Seduced by Innocence

“Only love can build a house of gold, and in every room there is a different treasure.”

—Annunciata Vanzani,
mother of Maurizio Vanzani

T
erri Wainright’s first sight of Maurizio Vanzani came so soon after her first sight of Venice that always afterward they were joined in her mind.

It began with the motorboat trip from the airport and along the Grand Canal to her hotel. At first she tried to take in details but eventually, overwhelmed by the heartbreaking beauty of the city on the water—even in the gray November weather—she sat back and drank it all in with a sense of wonder. Then the boat approached the Midas Hotel, and turned into a small side canal where a flight of steps led up from the water. And there stood a tall, raven-haired man, watching her arrival.

His eyes seemed to be fixed intently on Terri, as if he’d been standing there for a long time, waiting for her and her only. She gave herself a little shake and told herself not to be absurd. This must be the porter, and like any good hotel employee he was adept at making guests feel that only they mattered. That was the true reason for the searching look he kept on her from eyes so dark that they were almost black. Yet she still couldn’t rid herself of the strange sensation that her arrival was somehow significant to him.

When the boat was secure, he reached out to help her, and her small pale hand was enveloped in his large brown one. She had a disconcerting awareness of enormous power held in check, and for a moment she was conscious of everything about him, the height of his hard, lean body, the breadth of his heavily muscled shoulders and the heat of his flesh, communicating itself to her through the firm grip of his fingers. “Welcome to the Hotel Midas,” he said in a voice of such rich, bass beauty that she almost stared. “I hope you had a good flight from England.”

“Excellent, thank you,” she said.

“A few moments to check in, and I will show you to your room.” He led her to the reception desk and stood waiting while she handed over her passport and filled in a form. Then he took her cases and led the way across a cool marble floor into an elevator.

On the journey up two floors, she had the chance to study his swarthy coloring and the air of presence and authority that surrounded him like an aura. It combined oddly with the menial task he was performing, and she wondered if he was a gambler down on his luck. The Midas was famous not only as one of the best hotels in Venice, but as a casino where fortunes were won and lost on the turn of a card. There were tales of men who’d walked in wealthy and staggered out hours later with only the clothes they wore. Perhaps he was one of them, and he simply needed a job.

“Here is your room,
signorina,
” he said at last, throwing open a pair of double doors. Terri gasped at the luxury within.

“I think there must be some mistake,” she said hurriedly. “This can’t be the room I booked.”

“You’re quite right. The booking clerk made a mistake. The rooms in the price range you asked for were already taken and he double booked. The management doesn’t want you to lose by this, so you’ve been put in a superior accommodation—at no extra charge, of course.”

It sounded perfectly reasonable, yet it somehow troubled Terri. She tried to dismiss the feeling as just nerves. This whole trip, with so much depending on it, made her nervous. She was fearful of what she might find, yet she was driven on.

He set down her suitcases and went to throw open the shutters that led to a balcony, revealing a view over the Grand Canal that made Terri gasp. The better light also showed her a wine cooler, filled with ice, from which the man removed a bottle of champagne. “But I didn’t order—” Terri began to protest.

“This is a normal courtesy of the management with this suite,” he interrupted her smoothly, handing her a brimming glass. As she accepted it, their eyes met briefly over the rim, and again she had an unsettling feeling, as if there was something significant in his gaze. For a moment his eyes pierced her, producing a sensation of physical shock so intense that her hand shook and both his own hands closed over hers, steadying her. She could feel the barely leashed power, but it was gone almost at once as he released her and turned away to another set of double doors. “Your bathroom is through here,” he said, throwing open the doors to reveal a marble room, almost overpowering in its luxury. “Now I will leave you.”

Terri hunted quickly in her purse. The man raised a hand. “That is unnecessary,
signorina.
”

“Oh no—I must give you—here—” She held out a forty-thousand-lire note. It was a larger amount than she’d expected to tip, but she guessed it was normal for this palatial suite. “Please, I want you to take it,” she said hurriedly.

He glanced at the note with a slight twist of the lips that made her wonder if the amount was too small, after all. The feeling that he might be laughing at her made her suddenly awkward. “That will be all, thank you,” she said, speaking coolly to cover her embarrassment.

He gave her a small bow and departed. Terri sipped the cold liquid and realized that it was a fine vintage, not the semiplonk that many hotels would have used for a courtesy bottle. It was the final detail added to the world-famous luxury of the Hotel Midas, a place where she couldn’t really afford to stay, but where she
must
stay, because it was the starting point for her quest for her missing brother.

How she wished Leo was with her now, to raise her spirits with his charm and lightheartedness. But Leo wasn’t here. He’d vanished in Venice several weeks ago. Terri would have liked to start her search in the little Hotel Busoni, where Leo had stayed, but that had closed for the winter. So she’d chosen the Midas, whose casino had drawn her volatile brother like a moth to the flame. Somehow she
must
find Leo, but she had a sense of advancing into a void.

Terri, or Teresa as she’d been born, and Leo, were twins who complemented each other: Leo, easygoing, spontaneous, fun loving, and Terri, serious, gentle, reserved. Their sharply different qualities had dovetailed, making them lifelong allies against a confusing world, where nothing was quite as it seemed.

As a child and an adolescent, Terri had never been certain who she was. Her father, Carlo Mantini, had been a short, swarthy Italian, while her mother, Madge, was English with a stocky figure, solid features and hair of an indeterminate color that she refused to dye or arrange elegantly. “I’ve got no patience with that sort of nonsense,” she used to say firmly. “Makeup and folderols are for those with time to play.” She would look at her husband as she said this, as though blaming him for something, but Carlo had become prosperous through his own restaurant, and Madge could have had luxuries and “time to play” if she’d wanted. Her husband had pressed new clothes on her, in an almost placating way, as though he were seeking forgiveness for some unspoken wrong. But Madge rarely wore them, and seemed to take a perverse, gloomy pleasure in letting herself get unattractive.

Neither of the twins were strikingly like their parents, although from some angles Leo’s features had a passing resemblance to Carlo’s. They were both tall, slender, fair and beautiful, and the child Terri had been puzzled when Carlo assured her she looked Italian. “But how can I be like an Italian, Papa?” she asked, studying herself critically in the mirror. “Italians are dark, like you.”

“Not all of them,
piccina,
” he assured her. “In the north there are many with fair hair.”

“But you come from the south,” she reminded him, for she loved the stories of his childhood in Naples. “So why aren’t I dark?”

He didn’t get the chance to answer because Madge swiftly intervened, saying it was time for the children to go to bed. That had happened often, and Terri and Leo grew to understand that Madge hated certain subjects, and would act fast to end the conversation.

Any reference to Carlo’s nationality upset her, and she tried to ensure that the twins were raised as English as possible. Since they looked English, she had some success, but they loved nothing better than to hang around the restaurant, chatting to the Italian waiters. In this one matter Carlo stood up to his wife, and the children grew up speaking fluent Italian.

They adored their father, and as long as they were with him, away from Madge’s antagonism, they were happy. But Carlo died when they were fourteen, and the happiness was over. The events that followed were burned into Terri’s brain.

She could remember, as if it were yesterday, opening a drawer containing some of Carlo’s personal possessions, seeking a memento of him that she could take and keep secretly, free from her mother’s all-seeing eyes. But while she was looking through the items, Madge had stormed in. “How dare you touch your father’s things without my permission?” she snapped. She’d stood there in grim fury while Terri fled the room, then she’d locked the door.

In another wife this might have looked like devotion, but there was something horrible about the way Madge raged through Carlo’s possessions, as though seeking something that she must find, or die in the attempt. Then one day, Terri knew that whatever Madge was seeking, she’d found. She’d stopped searching and gone about with a dead, cold look in her eyes. She rarely spoke, but she seemed to tremble with hatred, and never more so than when she turned her eyes on her daughter.

Madge’s next act shocked Leo and Terri, both for its vindictiveness and that she tried to do it in secret. By chance they discovered that she had begun moves to change their names by deed poll, wiping out Carlo’s surname and calling the whole family Wainright, her own maiden name. They were too young to prevent her, but by uniting in indignant opposition, they secured a compromise. Instead of being totally eliminated, the name Mantini was relegated to the middle, with Wainright on the end. The twins disliked the arrangement and took every opportunity to emphasize their full name. Their mother countered by selling their home and moving to another part of London where nobody knew them. Gradually “Mantini” fell out of use, leaving the twins furious and appalled at the lengths to which Madge was prepared to go.

At last Terri discovered the secret of Madge’s hostility with cruel, shocking suddenness. Coming home late one evening with her boyfriend, she paused outside the front door for an innocent good-night kiss, then went into the house, and straight into Madge’s open hand.

“Slut,”
Madge seethed, striking Terri again and again across the face.

Terri had vainly tried to fend her off, but Madge was releasing the rage of years. “Slut!” she repeated.
“Slut, slut, slut.”

At last she’d stopped, and gasping, looked down at the weeping girl who’d collapsed into a chair. “Just like your mother,” she said sourly.

Terri raised a streaming face. “But you’re my—”

“Me? I’m not your mother. You come from an Italian slut, a whore who slept around with married men.”

In ten hideous minutes Madge spewed out the bitter truth that had eaten away at her for years. Terri and Leo were adopted, not Madge’s children at all. “But you’re
his
kids,” Madge seethed. “He never admitted it but I knew. He said one of his waitresses was in trouble, and we took her children so that she could go back to Italy and start afresh. He never admitted that
he
was the one who’d got her into trouble. To the end of his days he never admitted the truth, but I always knew.”

Terri had never even suspected that she was adopted, and the sudden discovery, in an atmosphere of hate, was like a blow over the heart. But there was more to come. Now she discovered what Madge had been searching for among her husband’s things.

“Look at this,” Madge snapped, thrusting a newspaper cutting into the girl’s face. “He kept it all these years.”

The cutting came from an Italian paper and announced the marriage of Elena Fresnio to Count Francisco Calvani. There was a photograph of the bride and groom, clear enough to show that Elena was as blond as a baby.

“Look at her, standing there in a white dress and veil, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,” Madge sneered. “And all the time the little whore had a pair of bastards by a married man.”

“You don’t—know it was her.” Terri choked on her words.

“I saw her in the restaurant when she’d just arrived,” Madge shouted. “I know her face and her name. Your father had this sent to him from Italy, five years later, and he kept it all his life to remind him of the slut who bore his brats.”

“Don’t,” Terri screamed, covering her ears. “If she was my mother, she wasn’t a slut.”

“That’s a fine piece of reasoning,” Madge said contemptuously. “But it works the other way around. She was a slut, you’re a slut’s daughter and you’re turning out just like her.”

Madge had burst into raucous sobs and run away. They’d never spoken of it again.

Leo had been staying with friends at the time, and knew nothing of the dreadful scene. When he returned, Terri told him that they were adopted, but nothing more; nothing about Elena. She couldn’t bear to speak of that. And so she was left completely alone with her shock and misery, to come to terms with it as best she could.

As she grew older, Terri’s natural generosity enabled her to pity Madge, miserable at her husband’s infidelity, gnawed at by jealousy and the pain of having to care for his unacknowledged children. But it was harder to forgive the cruel way she herself had been made a scapegoat at a particularly vulnerable time in her life. She was fifteen, just becoming aware of her flowering beauty and sexuality, but her budding pride in herself was stopped dead. Madge’s cry of “Slut” echoed in her ears, freezing her physical and emotional sensations, turning her into an iceberg. At twenty-three she was still a virgin.

Madge had died earlier that year, and at last Terri could bring herself to tell Leo about Elena. He became eager to find his natural mother. She’d urged him to be cautious, thinking that the Countess Calvani might not welcome a grown son appearing in her life after all these years, but Leo’s affectionate nature made it impossible for him to believe this.

“All right, think of her husband,” Terri urged. “She’s probably never told him.”

“I won’t give away her secret,” Leo promised. “I just want to see her and talk to her. Look.” He took out his passport bearing the name Leo Mantini Wainright. “Remember how mad we were when Mum insisted on getting us these passports?”