Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (50 page)

As at some unheard signal, they sprang together, growling, panting with strain, slinging each other this way and that, slipping on the tiles. There came the thud of a blow. At the same time Giovanni brought the scythe down and around in a hard swipe.

The attacker fell back, half turning, his head lolling only half on his shoulders while blood spurted from the great gash in his neck.

Giovanni stood for a wavering instant, staring down. He looked up at Violet, his eyes dark with pain and remorse. “I would have come sooner, madonna,” he said. “I heard your cry, but had no weapon—”

He reached then to grasp the stiletto protruding from his chest. He crumpled to his knees.

Violet stifled a cry with both hands while sickness rose up inside her.

“In the house! Run, Violet!” Allain gasped out behind her. The words were underscored by the clash of his sword as he held his two assailants at bay. Their blades whined, scraping together with a shower of orange sparks. Their breathing was labored. They advanced and retreated across the grass, stumbling over the limp body of the fallen attacker. They trampled the geometric herb beds, so the smells of basil and mint and shallots and trampled earth rose sharp in the air.

Violet, torn by pain and horror and terror, could not force herself to retreat to safety. As the struggling men danced back and forth they came between her and Giovanni’s fallen form, so she could not help him. She could only stand, hefting the sword in her hand, seeking some way to be useful.

Allain flicked a harried glance at Violet. He redoubled his efforts. Driving the taller of the two men backward in a display of rigorous skill and tempered, tensile strength, Allain circled the other man’s blade, slipped past his guard. The man cried out in terror as Allain struck like an adder, thrusting and withdrawing in a movement too swift to follow. Even as his opponent fell he whirled to face the last of the four.

The man had taken advantage of that bare instant of inattention to throw down his sword and plunge his hand inside his waistcoat. He brought out a pocket pistol, pointing it and pulling the trigger in a single, jerking movement.

The pistol boomed, a thunderous sound in the enclosed garden. Blue-gray smoke and fire exploded. Allain was flung backward like a puppet with cut strings. He clamped a hand to the crimson blotch on his shirtfront above his waistcoat even as he fell. Striking heavily, he rolled, sprawling in loose-limbed grace. He lay still with the fine curls of his hair mingling with the blades of the grass.

The last of the attackers threw the single-shot pistol to the ground in a fierce gesture of triumph. He flung a quick glance around him for his sword and he leaned to pick it up. He turned then toward Violet.

He halted abruptly as Maria, with three of their neighbors armed with rakes and pitchforks, poured from the kitchen doorway. He stared wildly around at his fallen comrades. His gaze fell on Violet’s journal, which lay in the grass with its blood-spattered pages ruffling in the light wind. Sprinting forward, he scooped up the book. With a last backward glance in Violet’s direction, he plunged toward the gate and skimmed through it.

In that instant everything seemed to stand out sharp and clear for Violet, so brightly crystalline that it hurt her eyes. The shape and outline of the garden and its bed, the silver glitter of the wind-tossed olive leaves were too perfect, too beautiful. The scents of herbs and bruised grass mingled with the smell of the warm blood that stained the mosaic tiles beneath her feet to form a sickening miasma. The feel of the soft spring air upon her skin was like a scourge. It seemed that if anyone touched her, no matter with what gentleness, she would flinch as from a blow.

Maria moved forward with an anguished moan to kneel beside Giovanni. She gathered her son to her, supporting him, reaching for the stiletto and dragging it free even as he smiled up into her eyes. Others gathered at his feet to lift him and carry him into the villa.

A kindly older woman came to Violet’s side, timidly touching her arm, tugging her toward the house.

Violet shook her head.

She forced her muscles to move, to answer her commands. Slowly she moved to where Allain lay with his blood staining his shirtfront, seeping into the grass. She lowered herself awkwardly beside him. She picked up his hand, lifting the lax, boneless fingers to her cheek. She closed her eyes, rocking a little; still, the warm tears seeped through, wetting the calluses that marked his thumb and forefinger and the inside of his palm.

His eyelids fluttered, lifted. He stared up at her with such love and concentration in his gray eyes that it seemed he meant to imprint her image on their surface, a final lovely vision.

He winced a little, allowed his gaze to drift. His voice so soft she had to guess at his meaning, he said, “Gone?”

She nodded, unable to speak for the aching tightness of her throat.

“My fault. Followed me. Should have watched closer.”

His hand was growing cooler. She swallowed hard. “Please,” she said, “please don’t.” But she hardly knew whether she meant to keep him from talking, or to beg him not to leave her again in death.

His gaze wavered, steadied as if by a supreme effort of will. He tried to smile, though pain arrested the movement. “I — would have brought you — flowers — but for haste.”

“Never mind,” she whispered.

“Rosemary,” he said, his voice no more than a fine-spun spider’s silk of sound. “For Remembrance. Pray, love—”

She cried out as his voice stopped and his eyes fluttered shut. The piercing keen of it hurt her throat, but she could not stop.

The pain came from deep inside her, a rushing, pouring tidal wave of agony. She was engulfed in it, submerged by it, carried on it to some far shore of her mind where she was left stranded and exposed. Racked by the merciless anguish, every touch was an added ache, every sound an exacerbation of it. She tried to fight the hands that lifted her, tugging at her, removing her from where she wanted to be. She heard voices she could not recognize, felt her own blood hot and wet as it drained from her as from a wound.

Then came the glad darkness. She reached for it with both hands open and supplicating, for she could bear the pain no longer.

“Your daughter, how she is beautiful.
Bella, molto bella.
”

Violet turned her head as Maria spoke. She smiled as she saw the cherubic picture the small baby made, lying in a soft white knit blanket upon the lap of Maria’s black skirt. The small face was relaxed in sleep, the perfect pink rosebud mouth still moist with milk. The tiny lids that covered the dark blue-brown eyes were finely fringed with curving lashes and made expressive by delicate, arching brows, and the fine hair that curled over her pink scalp was a soft light brown.

Yes, she was beautiful, and a joy, and a solace.

“
Bella Giovanna,
” Maria went on in soft tones. “I am so proud you named her so. She is,” the woman added in doting tones, “a very Italian-looking baby.”

Violet closed her eyes against the pain. She could control it now, though barely, since she had learned that it would, eventually, ease.

“Yes,” she answered just as quietly.

She turned back to her journal, a new one with an ornate cover of embossed burgundy velvet with brassbound edges that Maria’s nephew had found for her in Florence. She had spent the past days writing into it everything that had been in the old one, painstakingly recreating the days, and reliving them. Perhaps even living in them, at least a little. It was one way to escape the intolerable present.

It gave her something to do, that endless writing and remembering. More than that, she wanted the record of the year just passed. She would not be cheated out of it by spite and the petty fears of some assassin that it might document her days with Allain. She needed it for herself, and for Allain’s daughter.

Maria cleared her throat, her gaze still on the baby as she spoke again. “I have said nothing to you of the funeral. It was a solemn Mass, most moving; the priest said good things, true things of comfort. There were many mourners and — many flowers.”

Violet drew a quick breath, holding it against the press of tears. She said quickly, while she still could, “And the burial?”

“On the hill near the church, among my people. The headstone is beautiful, large, nicely carved with blossoms of roses and sprigs of rosemary, and with a standing angel.”

Violet could not answer.

They were silent for a long time. The gentle spring wind blew in at the window, stirring the bed curtains. There was a haze on the hills in the distance, though their colors of ocher and rust and gray green were bright in the sun.

Maria sniffed a little before she spoke at last. “The doctor has said you may walk a little today.”

“May I indeed?”

Violet had sat up in a chair by the window the day before, but that was all. The birth had been difficult, with much loss of blood. They had feared for her life, or so Maria told her; she didn’t remember. They had also feared for the baby, but Giovanna had come into the world screaming with rage at her early ejection from her warm cocoon. She had been a little pale at first, but had soon turned pink. Like a babe of normal time, she had suckled the first time the breast was presented to her, and had stopped only to sleep in the three weeks since.

“You must try,” Maria said. “He has been waiting all this time, and not patiently. He will see you today, or he will get up himself. This he should not do, not for at least another week.”

“He would do it if it killed him.” Violet’s voice trailed away and her smile faded slowly, like a candle burning out.

Maria reached out to press Violet’s hand, though her own eyes were dark with tears of distress. “Men are fools, yes. But would we have them any other way? No, no. Come, let me put the little one down and I will help you.”

Maria supported her as far as the bedchamber door. By then Violet had begun to feel less weak in the knees, had begun to get her strength back. It felt strange to be able to move with her usual supple grace, strange to put her hand on her stomach and feel the flatness. For the first time in ages she wondered what she looked like. Maria had brushed her hair for her and left it hanging down her back in a soft, brown-gold curtain, but she had not seen a mirror. She did not know if she was pale and sallow or flushed from her efforts.

It didn’t matter, of course. But it seemed that the fact she could care might be a good sign. She really was getting better.

Maria opened the bedchamber door, gave Violet a small, encouraging push, then left her.

Violet moved inside with the soft folds of her gown and dressing gown of batiste and lace flowing around her feet. The man on the bed had been dozing. His lashes quivered, then opened in sudden alertness. He saw her.

A slow smile gathered at the corners of his mouth, spreading over his face to shine in his eyes. He reached out to touch the chair that sat nearby, before he held his hand out to her. His voice warm and low, he said, “Come. Sit here, close beside me.”

Her heart shifted a little inside her. She felt the need to cry, but would not. There had been so many tears, so many.

She moved to do as he asked. As she placed her hand in his and felt the strong grip of his fingers, her own closed convulsively, holding tight, as if she would never let go.

“I wish,” he said, his voice vibrant with longing, “that you could lie beside me. So I might comfort you.”

“Yes,” she whispered from a full throat.

“If that cannot be, then speak to me. Tell me how you are, and how you feel. Talk to me of Giovanna — I have seen her and she is as lovely as her mother, as small as she is. I want to hear your voice and know you are here, when I was so sure, for a terrible moment, that I had failed to guard you, that you were lost to me—”

He stopped because she had leaned to place her fingers on his lips. Under the sensitive fingertips, she felt his smile, felt the movement of his lips as he turned the smile into a kiss.

“Tell me what will happen now,” he said.

She swallowed hard. “When we are better, both of us, we will go away. Perhaps to Egypt, if you like.”

“That should be far enough so that you will be safe.”

“And you also, perhaps.”

His smile was indulgent. “My safety doesn’t matter, so long as I am with you.”

“You will become strong again there, and brown by the sun.”

“Something to be wished. And then?”

“God knows. I cannot say.”

He made no reply, only lay playing with her fingers. Some minutes passed. His grasp on her hand tightened briefly and was released before it could become hurtful. He whispered, “Call me by my name. Say it. I want to hear it, now, on your lips.”

“I — can’t,” she answered with slow tears rising in her eyes in spite of all she could do.

“You must, for my sake. Please.”

How could she refuse? It was impossible. Still, she searched for even a small delay. She said, “Please, madonna?”

“Ah. As you wish, always. Please, madonna — my madonna.”

The pain was acute. Her lips trembled a little as she said, “Very well then. Yes, love, yes—”

“Giovanni,” he said for her, the word soft with pleading.