The Sonnet Lover (19 page)

The notion had struck my imagination then and it still has power now. This could be the forest of Arden from
As You Like It
or the enchanted woods in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The gardens of La Civetta seem to exist outside time and place, just as Shakespeare’s characters transcend their age and circumstances. As if to confirm my thoughts, I hear, from the
teatrino,
a voice reciting lines I recognize from
Romeo and Juliet.

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

I can just make out from where I stand the boy’s white shirt fluttering as he gestures on the grassy stage and the swirl of the girl’s spangled Indian skirt as she answers:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this:

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

I don’t wait for the kiss that ends the scene. I move past the
teatrino,
feeling insubstantial again, like a ghost spying on the living, and enter the knot garden. As I follow the narrow, curving paths I realize that the latter part of Robin’s film was made here—the part in which Zoe runs through the ruined garden after she has been betrayed by Orlando. From the film I recognize the broken statuary strewn across the paths. Arms and legs are scattered in the overgrown rosebushes as if there had been some massacre and these were the bodies of the dead. No heads, I notice. No doubt the garden was plundered for salvageable busts. I imagine Cyril selling them for pocket cash to his antiques dealer in Florence, and that now those marble faces—women’s faces, I gather, from the delicacy and curve of the broken limbs—lie atop coffee tables and bookcases in apartments in Rome, New York, and Paris, like exiled princesses.

When I get to the fountain at the center of the garden, I remember that this is where Zoe sees Orlando and the other woman reading the Moroccan-bound notebook. When I saw the film in New York, I’d read the scene as a generalized depiction of betrayal. The book stood for the lover’s innermost thoughts about the beloved. The lines of Shake-speare’s poems that the audience hears might be the poems in the book—or they might be meant to suggest the
sort
of love poetry to be found in the lover’s notebook. It didn’t seem necessary to know for sure in order to feel the sting of betrayal when another woman sits with the beloved and laughs at the contents of the book.

Now, though, as I tug at the thick underbrush that covers the rim of the fountain, I wonder whether Robin was re-creating his discovery of the lost poems in the film. Perhaps Robin had shown the poems to Orlando and Orlando wanted to use them for his own purposes—to sell them or write his own story about Ginevra de Laura and William Shakespeare…I pause with a vine in my hands, realizing that it’s far more likely that Bruno would write a book like that. In fact, it would be the perfect book for him to write. If Orlando told him about Robin’s discovery, Bruno might have asked him to get the poems for him. Perhaps it was Bruno who sent Orlando to New York.

The idea upsets me so much that I tug too fiercely on the tangled vegetation that is still keeping me from the center of the fountain, releasing a thick, thorny vine that snaps back at me, snagging my hair and wrapping itself around my head. I cry out and step back, but that only entangles me further.

“Stay still,” a man’s voice says from behind me, “and I’ll get you out.”

I try to turn toward the voice, but the thorns scratch my face. I feel hands moving through my hair, slowly unraveling the vine from each strand. I’m reminded, oddly, of the medieval tapestry in the rotunda that depicts a man releasing a bird from a net into a gilded cage. As I turn around I feel as one of those birds must, freed from one trap only to find itself caught in a larger one. In my case, it’s Bruno’s eyes that have snared me, the fine lines that have grown around them only making them a wider net. I feel myself falling into them, but then I remem-ber that he could have been the one to send Orlando to hound Robin for the poems. Which would mean that he could be the one responsible for Robin’s death.

“Rose,” he says, making of my one-syllable name a long, drawn-out sigh.

“Bruno,” I say, trying to make my voice cool, but it’s hard to sound imperious with tangled hair and scratched hands.

“You’ve torn your dress,” he says.

I look down and see a small tear-shaped rip in the gathers of the bodice.

“It’s along the seam,” I say—inanely! Am I really, after all these years, talking to Bruno about clothing repairs? “I can sew it back together easily.”

“
Brava.
It’s a lovely dress. The color of your name. And all these years I’ve been afraid you’d become one of those New York women who dress only in black.”

“As though I’d gone into mourning?” I ask, arriving now at the tone I’d meant to assume in the first place.

Bruno smiles—a small, reserved smile. “Well, you did return upon the death of your aunt, I remember, and your mother died sometime after, no?”

“Yes,” I say, disarmed by the sympathy in his voice. “And I heard your mother died. I’m sorry. It’s hard to imagine anyone replacing her here…”

I falter, remembering who
has
replaced her. It hasn’t taken us long to get to the heart of the matter. Bruno winces as though he’s been trapped, and I remember another detail from the tapestry in the rotunda. The man who kneels to unsnare the bird from the net is watched by a lady carrying a falcon on her arm. In the language of love practiced in medieval art, the tethered falcon is a reminder that even the hunter can be trapped. It’s some relief to see that he’s not totally in control of the situation, that he’s been unnerved by my presence as much as I have been by his. My heart is racing. But then, I tell myself, maybe that’s because it’s just occurred to me that he might be involved in Robin’s death.

“No one imagines that Claudia is a replacement for my mother,” Bruno says, “least of all Claudia. But it suited her purposes to come back here when my mother died.”

“You mean because of the lawsuit?”

“Ah.” Bruno tugs at the skin under his right eye, skin that has become darker since the last time I saw him affect this fundamentally European gesture (its meaning, I learned over time, ranging from “You can’t fool me” to “You’ve caught me”). “I see you’ve been keeping up with La Civetta’s abundant store of gossip.”

“Actually, I only heard about it a few weeks ago. I was surprised that you and Claudia would be here and that Cyril would allow it when you’re suing him.”

“Cyril and Claudia are both believers in the maxim ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Technically, I’m not suing anybody. The Brunelli family trust is suing the estate of La Civetta. It’s all civil enough, and in the meantime, where else would I go?” He holds up his hands and, although I know he means to include all of La Civetta in the gesture, I imagine he means the rose garden, the fountain, this very moment. Perhaps it is what he means, because as he lowers his arms, he says, “I see it’s drawn you back as well.”

“I was offered a job on the film,” I say primly, “as a research consultant.”

“Ah, I see. And you’ve come to the rose garden to do research?”

I look down at the fountain, at the torn-up shrubbery; the center is still covered by thick vines. I’ll have to come back to look in the basin for the poems, but for now I have to invent another reason for being here.

“Yes, I remembered the lines of poetry that are inscribed on the fountain. You were the one who showed them to me.” I say it as if it’s his fault I’m here—not just in the rose garden, but in Italy. I suddenly feel immensely tired and a little dizzy—the jet lag catching up with me. Surely that is what keeps making me feel
flimsy
—as if I’d left part of myself somewhere over the Atlantic and it hasn’t had time to catch up with me yet. “The boy who wrote the screenplay used them in one of his poems. Perhaps you showed them to him?”

“Ah, Robin.
Povero raggazo.
Orlando told me what happened. It’s upset him tremendously.”

“You know, the police wanted to speak with him after Robin died, but he disappeared,” I say. “And we’ve all wondered what he was doing in New York.”

Bruno shrugs his shoulders. “Teenagers—who can make any sense of what they do and why? I tried to tell him it was foolish to go to New York, and look at what happened. And then he was afraid of the American police. He watches too much of your American television shows,
CSI, Law and Order
…He was afraid they’d find some speck of Robin’s hair on his lapel and send him to prison. I’ve taken Orlando to the American ambassador and he answered his questions. He wants now to act in this movie the Americans are doing. You know, he was working with Robin on the script.”

“Yes, Leo Balthasar told me there was some disagreement over the writing credit for the screenplay. Perhaps he wrote the poem that’s in the script,” I say. “If so, he’s inherited your poetic talent. It’s very good.”

At the mention of the poem, a change comes over Bruno’s face, a stillness that freezes his usually mobile features as if he were posing for a picture, and I wonder whether it’s because he thinks I know where the poems are.

“You mean you don’t believe the poem is by William Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, Ginevra de Laura?” he asks.

“Well, I’ve only read one of the poems…but perhaps you’ve read others.”

Bruno hesitates. “I’ve heard one of the poems described, but no, I’m afraid I’m at an even greater disadvantage. I haven’t read any of these poems.”

“But you’ve heard the stories about Ginevra de Laura. You were the one who told me about her—” I blush, remembering the circumstances under which he imparted that particular lesson. “Finding those poems and proving that they were by Shakespeare’s Dark Lady would be a real scholarly coup for you, wouldn’t it?”

“And for you as well,” Bruno says. “Is that why you’re really here, Rose? To make your academic reputation?”

It’s exactly what I’ve just accused him of, so I shouldn’t be surprised—or as hurt as I feel by the sudden coolness in his voice. This
is
what I wanted, I remind myself, to establish right away that there was nothing between us. He’s also provided me with a chance to explain my presence here—and my search for the poems—that doesn’t involve Orlando and my suspicions about Robin’s death.

“Yes,” I reply, “I’d like to find those poems—if they exist. Not because I think they’re by the Dark Lady, but because I’m writing a book on Renaissance women poets. The discovery of a previously unknown poet would be a valuable addition to the book. I remember that you told me that Ginevra was Lorenzo Barbagianni’s mistress. Isn’t it more likely that if she wrote a series of poems they were addressed to him rather than to William Shakespeare?”

“Not if you knew anything about Lorenzo. He was a bit of a brute. No, according to references in contemporary diaries, she wrote to an unnamed lover. Someone she met as a young girl—an Englishman, it was thought, since the poems were written in English—before she became Barbagianni’s mistress and came to live here at La Civetta. After Barbagianni’s death she went to live in the Convent of Santa Catalina. It was believed that she destroyed the poems, but I came across a letter recently from the mother superior of the convent in the early seventeenth century referring to the ‘creative outpouring’ of one of her nuns, and it occurred to me that she might have been speaking about Ginevra de Laura and that Ginevra could have taken the poems with her to the convent. And if that were so, it’s possible they were brought here after the 1966 flood when Lucy Graham ‘saved’ the water-damaged books by bringing them to La Civetta and appropriating the ones she thought might be valuable.”

“If they’ve been in Lucy Graham’s archives since then, why haven’t I heard of it? Why hasn’t anyone—you, for instance—published it?”

“Because they’re not in the archives. I’ve looked, of course. It’s possible, though, that Lucy hid the poems when she realized how valuable they were. I’ve been looking for them for years. It’s one of the reasons I came back.”

I look away, up toward the villa, not wanting to ask what his other reasons might have been. All I can see of the building from here is a glimpse of golden ochre shimmering through the holm oaks and yew hedges. “It would make a great story, wouldn’t it? An undiscovered sixteenth-century Renaissance woman poet who wrote sonnets in English. And you’ve never found a single poem? You said you heard one described…”

“Just an old family story,” Bruno says. “My mother said Sir Lionel gave her a poem once, but she wasn’t really sure who it was by, and when I tried to ask her about it she refused to say more. No, the only lines of Ginevra’s I’ve read are these two lines…Do you remember them?”

While I’ve been looking up at the villa, Bruno has been excavating the fountain, pulling out handfuls of twisted rose vines, not gently as he removed the vine from my hair before, but roughly, so that all the roses on the vine have shed their crimson petals over the marble fountain and his hands are scratched from the thorns. There’s a hunger in his eyes that I recognize from the first time we met here and he asked me whether I thought one had to experience passion in order to write poetry. It occurs to me now that I’d never answered the question.

He holds back a last tangle with one hand and with the other circles my waist to draw me closer. Through the thin fabric of my dress I can feel the warmth of his arm penetrate my skin, setting off a vibration that radiates across my back like a net woven of electricity. In pulling the vines from the rim of the fountain, Bruno has also cleared the basin, which is empty. I barely have time to register my disappointment that the poems are not here before Bruno reads the two lines out loud.