The Whirling Girl (17 page)

BUT SHE COULDN'T STAND the look on William's face. Not just the loss. His realization, too, that someone in the group was to blame for carelessness, or worse.

“Oh eureka!” she heard herself shout.

She handed the bead back to William. His look — as if she were the person he would have expected to solve the crisis.

Then he strode off without a word, and headed down the trail.

“WELL YOU CAN STRIKE that one off the list of duty visits,” Luke said to the tweedy Marianne. He was driving the two women to the station to catch the train on to Rome. “Imagine dumping you on that hilltop after marching you up there in this heat and then waffling on and on, with so little to show. No wonder the bloke's college is rethinking the funding.”

“It is?” The big one in the backseat with Clare leaned forward, releasing a puff of camphorated air as the seat shifted with her weight. Luke bumped from the field. Clare's head hit the ceiling.

“They're about to cut him off,” Luke said. “And so they should. I've read the field reports, yards of filler. You saw it today, a huge kerfuffle about what? One bleeding bead.”

“Oh but listen —” Clare said.

Marianne interrupted, “I thought for a moment I'd stumbled into that endless battle waged last year in the pages of The Past Today. Old Warberton hammering away at his pet theory, based on the evidence of a few carnelian beads, that Troy had been just a small barbarian outpost. And Heimlich fighting back.”

“Heimlich out-manoeuvred him all right.”

“Tindhall, you are droll as ever!” Further cries of delight. “Whatever are you doing among the humourless fate-bound Etruscans, when the Middle East has need of you?”

“
Inshallah!
The will of my employer.”

A burst of Arabic then, out of which popped words that sounded like
jamilla
and
jager
and, alarmingly,
bint
— at which both women flicked a glance at Clare. Marianne said, “
Har Batata?
” The fat one giggled. Luke shrugged.

“OKAY, WHY DID YOU do that?” Clare asked when the two women had been left on the train platform.

“What, pray?”

“Everything you could to ruin William Sands's reputation, just for starters.”

“I suppose you think your friend Harry has limitless funds. Listen, there are a dozen worthy projects going on here just now. My job, like it or not, is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Why should any of those scarce resources go to bolster the work of a pedantic pin-sized intellect like Sands?”

“That's pathetic.”

“Right. I should amend that. An unbearable pedantic, whose ragtag team is harbouring an architect facing criminal charges in Berlin and an hysterical Danish poofter.”

“You're absurd.”

She closed her eyes. She would not spare him another thought. All that chatter in Arabic.
Har Batata!
He made her think of those boys who kicked girls in the schoolyard when she was little, just because they were girls. How she and another girl used to keep veering close to the kicking boys. They were the damaged boys; you could see it in their curiously mean faces. It was so easy to get them into trouble, exciting too, to shriek and run away.

Sky Black as Pearl

TONIGHT A MAN WHO believed in unicorns would take Clare Livingston to a wedding that had happened seven hundred years before. Clare repeated that sentence to herself as the small pot of espresso hissed. She would regard the evening with Gianni DiGiustini as just that: unbelievable, a loophole in time. A reprieve from the debacle of the day before, her attempt to do one good deed having backfired, Luke and William surely firm enemies now.

Not to mention the business of the bead.

Tiny artefacts were misplaced all the time on digs, she tried to reassure herself. Surely the theft of such a thing could be judged tiny on the grand scale of personal larceny, or the larceny of nations for that matter: whole continents taken over, pilfered, treasure appropriated by other nations, or melted down. It was ridiculous to keep having flashes of an alternate reality in which she stole it. She had never in her life stolen any inanimate object. Of course she had appropriated a large chunk of a continent, she realized; but still it was ridiculous to keep feeling, right through her gut, the beadness of a bead — to feel how even a tiny act of theft can leave the thief hollowed through the centre the way a bead is. To recall how snugly the bead had nestled between her heartand fate-lines, to feel weakened by such a near-escape.

In the end there was only one way to put all that out of her mind, and calm her jitters about the coming evening.

AS SHE STARTED UP the creek, preoccupied still, she slipped on a mossy stone. Half in water, half on the verge, with her nose almost buried in the ferny streamside growth, she caught a flash of purple and gold. A tiny plant was unfurling there, something like a woodcock orchid, yet nothing she had ever seen in life or in any illustration. In the excitement of once again coming upon something most unusual, everything else went out of her head. She scrambled to clear herself a nest among the ferns. She imagined herself approaching the orchid's capture with a kind of reverent stealth. As she drew it to her paper in a net of lines, then embarked on a thrilling struggle to achieve the dark purple-brown of the curling petal, the way that it faded into Renaissance gold — to depict the hair's-breadth stripes at the base of the petal — the sense came over her again that was richer than anything she knew. She thought, When I am doing this, I am true. She made a vow.

WHEN SHE RETURNED TO the house there was hardly time to bathe and change. Storm clouds were bunching in the west. She shivered in the skimpy yellow dress, with no suitable wrap to cover its spaghetti straps. Then she remembered the shawl on the low table behind the fireplace chair, where the ugly lamp wired to the bronze she-wolf lurked. There was no time to ponder whether the cloth would be stained or ripped. She heaved the chair aside, tipped the heavy statue one way and the other, to inch out the cloth from underneath. The table lid angled dangerously when the statue slid to the edge — then slapped back down onto its squat cubed base.

The cloth was undamaged, beautiful. It wrapped around her shoulders in a shimmering silk cocoon of gold and blue and plum. She put everything back in place, hurried to tidy the room, the beautiful room, feeling a flush of pride. He will see how I live, in this beautiful room.

The painting of the orchid rested on the table, still damp, propped on her portable easel.

THE LAND ROVER PURRED so quietly that if Clare had not been hovering by the window she wouldn't have heard him arrive.

There he was.

He closed the door of the vehicle with barely a click, bounded up her stone stairs with such a light step, shining hair floating and settling. He was wearing dark silk cotton pants and a shirt of the same blue, and a white linen jacket loose over his shoulders. When she came to the door his look of gladness was so intense that she could hardly breathe. She backed away. “Oh hello! I'll just go and get my wrap.” In the bedroom, in the mirror, she thought her pale un-madeup face did catch the light in a way appropriate for a woman setting out with a man who traced his family history back to some tragic tale of love and suicide in medieval times. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders. The beads on the fringe gave off tiny music and the colours of the antique cloth seemed fitting.

But when she went back into the other room, he was polite, correct, preoccupied.

He took the key from her, closed up the double doors to the arbour, and took her arm so she wouldn't twist her ankle on the stone steps in her teetering shoes. In the car he turned an unsettling look on her, somehow both amused and sad — as if even before they'd started out she'd failed some silent test. The dress? Would his famous dangling ancestor have disapproved? Could this even be why the girl flung herself from the tower? Not out of foiled love, but in a flash of precognition at how the family reputation for
bella figura
would eventually be so shamed? I must not be at all how he remembered, she thought. She studied his hands on the wheel as he steered gently around the many turns down the hill — the slim gold wedding band, of course: no other jewellery, just the ring and the watch, and on his right hand a white scar along the middle finger. She recalled Luke Tindhall's rough-handling the wheel, the ruby ring winking.

“So how are your unicorns doing?” she said after a too-long period of silence. “Were they glad to see you?”

Again his quizzical smile. “Clare Livingston! You are very beautiful tonight, if I may say. And even more to me a mystery.”

A little late for that.

“I take it the unicorns are okay. And you? You've had an okay few days, too?”

“I have spent some time both very interesting and also very disturbing,” he said. He smoothed a hand across his forehead, as if the disturbance was still there.

He said he'd wished she could have been with him to meet his Romanian friend Radu Radescu, the ethnobotanist, who had dropped by on his way back from a trek through the Amazon which had revealed how — even since Clare's extensive travels, it seemed — vast depredations were going on, the forest receding under ever-newer threats.

That was terrible to hear, devastating. Yet she'd so hoped not to get into a discussion about the Amazon tonight. She was silent.

Gianni was saying that Radescu's trek had taken him up the river Jari and over the Serra Tumachumac, then through to Roraima and into Venezuela, where he had climbed into that lost world that Clare had written about so well.

Yes I did, Clare thought.

This had been largely because she already knew Gianni's friend Radescu. She had interviewed him at length by phone, using one of her handy aliases, after Radescu had returned from a previous trip. Radescu had written about the use of
yage
and other hallucinogenic plants among the tribes, of the brilliant whirling spiritual universe the participants of such rituals entered; he'd written as well of the vast unwritten botanical pharmacopeia such threatened tribes had once possessed. When, in turn, she wrote about the loss of botanical knowledge, and the more recent near extinction of the tribes themselves, she'd been disconsolate. It was shaming that here, now, selfishly, she was wasting her sorrow on the way this evening was likely to turn into a perilous game of hide-and-seek.

Gianni gentled the car through the maze of walled lanes at the bottom of her hill, and again she couldn't help thinking of Luke Tindhall's rough driving. At least there had been none of this
you are even more a beautiful mystery
stuff.

And yes, she'd written an entire chapter on the wonders of trekking into the lost world atop Mont Roraima, where she'd come upon her remarkable
Circaea Livingston Philippiana
in the spray of Angel Falls. She'd taken particular delight in writing of that area because when her husband returned from his trip through those parts, the article he'd published in
Botany Today
had been full of footnotes and convoluted academic jargon, almost incomprehensible.

GIANNI DROVE THEM STRAIGHT to the Piazza Garibaldi. He pulled into a space that said No Parking. The policewoman put a ticket underneath his windshield wiper and they exchanged a solemn double cheek-kiss, he and this comely agent of the law. He took Clare's arm and guided her along the street towards the main piazza.

Everybody knew him. This, at least, was the same as before. The man from the grocery store doffed a triangular hat with a long feather. The secretary from the lawyer's office, now wearing a high and noble turban trimmed with pearls, sedately grabbed him by both ears. Was he asking himself what he'd got into, walking arm in arm with a woman in an outfit not even an Italian could pull off — the dress that was far too short, the sandals she could hardly walk in, the whole ensemble topped off with a table cloth?

He guided her up the narrow passage leading to the next piazza. After a bit of back-slapping with a man in monk's garb collecting tickets, he led her into the stands, though no ticket came into view. He guided her towards the section where the seats had cushions.

The great medieval stone palazzo loomed across the square, black against a sky that had turned deepest indigo. Beyond a roped-off area, the entire piazza swayed with a crowd so thick that the coloured garments and oval faces had a wavering pointillist effect. Music faded and swelled as bands approached from different directions through the surrounding spaghetti strands of streets. Small white lights flickered on, outlining the name of the Savings Bank of Florence on the crenellated building next to the grand palazzo. Trumpets sounded. The woman from the leather shop, Petronella, walked into the piazza wearing doublet and hose and a long-feathered hat. At her signal, the palazzo doors groaned open. Half a dozen horsemen skittered out on mouthy steeds. Little drummer boys emerged.

GIANNI BEGAN EXPLAINING, IN a careful travelogue sort of way, that seven hundred years ago the occasion would have linked not just two noble families, but two cities — as was the custom in those days, such alliances frequently forged by marriage. Clare was squeezed close to him, now that the seats had all filled. He gave off a crisp woody sort of smell that reminded her of how this morning, at the streamside, she'd slipped and buried her nose in green foliage. She wished she was back there, doing something she understood. She remembered how when she was painting the orchid she had made a vow: how she'd had a flash of the unique self that was her, how everything she looked at, all around, was something only she saw in just that way, and if she could cleave to the quiet business of recording that, she would be true.

She had left the painting on the table imagining that when Gianni came, he might see all those things about her in it. He hadn't even given it a glance.

He was being so careful, courteous, explaining how the town was divided into five sections, represented by the five groups of musicians that had come together in the square, each with costumes of different sets of colours; but his discomfort loomed out of him like a separate gargoyle presence, shadowing her enjoyment in this spectacle completely. How could another person do that to you, how could you let them, why should it be so hard to shake that shadow off?

More trumpets. At last the bride and groom emerged, the bride's horse rearing, circling, threatening to trample the long train of her white dress as it trailed across the stones, until the groom — very like a real groom, young and resolute and confused — sprang from his horse and helped the girl down. The two of them walked forward leading a solemn retinue, including small costumed children looking important and proud.

And no matter what, it was beautiful, serious, believable; not just a pageant put on for tourists, Clare thought, but holding some far deeper meaning for the town. She wished she was here on her own and could enjoy it, without this fine-smelling man glowering beside her.

When the marriage vows had been exchanged, celebrations began: a performance which in the old days would have been a night-long romp, as Gianni dutifully explained. Flag bearers sent shadows swooping over the palazzo walls like giant moths, tumblers rollicked, acrobats swung whirling balls of fire. A chorus of lute-shaped girls sang madrigals. Finally, with the lights still low, a flock of very little girls in white dresses came sweetly down the stairs of a palazzo at the side, playing recorders; a flock of intense little angels.

The battlements were glittery through the rainbow of Clare's lashes when the piazza suddenly flared up with light.