Master of Glenkeith (3 page)

Doors lay wide open and a line of washing was fast drying in the strengthening sun. There was no wind in this secluded spot and the general effect was that of an oven, with the steam rising like a grey curtain from the wide paving stones.

Andrew approached a circular flight of stone stairs leading to the balcony. It was guarded by an iron railing over which a busy housewife was beginning to throw her rugs, but she hesitated and disappeared through the open doorway behind her as she saw the stranger approaching.

Damn! Andrew thought explosively. This is going to be difficult.

He supposed that he was on the right track. The Villa Rosa, of all names! It bore the number that had appeared at the top of Signor Zanetti’s letter, however, and at least he could produce Luigi’s signature to lead him to the end of his quest.

Suddenly he found himself wondering if the child he sought had been one of the little group which had swept past him in the entrance to the court, and then he turned to find the girl with the dark violet eyes standing a few paces behind him.

Framed in the ancient stone archway, with a strand of white-starred creeper almost touching her cheek and the soft dark hair that had fallen over her eyes as she had run in pursuit of the children swept backwards from a clear, high brow, she looked different—older somehow. The cut of her dress was nondescript, but it curved over her young, high breasts and clung to the long, slim line of her figure with a certain attractiveness which Andrew sensed rather than saw, and her eyes were smiling now, gently and challengingly, as she looked at him.

“Are you Mr. Meldrum?” she asked in a firm, clear voice that bore only the slightest trace of an accent. “Luigi said that you would come.”

Taken completely aback, Andrew could do nothing but stare at her for a full and uncomprehending second before she spoke again.

“I am Tessa Halliday. Luigi said that he had written to Scotland and that Mr. Meldrum’s son would come to fetch me.”

“His grandson,” Andrew corrected, feeling completely at a loss to cope with the situation. “I am—your guardian’s grandson.”

She was looking at him now with her head on one side, the dark-lashed violet eyes considering him with deepening interest until her smile flashed out, widening the too-generous mouth and setting the seal of an urchin cheerfulness upon her without the shadow of a doubt.

“I knew you would come!” she said. “I knew it was going to be all right.”

He felt awkward and decidedly uneasy standing there with the thought of Glenkeith flashing through his mind, but at that moment a small, rotund figure appeared in the doorway above them and Luigi Zanetti waddled down the steps to bid him welcome to Rome.

“I have told Tessa that you would come quite soon!” he beamed, holding out his plump hand. “And all day she is excited to know when it will be! Every time there is a cab come into the street she must run out for fear it will pass and you not knowing the way you are to come to the Villa Rosa!” He fussed round his visitor, leading the way up the steps, which were now alive with children. “Ah! the leetle ones, they are everywhere!” he said, his dark eyes glowing in his round perspiring face as he picked two of the youngest up in his arms and allowed a third to ride pick-a-back on his shoulders. “Never do you go anywhere in Italy where there are not a lot of children making a lot of noise, but always they are laughing!”

His own laugh was so infectious that Andrew found himself smiling in return, although he was all the while conscious of some cataclysmic event marching inexorably towards its destined end.

Luigi ushered him into the nearest flat.

“Ben venuto, Signori
,” he said. “It is not much, but it is my home!”

They entered a big, untidy room full of the smell of cooking and hung with children’s clothes. The small Zanettis had obviously been out in the rain before they had been stripped and put to bed for the midday
siesta,
and as yet the big bed in one corner of the room was unmade. A table in another corner was set for a meal, and Andrew noticed with relief that everything on it was scrupulously clean, from the lace-edged cloth, which was no doubt kept for christenings and other special occasions, to the last cup and saucer of motley design which adorned it.

“You will stay and eat with us?” Signor Zanetti invited, and Andrew was conscious of his own refusal like a cold douche of water flung in the face of impulsive kindness.

“I shall have to find an hotel,” he explained.

“You can go to your hotel afterwards.” The voice behind him was eager in its youthful insistency. “I will take you. It is not very far. There are many hotels on the

Corso from which to choose.”

Her English was perfect. Andrew found himself looking at Tessa and realizing for the first time that it was only natural, since she had a Scottish grandmother and a mother who had accepted Scotland as her place of adoption, and, presumably, an English father.

The thought of Veronique struck him like a blow between the eyes and he realized for the first time that here was Veronique’s daughter, no more the product of the Italian scene than he was himself, but a strange, wilful mixture of nationalities that might so easily lead him astray.

Not that he would have anything to do with her once they reached Glenkeith, he assured himself. He knew that she must be older by far than she looked and far older than he had expected. He smiled grimly to himself when he thought that he had come to Rome expecting to find a child.

“I have arranged that we will fly back,” he said, turning to her stiffly. “I have booked seats on a plane leaving the day after to-morrow, if that is not too great a rush for you. The fact is that I have little time to spare. We are a farming community at Glenkeith and we should be getting in the harvest.”

He had not sought to spare her the knowledge of his impatience. Something in him wanted to strike back for the shock she had given him when they had first met, for the fact that she had grown to woman’s estate almost before his eyes, and he saw her face sober a little as she turned away.

“I could have come with you at once,” she told him with a dignity he had not expected in anyone so young. “I am ready. Everything I have is packed, waiting.”

Evidently she had taken them for granted. A more generous estimation of the situation might have suggested that Tessa had faith in their kindness, but Andrew had thrust generosity from him at the memory of Veronique. This, he reminded himself, was Veronique’s daughter, and what was bred in the bone showed in the flesh, didn’t it?

He watched as she put the finishing touches to the table in Signora Zanetti’s absence, her hands sensitive as those of an artist going about the everyday task with a swiftness which might be appreciated at Glenkeith if Hester MacDonald could sink her prejudices against the mother.

Andrew drew his thoughts up there, realizing that he had no right to demand from others what he could not give himself, and during the meal which followed he kept his eyes deliberately averted from those sensitive hands, as if they might be capable of telling him much that he was not willing to learn.

The buxom Signora Zanetti had come from an inner room to be introduced before they sat down, but she had no knowledge of English and could only smile and nod brightly as her contribution to the conversation.

When the meal was over Andrew sat with Luigi on the narrow balcony while Tessa and Signora Zanetti washed up at the sink in another corner of the room. A great wooden platter of fruit and a flask of red wine were set on the little iron table at Andrew’s elbow, but neither Tessa nor Signora Zannetti joined them while they smoked.

Luigi explained to Andrew that Veronique’s second husband had been an English artist who had come to Rome because of his health and also because of the atmosphere it afforded for his art. They had been neighbours in the Villa Rosa for twenty years and Tessa had been born there eighteen years ago and had grown up with Luigi’s children because Roger Halliday had never quite made the grade with his painting. He had sold the odd canvas now and then to tourists and supplemented his living by driving other tourists along the coast to Naples or Amalfi in Luigi’s decrepit old car which he kept for carting his greengrocery products in from the Campagna, but that could only be spared to him occasionally when Luigi himself was not in need of it.

Andrew smoked in silence, and for the first time in his life it had no power to soothe him. The tobacco had an acrid taste in his mouth and finally he thrust his pipe into his pocket and rose to his feet.

“I must go now and find an hotel,” he said, looking down into the little Italian’s beaming face. “Will you thank your wife for her hospitality and tell—Miss Halliday that I shall come back to collect her the day after tomorrow.”

“But she is here!” Luigi smiled. “She is waiting to take you back to the Corso by a way that you would not find by yourself.”

Andrew swung round to find Tessa standing dutifully behind him in the aperture of the window. She was still smiling, but he imagined a new reserve in her for a moment before she turned back into the room to make way for him.

“If I had known you were already packed and waiting,” he said almost frigidly as they went down the outside stairs, “I should have arranged our return for to-morrow instead of Friday.”

Her eyes opened wide in surprise.

“But surely you will want to see Rome while you are here?” she suggested, as if the thought of his indifference or pressure of business anywhere else had never entered her head. “There is so much to see. The Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine—St. Peter’s itself! They have so much to give—a glimpse into the distant past, the art of another age. You cannot go away without having had at least that glimpse!”

“I know nothing of art,” Andrew said, conscious of bewilderment at the maturity of her observations and suddenly aware that his remark must have sounded uncommonly churlish when she did not reply.

When he turned to look down at her, the violet-coloured eyes under their dark lashes seemed enormous.

“It seems impossible,” she said with a deepening seriousness, “that anyone should not appreciate the Eternal City. Would it not stir you to stand in the footprints of the past? Would you find nothing in the Forum where the Romans and the Etruscans and the Sabines came down from their separate hills to do their marketing and sacrificing to their gods? Would you feel only bored on the spot where Mark Antony delivered his oration over Caesar’s body or standing beside the fountain where

Castor and Pollux watered their milk-white steeds? On the Palatine,” she went on in a gentle, convincing way, “there is the Cave of the Wolf which suckled Romulus and Remus.” Suddenly she thrust all seriousness from her, laughing till her eyes danced. “I could not teach you to appreciate all these things in a day, Mr. Meldrum, but I could show them to you, and I could make you love Rome, even though you do not want to look farther than Scotland for your happiness!”

The amazing contrast in her make-up, the suggestion of something half-child, half-woman, which he had encountered even in the first moment of their meeting, baffled Andrew so that he looked sharply away from the teasing expression in her eyes, concentrating frowningly on the way ahead.

She had led him back on to the Corso by a series of side passages and narrow streets. The teeming life of the wide, sophisticated boulevard seemed to belong to another world, but in some ways Tessa belonged to it, too. She did not seem to have any inhibitions, he mused, looking down at her dark head as she moved beside him, her shoulders straight, her eyes alive and bright as she threaded her way through the busy throng.

“Rome can be very beautiful in this light,” she observed. “My father and I used to walk all the way to the Capitol just to see the play of it on the white travertine which is almost as beautiful as marble and in some ways not so cold.” She looked at him with an elfin grin. “Perhaps you will not understand that, but my father was an artist.”

Andrew felt impatient, even vaguely angry, yet there was no reason why he should care what she thought about him or whether he was lacking in understanding of the arts.

“Here is your hotel,” she said in an entirely different voice. “There will be plenty of room at this time of year. While you go in and register I shall wait out here in the sunshine. After it has rained in Rome we appreciate the sunshine so very much more.”

He wanted to tell her not to wait but found that he could not look directly into her clear eyes and administer such a rebuff, and within a short time he was back with her on the pavement, prepared to climb to the Palatine and up the flight of steps to the Capitol to see the sunshine playing on the white Brescian marble like light on water.

Not until he had left her, with a nodding acquaintance with half of Rome’s famous monuments behind him, did he finally realize that he had been seeing the Eternal City through her eyes.

She had that way with her, the precious quality of a child-like enthusiasm for all things, but possibly she had inherited it from Veronique.

Her mother’s name stood out before him in the moonlit quiet of his bedroom far above the Corso, and he thought again of his father, whom he had never really known but whose memory had been cherished in his heart for as long as he could remember. Veronique had betrayed his father. The lovely, frail creature who had captured Fergus Meldrum’s heart after his first wife’s death had thrown that love back in his face and gone her way, sending him to his own death in circumstances which had always been suspect.