Flirting in Italian (20 page)

I manage a grin for her.

“It’s nice,” I say. “Thank Benedetta for me.”

“I tasted it first,” Kelly says, watching me carefully. “You know I said I tried some.”

I spoon some more yogurt into my mouth and swallow it slowly.

“Thanks,” I say, just as carefully.

“I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” Kelly says. Her red hair’s brushed back into a ponytail, and she pulls the ponytail around to one side of her neck, stroking it absent-mindedly, like she’s concentrating hard on what she’s about to say. “But I think you should be careful about what you eat and drink from now on. You were
really
sick. And no one knows what caused it. I’ve been looking stuff up on the Net. People can eat from the same plate of mussels and clams and some of them get sick and some don’t, ’cause you can get a single dodgy one. But what we all had—there’s no way you could have got so sick from that.”

She twists her head to look at her ponytail now, as if its ends are hypnotically fascinating.

“Unless,” she adds, “someone put something in what you ate or drank.”

My throat’s already feeling much better; though it hurts to swallow, the yogurt is really nice and soothing. So my voice is much clearer when I say:

“Yes.”

Kelly lets her ponytail go, and her eyes meet mine. They’re clear hazel, framed by pale sandy lashes, and full of sharp intelligence.

“At the castello,” she clarifies, making sure we’re both on the same page. “Because I heard what the doctor was saying to Catia. I’m really managing to understand a lot of Italian—I’ve got this whole course on my MP3 player, and I’ve been listening and listening to it. He was saying it was something you must’ve just eaten.” She grimaces. “ ’Cause, you know, it came straight back up. I mean, it didn’t have time to go through you and out the other side.”

I grimace too, setting the spoon back in the bowl as my stomach rumbles a bit.

“Sorry,” she continues. “But I had to say it. And Benedetta thinks the same. She says whatever it was, you ate it only an hour or two before you started upchucking.”

Kelly gets up and walks over to the bedroom door, which is ajar. She closes it, makes sure it’s shut, and comes back and sits down on the bed again.

“Violet,” she says very seriously, “I told Benedetta that your lips went blue when you were puking, and she went all funny and freaked out. She thinks there’s no way this could have been an accident, and she’s sure the doctor thinks so too. She says that happens when people eat yew berries. They’re, like,
really
poisonous.”

“Yew berries,” I echo slowly.

Kelly nods. She’s watching me very closely, checking to see if I’m going to freak out at the suggestion. But actually, I’m glad that someone’s put a name to what’s going on. And that I’m not alone with it.

“I don’t want to go home,” I hear myself say. “If my mum knew this wasn’t just food poisoning, she’d whip me back to London in about thirty seconds flat. And I
really
don’t want to go back yet.”

“I wouldn’t either,” Kelly says. “Not if a boy like Luca were after me.”

I blush.

“He isn’t really after me,” I mumble.

“Violet.” Kelly rolls her eyes. “I
saw
you two sitting in the window seat. I know what it looks like when two people have just been snogging, okay? You were all …”

I’m dying to know what she’s going to say. I want to hear that Luca looked completely dazed and blown away, that he had stars in his eyes and was staring at me as if I were the most beautiful girl in the world.

I am tragic.

“… disheveled,” she concludes.

I can’t help grinning, which definitely helps; at least it’s a moment of light relief.

“I get that you don’t want to go back to London,” she says, shifting as she leans forward on the mattress. “But don’t you see that the reason this happened to you is probably
because
of this whole Luca thing? Because you’ve made someone really jealous?” She lowers her voice. “Like Elisa! She’s obviously dying to get in there and be a flipping princess! Honestly, if I thought Paige were capable of poisoning you with yew berries, she’d be at the top of my suspect list, the way she was going on yesterday.”

“How do you even poison someone with yew berries?” I ask, feeling like Kelly’s steps and steps ahead of me. She’s obviously been doing nothing else since I got sick but talk to Benedetta and go online to research this theory of hers.

“Boil them and make a decoction,” Kelly says promptly. “Just a few drops would be plenty. And there are loads of yew trees around here. I checked. It’s really toxic to horses, for some reason. Hang on a sec.” She grabs her laptop, flips it open, and reads: “ ‘Symptoms include staggering gait, muscle tremors, convulsions, collapse, difficulty breathing, coldness,
and eventually heart failure. Fatal poisoning in humans is very rare, only occurring after eating a lot of yew foliage. The wood is also poisonous. Some bow makers are reputed to have died from the frequent handling of the wood in their craft.’ ”

She looks up from the screen.

“That’s Wikipedia,” she says. “But the
New York Times
website had lots of other symptoms, including vomiting and blue lips.”

“It feels really creepy to think of someone making this stuff,” I say slowly. “You know, they’d have to have boiled up the berries, I suppose. Done it in advance.”

“Exactly!” Kelly shuts the computer with a snap and pulls her legs up onto the bed, crossing them. “You couldn’t just whip this stuff up in a second—you’d need time, and a place to do it, somewhere you wouldn’t be seen. Violet, this is scary. I know you don’t want to go home. I mean, I think you probably should, to be honest. But I do get why you don’t want to.”

She looks at me really seriously.

“I think it must have been in your glass of
vin santo
,” she says, her Italian accent already sounding better than it did just a couple of days ago. She’s a quick learner. “It would be easier to put it in liquid. Did you leave it alone at all?”

I nod. “On a side table when I was looking at this book of watercolors. Who came back in from the terrace when you were all out there? Anyone?”

Kelly’s ahead of me; she’s already thought this out. “I didn’t,” she says. “Kendra might’ve—she wandered away to the side of the terrace, and I didn’t see her for a bit. I’m
sure Paige was there the whole time—she was sucking up to Luca, doing all that hair-flirting she does.”

Jealous as I am of anyone cozying up to Luca, I can’t help sniggering at the term “hair-flirting.” It’s perfect.

“And Elisa?” I ask.

Kelly raises her eyebrows.

“She went back to get her cigarettes,” she says. “And I remember thinking she was gone longer than you’d expect, because I thought she’d shoot right back to make sure Paige wasn’t all over Luca.”

I’m not surprised. Not at all.

“And earlier?” I ask. “When someone shut me in the passage?”

“Okay,” Kelly says. “I thought about that, too. I was up ahead with Catia and the principessa, but Paige and Kendra were sort of dawdling behind. They could have sneaked back and done it. But they’d have had to do it together, unless one of them said she was going off to look for the loo, I suppose. I really don’t see Paige going off by herself, though, do you? Or letting Kendra go off without her? She’d freak about getting lost.”

I nod. That’s spot-on about Paige’s character: she hates to be alone. Even if she’d needed a loo, and found one, she’d probably have wanted Kendra to stand outside so she could chatter to her through the door. It’s not proof of anything, but it sounds right.

“I saw Catia the whole time,” Kelly’s saying. “But the principessa did go off for a bit. She said she was going to check that Maria was bringing the drinks to the Gold Salon. She must have been gone about ten minutes.”

My heart drops. I stare at Kelly, my mouth gaping open.

“The principessa? I
totally
assumed it was Elisa,” I say.

“All I’m saying is that she wasn’t there the whole time on the tour,” Kelly says. “And she could possibly have got up and put something in your drink without Catia seeing.”

I’m speechless. This idea had never entered my head before.

“All that stuff about you looking like her husband’s sister,” Kelly’s saying. “That was pretty strange. She definitely went on about it a lot.” She pulls on her ponytail again. “Basically, if you’re going to stay, you need to be really careful around Elisa. Make sure she’s nowhere near anything you eat or drink.
And
,” she fixes me with a stern look, “you shouldn’t go
near
the Castello di Vesperi, or the principessa, ever again. It’s just not safe for you.”

But that’s why I’m here!
I want to protest. In a deeply weird way, the entire scene at the castello yesterday, plus my poisoning, has only confirmed what I thought when I looked at that portrait in the museum in London: that there’s a mystery centering on the Castello di Vesperi and the family that’s lived there for centuries, a mystery of which I’m very much a part.

I’m not going to tell Kelly about the girl in the portrait.
Let her keep thinking I’m staying here just because of Luca
.

And despite the gravity of the situation, despite the fact that someone—maybe Luca’s mother!—has made me very sick, I can’t help smiling at the thought of Luca.

Even if the portrait didn’t exist
, I find myself thinking,
even if that weren’t a reason in itself to be there, it’d be worth staying in Italy just for the chance to kiss Luca again
.

Luigi, the art teacher, holds up his brush, and we all do the same. I’m not quite sure why we’re mirroring his action, but Luigi is very compelling, more than capable of making four excited girls calm down and concentrate on what he’s telling us. I think it’s partly because he’s very serious. Either he doesn’t have a sense of humor, or it’s extremely well hidden. This, as I’m perfectly aware from years of a girls-only school, is a crucially important quality for male teachers. There aren’t that many of them in a girls’ school, and unless they look like the back of a bus, they inevitably become huge crush-objects. Little girls follow them around in packs, giggling madly, turning bright red and running away when the teacher turns to look at them; older girls wear the shortest skirts and tightest tops they can get away with, and do a lot of what Kelly calls hair-flirting. Male teachers are usually pretty good at coping with the flirting techniques: the best way to get under their skin, forge a special bond with them, is to share their sense of humor, make them laugh.

The clever girls know this; the pretty ones usually don’t, because they tend to rely too much on their looks. Of course, the ones who are both clever and pretty do especially well, but that’s true for everything in life.

I look over at Kendra, who’s both clever and pretty. I’m surprised to see that she’s staring, wide-eyed, at Luigi, absolutely mesmerized by him.

“We put the paint on thee brush, then thee brush on thee paper, and you see.…”

Luigi demonstrates, dipping his brush into black tempera
paint from a tube he’s mixed with water and put on his palette, then flicking the tip of the brush swiftly across the paper. “It dries almost immediately. As you pull the brush across, it is drying already. You see?”

We nod in unison. Luigi has executed a perfect stroke on the paper, like a ribbed black branch stretching from one end to the other.

“That is why watercolor is thee most deefeecult way to paint. You will cry, maybe. You weel be vairy frustrated.” He smiles. “Is good for life, to learn sometheeng vairy deefeecult. And one day, perhaps, if you are vairy good and try vairy hard, you will be able to do thees.”

He dips the brush into the black paint again and, with a few more strokes, sketches in a few branches and twigs flowing from the main branch; then, with a deft, practiced twist of his wrist, he cleans the brush in a can of water, wipes its bristles off on the edge, loads it with red paint, and taps little flowers as plump and pretty as cherries onto the branches, seemingly at random.

He steps back: we all gasp. The picture he’s just made is so simple; it looks as if it would be the easiest thing in the world to do.

“I study in Japan,” Luigi says. “That is my style. I weel teach you a number of styles, but we start today weeth the most deefeecult. Today, you will all try to do thees, the tree branch with flowers. You must ’old the brush very steady. You weel make many meestakes and be vairy un’appy. Okay!” He claps his hands, making us all jump. “We begin!”

I’m excited. Only two days ago, at the castello, I was looking at watercolors, and now we’re learning how to do
them—even if it does include making many mistakes and being very unhappy. I was absolutely determined to make it to our first art class today, so much so that after spending the day in bed yesterday eating more yogurt and plain boiled rice, I hauled myself down to dinner to show Catia that I was okay to restart the normal daily program. Elisa, unfortunately, was there with Ilaria, oversympathizing with me in a way so exaggerated it was almost offensive. I can’t believe that Catia doesn’t realize what a bitch her daughter is. Every time I picked up my fork, Elisa would lean forward to make a comment:

“It’s so good you have your appetite again, Violet!”

and:

“Oh, you finish
all
your pasta! You feel much better, yes! You eat everything!”

While, of course, leaving most of her own pasta on the plate. Catia was smiling approvingly at Elisa, just as if she really believed the face value of all her daughter’s nasty snarks. She’s oblivious to Elisa’s deeply unpleasant personality.
She’s probably always let Elisa get away with murder
, I reflect,
and this is why Elisa’s such a spoiled little horror
.

Around me, the other girls have all made tentative starts on their watercolors. We’re in a converted barn in the gardens of the villa, big skylights set into the roof, so light pours down, clear and white, onto the equally big trestle table in front of us. Catia runs art courses at Villa Barbiano when she isn’t hosting summer schools, and the barn is done up as a full art studio, with canvases propped against walls, easels stacked at the far end, even a plinth for a model to sit on. There’s a huge stainless-steel sink for washing up; a
long built-in marble shelf running the whole length of one side holds a dizzying array of paint tubes, acrylics and oils, paintbrushes, and wooden palettes, all battered and paint-stained.

I look down at my own palette. It’s metal, because, as Luigi explained, wood is absorbent, and the water-based tempera would just soak into it. I have black mixed into one of the dips in the palette, and pale pink in another. Inspired by Luigi’s Japanese-style painting, I have the idea of trying to do a cherry-blossom branch.

I pick up my brush and dip it into the black; just as I’m drawing it across the top sheet of paper, Kelly, next to me, rips her first attempt off with a deep groan of disgust, and the sound makes me jerk. Just a little, but more than enough; to my dismay, the straight line I’m trying to paint wobbles and bends the way only the weirdest, most deformed branch would do in real life. Thinking fast, I don’t fight it. Instead, I follow the bend, tail it off as best I can, lift the brush, and then add another line, continuing the original branch. I don’t think it looks brilliant, but I’ve sort of saved it, and before I can lose my nerve, I take just a little black paint, the way Luigi did, on the very tip of the brush, and sketch in some twigs coming off the branches.

He’s right; the paint dries almost before you’ve taken the brush off the paper. It’s a terrifying pressure to be working under. Around me, I hear tuts of exasperation, sighs of annoyance, more paper ripping off the sketch blocks, but I’m in a kind of zone now and I tune the noises out. At least the speed with which the tempera dries means that I don’t have to wait for the black to set before I start painting
the blossoms. If I stop, I
will
lose my nerve. I know that instinctively. So, barely breathing, heart pounding, I clean my brush, clouding the water with an inky black swirl, dip it into the pale pink, and dot blossoms on the twigs. I can’t picture cherry blossoms in my mind, see exactly what they look like, but when I’ve done them, they look unfinished somehow. Bare.