A Dancer in Darkness (9 page)

There was a soft patter all around them. She sat up and wiped her eyes. Now their tears extended into real rain, as though the world had taken their emotion up. She leaned back against the table-tomb. He lay with his head in her lap. Through the arcade they could see the veils of rain sweep across the valley and meet in the middle like curtains.

Above them the candle spluttered, its wax rippling down its flanks and over the fancy stonework of the tomb. Its dim echo caught the needles of the rain and shimmered along them in waves of magic light.

He lay there for a long time. They were waiting for the right moment, and then it came. He stood up.

“Wait here,” he said. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone. She turned and leaned upon the tomb, gazing earnestly at the candle burning brightly in its little sea of liquid wax. Her eyes snapped and she smiled.

He came back again, with something over his arm. “Come,” he said. He held out his hand to her, and they moved among the tombs. Close to the arcade was an open place perhaps six feet on the side. He handed her the candle to hold and threw down the cloths he had over his arm. They were gorgeous albs and chasubles from the vestry, where they might have been locked in chests for forty years. The candle-light caught the green embroidery, the saints, paste jewels, seed pearls, and
gold and silver threads. The open space became a metallic meadow. He took her in his arms and the candle went out as she sank down into darkness with him. The fall seemed infinite.

Why are people so different by night and by day? His body was like his dancing. It had the same urgent, coherent suavity. She had slept only with Piccolomini, that vain old man who had had to be helped even to produce an heir, and to whom erotics were merely a branch of genealogy.

She laughed. She had not known that the emotions could be so easy. She was utterly detached from her body, and watched it as a nurse would watch a happy child.

In the darkness we begin to see with the finger-tips, and then the body has no shape, but only a meaning. It becomes
transubstantiated
into the nature of the thing it otherwise expresses only by its appearance. The thighs become a coast, the chest a platform, the navel an eager opening. How it clutches at the fingers when we put a finger there. Yet it was not the act that excited her. It was Antonio. His body was the symbol of
himself
, and that is why she loved it. People had no right to be so rare. There was a pathos in the way he bent his head, and his hair was like the feathers of some plaintive bird. And all that time they said nothing. What was there to say?

Outside the double window the rain began to disperse. It had been sated, and fell now more fastidiously, so that clumps of fine rain hovered here and there about the hills, like silver trees. Then even they were gone. The world slowed down and settled into place. The stars appeared.

They lay there quietly for a while. She noticed now, what she had not noticed before, that the studs, stones and threads of the copes had embossed her flesh cruelly.

She stirred and pulled down her dress. He stood up, and when she looked around for him, he was over near one of the tombs, gravely doing a slow arabesque with his right foot. She watched, fascinated. He was utterly unaware of her. Slowly the rest of his body followed his foot, and he fluttered gravely against the shadows of the tomb behind him, like a wounded sparrow. It was spontaneous. It was beautiful. It was
heart-rending
. He did not even know he was doing it, and it was a little ode of joy. She could not bear it.

“Stop that,” she said. She did not mean to be cruel.

All the motion faded out of his body, and his head jerked towards her self-consciously. She had diminished him.

“I mean I’m cold,” she said. “Oh, I don’t know what I mean.” She put her face in her hands. She put him back in his box like a naughty doll, and she would have given anything not to have done that, but it was too late.

He found the candle and lit it again. She drew away,
formally
, and they stood together in the stone shadow of the tombs, surrounded by the quiet effigies. He was a trifle shorter than she was, and that, as she stroked the back of his head, gave her back her sense of place and some command over him, and therefore over herself.

“We had better go,” she said.

“There is only Cariola with you.”

“Only Cariola,” she said, and felt a pang of fear. Cariola would only have to look at her to know. She picked up her skirts and moved uneasily towards the grille. She had thought of rank as only a barrier between them. Now she saw that rank was a system of self-control, an armour to protect us from
ourselves
. The difference between a gentleman and a Duchess is greater than that between a Duchess and a peasant. For his sake, then, let it remain so.

He scooped up the copes and returned them to the vestry. Then they went outside.

The broken silhouettes of the town were black against the paler black of the sky. The night was cold and crisp. She sat on the pillion of his horse, while he led it by the bridle.

They passed across the church square. At the top of the stairs leading up to it, the church’s green bronze doors stood open like the doors of a rifled crypt. Both breathed easier once they had regained the narrow lanes.

The palace was cut off from the town by a wall built entirely across the cliff, a wall with a narrow gate of wrought iron. The horse halted and the Duchess slid down to the ground. She half-moved towards Antonio, thought better of it, opened the gate, and fled inside, shutting the grille on his anguished face.

The white gravel path was thick with shadows, and bordered
with clipped yew and absurd Grecian hermæ. Despite herself, she glanced back, and he was still standing motionless, his white face a blur, gazing forlornly after her.

The palace lay to her left, very small, very low, and without a window on the garden side. She had done right. She had sent him away. But she could not face Cariola yet.

Instead she pushed hurriedly between the diamond-speckled shrubs, as the rain water ricocheted off on her dress, and went right to the gazebo. Far below her the fishing boats were out, each leaning heavily towards the water, on the side to which its net was attached. There was now a ghost of a moon. A thin, turbulent mist lay over the sea. Each boat carried a flare to daze the fish, and the sea was dotted with them, shimmering delusively in the mist, like fox fire in an autumn bog. The wind stirred her dress. She looked down. But even so she saw his abandoned face staring solemnly back at her, superimposed on the sea. Love, say the poets, is the only felicity. But love in great ladies is as culpable as crime.

Ravello made her restless. So did Cariola. She was only too aware that Cariola knew that something had happened. She was equally aware of the church and tomb-house standing empty across the valley. None the less she forced herself to remain in Ravello a week, for she told herself that by the end of that time Antonio would have forgotten the incident.

At the end of the week she rode down to Amalfi along the cliff road. Since there was no freedom for her anywhere, it did not seem to her to matter where she went. She saw that we merely move from a larger to a smaller, a smaller to a larger cell in the prison of the world, at the whim of our gaolers, and are lucky if once in ten years we hear someone from the next cell scratching on the wall. And though commoners may take some comfort from being flung into the same dungeon, nobles, as befits their station, are locked up by themselves.

Cariola, however, was glad to be back. No doubt she missed the gossip of the kitchens and the halls. The Duchess could not
feel the same enthusiasm. A town can have a thousand
inhabitants
and still be empty for the absence of one.

Court life did not interest her. Unlike her brothers, she had not risen by petty intrigue, but had been raised by it. It did not have for her the charm it had for them. She was only a woman, wedged between the world she ruled and the world that sought to rule her. She only knew that she must never look directly into Antonio’s eyes, and never grant him a private interview, both for his safety, and for hers.

She had to sit for what she thought was to be a medal to commemorate the shooting of the popinjay. It filled up the empty hours. Her nerves were badly frayed, and the painter annoyed her. Everything annoyed her. She saw Antonio in public, and it was worse than not seeing him at all. She longed for him. It was ridiculous. A tension built up within her and could find no way out.

She had told him to stay away, but there are times when it is not so pleasant to be obeyed. She began to feel that he was avoiding her, even that he had done with her. She was mortified. She did not dare to find out.

She took to catching glimpses of him. She told herself these glimpses were accidental. Every morning at nine he crossed the yard towards the household offices. She could watch him from the loggia that faced the court. She did so for a week. It was the event of her mornings. He never looked up. He did not seem to know that he was being watched. His figure was so trim and jaunty. She would have wished it sad. When she received him formally, on business, it seemed to her that his eyes were sad. But perhaps his eyes were always sad. It was impossible for her to say.

On Friday he crossed the yard as usual, and she watched as usual, standing in the shadow of a column. He was very small below her, and too far away. He disappeared into the doorway to the offices. With a sob of exasperation she turned back towards her rooms.

Cariola was standing in the middle of the loggia. She said nothing, but she dropped her eyes, though not before the Duchess had seen the eager, gratified, faintly malicious look in them. She lost her temper.

“Send for him,” she ordered.

“For whom?” Cariola blandly folded her hands across her dress.

“You know perfectly well for whom. Either that or you are a worse spy than I thought you were.”

“I was not spying.” Cariola eyed her mistress anxiously. “I don’t like to see you this way.”

“You love to see me this way. Bring him to me at once. At once.”

“That would be unwise.”

The Duchess did not care whether it was wise or not. If she was going to lose everything anyway, it did not matter greatly how she lost it. “Bring him to me tonight. Smuggle him in. I must see him.”

Cariola stirred restively. “It would be most dangerous.”

“I don’t care whether it is dangerous or not.”

“And what about him? Do you want to see him dead?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your brother has arrived. He is down in the harbour now.” Cariola looked around her. “It is not good to talk here. We might be overheard.”

It was true. Ferdinand had come. He had come because he could not stay away. He had to see what she was doing. The Cardinal knew nothing of this visit. It was not to his interest that brother and sister should meet, for it was Ferdinand’s jealousy he planned to make use of, and jealousy flourishes on partings, not meetings.

Ferdinand sent no message and did not appear. No doubt he was spying out the land, for he had never been to Amalfi before. Besides, Ferdinand was like a dog. If he had a master, then he whiffled on the trail, but if the master was away, he was apt to follow any scent that caught his fancy. He had that capacity to find ordinary people interesting that completely disqualifies some people for any career of their own. He approached tradesmen, dancers, fishermen, soldiers, even dwarfs, as a child approaches a grown-up, humbly, and with a desire to know how the thing was done. He seemed
superstitiously
to believe that the poor had a secret knowledge of their own.

The Duchess waited for him until four, and then could stand the waiting no longer. She did not want Ferdinand to see Antonio, so she had had him sent on an errand to Salerno. But she had to know why Ferdinand had come. She decided to go in search of him herself.

She found him still at the harbour, and approached him over the hard-packed, clammy beach, her skirts trailing after her. The light was low, the shadows long. The fishing boats were drawn up on shore, their painted prow eyes staring blandly out to sea, and the sand around them was corded with nets spread out to dry.

Since the Popinjay the Amalfitani had accepted her. They fell back respectfully as she approached, and she found herself looking at Ferdinand with some eagerness. The Cardinal she was afraid of, for she did not understand him. Something saturnine in his character had always kept her at arm’s length. But when she was a child, Ferdinand had been like a big shaggy dog which once petted becomes the best of friends. It was only his monstrous need of her affection that frightened her and drove her away from him. If he had allowed her merely to like him, she would have liked him very much.

He was smiling, but when he looked up and saw her, his smile instantly drained away into something more serious, and his eyes became suspicious, as they always did.

She looked at him helplessly. She would have liked nothing better than to sit down in the sand with him and eat calamari with the fishermen, by the light of their flares. But he made such young and instinctive things impossible. Paranoia had cut him off from everyone. He could be friendly only in an empty room.

No doubt he had come with the best of motives. She knew that much about him. He really did love her. He wished her well. But when he saw her, something happened to his
friendliness
. He clouded up. His voice became choked. He curled his fingers into his palm when he talked to her, even if what he said was a compliment. And sitting in shadow, with one finger to his cheek and his legs crossed below the knee, he would let his famished eyes glower out at her until everything she did was wrong. And why did he act so? She refused to know. It
was something she felt she would be better off not to know.

“You’re well liked here, sister,” he said, standing and
brushing
sand off his legs. He waved away the fishermen, took her arm, and turned towards the stairs leading up from the beach. “I hope you never give them cause to think otherwise of you.”