The Sonnet Lover (42 page)

“So he
did
show you the poems?” I say, sitting down on the side of her bed. I’ve tried to say it as gently as possible so she won’t think I’m accusing her, but she still colors deeply.

“I didn’t mean to lie to President Abrams, honest. When Robin read me the poem I thought it was one he made up. He’d printed it up on the Web site he made for the film—”

“Web site?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if it’s still up. He’d gotten some computer major to design it and paid for a few months’ maintenance. He thought it would generate interest in the film. Do you have a computer?”

I go into my room and retrieve my laptop and hand it to Zoe. I watch over her shoulder as she types in GinevradeLaura.com. The screen turns deep lilac—the color of the evening skies the last two nights—and then a rosebud unfurls on the screen. To the strains of Elizabethan lute music the rosebud opens, blooms, and fades, and then, one by one, the petals fall off the stem.

“You click on one of the petals and…ta-da!”

The screen fades and resolves into a schematic rendition of an ornately furnished Renaissance bedroom. “It’s my room,” I say, amazed at the detail of the drawing. There’s the
cassone
and the wall paintings and the tapestry. The only difference between this rendition and the room next door is that the carpet’s been removed in the virtual room. Instead the floor is covered by the
pietre dure
rose pattern.

“It’s not finished,” Zoe says, clicking on the bed and tapestry and getting a window that reads “Site Under Construction.” “His idea was to have a poem connected to each object in the room and then if you clicked on the window you’d go outside and find poems in the gardens. Only Robin ran out of money. Here, I think there’s a poem in one of these petals on the floor.”

Zoe drags the cursor over the rose petals on the floor until it turns into a hand, and then she clicks. The room fades and a page opens that’s the color and texture of old parchment. The poem is written in flowing script, which I follow as a voice—Robin’s, I realize with a pang—reads aloud.

Be not dismayed at winter’s icy breath,

At jagged winds that tear and whirl fresh snow,

Revealing rock as chill and still as death,

Since balm of rose awaits thee soon below.

The very wind whose frigid hands thou feelst,

Those daggered enemies of flesh and bone,

Transforms to sweetness, hands that soothe and healst,

When thou descends into the southern sun.

Here other hands await, mine dewed with love

As roses are asplash in April’s rays,

Their petals plucked by breezes on the move

From icy Alps to open-windowed days.

Our bed awaits thee, strewn with wisps of rose,

My longing more than any the wind knows.

“Those last two lines are inscribed on the fountain in the garden, so it really is by Ginevra de Laura, but where did he find them?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Not in the archives—I told President Abrams that—because I had the key and he was only in there when I was in there, but I do have an idea.”

“Yes?”

Zoe blushes again and tilts her chin toward the door to my room. “In there. We sneaked in there a few times—only I didn’t like those creepy pictures, so I refused to go there anymore. Robin kept going there, though, and I think he’d gone there with Orlando, so maybe that’s where—” Zoe interrupts herself by yawning and I feel instantly guilty that I’ve kept her up.

“You need to get some rest now,” I say, taking my laptop and closing it on Robin’s clever Web site. “I’ll leave my door open. Don’t be afraid to call me if you wake up and need anything.”

“S’okay,” Zoe slurs, her eyes already closed. “I feel safe here,” she says, and then her mouth falls slack and her breathing deepens.

I turn off her light and close the door partially so that the light from my room won’t disturb her. I plan to keep my lights on for a while so that I can thoroughly search the room.

First, though, I reopen Robin’s Web site and search the virtual room, making a note of every place that’s been marked to hold a poem. I end up with a list that includes almost every object in the room: the
cassone,
the bed, each of the wall paintings, the tapestry, the window, the dressing table (although in the picture the place taken up by Lucy Graham’s art deco table is filled with a Renaissance curio cabinet—itself decorated with
pietre dure
panels, each one of which hides a window where Robin planned to include a poem), and many of the scattered petals on the floor. When I’ve completed my search of the virtual room, I start looking through the real one.

I start with the
cassone,
removing Orlando’s robe and feeling along the bottom, sides, and top, wincing at the feel of Ginevra’s nail marks and the sight of the dark stains on the bottom while I search for a secret compartment. But there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to hide anything. After I’ve put back the robe and closed the
cassone,
I roll back the carpet and creep over the bare floor on my hands and knees (my knees still tender from my fall in Bruno’s apartment), feeling for loose stones in the floor pattern. I even crawl under the bed, stifling the feeling I have of being entombed while I’m under there. Then I search the walls, starting on the right side of the bed and going over every inch of painted wall, looking for a hidden compartment. When I get to the tapestry of the two courtly lovers, I lift it and stare at the disgusting picture underneath, forcing myself to inspect it closely for cracks or openings. I find nothing. None of the furniture in the room except for the
cassone
dates from the Renaissance, but still I search the bed frame and the bottoms of the chairs and go through the bureau drawers. In the dressing table I find a drawer filled with letters, but they all date from the 1940s and ’50s and comprise the correspondence of Lucy Wallace Graham. I flip through this depressing compendium of the life of a bored socialite: invitations to teas and dinners, responses from garden societies in England concerning Lucy’s attempt to get a rose named after herself, and Lucy’s own letters to Cyril at boarding school, which she must have collected back from her son. There’s nothing in any of these even remotely about love or poetry. The only person I can imagine being interested in them is Daisy Wallace, and so I put them all in an Hermès shopping bag and write her name on it to give to her tomorrow. By the time I’ve searched the entire room, the sky outside is getting light and I suddenly realize how exhausted I am.

Before going to bed, though, I check on Zoe one more time (I’ve peeked into her room several times over the night), unable to banish the idea that she’s in danger. In the pearl light of dawn she looks very young and innocent—not so different from the young novices who once lived in the convents she’s suddenly so interested in visiting, although I doubt any of them ever had Zoe’s exact shade of hair. Nor do I imagine that Zoe’s fascination with convents would last more than a couple of nights in a real one (although the idea of locking her away in one, out of harm’s way, doesn’t seem so bad right now).

I go back to my room and crawl into bed, my head a jumble of impressions from the day: the tall gloomy cypresses of the English Cemetery, the red roofs around Santa Croce, Ginevra trapped inside the
cassone
at the foot of my bed, Zoe’s pale face when I thought she was dead…and running through all of these images are flashes of the moments I spent with Bruno on the couch in his apartment, each of those brief moments seeming to swell over the other events of the day. Each time I remember a touch, a sigh, a glance, I feel him near me.

Just before I fall asleep, though, I recall what Zoe said about missing the field trip to Santa Catalina last year. Robin had come back from the trip “all excited,” and soon after that he had read one of Ginevra’s poems to Zoe. I’d been more interested in Zoe’s inadvertent confession to seeing the poems then, but now I think about that trip to the convent. Had he found the poems there? Is that why no one’s found them here—because they’re at the convent in the Valdarno? I remember taking a field trip there myself twenty years ago. It was a long trip, but doable in one day and worth the journey. I remember the convent as pretty and peaceful. I close my eyes, imagining an old stone building by a river in the undulating hills of the Valdarno, and for the first time in three nights I fall into a dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX

I
WAKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING FEELING ODDLY ALERT AND CERTAIN OF
what I should do, as if a veil that had been hanging over my eyes had finally been torn away—or maybe it’s just that my jet lag has finally vanished. When I check in on Zoe, I see that she’s still sleeping, but her breathing is regular and more color has returned to her face. I consider waking her to ask whether she’d like to come to the Valdarno with me, but then I realize that it would be too draining a trip for her after what she’d been through last night. Still, I don’t feel easy leaving her alone. When I’ve finished dressing in hiking shorts and a T-shirt, I take the robe from the
cassone
and bundle it into the Hermès shopping bag. Then I go down the hall to the west wing.

Daisy Wallace, wrapped as tight as a mummy in a pale blue cashmere robe, opens her door gingerly as if afraid to let in drafts. “Is anything wrong?” she asks, gripping a fold of her robe to her throat. “Is Zoe okay?”

“She’s fine,” I say, “but I have to go away today, and I think someone should keep an eye on her.”

“I don’t understand,” Daisy says. “Why would anyone want to hurt Zoe Demarchis?”

I look anxiously down the hall to indicate that I’m worried about being overheard—I know that Mark’s room is in this wing—but Daisy doesn’t take my hint and invite me into her room. She does lower her voice to a whisper, though. “Does this have anything to do with what happened on the balcony in New York?”

“I think so,” I say, relieved that she’s anticipated my fears. “I’m afraid that Zoe maybe saw something.” I reach into the shopping bag and pull out Orlando’s robe, holding up the piece pinned with Robin’s button. “I found this”—I’m about to say “in Bruno’s apartment” but change my mind—“in the props room. The button pinned to it belonged to Robin Weiss—I’m sure of it. If you check with the police in New York, I’ll bet they’ll have in their report that Robin was missing a button from his jacket.”

I look up to see whether Daisy’s following all this. Her eyes are as round as the button, but she nods when she sees that I’m staring at her. “So, you’re saying it was Orlando who pushed Robin?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so—and he must think Zoe saw him do it. There’s also this.” I hold up the vial that poisoned Zoe. “It was with the robe.” True enough, I think; I found the vial close to where Orlando had tossed the robe.

“You mean he also poisoned Zoe Demarchis?”

“Either him or his mother, Claudia,” I say, wishing I could at least spare Orlando the onus of one crime, but there’s probably no point—Orlando will try to protect his mother anyway. “So, you see,” I tell Daisy, “you have to make sure that neither Orlando nor Claudia gets anywhere near Zoe today.”

“But where are you going?”

“I have an idea how Robin found the poems, but I can’t go without knowing that you’ll make sure she’s safe.”

“Don’t worry,” Daisy says, “I won’t let her out of my sight—but you can’t expect me to keep quiet. I have to take this to the police and I’ll have to say you gave it to me.”

I nod, unable to think of an argument against this course of action. It is the best way of keeping Zoe safe, but it also means that Bruno will know that I’ve accused his son and wife of murder. That I didn’t have the guts to do it in person will only make it worse. I don’t expect that he’ll want to have anything more to do with me by the time I get back here tonight.

It takes two buses to reach the train station near Santa Maria Novella, where I switch to another bus that takes me south into the Valdarno, the valley from whence both the Arno and the Tiber spring, following the river past Incisa Valdarno, where Petrarch was born, and San Giovanni Valdarno, where Masaccio was born and where, in the basilica, is a fresco I remember from a school field trip of a local miracle—a grandmother able to give milk to her starving grandchild. From San Giovanni I take another bus west through the forested mountains of Pratomagno and get off at the little village of Santa Catalina Valdarno, the closest town to the convent. Since it’s a three-mile walk to the convent and it’s already noon, I buy cheese, bread, olives, and a bottle of mineral water—stuffing them all into the deep pockets of my hiking shorts—before setting out.

The day is warm and my legs are still sore from hiking up the hill to the villa yesterday, but it feels good to be in the countryside. For the first time since I’ve arrived in Italy I feel peaceful and I wonder whether Ginevra de Laura felt this when she left La Civetta and came to this valley.

In less than an hour I see the convent below me—a collection of low gray-stone (
pietre serena,
I remember that kind of stone is called) buildings with red-tile roofs sheltered in a curve of the river. The buildings are surrounded by olive groves and a grassy pasture sloping up from the river where sheep graze. The convent still produces its own wool for the tapestries it makes, I remember as I walk down through the grove. I pass several nuns in gray habits picking black olives from the trees and dropping them into rough hemp bags that hang around their necks. I notice that each nun has a wooden spindle tucked into the rope belt tied around her waist. I say hello, but they only smile and nod at me. I wonder whether they’ve taken vows of silence. After the loquacious and literary Sister Clarissa, I’d been expecting a nun conversant with the history of the convent. Now I hope I at least get one who talks.