The Sonnet Lover (23 page)

Of course, I think turning back to watch the performance as Bruno goes, the grief in this dance is not for Titania and Oberon, but for the original Puck—Robin Weiss. I should have known it was originally Robin’s part. Robin would have made the perfect Puck; even his name echoes one of Puck’s aliases: Robin Goodfellow. When Orlando has finished his dance, he sinks to the ground, wrapping his arms around his knees in exactly the same pose he’d assumed that night in the park after Robin’s death. I’m relieved when the actors playing Titania and Oberon appear and enact their quarrel. “The parts will be spoken in the final performance,” Bruno, who’s returned to my side, whispers in my ear, “but the director wanted this wordless prologue to precede the play.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say as Titania and her retinue leave the stage, their lights slowly dying as they fade into the
teatrino
’s green stage wings. Oberon’s dark fairies remain, but curl into tight balls around their lanterns, extinguishing the lights one by one. Only Oberon and Puck remain at the center of the stage, lit by a single lantern. Oberon performs a slow stately dance around Puck, telling him, I remember from the play, of how he saw Cupid shoot an arrow at the young virgin queen and miss, the bolt falling on a “western flower,” turning it from milk white to “purple with love’s wound.” Oberon points toward the
limonaia
to send Puck on his quest for this love potion—the touch of which will make any man or woman love the next creature that he or she sees—and Orlando springs to life, runs uphill, and then grabs a rope held by another fairy, and suddenly he is airborne, swinging over our heads into the
limonaia.
The crowd gasps at the stunning leap, but I am painfully reminded of the moment when Orlando rushed from the balcony after Robin’s death. I don’t have time to ruminate on the memory, though. I hear a rustling sound above my head. Again I think of the manuscript pages that had once been strung to dry in the
limonaia,
and when I look up I see they’re raining down on us. Only it’s not paper, but a shower of purple and white petals, Shakespeare’s love-in-idleness, settling over hair and eyelashes and shoulders. Everybody is clapping and laughing in the downpour, the fairies taking their bows in a final explosion of purple fireworks and then scampering offstage while the Capulet actors resume their dancing and the waiters light the table candles and serve Vin Santo and almond cookies. Bruno plucks a petal from my hair and touches it first to his eyelid and then to mine, and I can feel the echo of that velvet touch in every atom of my flesh.

I open my mouth to speak, but the voice I hear isn’t my own.

“Rose, I told you to be careful,” a voice admonishes me. “And now look!”

I turn around and see Mara standing at our table, her arms open wide. “It’s gone! Your Hermès scarf ring is gone.”

I sigh and leave Bruno to make my way back to my seat, scanning the petal-strewn table, and then, pulling out my chair, I spy the glint of silver. “It’s just been moved to my chair, Mara…” I begin, and then stop, because I’ve noticed that what I thought was my napkin rolled into the ring is actually a piece of paper—the same type of yellowed parchment I found in Robin’s package back home.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

M
ARA PEERS OVER THE TABLE TO SEE FOR HERSELF THAT MY
H
ERMÈS SCARF
ring is safe, but before she can see it I slip the rolled parchment out of the ring and into the fold between my shawl and dress. Then I hold up the silver ring for her to see. “It’s definitely mine,” I say. “Here are my initials.”

“Well, you’re lucky,” she says, frowning at the espresso cups being laid out on the table. “You really should put it away someplace safe.” “You’re right,” I tell her. “In fact, I’m going to take it up to my room right now.” I turn to say good night to Bruno, but he’s vanished into the crowd. Mark hasn’t returned and Daisy Wallace has also left. I suppress a niggling suspicion that she’s gone off to find Mark. Really, it must be the atmosphere at La Civetta that breeds jealous thoughts—or these magic petals strewn across the tabletops and floor.

I leave Mara looking for Gene, and Leo Balthasar trying to negoti-ate decaf American-style coffee from the waiters. As I walk through the
pomerino
toward the villa I see that all the interior lights have been turned off, no doubt so that they wouldn’t interfere with the light show in the garden. The library—also known as the Sala dei Ucelli because of the frescoes of birds that adorn the ceiling—is lit only by the moonlight coming in from the windows. I can just make out the profusion of painted songbirds fluttering through the branches of a painted grove and, at the top of the domed ceiling, a great horned owl, its wings spread and talons extended, about to descend on its unsuspecting prey. I consider switching on a lamp and reading my mysterious missive here, but the room has always made me uneasy. As I cross the tiled floor I can hear the parchment crinkling under my shawl, and the sound, like mice running through dry brush, makes me feel like the owl’s prey. Better to wait for the privacy of my own room.

When I enter the rotunda, though, I see that it’s empty, and although it’s also unlit, the moonlight pouring through the oculus is so bright, I can see clearly. I find I can’t bear to wait any longer. At the foot of the steps I take the parchment out and unroll it. The sonnet is written in the same antiquated hand that penned the poem I read in New York. The drawing that forms the border is in the same faded ink, only now instead of lemon trees the poem is framed by roses shedding their petals. I read as I walk up the steps, the sound of my footsteps keeping time with the meter of the poem.

I long for thee more than the wind can know,

More desperately than roses for the sun;

I crave the grace thy kisses can bestow

Upon my fallen self’s scarred flesh and bone.

My violation was no fault of mine;

My lowborn fate turned woeful in this bed

In contradiction of divine design;

My blood announced my anguish as I fled.

But on these very stairs once streaked with shame,

Thy trail of petals starts, leading up to

Our destiny to merge; pink wisps proclaim

Perfection greater than what Adam knew.

For blood is fleeting but love’s perfect rose

Blooms from eternity, as sunlight knows.

I pause at the top of the stairs and read the poem over again. The opening line echoes the closing couplet that’s on the rim of the fountain, as do the rose wisps in the eleventh line, suggesting that the poem is either by Ginevra or by someone imitating her. Here, though, the bed strewn with roses has become the site of violation, the rose petals have been transformed into the blood of defiled virginity, and then that blood is turned into a marble trail to lead her lover to her bed.

I look down at my feet. At the top of the stairs the pattern of rose petals ends at the border of narrow carpet that lines the hallway. I hook my foot under the edge of the carpet and kick back a corner. Yes, the pattern continues under the rug. I look down the hall toward my bedroom—the nuptial suite with its frescoes of garden and grove and its
cassone
painted with traditional wedding scenes to celebrate a marriage. If the poem in my hand really was written by Ginevra de Laura in the sixteenth century, then perhaps the pattern of roses embedded in the bedroom floor, in the hall, and down the steps of the grand staircase was commissioned by her to commemorate her own deflowering in this house and to turn the shame of that blood into a path her lover can follow up to the bedroom to find her.

It’s far more likely, though, that such a fanciful idea came from Robin Weiss’s fevered imagination and that he has concocted these poems out of the myth and gossip that surround La Civetta. The floor, the wall paintings, and the
cassone
were probably all there before Ginevra de Laura was even born. Certainly the
cassone
must predate her, since
cassoni
went out of fashion by the early sixteenth century and the wall paintings look like they’re from the same period. As for the floor…well, I suppose it’s possible that the floor is later, because
pietre dure
became popular in the late sixteenth century. But I shouldn’t have to depend on stylistic clues alone. The villa’s archives include the ac-count books and inventories of the Barbagianni family going back to the fifteenth century, when the villa was built. I should be able to find out when the bridal suite was painted, which bride brought the painted
cassone
into the house as her dowry, and when the tiled floors were laid. Even if they were created during Ginevra’s time, it seems unlikely that she, a mistress, not a wife, would have had anything to do with their commission.

Whoever has written these poems has finally made a mistake by including a detail that can be verified or disproved through a little historical research. I decide to go back to my room and turn in for the night so that my head will be clear in the morning. As I turn down the hallway, though, I’m startled to see Daisy Wallace coming out of my room. I imagine she must be startled to see me as well, but if she is, she recovers quickly. She squares her shoulders and approaches me, head up, very much as if I were the intruder and she were the lady of the manor. Her attitude makes me wonder whether she had been totally honest when she claimed her family had no interest in La Civetta. It also makes me feel sufficiently wary of her that I tuck the sonnet back into my shawl before she can see it.

“Was there something in my room that interested you?” I ask when she’s reached me.

“Your room? Oh, I didn’t realize it had been assigned to you. My apologies. I wanted to see it because it was Lucy’s room. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that she was my great-aunt?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten. I also remember you saying that no one in your family wanted anything to do with this villa. I’m surprised you’re so interested in Lucy’s old room.”

Daisy looks pale, but then I realize that the moonlight has bleached her face, her blond hair, and her white dress so that she looks like an apparition. “I’ve been reading Lucy’s letters,” she says, “and she mentions several times that she believed the room was haunted. She said that at night she could see the figures on the walls moving and that she heard sounds coming from the
cassone
at the foot of the bed. She believed that a young bride who was brought to this house was murdered on her wedding night because her husband discovered she wasn’t a virgin and that he stuffed her body into the
cassone
and returned it to the family.”

“Then what’s the
cassone
still doing here?” I ask.

Daisy opens her mouth but says nothing.

“And as for the moving figures on the wall,” I continue, “I think you have to remember Lucy’s drinking problem.”

“It’s not that I think the room is actually haunted,” Daisy says, recovering her composure. “Obviously, Lucy was imposing her own feeling of imprisonment at being forced to marry against her wishes and made to move to a foreign country.”

“I didn’t realize she was forced to marry Sir Lionel.”

“Yes, the marriage was arranged by her mother, who liked the idea of having a titled son-in-law. And Sir Lionel liked the idea of her money.”

“It sounds,” I say, “like the plot of a Henry James novel.”

“But these were real people. That’s what you academics never get. Lucy had dreams of her own. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and came to Europe to study art. Instead she ended up embalmed in this museum.” Daisy sweeps her arm in an arc to indicate the rotunda. I had thought, earlier in the evening, that her pale, loose dress made her look like Rossetti’s Mary, but now she looks like one of Burne-Jones’s hungry sylphs reaching up though the water to drag an unsuspecting sailor down into the watery depths.

“So, what did you make of the room?” I ask. “It seems like an awfully pleasant prison to me.”

“Have you looked closely at the paintings on the walls and on the
cassone
?” she asks.

“No,” I answer, “I haven’t had the time.”

Daisy smiles. “When you do, I think you’ll see what I’m talking about. They’re downright creepy. I can’t imagine what kind of sick mind would put a young bride in there. It almost makes me believe my father’s story about the steps…” Daisy looks down toward the marble steps I’ve just come up and I see her eyes widen. As I turn I almost expect to see someone coming up them—some apparition conjured out of Lucy Graham’s alcoholic delirium—but instead I see that the steps are stained with crimson drops. I’m trying to reconcile these pools of red with the faded pattern I saw before, but then a current of air—stirred by the opening of a door in one of the rooms leading into the rotunda—spirals up the steps and the pools of red quiver like raindrops falling into a pool. Only when one strays over my foot and I feel its velvety caress—so like the petal Bruno stroked over my eyelid earlier tonight—do I realize what they are. I kneel and pick one up and hold it out for Daisy to see.

“Look, they’re just rose petals,” I say.

“But where did they come from?” she asks, her eyes still wide. “They weren’t on the steps when I came upstairs a few minutes ago.”

I touch the back of my head and feel a bare thorn embedded in my hair. “It’s from the rose I was wearing in my hair,” I tell Daisy. “Its petals fell while I was climbing the stairs.”

Daisy nods, accepting my explanation, but as she says a hurried good night and heads down the hall in the opposite direction from my room, I have the feeling that the fact that the ghostly phenomenon has come from me is no relief to her. Looking down at the petal-strewn steps, I have to admit, it doesn’t make me feel any easier either. Nor, as I make my way down the darkened hall, do I find that I’m able to dismiss from my mind Daisy’s hysterical description of the paintings in my room. I could, of course, choose not to examine them now, but her account has piqued my interest, and when I open my door I have, for just a second, the unsettling impression that the figures on the walls are waiting for me. I turn around in a slow circle, scanning the scenes, looking for where the narrative begins. I find it, I think, in the large painting on the right side of the bed, where a courtly young man, expensively dressed in gilded tunic, embroidered tights, and a hat adorned with peacock feathers, takes his leave of a beautiful young damsel in a walled rose garden. The youth passes through an arched doorway and then reappears in another painting on the east wall wandering through a dark and mysterious forest. The sequence appears to proceed clockwise from the perspective of the bed.