The Sonnet Lover (46 page)

Cyril is standing above Mark with a small silver pistol in his hand, his face pursed in disapproval—but whether it’s because Mark had been about to kill me or because Mark’s blood is dripping down the marble steps, I’m not sure. He shakes his head as if he were thinking of how hard it will be to scrub the bloodstain off the marble. I can’t think of anything better to say than, “Why aren’t you at the play?” to which he answers, “Oh, my dear, when you get to my age you really have had enough of tragic endings.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

I
THINK YOU
’
D BETTER GO CALL THE POLICE
,” C
YRILSAYSTOME
, “
AND AN
ambulance.”

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Mark says, drawing his lips back in pain. “You could dress it yourself…No need to call the police…I won’t press charges…”

Cyril starts to laugh. “Do you hear that, Rose? He won’t press charges. I don’t suppose you feel the same.”

“Certainly not. He was trying to kill me—and he did kill Robin.”

“You can’t prove that,” Mark says. His breath is getting ragged. He really could bleed to death, and though a moment ago he was about to kill me, I find myself not wanting him to die—not out of any sympathy for him but because I want to watch him confess his misdeeds. I would like, ultimately, for Saul Weiss to see him convicted in a court of law for Robin’s murder.

“There were other witnesses,” I say. “Gene Silverman and Leo Balthasar. I think when they realize how far you went to protect your secret they’ll testify against you.”

“Yes,” Cyril says, “you have no power over them any longer. I certainly won’t be leaving my villa to your college with you as president, nor will I allow Balthasar to film on the premises if he persists in backing you up—”

“It won’t be
your
villa much longer once the Brunellis get a hold of this.” He reaches into his pocket with his good hand and gingerly retrieves the folded letter.

“You’d better take it from him, Rose,” Cyril says. “I don’t like to let him get too close to the gun.”

I take the letter from Mark, but instead of handing it to Cyril I read it aloud. I don’t intend to let anyone take it from me again. Cyril is silent after I finish reading it. Mark starts to say something, but Cyril waves the gun at him to be silent. When he finally speaks I’m surprised to hear that his voice—perfectly controlled after shooting Mark—is quivering. “What an old romantic fool—” Cyril begins.

“Let me go and we can destroy the letter. It will only be her word—”

“Which is worth a million times more than any you’ve ever uttered,” Cyril says sharply. “Do you honestly think I’d stoop to such base tactics to avoid sharing my home with my half brother—a brother who’s never asked a thing of me? Or that I would condone the murder of an innocent young boy for the sake of property? No, Mr. Abrams, I don’t believe you would have ever made a proper steward for La Civetta.”

“And you think Claudia Brunelli will make a better one?”

“I don’t believe Claudia will have anything more to say about the matter.”

“She murdered Mara,” I say, “and poisoned Zoe.”

“Yes, yes,” Cyril says, clucking his tongue, “all terrible things and all for nothing. She and her son have no claim on La Civetta at all. They never have.”

“But the letter—” I say.

“Only proves that Bruno has a claim,” Cyril says. “As for Orlando, well, the thing is, he’s not Bruno’s son.”

Before I have a chance to say anything, I notice that Mark’s eyes are fluttering and he slumps to the floor. “You’d better go call that ambulance,” Cyril says. “I’d hate to have his death on my hands.”

The arrival of the ambulance, blaring all the way up the
viale,
alerts the audience of
Romeo and Juliet
to the drama going on in the main villa. They flock down the muddy road, the actors still in their costumes, just in time to see Mark loaded into the ambulance. I find Frieda Main-bocher and tell her to get the students back to the dorm, and then I ask Daisy Wallace to bring Gene Silverman and Leo Balthasar into the library. It takes me a few more minutes to get back there myself because Zoe Demarchis corners me and I feel she’s owed an explanation of what’s happened.

When I tell her that Mark pushed Robin off the balcony she starts to cry. “I should never have believed he killed himself,” she says. “I should have known President Abrams was lying.”

“You couldn’t help that,” I say. “Mark took advantage of all our weaknesses. Orlando was too afraid that he’d be accused of killing Robin to come forward with what he saw, and Claudia was only too willing to trade her son’s silence for money. He used Leo Balthasar’s greed and Gene Silverman’s desperation to break into film to buy their silence. Mara was willing to do whatever Gene told her to do if it meant a more comfortable lifestyle. He knew I’d feel guilty if I believed Robin killed himself and he thought I’d be too paralyzed by that guilt to do anything…and he would have been right if I hadn’t gotten that note from Robin and started to think that Orlando killed him. And once Mark realized I thought that Orlando killed Robin, he thought I’d be too afraid of losing Bruno to tell the truth. He was almost right about that, too. Your only crime was believing what a responsible adult told you to believe. We’re all more culpable than you.”

She nods, but she doesn’t look as if she’s ready to forgive herself. I imagine it will take a while. She leaves with Ned and a few others, but I still put off going into the library. In all the crowd there’s only one person missing—Bruno. Surely he would have heard the commotion from the
limonaia
—but then Daisy pops her head out of the library and waves me to come in.

Cyril is sitting in his favorite club chair; Leo and Gene are crammed together on the little love seat looking like boys called into the principal’s office; and Daisy is standing between them with her blue portfolio balanced on one arm, ticking off points on a hastily scribbled list, pausing only to speak into the phone headset attached to her right ear. In the ten minutes I’ve lingered in the rotunda she’s cowed Leo and Gene into testifying against Mark and formed a plan to minimize damage to the college.

“Rose,” she says to me, “the police will want to speak to you first. I’ve asked them to interview you in the dining room, but they may want you to walk them through the house to show them where Mark attacked you and where he was shot. I will accompany Mr. Balthasar and Mr. Silverman to the police headquarters, where they will be giving their statements, and Mr. Graham…”

“Call me Cyril, darling; we are, after all, cousins.”

“Cyril will be talking to the police in here.” By the time the police have arrived, Daisy has marshaled us into our separate rooms. “Just tell them exactly what happened,” she says. “Don’t be afraid; you did nothing wrong.” Then she closes the door.

Despite Daisy Wallace’s unexpected reassurance, I can’t help feeling nervous waiting for the police. The formality of the room doesn’t help. I look up at the fat cupids on the ceiling and miss the monkeys from the New York version of this room, and I miss having Chihiro by my side. How long ago that last meeting at the Graham townhouse seems! And the night of the film show seems like it happened in another lifetime.

I close my eyes and see an image of Robin Weiss standing at the end of the lemon walk, the same image I’d seen in my mind when Mark asked us to observe a moment of silence for Robin, but then I had imagined Robin looking away and despairing that he’d lost a part of himself—the best part of himself—at La Civetta. I’d let myself believe Mark when he told me that Robin killed himself, but now the Robin in my head turns to face me. He’s smiling into the camera, the Tuscan hills behind him, the future in front of him. I open my eyes. When Mark lied, when he told me that Robin killed himself, he’d been protecting himself, but he could have said that it was an accident. There was no reason to claim that Robin had killed himself except that he knew how much it would hurt me and how much I would blame myself. How well he had understood me, I think, beginning to cry for the first time tonight. Even when I started to suspect that Orlando had killed Robin—even when I decided to come here to find out the truth of Robin’s death—a part of me had been afraid that I was only trying to avoid the guilt of letting Robin down. Mark knew that and used it. He counted on my guilt to keep me quiet.

I hear voices at the door and steel myself to face the police. I look down at the
pietre dure
pattern on the floor and remind myself that if Ginevra de Laura could face Barbagianni in court and tell her story, so can I.

By the time I have finished with the police, it’s after four a.m. They had wanted me to show them Mark’s room, where I had found the letter, and then where I’d hidden after I ran from him. The worst moment was when one of the officers had lifted the lid of the
cassone
and noticed the nail marks in the lid.

“Did you do this?” he asked, and for a moment I couldn’t remember whether or not I had. For a moment I wondered how I could have lain in that box and not gone mad and tried to scratch myself free.

Before they left me in my room, I asked whether I had to stay in the country. They told me that before Mark could be extradited to America he’d have to face charges for my assault and for the part he played in the death of Mara Silverman. I would no doubt be called as a witness, but there was no legal reason that I couldn’t leave until then. Did I have a contact number where I could be reached? I gave them Chihiro’s address and phone number in England, and then, as soon as they left, I gathered the poems together and put them in an envelope, which I stuck into my laptop case. Then I picked up my suitcase and headed downstairs.

The truth was, I’d wanted the police to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to leave the country. I’d wanted an excuse to see Bruno before I left, to apologize for ever thinking that Orlando had killed Robin, even though I know there’s no point. I remember Bruno’s last words to me and the way he looked at me. There’s no chance he’ll ever forgive me. There’s no reason for me to stay.

The lights are off in the rotunda as I make my way down the stairs, but now that the storm has passed, moonlight pours in through the oculus and falls on the marble rose petals that trail down the steps and swirl in a circular pattern on the floor at the bottom. The light does not make them look like blood, though, as in the legend, but rather like scarlet leaves swept by the the last winds of autumn. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” That’s what the rotunda feels like to me now—a bare ruined choir. Staring at the pattern as I come down the stairs, I notice for the first time that the marble petals seem to form letters. I put my suitcase down at the bottom of the stairs and turn to look at the floor from another angle.

“I’ve always thought it looks like a
G
and a
W,
” a voice says from behind me, “but part of the floor was destroyed when the rotunda was enclosed in the eighteenth century. Do you think those poems you found will tell us the answer?”

I turn to see Cyril seated in his armchair, a glass of cloudy liquid in his hand. The green glass shade of the lamp by his side casts a glaucous glaze over his face and the drink.

I remove a thick envelope from my book bag. “I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t had a chance to read them. Here”—I hand him the envelope—“would you do me one favor?”

“Anything for you, Rose.”

“Would you show them to Bruno and tell him I wanted him to read them first?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait until morning and tell him that yourself?”

I shake my head. “I think it’s better this way. He’ll never forgive me for being willing to sacrifice his son…even if…”

“Even if Orlando isn’t his son,” Cyril finishes for me.

“That’s what you meant the other night about sacrificing a young life for the sake of La Civetta, isn’t it? I thought you meant Robin, but you were thinking of what it would do to Orlando when he found out that Bruno wasn’t his father…. How did you find out? Did you perform a covert DNA test on them while they were sleeping?”

I’m only half kidding, but Cyril chuckles. “Well, not quite, but they both had blood drawn last month for a new insurance policy, and I was able to bribe the doctor. I’d always had my suspicions.”

“Does Bruno know?”

“I thought it only fair to tell him, but it turned out he had always known that Orlando couldn’t be his son.”

“But how?”

Cyril raises an eyebrow and waits for me to put it together.

“You mean, he had no reason to think Orlando was his?”

Cyril nods.

“But then why…?” I sink down onto the love seat and Cyril pours me a glass of the absinthe, which I wave away. The last thing I need is to make the situation any more cloudy.

“That’s what I asked him. He told me that the man who’d gotten Claudia pregnant was married to someone else and he wasn’t interested in having anything to do with the child. Claudia was still his wife and so he felt he couldn’t abandon her—or the child. He begged me not to tell Orlando the truth. He said he’d always regarded him as his son.”

“And did you ask him why he let me think Orlando was his child?”

“I didn’t have to. Isn’t it obvious? He thought it would be easier for you if you hated him. That you’d get over him more quickly. A noble idea, I suppose, but he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

I nod my head, unable to speak.

“As wrong as it is for you to leave now, Rose.”

I look up at Cyril’s face and see that it’s suddenly illuminated, as if the truth of what he’s saying was lighting up his face, but then I realize it’s just the headlights of the cab I’ve called coming up the
viale.
I stand up and bend down and kiss Cyril’s cheek, which is surprisingly soft and, even more surprisingly, damp.