The Sonnet Lover (47 page)

“Ah,” Cyril murmurs, “ ‘I crave the grace thy kisses can bestow / Upon my fallen self’s scarred flesh and bone.’”

“That’s the poem I found the first night….
You
left it for me…but how?”

“Robin sent it to me last year with that ominous little note—as if I didn’t know what stains this house bears! He wanted me to know he’d found the poems so that I’d back the movie, but the little imp wouldn’t tell me where he’d found them. I spent the winter looking for them and then I thought I’d let you have a go. And see? I was right; you found them. You’re meant to stay here, Rose; you’re meant to be with Bruno. I’m sure of it.”

“You’ve inherited your father’s romanticism, Cyril.” I straighten up and the headlights from the cab strafe the room and catch a glitter on his cheek; then as they swerve—the cab coming around the circular drive—and leave his face in shadow, the tear vanishes. “But you’re wrong about me and Bruno. Don’t you see? He was willing to give me up for Orlando before Orlando was even born. Why would he place me first now?”

I turn away then and hurry into the rotunda. As I bend down to retrieve my bag I hear Cyril answer my question, “Maybe because he’s acquired a modicum of sense in the last twenty years.” But I walk out through the
ingresso
without letting him know I heard him.

“Andiamo?”
the cab driver asks when I get into the back of the taxi.

“Sì,”
I say.
“Andiamo.”

As soon as I settle into my seat on the train I fall asleep. I only awaken when the Swiss customs officials board the train to check passports. For a moment I think that the Florentine police have changed their minds and decided that I’m not allowed to leave the country after all, but after a cursory look at my passport they let me go.

The sun is coming up as the train starts up again. I notice a sudden ordering of white stones along the roadsides and the absence of laundry hanging from clotheslines as we pass over the Swiss border and feel a pang for the mess and drama of Italy. I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep again, so I take out my laptop and begin to read Ginevra’s sonnets. By the time I’ve reached Paris I’ve read all the poems—sixty-six of them—at least twice. Some I’ve read three or four times, a few so many times that their words have begun to swirl in my head and the rhythm of the train has acquired the meter of a sonnet. In Paris I switch trains in a fog and fall asleep again as soon as I’m settled in my seat, lulled by the beat of Ginevra’s poems as I cross the English Channel.

In London I have to switch stations—from Waterloo to Euston—to catch a train to Lancaster. Crossing the Thames in a taxi I glimpse the enormous Ferris wheel, the London Eye, that strange new addition to the London cityscape. I haven’t been in London in a decade—not since I attended a conference on Elizabethan poetics—and it occurs to me now that I might have planned this trip a little better to take advantage of passing through. But then I’m not in the mood for sightseeing, nor do I have the money to pay for a London hotel room now that I don’t have that consulting check from Lemon House Films to look forward to. I’m not even sure that I’ll want to continue teaching at Hudson in the fall. As the taxi makes its way through the London streets, I ponder my economic straits and find myself curiously unrattled by them. I’ve lived modestly over the years and, thanks to Aunt Roz’s rent-controlled apartment, managed to put away a fair amount of savings. The cabin in Woodstock is paid off. I could sell it if I needed to—or I could sublet the MacDougal Street apartment and live in Woodstock until I got another job. I could take time to finish my book on the sonnet—or I could take the year to write a book about Ginevra de Laura. The story that is emerging in her poems has seized me in a way that I would have thought impossible when I left La Civetta this morning. Perhaps it’s because her own ruined love affair is even sadder than mine. It may be meager comfort, but by the time I’ve reached Euston Station I no longer feel like the only person in the world whose heart has been broken. Still, I don’t want to spend an hour sitting in the station watching young lovers saying tearful good-byes or springing into each other’s arms in gleeful reunion. I decide to roll my suitcase over to the British Library instead.

The new library was built since my last trip to England, but I know that the things I’m looking for, which were at the British Museum the last time I was in London, are in the John Ritblat Gallery now. I look at the Blackfriars mortgage deed with Shakespeare’s signature, at the Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, which many scholars think is written in Shakespeare’s handwriting, and at the portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout on the title page of the First Folio. I find myself looking at the portrait as if sizing him up as Ginevra’s English lover, but then shake myself. There’s been nothing in the poems that proves Ginevra’s English lover was William Shakespeare. I check my watch and see that I should start walking back to the station, but before I go my attention is drawn to the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It’s opened to sonnet number 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken:

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Turning away from the display case and making my way through the crowded lobby of the library, I find, to my embarrassment, that I’m crying. I cry all the way back to Euston Station, through the rain that has begun to fall—a sudden, violent shower that recalls the tempests that aren’t supposed to shake true lovers. It’s ridiculous, I tell myself when I’ve boarded the train to Lancaster. No lover ever lived up to the ideal that Shakespeare proposes.
Of course
love changes when the object of that love changes. I can’t expect Bruno to still love me after he realized that I’d turned his own son in to the police. Just as he didn’t expect me to keep loving him when I believed that he’d been sleeping with Claudia. If I had clung the longest to love even after I believed myself betrayed, that didn’t mean I’d been the truer lover. It just meant that nothing had come along to replace that first love.

Ginevra had no better luck. I reread the poems again and at last I see her story clearly. She’d written the
limonaia
poems—and all the others urging her lover to come to Italy—not only to gain her lover back but also to make herself believe that their love was so strong that it could weather betrayal and the lapse of time. But she had been wrong. There’d been no reconciliation, no last-minute reprieve. In the end she’d gone alone to the Convent of Santa Catalina to live out the rest of her life.

By the time I arrive in Lancaster I feel like I’ve not only traveled halfway across and off the Continent but also across four centuries. And yet, as I catch sight of Chihiro on the platform—attired in a sort of neo-hiking–cum–Mary Poppins get-up of neoprene climbing tights tucked into green thigh-high Wellies under a Harris tweed capelet—I feel that while I’ve come to the end of the story of my love affair, I haven’t come to the end of the story of Ginevra de Laura and her English lover. I suspect, actually, that I’ve come to where their story began.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

I
T RAINS EACH MORNING MY FIRST WEEK IN THE
L
AKE
D
ISTRICT, WHICH SUITS
my mood just fine. I leave my light Italian silks packed in my suitcase and purchase waterproof hiking boots and a waxed Barbour rain jacket. I consider buying a cheaper jacket but then hear, as clearly as if she were standing next to me, Mara telling me that the classic Barbour is really an
investment
. Each morning I print out a few of Ginevra’s poems and toss them into my book bag along with water, a chunk of cheddar cheese, and a package of McVitie’s Hob Nobs. (Chihiro’s pantry, which in New York held little else but ramen noodles, is here stacked with such British delicacies as PG Tips tea, McVitie’s digestive biscuits, Cadbury chocolate, and Marmite.)

I spend each morning and afternoon hiking through a light but drenching drizzle, climbing toward mist-enshrouded views. I don’t really care how far I can see when I get to the top of another peak, though; I care only that the walk has some goal—a crest or lake view, a ruined tower, a literary marker where Wordsworth stopped and wrote a poem—because otherwise I wouldn’t know when to stop. When I reach my goal, I eat my spare lunch and read a few poems. Sometimes I read them aloud, a practice that would be considered eccentric any other place on the planet but here in the Lake District, where declaiming metered verse is fairly common behavior. The only thing that distinguishes me from my fellow Barbour-clad tourists is that I’m not reciting Wordsworth or Coleridge; I’m reading the lines of an unknown Italian poetess who lived four hundred years ago.

In the evenings Chihiro comes back from her research at the library at Dove Cottage and we share a dinner of shepherd’s pie and Guinness drafts at the local pub. It takes five or six nights just to catch her up on the events of my short stay at La Civetta and then another night to read and dissect a long e-mail from Daisy Wallace.

“She says that when Saul Weiss heard that Mark is being charged with Robin’s murder he decided to come to Italy to attend Mark’s trial in Florence.”

“Really? Why not just wait until he’s extradited to America?”

“Daisy says he ‘wants to keep an eye on President Abrams and remind the Italian court that he’s awaiting more serious charges in the States…” I imagine he needs to feel like he’s doing something. Cyril’s given him a room at the villa for the summer and Daisy says that Frieda Mainbocher has taken him under her wing.”

Chihiro nearly spills her Guiness. “God help the poor man—he could be smothered!”

I laugh, but then I shake my head. “You know, actually, I can see them getting along. Apparently they’re going through the villa’s accounting books together—”

“Asher, are you ‘shipping’ Frieda and Saul?”

I take a sip of my ale to hide my smile. “Well…they both do have an interest in double-entry bookkeeping…”

Chihiro squints her eyes as if examining an image of the accountant and the social historian together and then nods her head up and down. “Okay…yeah…maybe…. Now what about Claudia? Has she been brought up on charges yet?”

“Daisy says that Claudia is being charged with the Italian equivalent of manslaughter for Mara’s death,” I tell Chihiro. “She claims that Mara thought Orlando was trying to seduce Ned and when Claudia laughed at her she became hysterical and attacked her. She said she slipped down the stairs in the struggle.”

“Hm,” Chihiro says, blowing at the foam on her Guinness, “do we believe that? Mara
was
high strung…”

“It could have happened that way,” I admit. “Daisy says that either way Claudia’s bound to end up in jail for years. When Mark’s extradited she’ll face charges as an accessory after the fact for Robin’s murder because she didn’t come forward with what Orlando told her. Gene Silverman and Leo Balthasar will also be charged as accessories.”

“And Orlando, too?”

“Yes, but Daisy’s hopeful that he’ll get a lenient sentence. While Gene and Balthasar stayed quiet for reasons of personal profit, Orlando was afraid he’d be accused of murder. He claims he didn’t know his mother was trying to bribe Mark to settle the lawsuit—only that she begged him to stay quiet so he wouldn’t be accused of murder himself. Combined with his youth, Daisy thinks he shouldn’t have to serve any time at all.”

“So there’s no reason for Bruno to be angry with you anymore, right? Certainly he can’t blame you for mistakenly thinking Orlando was Robin’s murderer when so many people were conspiring to make it look like that—and if you hadn’t stopped Mark, he’d be facing murder charges.”

I shrug and take a long sip of the sour warm beer.

“Have you heard from him?”

“No,” I say. “And I don’t expect to. I accused his son of murder. I don’t think he’s going to forgive me for that.” I finish my lager and put the mug down on the table harder than I meant to, upsetting Chihiro’s full mug and spilling some of the creamy white foam on top. I take my time coming back from the bar with paper napkins to clean up the mess, but Chihiro still isn’t willing to let the subject drop. “Have you heard anything else about Bruno?”

I tell her that Frieda Mainbocher e-mailed to say that Bruno had given a small informal lecture on the poems of Ginevra de Laura. “Zoe IM’d me to say it was the most romantic love story she’d ever heard. ‘Better than the Brownings!’”

“See?” Chihiro says. “He wouldn’t even have the poems if not for you! Maybe he’s changed his mind about you after reading their story.”

I shake my head. “You don’t know the story,” I say.

“That’s because you haven’t let me see the poems yet. You must have figured out the story by now.”

She’s right; I’ve read the poems so many times that I know most of them by heart. “I’ll tell you what,” I say. “I’ll tell you their story tomorrow night. Then you can judge whether it’s the kind of story that’s likely to renew your faith in love or not.”