The Whirling Girl (36 page)

“… and for nine months Myrrha roamed,
till at last, ‘Oh gods, in case I should contaminate
the living with my presence, or the dead if I die,
banish me from both.'
And roots broke out through her toenails,
and her arms became branches,
and her skin hardened into bark flowing sap instead of blood …”

And then, just as Nikki had predicted, Vittorio's cell phone went off. A grand eminence from Florence was halfway down the autostrada, furious at having had to learn about the sensational discovery from the media. Vittorio said that everybody would need to leave, with the exception of the noted philanthropist Sir Harold Plank, seeing as with great financial sacrifice he had arranged to purchase this land to save it from development. Also, the Foundation's esteemed research director, Signor Tindhall, could scarcely be denied a brief glance into the adjoining room.

Shaken and embarrassed after her outburst, and above all needing to get away from them all, Clare turned and insisted — over Luke's warning glare — that William Sands must be allowed to stay as well.

Perhaps she looked spooky, covered in ashes, face streaked with tears. Perhaps it looked as if she was going to lose control completely. And perhaps she was. At any rate, Vittorio nodded gravely, and William also stayed behind.

Treasure Trove

CLARE WAS STILL SHAKING as she stumbled out into the sunlight and pushed her way past the crowd of journalists and past Ralph and Federica too, catching Federica's malign glance and looking away; that whole story so distant now, so muffled by the surprise the tomb had sprung, the image on the mirror — the scouring personal associations of that — to find such an echo of her own story here.

A woman in a Madras shirt came after her, a reporter from Newsweek (Luke really had done his work) wanting a personal angle on this story. She asked, “Excuse me but are you the niece of that man Kane who wrote about the Etruscans and owned this place? Are you the artist who did a book about the Amazon, too?” Clare pretended she was Italian and didn't understand, mumbling that she was only
la ragazza, sì
, of the rich
Inglese
; “I know nothing,
niente
. Bugger off!” The woman shrugged and let Clare alone.

Clare made her way to a shady spot behind the nearest hillock and crouched on a stone; she closed her eyes and saw the mirror, thinking of how it had been wrapped in cloth when it was buried, and its powerful image. Could it really be that today — for the first time in thousands of years — that mirror image had again sprung free?

She crouched until the TV crews and journalists were let back into the tomb. She heard the grumbling of Ralph and Federica as they remounted their horses and rode away. The coincidence of that particular mirror turning up in that particular tomb was too extreme. But was she connecting random dots, making up a pattern, because randomness was so hard for the primitive human mind to grasp? The meadow filled again with the hot snapping sounds of summer silence; silence like the gaps between the tiny fragments of what we know for certain in life, she thought, black gaps, black holes with huge gravitational pull, that could suck you under …

Oh for God's sake get a grip.

SHE CAUGHT UP WITH Nikki Stockton halfway down the meadow. Nikki pretended she didn't hear, then finally stopped, turned, her straw hat surrounding her in a circle of shade.

“I'm heading off to find one of those chocolate mousse cakes,” Clare said to the curtained face. “I wish you'd come.”

Nikki parted the curtain. She gave Clare a long agate stare. Clare realized she had never taken proper note of the colour of Nikki's eyes: they were almost gold, with stony flecks. Nikki came up so close that the rim of the hat bumped Clare's forehead. She pulled Clare under, into that woven shade. “Clare Livingston,” she said. “I was never going to speak to you again.” She backed off. The midday sun struck a hammer blow. “But sure. Let's see if we can rustle up some just desserts.”

She turned and ran down the dried stream bed, calling over her shoulder, “Catch me if you can!” jumping from grooved rock to rock, the black curtain of her hat flapping, and the wings of her red blouse. Clare thought it was like following a giant harlequin moth. When Nikki stopped abruptly at the bottom, Clare ran right into her. The two of them tumbled to the ground. They lay there laughing and panting. Nikki's arms found their way tightly around Clare.

“I thought I was in love with you,” Nikki said. She kissed Clare. Her lips tasted of straw. She pulled away a fraction, and said, “But in fact it was just another rebound. Or at least I'm way beyond that now.”

Clare kissed her back. “But I do love you,” she said. “I won't even say ‘not this way.'”

Nikki burrowed two hands in Clare's hair. “Yeah, but still it's not this way — right? I still can't lure you back to my studio and paint you with henna.”

“Henna maybe,” Clare said. “Fucking … no.” She traced the line of Nikki's lips with a finger. “My life is screwed up enough already. I'm sad to say.”

Nikki sat up and pulled the hat back on. “Mine too.” Her voice came, sepulchral, from behind the black curtain. “I've been taken.” She stretched her red-wing arms. “‘World was in the face of my beloved.' Do you know that poem by Rilke?”

Clare said she didn't. But as she parted the curtain and kissed Nikki once more on the mouth, she let herself imagine that Nikki meant she'd been both captured and set free because of Clare — because of Clare growing out of her fingers, just as the branches grew from the limbs of girl in the mirror.

UP IN THE TOWN, Clare led Nikki to the pasticceria, where they found a tiny booth at the back. They set to eating slices of the ambrosial confection, melting bite by melting bite, the sweetness filling all the places where awkward conversation might have strayed. When they finished, Nikki took her paper napkin and folded it into an origami bird and perched it on Clare's head.

“That tomb was a totally remarkable discovery!” she said.

Clare said yes, she was so right.

“So what's the backstory?”

“Well,” Clare began, “What happened was that I … went off, you know.”

“I heard.”

“And when I came back,” she felt her face twist, “I found I had acquired a couple of … beautiful dogs.” She buried her face in her hands.

“Dogs?” Nikki had no idea what the dog thing was about. But when Clare looked up there seemed to be a wordless acknowledgment between them of the sweet devastating surprises that the world might hold.

Clare segued from that into the fib that she'd told others. She said that Harold Plank had been at her to sell, and when she decided to explore the property before she made up her mind, she'd found that Niccolo had been doing some suspicious-looking digging in that upland meadow.

“When I started to question him, he got in a huff. And then his wife Marta got in a bigger huff.” Clare threw up her hands. “I haven't seen either of them since.” She laughed and cut another piece of cake. “So clearly I have to sell. No one to sweep the floor.”

She said the disappearance had made her suspicious, though, so she'd called Luke in London to get some advice. “You saw the rest.”

“But it was so unfair that you had to leave the tomb,” Nikki said, “without seeing what was inside that other chamber.”

Clare said, yes, she was regretting that now. But she figured she wouldn't have any trouble getting back in.

“Don't count on it. Once the Gnomes of Florence get hold of things, mere mortals don't have much power.”

“I figure I can swing it.”

Nikki said she hoped so. She looked doubtful.

“It was amazing, wasn't it,” Nikki added. “When those rocks fell, and I saw that door into the cliff face, I had a feeling I was in the middle of a fairytale. The door opening into the mountain. The magic land within …”

Clare winced when Nikki said “fairytale.” Nikki caught that. Those trickster eyes, Clare thought, which have sneakily stolen every one of my features, so that now I really am growing out of her fingers.

It was a strange thought, but not really a bad thought, as if a separate life force was at play, using her …

Nikki reached for her hand. “I'm going to give you something,” she said, as if she'd been reading Clare's thoughts.

Clare tried to protest.

“No, no,” Nikki said. “I don't even know what it is yet. But don't worry. You'll never know it came from me.”

Nikki's cell phone rang. Clare could hear Ralph Farnham's hearty bark. Nikki rolled her eyes. She said “Thanks,” and “Sure thing,” before she clicked off.

“So?” Clare said.

“I'm not supposed to tell you. It seems Federica will rip you to shreds if you turn up.”

“But?”

“They're assembling a
Salon des Refusés
of the Etruscan tomb world at her place, to watch the program on RAI that was shot this afternoon, about the discovery. I bet it will be on over at Bar Sport, too.”

She was right. When they got to the bar, regular programming had been pre-empted and the soccer fans were kicking up a fuss.

THE PROGRAM STARTED WITH a shot of the four men making their way through the shadowy doorway from the inner chamber, which by then was roughly cleared of rubble, and Luke announcing in a dramatic voice that in there nothing had been touched for some two-and-a-half-thousand years. Imagine, he said, what this discovery might bode! Sir Harold Plank, “brilliant Etruscan expert and head of the Plank Foundation,” now believed that more tombs were waiting to be discovered along this cliff, within a stone's throw of Cortona, solving at last the mystery of where the inhabitants of that once-great Etruscan city had been buried.

Even the football fans were paying close attention now, though the Italian voice-over garbled the effect of Luke's words.

Then Vittorio Cerotti crowded forward and began to describe two funeral beds carved in the manner of the Tomb of the Monkey in Chiusi … But William Sands's voice was heard over him, talking about the hoard of
bucchero
. Then Vittorio reclaimed centre stage by mentioning gold. In there lay a stunning collection, he said, pieces of brilliant workmanship: earrings shaped like little barrels, which set the time of burial to around 500 bc; a wide choker necklace of granulated beads; several chest-length chains holding amber amulets of human figures; and a number of decorative pins that were possibly heirloom pieces of the deceased, dating from a considerably earlier period. The gold would be transported to Florence this very night for safekeeping, he added. The remainder of the tomb contents would await the arrival of a team of skilled specialists.

He paused. He pulled at his beard, removed his spectacles, then replaced them. He announced that the tomb chamber held something even more remarkable. He invited the camera close. In a confidential whisper, he said that the chamber held two intact skeletons, a mature woman and a much younger man.

He began to tell a ghoulish, if highly technical story. When he had examined the skeletons, right away he'd seen that the breast bones on each had been removed. Also, there was no evidence of staining on the funeral beds, as would have been left when the corpses decomposed. This, then, could throw an entirely new light on Etruscan funerary practices. Perhaps the bodies were not deposited right after death and left to putrefy! Perhaps they were de-fleshed elsewhere, by an extended grisly process, which he detailed, the ultimate point being that if only clean bones were brought to rest in Etruscan tombs, this could explain the practice of tombs being reopened for new burials, again and again over many generations, and the whole air of celebration around those burials, too.

By the time William Sands regained the spotlight to describe, in greater detail, the hoard of
bucchero
, the patrons of the Bar Sport had had enough. The owner switched the channel.

WATCHING ALL OF THIS, Clare had begun to feel sick at her earlier weakness in leaving when she'd been asked. But surely, she insisted to Nikki, the Gnomes of Florence wouldn't deny her.

“Don't count on it,” Nikki said again. “You're up against the red-taped arm of the Soprintendenza now.”

Clare said she did not care how many shining Carabinieri in their flak jackets were posted, they couldn't keep her out of there. She didn't tell Nikki the rest. Ever since she'd first glimpsed the
bucchero
pieces a week ago — the friezes, the half-animal gods, the staring wide-winged eyes — she had started getting a sense of her sleeping fingers waking, itching to draw again. She could make something of this. She didn't know what. But she would.

Neverland

NICCOLO AND MARTA HAD disappeared. But they had been honourable in a way. Perhaps they'd always been honest farmers — shrewd, yes, but honest — until Clare's uncle came along with his knowledge, and pried the secret of the tomb from the cliff. Then maybe they'd just spied and observed, perhaps not deciding to “rescue” some of the booty to benefit themselves until after he'd left? She would never know; but the point was that they had not in fact disappeared, along with the Lamborghini, until the day the police helicopter came roaring in.

During the past week the uproar had continued, police whirling in and out, tearing up the grasses, flattening the flowers. The tomb itself crawled with scientific and forensic specialists. Every day when she'd hiked up there, Clare had been met with some stern official stone-face who spoke, she thought, neither English nor Italian but a kind of bureaucratic doublespeak about forms she would need to fill out, numbers in Florence she should call — before disappearing rabbit-like into the dark burrow, leaving her to face once again the implacable tall-hatted presence of the police.

Luke was off in Florence on Harold Plank's behalf; Vittorio Cerotti, too. Both, it seemed, were trying to sort out the bureaucratic tangle of who would, ultimately, acquire a permit to further excavate the cliff face. Clare repeatedly asked Luke to help persuade the authorities to allow her access to the tomb, but he refused to rock the boat. It felt almost dangerous to be near him now. There was something infectious in his powerful, wounded determination to wrench a way forward out of all of this for himself.

Harold Plank was the one who'd promised to see what he could do for her. Alarming, forceful, charming man; Clare didn't like thinking how much she already owed him. With just the lightest tap from his great battery of resources — and a commitment of funding for Federica Inghirami's horse-breeding project— he'd managed to arrange for clear title on the property to be delivered to Clare. This of course freed the property up for him to purchase. She knew he would be prepared to administer some similar “tap” to her aunt's lawyers in Seattle, too. She'd decided not to think of that just yet.

Plank had also, at her persuading, agreed to make a trip to Poggio Selvaggio while he still had the helicopter at his disposal. She believed he'd been up there yesterday. Until she was sure he'd done this, she didn't want to push him to use his influence further in the matter of the tomb.

So finally, a week after the chamber tomb's official discovery, she decided she would just damn well bully her way in on her own.