to hear him? I am devoted to your service, madam, but I hope I am not stupid. Besides, he did not appear to be giving a blessing.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was no holy water; no aspergillum. It appeared that he was merely delivering a speech to the crowd.”

“Really?” Arabella was intrigued. “What did he say?”

“I’ve no idea. It was in Italian, of course.”

Further discourse upon this subject was effectively curtailed by the arrival of Charles, bearing Arabella’s costume and Belinda’s greyhound, which he had previously secreted in his room. And to his delighted astonishment, he was fairly smothered in unaccustomed gratitude from his amazed and delighted sisters.

 

“No post . . . no Pietro . . . I am becoming a regular nervous Nelly!” Arabella observed to Belinda, as the sisters posted handbills in the little town. These had been translated into Italian, and advertised a reward for any news leading to the statue’s recovery.

“In that order?” Belinda asked.

“What?”

“Which worries you more, Pietro’s absence, or your lack of letters?”

“What is the difference? Sometimes, Bunny, I cannot fathom you at all.”

They finished their task, and were making their way back to the hotel, when a large bush growing beside the road suddenly and unaccountably sneezed. The sisters halted in their tracks, and regarded the shrub with grave uncertainty.

“Signorina!”
whispered the bush. “Come closer! It is Pietro! I cannot be seen talking to you!”

“What . . . ?”

“Ssshh! You are being watched,
signorina!
Pretend you are tired, and sit down in the shade.”

She and Belinda sat upon the grass.

“The smuggler is back,” he said quietly. “Meet me in town tomorrow, and I will fix a time to take you to his house. You will need to bring men with you.”

“Will coachmen be all right?” she asked softly.

“Yes. Get big ones.”

“Very well. Where shall I meet you in Resina? And at what time?”

“
Non è importante
. I will find you. Good-bye,
signorina.
”

“Do you really think you’re being watched?” asked Belinda as they walked toward the hotel.

“Of course not! Why should anyone want to watch me? Other than for business reasons, of course. I think Pietro is just attempting to inject a little mystery into an otherwise dull assignment.”

In any case, the fellow who
was
following them was just an ordinary man, going about his ordinary business, which coincidentally happened to lie in the same direction.

The following morning, Arabella and Mr. Kendrick went to Resina. Belinda had an assignation with her professor, and Charles, now that his luck had changed, was no longer in need of a minder.

“Where should you like me to take you?” asked the rector.

“I don’t care where I go or what I do, so long as I may bask in the sunshine!”

“Then I think I know the very place! Your brother and I discovered a little taverna with outdoor tables, on that day you went to Pompeii with Miss Belinda. It was around . . . here, someplace . . . I cannot quite recall where, though . . . ah!” (He had spied a shop window with an
ENGLISH SPOKEN HEAR
sign.) “If you will wait just one moment, Miss Beaumont, I shall pop inside and enquire about it.”

Arabella stood in the tender sunlight, idly humming, and swaying a little to her own music. It was a mild day, only slightly chilly, with the gush from the public fountain glistening in the sunshine, and the birds singing for all they were worth. She was feeling happy on the inside, and exquisite on the outside, dressed as she was in a soft gown of cream-colored wool, with Mameluke sleeves and gray ribbons, surmounted by a gray velvet spencer and a tippet of silver fox fur. In point of fact, the inner happiness was most probably occasioned by the outward display, and so engrossed was she in contemplation of this fact as to be not at all prepared when someone seized her roughly from behind and whipped a blindfold over her eyes.

“Help!” Arabella screamed, or started to, but a hand was quickly and firmly clamped over her mouth. Then she struggled womanfully to free herself, but that was no good, either; her head and shoulders were the only parts of her anatomy she was able to move, and these are not very effective in amateur self-defense maneuvers.

Oddly enough, her assailant was making no effort either to force her into a carriage or to cut her throat. He simply held her immobilized in the public square for a few moments, as she strove ineffectually within a pair of arms that embraced her like iron barrel staves.

“Stubborn little idiot!” growled a voice in her ear. “You were warned, time and again, but you have failed to listen to reason!”

It was an English voice, and Arabella wondered, in her panic, whether that was a good thing. Where was Kendrick? Would he find her in time?

And then, as suddenly as she had been seized, she was released again, and the blindfold removed. (The reader may be interested to learn that it was a pocket handkerchief, tied into a loop so as to be easily dropped over her head.)

Arabella spun round and furiously confronted her assailant. “Gordon!” she exclaimed with an admixture of relief and delight. “My God, you nearly gave me heart failure!”

He laughed and kissed her.

“Hello, my darling! What are you doing so far from home?”

“It’s rather a long story. What are
you
doing out here?”

“Searching for a decent cup of coffee, like everybody else.”

“Look who I have got, Mr. Kendrick!” Arabella called as the rector emerged from the shop. “It’s Lord Byron!”

The two men were not actually friends. One couldn’t be, with Byron. By his own admission, the poet’s only friend had been his dog, Boatswain. And Boatswain was dead. But Byron liked John Kendrick well enough for all that. They sat outside because Arabella wanted to admire the sky. She had to crane her neck a bit to actually see it above the sheer walls of the tenement buildings that hemmed them in, but it was better than nothing. Besides, craning shewed off her throat to its best advantage, and a couple of youngbloods on the other side of the street were making friendly kissing noises at her. Arabella smiled at them provocatively.

“Any number of people love their work,” she preened, “but how many can claim that their work loves them back?”

“I can,” said Kendrick. “My parishioners daily shew their gratitude for my presence in a thousand different ways.”

“But that’s hardly the same
sort
of love,” Byron observed.

“Good heavens, I should hope not!”

Coffee was brought out to them in tiny cups, because it was so very strong.

“Do tell us about your adventures, Gordon!” said Arabella. (Byron’s intimates all called him Gordon, as he had the misfortune to share his Christian name with the widely detested prince regent.) “When did you leave England?”

“I don’t remember
when,
” he said. “Only
why:
I left in order to get away from Caroline for a bit. She’s a lovely woman, you know, but ever so slightly off-balance. I beg your pardon, that is most unfair . . . to all the slightly off-balanced persons in the world! Caroline is a raving lunatic. Usually I like that in a mistress, but not when it involves possessiveness.

“Anyway, I went first to Greece, where Lord Elgin’s agent gave me a tour of the Parthenon. And when I saw the places where that bastard Elgin had ripped away the friezes and wrenched off the caryatids, I was blind with fury! That wasn’t the agent’s fault, of course, but it
was
his fault when he said, ‘Thank God for Lord Elgin! What a friend to antiquity!’ I nearly choked the life out of him.”

Arabella shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Actually, the precise word for what she did is “squirmed.” For she had remembered her handbills. She could even see one of them from where she was sitting. Thankfully, they did not bear her name, but they did give the hotel’s address. And Byron was fluent in Italian.