Death Among the Ruins (7 page)

Now she could make out multiple human shapes in the gathering darkness. The people who had worshiped Pan were said to “panic” when they were filled with the divine presence, weren’t they? She wouldn’t, though, because she did not want the god; only his statue. She would find it soon and take it home, and relax with a cup of tea and her feet propped up on something, and she must keep on with this inner monologue, this inner, mindless chattering, so as to keep from thinking about those people following her on both sides of the road, and how more of them were appearing up ahead and coming toward her. She was being surrounded.

Suddenly, Arabella broke into a run, and fled down a side street. The movement was so unexpected that her pursuers failed to react for a moment, but soon they were giving chase, a pack of hounds hunting a stricken doe. She left the street and zigzagged across a series of alleys, praying to God, to nature, to her dead grandmother, but knowing it was only a matter of time before she would fly unwitting down some cul-de-sac and come up short against a wall of solid stone.

And then, on rounding the next corner, Arabella saw some sort of official up ahead—a night watchman, perhaps—shoveling a dead animal into a sack. She was struggling to draw sufficient air into her lungs to scream for help and still running as hard as she could, when someone stepped directly in her path.

“
Signorina!
Hello,
signorina!
You need a guide?”

A small ragamuffin in an oversized man’s shirt was grinning up at her, and Arabella had a fleeting impression of white teeth in a dirty face. Mortified by the shriek that she had been unable to suppress, and still panting for breath, she brushed past him toward the watchman, with a hastily mumbled “No, thank you. Not just now.”

“Not just now?” he persisted, jogging along at her side. “So, how do you think? Later is possible? I am good guide! I know all these houses and secret buried places. My name is Pietro! When later comes and you are ready to look, ask for me! I can show you anything, anytime you like!”

Her pursuers had stopped running behind her, and now she saw that they were children, also. But unsupervised children, Arabella knew, could be every bit as dangerous as adults. She halted and looked at the boy. “Anytime?” she asked. “Don’t you ever go home, then?”

“This my home!” he cried, with a sweep of his arm that included his compatriots. “I . . . they . . .
all
of us, live here! In Ercolano!”

They were the filthiest children she had ever seen, and Arabella was a Londoner! Pitifully thin, and shoeless, with pointed little feral faces. The watchman shooed them away like chickens and admonished her. His English was not as good as the boy’s, but his meaning was clear: The children were bad. She should not speak to them. She should go home. He brought his lantern and showed her the way out.

Returned to the hotel at last, Arabella dragged herself upstairs, where she found Belinda revived, refreshed, and dressing for dinner.

“There you are!” cried her sister gaily. “I wondered where you’d gone! Should I wear pearls in my hair tonight? Or do you think them too sophisticated for Resina?”

“Too . . . sophisticated . . .” Arabella gasped. “The silk baby’s breath is much . . . more suitable. Bunny . . .”

“Hmmm?”

“Bunny, I think I need to lie down for a bit before dinner. Would you mind?”

“Well . . . we haven’t much time, Bell. You should have had a nap, like I did, rather than go exploring right away.”

And then, for the first time, she had a really good look at her sister.

“Bell! Are you all right? Here, lie on my bed! I’ll ring for a glass of . . . whatever it is they drink here!”

A short time later, Arabella was propped up with a lot of pillows and a glass of . . . whatever it was they had brought her. She was feeling much better.

“Thank goodness!” said Belinda with heartfelt relief. “You gave me a terrible fright just now!”

“Yes, well, I’d had one myself, you see. But it turned out to be only fancy on my part. There was actually nothing to be afraid of, at all.”

By the time the dinner bell sounded, the fair explorer had recovered her healthy complexion so completely that she was able to wear pale green brocade, without it making her look the least bit jaundiced.

 

 

A
welcoming fire was crackling in the
sala da pranzo,
and the aromas wafting in from the kitchen (a circumstance that would have been regarded as a travesty in an English household) excited the appetites of the expectant diners, with the exception of Charles. But Arabella was irritated to find eight persons already seated when she entered the room. And where she had expected to see a number of tables, or in any event, two, there was only the one. Evidently, the guests would all be obliged to dine and converse together, whether they would or no.

Later that night, she described her fellow guests in the CIN. On her only other detection adventure, Arabella had used her crime investigation notebook solely to record her impressions pertaining to a murder. But she had not been traveling then. In the present instance, moreover, she had forgot to bring a separate travel diary with her. And so, having surmised that little detection work would be required of her this time, she was using the back of her CIN to chronicle her travels.

 

 

Once introductions had been made and the Beaumont party was seated, soup was served to these latest arrivals, and the silence that now seized the company had more to do with the English group’s fatigue, and both parties’ desire for privacy, than with concentration upon the food. Belinda was fading again after a brief revival—her nap having been either too prolonged or not long enough. Charles did not like the soup and stirred it about without taking any, brooding over the two or three games of vingt-et-un lately lost to Osvaldo. Arabella was in a state approaching stupefaction from the combined effects of her tiring day and her scare in the ruins. And Reverend Kendrick, who had been kept constantly busy tending to the luggage, signing the register, seeing the passports safely secured, and watching over Charles, had been unable to procure a restorative of any kind, and nearly fell face-first from exhaustion into the
pasta puttanesca
.

After a while, though, when Arabella attempted to invest the occasion with a modicum of civility by recounting her recent adventures in the buried city, he mustered sufficient energy to rebuke her for having ventured out without a chaperone.

“Anything might have happened to you, Miss Beaumont! Please remember that a murder occurred in that place only recently! The watchman had a shovel, you said? Isn’t that what the victim was killed with? Perhaps it was the very murder weapon itself you saw! I implore you to exercise more common sense, in future!”

“The murder weapon!” Arabella exclaimed. “You are right, Mr. Kendrick! It could have been the very one!” And she might have been killed whilst the spirit of the ancient Roman had been occupying a part of her consciousness. How sad for the poor soul, waiting over seventeen hundred years to reanimate in a receptive mind, only to be killed again, almost immediately, with a shovel this time.

“The reverend is indeed right,
signorina,
” said the priest, nodding sagaciously. “You must not allow your eagerness to run away with you. Otherwise, some vagrant, seeing how easy it is, will try to run away with you, also!”

The other members of his party laughed gently at their leader’s little sally, except for Renilde. She had the sort of face that looks a stranger to laughter.

“It is, if I may say so,” added the prelate, “an unusual season for sightseeing.”

“That is why I have chosen it,” Arabella replied. “I cannot bear crowds. Has your journey been a long one, Mr. Terranova?” She would not address him as “Father.” He was not
her
father, and she was not of his faith. Arabella was determined to shew this fellow that he was no better than she was: After all, in their respective universes they were both stars, each with its host of orbiting bodies.

“It has, indeed,” he replied. “We should have arrived before you, but for a slight accident which delayed us some hours. ‘Don’t worry, Felice,’ I say to myself. ‘You will be there soon enough. There will be few people traveling at this time of year, and Osvaldo can go on ahead to procure the rooms. Just trust in God.’ So I do. And what happens? I find your group already here, and in possession of the very suite we were to have had!” He shrugged. “Such things, they happen. Who can say why? Those of us with faith, trust that God knows what He is doing.”

“And
you
have faith, of course!”

He smiled. “I do not always have it, but I always
try
to have it.
Signorina,
” he said, addressing Arabella, but looking at Charles. “Do you think that your brother would consider changing rooms with us?”

“No, I do not think that he would. This is
my
expedition,
signor,
and I make the decisions. Charles has no say in what we do here.”

“Oh! But this is most unusual, yes? Even for the English?”

“Quite. Yet I can assure you that it is the case.”

“Then, would
you
consider changing rooms?”

“No. I like the balcony, and am partial to the view it affords. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” he said grimly. “I, too, am partial to that particular view.”

Perceiving the conversation to have reached an impasse, Arabella now addressed herself to the garlic bread, whilst on her right, Mr. Kendrick and Father Terranova commenced the sort of religious discussion in which she took no interest. With Osvaldo on her left, there was no one to talk to, for the fellow was inspecting her through his quizzing glass as though she were a museum exhibit.

Across the table, his sister was asking impertinent questions of Belinda concerning her relationships to Charles and Mr. Kendrick, since Renilde had been too absorbed in the soup course to mark the landlord’s introductions.

“Of course,” said she, with a toss of her head, “we might have taken a more exclusive hotel than this one, but my cousin had very specific reasons for wanting to be here. And the beds are tolerable, I suppose.”

“Yes, they are very comfortable,” said Belinda, and she could not for the life of her think of anything else to say. Because in the whole of her life she had never before sat for such an extended period in such close proximity to such a thoroughly disagreeable person.

“I know who you are,” said Osvaldo abruptly, addressing Arabella and pocketing his quizzing glass.

“You can hardly expect me to be impressed by that news,” Arabella replied. “
I
have known it for years. I also seem to recall being introduced to you a short time ago at this very table.”

“Yes. And I think at once that your name, she’s familiar. But only this moment I remember where I see you before. You are Arabella Beaumont, the London courtesan, are you not?”

Osvaldo had chosen to make this remark during another lull in the conversation, so that it was heard by everybody in the room.

“Yes,” said Arabella simply. “I am.”

The priest’s mother and aunt hastily excused themselves from the dinner table. They tried to induce Miss Rinaldo to come with them, but unfortunately for Belinda, they were unsuccessful.

“Quite so,” lisped Osvaldo in a horribly accurate imitation of a typical London dandy’s voice, without the typical London dandy’s command of English. “My Mayfair friends, they point you out to me at the theater, once. I spend fully much of the time amusing to myself in London, you see. I am-a, how you call, a natural son of the Duke of Clarence.”

And how many times had she heard
that
before? Foreigners were ever wont to claim relatives amongst the nobility of one’s own country, although, as a matter of fact, Osvaldo
did
somewhat resemble the duke, with that pear-shaped head.

“Where I come from, sir,” said Arabella frostily, “illegitimacy is considered a severe social disadvantage!”

“Ah!” he replied. “And where you come-a from, the courtesan, she is also the social outcast, no? But this is not so much true in Italy. Not if one can boast of noble blood in one’s veins!”

The guests now found it convenient to withdraw to the coffee room, where Mr. Kendrick attempted to join Arabella on a small divan. But the
Powerful Force
got there ahead of him, settling his bulk emphatically down upon the cushions and practically tipping the side with Arabella on it up into the air.

“So!” said the priest, with evident relish. “This is a most unusual circumstance! I do not believe I have ever shared after-dinner coffee with a whore.”

Arabella told herself that perhaps the man did not mean to be rude.

“As a matter of fact,
signor,
” said she, “I am a
courtesan,
not a whore.”

“There is a difference?”

“Indeed there is.”

“And what is that, may I ask?”

“Self-respect.”

He chuckled. “Most interesting! And just how do you justify this profession, whatever it may please you to call it, to God?”

“There is no need for justification,” she said. “All creatures fornicate, with God’s complete approval. The Divine Injunction bids us go forth and multiply, is it not so, Mr. Terranova? And humans must earn their bread. Thus, I earn my bread like a human being, by fornicating like one of God’s creatures. How can He possibly object to that? How can
you
object to it?”

“But I do not object to it,” he said, smiling. “Your profession gives my profession the means of earning its bread, also. Until a short time ago, the church even conceded the necessity of brothels. After all, in Italy there are many whores, and every one of them contributes to the church collection basket!”

“While your ignorance is perhaps understandable,” said she, “it is also insulting. There is as vast a difference between a whore and a courtesan as there is between a novice monk and an archbishop. Although the difference between the examples
themselves
is perhaps not so great.”

Confound the man! He actually had the temerity to laugh!

“That was well said!” he cried. “And I do beg your pardon for insulting you, my dear . . . lady. Is that an insult, too?”

Arabella shook her head.

“You see,” he explained, “as a courtesan from a Protestant country, you probably think the Church is your enemy. But consider: The same system that made you an outcast has also made you wealthy, and as your excellent friend, Mr. Kendrick, informed me at dinner, you generously provided the funding for the roof repairs to the Effing church. Do you see? All things are connected, and every part works together.”