The Sonnet Lover (32 page)

“Ugh,” Daisy Wallace says, “you mean she would have had to marry her rapist?”

“That would have been considered a positive outcome,” Frieda says, “but it’s unlikely that a man of Barbagianni’s station would have agreed to marry an artisan’s daughter.”

“And,” I add, “he was already engaged to a woman from a wealthy family. A Cecchi.”

“An old family indeed. Yes, these old families stick together,” Claudia says, glancing at Cyril. “They have little use for commoners. They make promises they don’t keep—”

“Exactly,” I say, startling Claudia by agreeing with her so vehemently. “It’s another possibility. Perhaps Barbagianni pretended that he intended to marry Ginevra.” I take another sip of the bubbling Prosecco and the idea begins to percolate in my mind. I look around at the dining room table and it calls to mind another banquet, the one painted on the wall of my bedroom upstairs and the next painting in the grisly cycle of Nastagio raping his fiancée before the wedding night. “He lured her to the bridal suite with presents and false promises and then raped her.”

I pause, noticing that my audience is as morbidly entranced with the scene I’ve conjured as Nastagio’s guests are with the bloody scene they’re forced to witness. “When she knew that he had tricked her, she ran from the bridal suite. She ran down the hall and down the steps of the rotunda, her own blood marking the path of her flight. ‘My blood announced my anguish as I fled.’ ” I pause, realizing that I’m quoting Ginevra’s poem. I look around the table to see whether anyone gives any sign of recognition at the line, but I meet only the wide-open eyes of interested listeners. If the person who gave me the poem is at this table, he or she isn’t letting on. “Although she never became Barba-gianni’s bride, she did become his mistress, and after Cecelia Cecchi died he installed Ginevra here in this house. I think it was she who commissioned the pattern of rose petals in the nuptial suite, along the upstairs hallway, and down the steps of the rotunda.”

“I think you’ve got it all wrong,” Mara says, suddenly breaking her silence. “You say that Ginevra was sleeping with Barbagianni before he married Cecelia Cecchi—well, what if she plotted to kill her so she could take her place?”

“Well,” I say, trying not to sound condescending, “for one thing Cecelia Cecchi died in childbirth—”

“So? The Laura woman could have bribed the midwife to poison her…or let her bleed to death…I bet that’s what the bloody petals on the floor are supposed to represent—that whore’s triumph over poor Mrs. Barbagianni!”

During Mara’s increasingly hysterical speech, the server has come in to deliver the
piatto secondo
—a beefsteak Florentina. When Mara looks down at her plate, she shrieks at the sight of the bloody meat and pushes her chair away from the table. Gene reaches out a hand to restrain her, but she bats it away, screaming, “No, it’s unclean, and if you touch a carcass or you’re a witness you’re supposed to confess.” Then she runs through the open doors of the dining room out onto the loggia.

Gene looks around the table, his face baffled, and meets Mark’s gaze. Mark tells Gene that he’d better go after her.

“Yes, yes,” he says, getting up and laying his linen napkin over his plate. I wonder whether he covers the meat because of Mara’s calling it unclean. “It’s just the jet lag, you see, and this new medication she’s on, and”—his gaze falls on his plate, where the red blood of the steak is seeping up through the white cloth—“and she doesn’t eat red meat.”

When he leaves, the rest of the table is silent for several minutes. None of us has much of an appetite, I imagine. Only Cyril seems undeterred by Mara’s unflattering description of the entree and is happily tucking into the rare steak. Mark finally excuses himself, saying, “I think I’ll go see how they are. Maybe I can help.”

“It’s funny,” Frieda Mainbocher says after Mark’s gone, “but what Mara said about the meat sounded very familiar. I believe it’s from the Old Testament. Leviticus, I think.”

I nod. Yes, Mara had been quoting from her Haftorah portion, the section that stipulates what sacrifices are expected for what sins, including what’s necessary of a person who has witnessed a crime. I can only conclude from Mara’s outburst that Gene hadn’t been amenable to sacrificing his producer’s credit and one percent of the film’s revenue to come clean.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

A
FTER COFFEE IS SERVED, THE GUESTS DISPERSE QUICKLY AS IF EAGER TO DISPEL
the mood of the dinner. Some wander out onto the loggia to enjoy the night air—or in Leo Balthasar’s case, to enjoy a good cigar—but I excuse myself, pleading jet lag, and head into the rotunda. Bruno catches up with me, though, at the foot of the stairs and, laying his hand over mine on the banister, says, “Rose, I need to speak to you.”

I turn to him and am startled by the worry in his face. I almost say no, knowing that what I have to tell him will only cause him more pain, but then how much worse will it be to learn about Orlando’s role in Robin’s death with no preparation at all? “Yes, I have to speak to you, too,” I say, stepping down toward him.

“Not here,” he says, glancing around the rotunda. At the very center of the house—open to all the main public rooms on the first floor and the hallways of the second—the rotunda is indeed the worst place in which to have a private conversation.

“Where?” I ask, half afraid he’ll suggest my room—or his apartment.

“In the garden in half an hour, at the fountain. Can you find it?”

“I think so,” I say, “but why can’t we just go now?”

“I have to find Orlando first,” he says, “but I promise I’ll be there in half an hour. You should put on something warmer. As lovely as you look in that dress…” His eyes linger over my dress and I blush.

“Okay,” I say, “half an hour, then.”

“Oh, and Rose, that poem you quoted at dinner tonight about the blood in the rotunda”—we both look down at the rose-petal pattern on the floor swirling around the impluvium—“is that one of the poems in Robin’s screenplay or have you found something?”

Looking into his eyes, I find myself unable to lie. “It’s a poem I found—or rather that someone gave me last night. I don’t know who.”

He nods. “Did it come with a note?” he asks. When I nod he asks me to bring it with me.

“Okay,” I say. It seems little enough to give him in return for destroying his life. “I’ll bring it.”

I turn around then and go up the stairs. It’s not until I get to the top that I hear his footsteps echoing in the rotunda and I know that he watched my ascent.

When I get back to my room, I quickly retrieve the poem I was given last night and the other original poems I have so far—the one Robin gave me in New York and the one I found in the
cassone
—from my book bag. Then I pick up the embroidered shawl I wore around my waist last night and turn it over. I’d noticed that the black silk lining has come unstitched along one side, creating a sort of pocket that’s just the right size for the poems. I slip them into the lining and then arrange the shawl so that the poems are close to my body and the black lining faces out. Then I change my high-heeled shoes for the flat Tibetan sandals Chihiro gave me, wondering whether she imagined me using them for clandestine night journeys. I wish, for a moment, that she was here instead of in England so I could go over with her everything that’s happened in the short time I’ve been here, but then I realize that if she were here she’d probably be telling me that sneaking off to the garden in the middle of the night to meet the father of the man who killed Robin is not the smartest move I could make.

Although I’m ready, it’s still too early to go. I sit down on the bed, facing the painting of Nastagio degli Onesti wandering through the woods. I’ve left only the night light on, so the room is too dark to make out much of the painting, but the shadows only seem to bring out the lurid yellow eyes of the owls in the trees tracking Nastagio’s progress through the woods. I can’t help wondering whether Barbagianni had these eyes added to the wall painting for the benefit of his new bride so that she would know that wherever she went, he, Barbagianni the owl, would be watching her. It’s a creepy thought and makes sitting here all the more unbearable until I remember that I have another place to wait. I get up, open the door, and cross into the plain little cell I lived in twenty years ago. My little convent room. I’d almost forgotten about it.

In the moonlight its whitewashed walls have a nacreous glow—like the inside of a pearl. I sit down at the desk by the open window without turning on a light. There’s no need. A full moon has risen over the hills of Valdarno, silvering a path through the river valley to the rooftop of the
limonaia,
which, I notice, is still dark inside. The bust on the corner eave seems to be looking directly toward the path of moonlight. I always felt that she was waiting for someone to appear at the crest of the hill, and now that I’ve read Ginevra’s poems I imagine that she felt that way, too, that she sat in this very room—her only escape from Barbagianni’s paintings—penning the poems that would bring her lover across the Alps to her. Who could resist such invitations? I certainly hadn’t.

But did he come? The three poems that I’ve found so far are all by a woman asking her beloved to visit her. The fact that these poems are here at all is not a good sign. They might be copies of the poems she sent, or maybe she never sent them at all. And if she did send them, did he ever respond? Did he heed her summons and come to La Civetta? And if he did, what happened? When Ginevra left this house it wasn’t on the arm of her lover. It was alone, in a threadbare shift, and she didn’t flee to England; she followed the river thirty miles to the east—a path that would have closely followed the path of moonlight I can see now—to the Convent of Santa Catalina, where she lived out the rest of her life in a cell that was probably even smaller and colder than this one. What went wrong? Did her English lover never come? Or did he come only to find that it was impossible to revive their lost love? To forget their history of betrayal?

My thoughts are interrupted by the sound of voices rising from the
pomerino.

“I’m not crazy. I know what’s right.”

It’s Mara’s voice. I lean closer to the window to look out and I see Gene and Ned standing by Mara in the center of the walled garden. Leo Balthasar is a little ways off on a marble bench, smoking his cigar and looking impassively on as the two men try to calm Mara.

“Mom,” Ned says, extending his hand to Mara, “we can go inside and talk about it. You know how you always say that talking about things makes them better.”

Even from here I can see Mara’s face soften. “Neddy,” she says, taking his hand, “that’s absolutely right. Let’s go inside and talk. Let me tell you what your father wants me to do—”

I see Gene and Leo exchange a look, and a second later Gene has Mara by the shoulders and is pulling her away from Ned and into the library. “I think your mother is too upset to talk right now, Ned. I’d better get her into bed, and you…I’m sure you’d rather be with your friends…”

A burst of laughter comes from the opposite side of the
pomerino,
from inside the
limonaia,
and a boy and girl come tumbling out in a little cloud of marijuana smoke, which I can smell from here.

“There—isn’t that the girl you like, Chloe?” It’s a mark of how desperate Gene is to keep his son away from Mara—and from what she might tell him—that he’d rather send him off to smoke pot.

“Zoe,” Ned corrects his father. His face looks suddenly wistful and I see why. Zoe is with the handsome Orlando. I guess they’ve made up the argument they were having in New York—or now that Robin is gone, Zoe’s seeking solace in her former suitor. “And Orlando.”

The two teenagers stop short when they see the group of adults in the
pomerino.
Zoe erupts in a fit of giggles, but Orlando looks serious. He straightens up and walks across the walled garden, his posture and stance reminding me forcibly of his father. He’s walking straight toward Ned.

“We were looking for you—” he begins, but Mara hurls herself between the two boys, snarling at Orlando. “Stay away from him. Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”

It takes Leo and Gene both to hold Mara back from scratching Orlando’s face. She struggles for a moment and then collapses between the two men, sinking to the graveled pathway.

Orlando holds out his arms and looks toward Ned. “I don’t understand,” he says.

“I think you’d better leave, son,” Leo says. “In fact, why don’t you come with me.” He lays a hand on Orlando’s shoulder, but Orlando shrugs it off and with a last parting glance in Ned’s direction leaves the
pomerino
by the side gate leading onto the lemon walk.

“I’d better follow him,” Leo says. “Can you handle her?”

“Sure,” Gene says, bending down to help Mara up. Mara, though, suddenly springs to life.

“I don’t want to be
handled,
” she spits at Gene, and then, before either man can stop her, she runs out of the
pomerino,
taking the same side gate that Orlando walked through a minute ago. Ned tries to follow, but Leo grabs his arm. “I think it’s better that I talk to your mother right now. She seems to be angry about your…relationships. Let me talk to her. I’ve had some experience with these things.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—” Ned says to Leo’s retreating back, but the producer’s already through the side gate.

“Son, we should go inside,” Gene says, looking up at the villa as if suddenly aware that there are windows facing onto the
pomerino.
I move back a few inches into my darkened room, hoping Gene hasn’t seen me. “It’s nobody’s business—”

“A minute ago you said I should go off with my friends,” Ned says defiantly. He moves over to Zoe, who’s been watching the whole scene goggled-eyed as if it were a reality TV show, and drapes his arm around her shoulders. He glares at his father as if daring him to intervene, and Gene throws up his arms in an exaggerated display of parental pique. “Fine—do whatever you like,” he says. He turns and goes into the library. Ned whispers something in Zoe’s ear that makes her giggle, and they head toward the
limonaia,
but before they reach it Zoe whispers something into Ned’s ear and they veer off to the side gate. I keep staring at the deserted
pomerino
as if waiting for the next act, but when no one else appears I realize I’m going to be late for my assignation with Bruno. I can only hope that all the people who have just headed off into the garden aren’t going in the direction of the fountain.