She Walks in Darkness (14 page)

“Then—when I ran away?” It took me a minute to remember; everything that had happened before Prince Mino came seemed so long ago. “But when he brought me back, you never stirred—”

“I was in no shape to take him on. I’m still a bit wobbly.”

“Oh, I should have thought! Let’s sit down.”

We did, and I knew that he was glad of the wall to lean against. He turned off the flashlight, saying that we must save the battery, and I said, thinking back, “So that’s where that last cup of coffee went. I thought there ought to be one more in the pot.”

“That cup saved my life. Or I felt as if it did. When I’d rested a little while, I made another pot, and drank all of that. I had some toast too. You and your would-be boyfriend were gone quite a while. Long enough to make me sweat blood.”

“And when you did come, you just lay there—and listened?” My cheeks burned.

“Honey, the best moment of my life was when I heard your voice and knew you were all right.” His own voice, that had been very serious, suddenly broke into a laugh. “If he’d known you half as well as I do, you couldn’t have fooled for a minute. If you’d ever pulled that damn fool giggle on me you’d still be safe in America, a single woman.”

“What would you have done if—?”

“I’d have cracked him over the head with this flashlight. I kept it in my hand, under the covers, just in case. Even if I wasn’t at my best, surprise would have been on my side, that time.”

“That time?” I didn’t understand.

“You didn’t think I was fool enough to crack up my car on the way into the garage, did you?” He sounded insulted.

“You mean—Floriano—?”

“I’d just started the car when I saw him in the rearview mirror. I let out a gasp, and that was my mistake. He was prepared for emergencies; he had a wrench in his hand, and he hit me over the head. He must have jumped clear as the car crashed. I don’t know how on Earth I got out.”

“I tried to help you.” I began to shiver again, and he held me closer, said quietly, “Tell me about it.”

I did, ending, “He must have followed me to the car, and have hidden in the trunk, Richard—there in Volterra. He was the escaped prisoner the police were looking for; I figured that part out. But I never thought of his having hurt you—tried to kill you—” The shivering started again, but when he kissed me it stopped.

“Thanks. You certainly saved my life. But you’ve had some mighty narrow squeaks yourself. When you and dear Floriano left our rooms, I sweated a good deal more blood. I couldn’t move fast enough to spring on him, and when I followed you it seemed to be at a snail’s pace. Then when I saw Prince Mino, I thought that crack in my head must be a lot worse than I’d figured.”

“Why? You didn’t know him.”

“I did. I’d seen photographs, and Dr. Pulcinelli had told me he was dead. For a while I must have been just plain groggy; then when I saw the three of you going downstairs—”

“You couldn’t have followed us all this way!”

“No. I’m ashamed to say I blacked out at the head of the cellar stairs. When I came to, I realized I’d have no chance to find you in all this maze down here; I couldn’t see Prince Mino stopping in the wine cellar. So I just sat there with my trusty flashlight in my hand, and waited for whoever should come up.”

“Then how did you get here?”

“Prince Mino brought me. I’m glad I was feeling a little too dopey to cosh him when he came up.”

“You—met—Prince Mino?”

“Yes. The old fellow was very decent. He gave me some brandy from his flask, and I told him I’d been hurt in an accident, and thought you must have gone down to the wine cellar to find something reviving, but that you’d been gone so long I was getting worried.”

“Do you think he believed you?”

“I have no idea. He said the telephone was out of order, and that since he’d sent old Mattia on an errand, he’d have to fix it himself; that once he’d phoned for help, he’d go down to look for you. But I said that if he started for the telephone, I’d start after you by myself. In the end we came down here together.”

“You went—with him?” I felt cold with fear, although he was safe here beside me. I didn’t think until later what fear he must have felt for me during that long, awful time of waiting. Of all the misery and anxiety and physical exertion that his light words masked.

That must have been a strange journey that the two men made into the depths. Prince Mino professed great surprise that Richard had known nothing of his “projected visit” to the villa. “But our good friend Professor Harris did not expect me so soon; my doctors have been most cautious. My good Mattia was truly overjoyed at sight of me.”

“He kept leading me farther and farther down. Always saying that if you hadn’t gone this way, you must have gone that way. Until I knew that actually we were playing the spider and the fly. I kept my feet partly because of the brandy—he gave me a couple more swigs—but mostly because I knew I had to.

“We finally came to a pair of enormous stone doors, and I decided that I’d gone far enough; whatever was behind those doors, it was probably the spider’s parlor. I sat down—flopped down, rather; said I had to. He believed that; I’d already had to rest several times. He even seemed pleased, said he’d go in and see if the room was just as he had left it; it had been the scene of some of his most important discoveries. He did go in; he actually shut the doors behind him. I wondered why.”

I didn’t. He had been afraid that Floriano’s cries might still be heard from within. I felt sick.

“I took a chance.” Richard was still speaking. “I followed him and wedged those doors shut with my clasp knife. He can’t open them. He tried. I saw those immense stone doors move—just a little—but there was no sound. I called to him. I put my mouth to a tiny crack there in one place between the doors; I told him I’d seen you with him, and with another, younger man who’d already roughed you up and dragged you back when you’d tried to go for help. I said I had a gun and I’d let him out if he brought you with him. But he never made a sound. Not one sound.”

He stopped. I knew that once again he was feeling that silence, the awful chill of it. I could feel it too.

He said slowly, “I was worried, about as worried as a man can be. You might just possibly have been in there. Barbara—” His arms tightened around me. For a little we didn’t say anything. Then he said matter-of-factly, “We’d better be getting out of here. Back upstairs.”

I said in fresh panic, “But how will we ever find our way out of here?” and Richard chuckled in answer, waved a bit of white muslin under my nose. “We owe the Harrises for a sheet. When I followed you and Floriano, I pulled this off the bed and carried it along. I thought that if I could knock him, we might tear it up and tie him up with it. But when I came down here I cut it up for markers instead.”

I stared, then understood. “You mean you dropped a little piece every time you went around a turn? Like the children in the fairy tale, only they used pebbles. Oh, Richard, you’re wonderful!”

“Fairly so, but I can’t claim originality. I remembered the fairy tale. So did Prince Mino. When he first saw me cut out a bit and drop it, he explained that since he was with me that was quite unnecessary. But I was a sick man, so he decided to humor my cowardly nerves.” Now Richard’s smile was dry.

Whatever he was doing, Prince Mino was no longer smiling. The trapper was trapped, shut up in his own lair. He too must be feeling like a cornered beast now. It is always terrible to think of pride broken; though he had been wrong and cruel and wicked, I felt sorry for him. But only for a moment. Then I slipped my arm through Richard’s; I knew that he was going to need all the support I could give him.

They never failed us, those bits of white muslin. Not one turn had Richard missed, half-fainting though he must have been. We made many stops, some of them short, some seemingly long, but finally we made it.

Richard was reeling, wheezing with exhaustion, when at last we reached the ground floor of the villa. He collapsed onto the first sofa we came to, a lovely ornate thing, and I covered him up with a throw rug, then dropped down myself. The floor here was stone too, but the rich, thick rug on it felt like heaven after the bare rock I had been getting used to. That is the last thing I remember....

A tremendous crash woke me. I jumped up, then sank back, afraid. The whole world seemed to be rocking beneath me. The floor shook; from below came more crashes, muffled now, deep, horrible noises as if some titanic monster were grinding up stone walls in his teeth.

“Richard, what is it?” I caught his hand. He was sitting up on the sofa now.

“An earth tremor, Barbs. They have them in this country, you know. It’ll be over in a minute.”

I thought of the depths below. “Richard, what is happening—down there?”

He said very gently, “It’s already happened, honey. And I think it’s better this way. Now Prince Mino never will have to go to either of those grim-looking places in Volterra.”

For the first time I remembered those stored explosives that had worried Roger Carstairs, remembered and understood. Prince Mino had thought as Richard thought. As long ago, when Sulla’s men drew near, the high priest of Mania must have thought....

The subterranean shaking and crashing had ceased. Light streamed in through the windows; the golden morning lay quiet around us. The morning of a new day.

hose ponderous stone doors that once led to the Tomb of the High Priests still stand, though split and riven, but the chamber behind them must be a solid mass of fallen rock. When the
carabinieri
came, they shook their heads. “To dig out a trace of those two men would take a fortune, signore. Nor could we identify them then. There would be no faces, no bodies even. Not a bone that was not splintered.”

So the Tomb of the Guardians no longer exists. Neither can that weird passage that wound down from it; that secret way that for thousands of years no man had ever trod never will be trodden by any man again. Does the terrible shape of Mania herself still stand, down there in those abysmal depths? Richard thinks that possibly—just possibly—it may, that that roof that was not reared by the hands of man may have withstood the shock of the cataclysm.

“But I’ll never get down there to see, Barby.” He sighed; he will always envy me my sight of the temple. “Nowadays archaeologists can’t get hold of the kind of money it would take to dig that place out again. Not when the chances of its survival are so slim, and the evidence so vague. You are the only witness, and you’ve had no archaeological training.”

“If you had let me tell the police who Prince Mino really was, Richard—not just let them think he was some unknown criminal associate of Floriano’s who quarreled with him—”

“We can’t prove his identity, and if we could we’d only make trouble for the doctor he blackmailed into letting him go.” Richard added gently, “He never was too sane, honey. And he’d lived too far underground too long. That yarn about Etruscan manuscripts written in something like Maya characters—”

“I’d think being suspected of Roger’s murder would hurt his memory more. But you have a point about the doctor.”

“Also Prince Mino can’t be cleared of murder. He died the murderer of his own son.”

“Yes, he did do that. And I wish he’d let Floriano be hanged. Whenever I think of the way whatever he did do sounded—” I shuddered, remembering those wails.

Richard said soberly, “I think I know what happened. But do you really want to hear?”

“Knowing’s always better than imagining things.”

“You and Floriano both seem to have thought that the Prince carried Mattia Rossi’s body down to the abyss. But to have taken it down that narrow passageway you describe would have been very hard for one old man. Hard on both him and it. My guess is that he put it in a sarcophagus in the Tomb of the Guardians. And that when you fainted he made Floriano open that sarcophagus. That would explain that first shriek you heard.”

I shuddered again, at the picture those words evoked. “But those later wails? They were awful!”

Richard said very quietly, “In that famous passage of Virgil’s, the man whom the Etruscan king leaves to die is bound to another man’s body. Not to a woman.”

Well, I hope Prince Mino can rest. Richard later found confirmation of his theory, something that the
carabinieri
had missed. Something that must have been pushed out from under those stone doors carefully, delicately, with some very fine thin instrument like a steel yardstick. Only a trained searcher like Richard ever could have fished it out of all the debris that lies heaped before the Tomb of the Guardians. But as Richard says, “It had to be there. He couldn’t have gone without a word. He wasn’t the type.”

It was a neatly folded sheet of paper addressed to

Richard Keyes, Esq.

in a bold, precise, yet delicate hand. Unfolded, it read:

“My dear signore:

“I trust that by now you have found your lovely lady, and that soon neither of you will be the worse for your adventures. Permit me to offer you both my profound regrets for any inconvenience caused you by me or mine. I am only too well aware that our hospitality has not done credit to the Villa Carenni.

“Your story of the signora’s flight and of my son’s angry pursuit shows me that I did her a grave injustice, for which I most humbly beg her pardon; had I known the truth, she would have been spared certain sights and sounds which, I fear, caused her distress. Still, it is not altogether amiss for a young and beautiful woman occasionally to see something of how justice is done.

“You yourself, signore, I congratulate on the cleverness with which you outwitted me. Few men have done that, and no other with impunity. But I pardon you; you could not have been expected to understand the honor of the Carenni.

“You never had any cause to fear me; from the moment we met, I knew what I must do. Had I been fated once more to come out of this tomb chamber where so many of my possessions are still stored, we would have drunk together again and I would have drugged you, then have sought out your lady and conveyed you both to a place of safety. For one error I could not have permitted—any presumptuous meddling with my son’s just sentence—and I was in no good position to resist any such sentimental folly. I fired my last bullet into that unfortunate young man when I found him with the Signora Keyes.”

I gasped. “Then he really was helpless! All the time. Floriano and I were scared to death of an old man with an empty gun!”

“The prince would have made a fine poker player,”

Richard said dryly. He read on:

“In what I must do now I shall miss the help of my faithful Mattia, but it does not greatly matter. An explosion here will harm no real Etruscan antiquities, the tomb being of so late a date. It will destroy the bones of those who outraged my ancestor’s honor, but there are no more young Carenni to be shown them.

“My one regret is that I must hasten my son’s release from his sufferings, but perhaps they will not be greatly lessened. For some time now I have heard no sound from him, and though he does not deserve the mercy of unconsciousness, I must confess that I am somewhat glad of quiet.

“He lies there now with his head beside Mattia’s half-crushed, bloodstained gray head, and one of them makes no more sound than the other. Yet he made a great fuss when first he learned what his punishment was to be. I said, ‘When you were a child, he did you many kindnesses, this old man you have butchered. Now while your sight lasts, you shall behold your handiwork.’ I even taped his eyes so that he could not close them; that is one refinement that I think the old Rasenna did not know. And for a while the results were all that could be desired, yet now he lies as if he saw nothing. If I had more time I would try to rouse him....

“To some extent he has bested me. I see now that I never could have been the man to give my work to the world. In you I bequeath that task to a man of courage, integrity, and some scholarship. You will find my papers carefully arranged—”

All the rest was technical, the advice and instructions of one archaeologist to another. I saw Richard’s face when he put the paper down and I said, perhaps awkwardly, “I’m sorry. I know that work would have meant a lot to you.”

He grimaced. “Well, I’ll never know exactly what I’ve missed. But I am sorry for the prince. He was no vandal; he’d never knowingly have risked destroying that temple or its treasures.”

No, you were no vandal, Prince Mino. You never would have done intentional harm to precious old stone, only to sensitive, living flesh.

I said, “But that first explosion didn’t go wrong. The one they staged just after Roger’s death. I wonder what was the matter this time.”

“Mattia Rossi was there then. He may have understood explosives better than Prince Mino. Also this time the pillar was weaker; that repair job never should have been tackled by two old men.”

“And I suppose Prince Mino was too much of a megalomaniac ever to believe that anything he undertook could go wrong.”

“He had to admit one failure, Barby. About the worst kind that a man can make. His own son destroyed him.”

“He destroyed his son!” I felt a sudden flash of anger. “It wasn’t all Floriano’s fault. His father had no right to judge him; he’d helped to make him what he was.”

“You always were a bit soft on that young devil, weren’t you, Barby?” Richard’s smile was quizzical.

I winced, felt my cheeks burn. “You’ve no idea what it was like, Richard, with you lying there as if you were dead. When Floriano came, he wasn’t just beautiful—
he was the only warm, friendly thing in the world. I know I should just have been angry when he tried to make love to me, but—”

“You weren’t?” Richard looked amused. “We’re all human, honey, and some reactions are automatic, as inevitable as winds and tides. Since Floriano only tried to make love, I’ve got no kick coming. You didn’t go overboard.”

“No, I didn’t. But I’ve felt like a fool ever since. And when Prince Mino was despising me, I felt like something a whole lot worse. I couldn’t fight back.”

“Forget him. Forget both of them. Come here.” He grinned and held out his arms, and I came. We were happy. We never again have spoken of that part of what happened; Richard is not the man to rub things in. And now that we have lived together longer, loved each other longer, I understand much that I could not understand then. But I am still puzzled whenever I think of those two men that he told me to forget.

What kills it? The ability to love, to learn? Prince Mino once loved his wife; Floriano loved his mother; and in the capacity to love one thing, there must be the seed of the power to love all things. Yet Floriano, for all his magnificent maleness, was not a whole man. He and his father were alike, for all their unlikeness. What ate out their humanity—the capacity to feel pity, remorse, to share the joy and pain of other people? Yet those who feel either better or worse than their fellow humans always seem to end by being a little less than human.

I never loved Floriano, but I am glad that no pitiful travesty of his beauty still lies bound there in the depths. Glad, too, that those other poor bones, with the fetters that imprisoned them so long, have been crushed to powder by all those tons of rock, released at last. Somewhere I once read of an Eastern belief that the sense of guilt, justified or not, can bind a soul to Earth. If those poor young lovers were finally terrified into believing themselves as sinful as their murderer believed them, then their chains must have bound to that grim bed through all those centuries, in the dark.... But that is only a crazy fancy, surely. It could come only to one who also once had been judged by a Carenni.

Well, there are no more Carenni. All that summer, our first together, the villa was ours, Richard’s and mine. He offered to take me away, and I was tempted. I thought of Eos, her great wings all white loveliness in the clean gold light of morning, and then turning to black terror in the dusk. But then I thought of Richard himself.

“There is still plenty of work you can do here, isn’t there, Rick? Plenty of tombs that weren’t hurt?”

He hesitated; I saw the longing in his face. “Yes. But this place is so full of endings, I don’t believe it’s the right one for a beginning.”

“Yes, it is. Remember what you said the day we came here, Richard? That all old houses have seen both ugliness and beauty? I think this one’s been cheated. Let’s stay and give it a little of what it deserves.”

So we stayed. Sometimes at first I used to wake in the night (Richard never knew that), hearing, not the explosion, but that terrible utter quiet in which Prince Mino must have sat, writing his last letter. Seeing the everlasting darkness of the tomb chamber pressing in upon him, closer and closer, until even the lamplight could not keep it back.... But always in the mornings, when I woke again beside Richard, I would know that I was glad. Glad to be there loving in the midst of all that loveliness. It is right that beauty should be rightly used.