Three-Cornered Halo (19 page)

“You see, Isidro. In England, everyone has one. Miss Foley—yes? And Major Bull?”

Miss Foley had had a bicycle when she was a girl and it had been called Magicar, short for Magic Carpet, and had carried her away, away, into a fairyland all of her own among the woodland dells, the primrose copses of her country home. And as for the Major, yes, by Jove, fairyland, fairyland, ting-a-ling-a-ling on the bell, look-no-hands, what, what? “You understand,” said the Grand Duke, skating over these contributions a mite hastily, “that in the ordinary way we have no such things on San Juan. No wheels mechanically propelled, are permitted—we are too hilly and far too small. But——” He appealed to them. “The boy is fatherless, it is all left to me. Can I let him go to a prep. school in England, never having so much as seen a bicycle?”

It seemed to Miss Cockrill that so lacking was Don Isidro in attributes desirable in the English prep. school boy, that the mere absence of bicycling experience would hardly be observable: and anyway would be offset by items of knowledge beyond the dreams of most of his fellow pupils. She refrained from comment, therefore, and merely asked whether the Grand Duke had actually obtained a bicycle for him?

“Smuggled up to the palace, yes. A group of my wife's friends arrived from Paris yesterday, this was sent over with their advance luggage, in a wooden case. There are people still on the island, you see, who'd regard it as a contraption of the devil.”

Mr Cecil heartily agreed with them. He had got through life with perfect satisfaction to himself without ever having so much as set bottom to saddle, and was about to unburden himself to this effect, when the old woman interrupted with a stream of rapid jabber. “She says,” reported Isidro, “that I shall fall off.”

“There will be half a dozen palace guards there to hold you on.”

“She says I shall evade the guards and try by myself.”

“Nothing is less likely; but tell her you shall be watched to see you do not.”

“She says I shall do it nevertheless. She says I shall creep out at dead of night and go spinning at a great rate down the steep paths of the gardens. She says,” said Isidro shaking his head at the hopelessness of trying to deal with his own insensate daring, “that I am so brave.”

“I have already removed the lamp from the bicycle, so that you can't.” There was a moment of silence, and the Grand Duke asked in some triumph: “What does she say to that?”

“She says you are taking a suspiciously kindly interest in my welfare,” said El Bienquisto: and stuffed another handful of chestnuts into his mouth.

It was twelve o'clock. In the silver moonlight, the silver fountain tinkled in its silver bowl, the marble babies wore masks of shadow that transformed them from innocent childhood to a sort of arrested old age, sporting with the marble dolphins in some horrid ring of vice. Lorenna moved silently, on her rounds of solicitation, pressing forward the tray of sweetmeats, the bottles of green and red and yellow liqueurs. From below in the rock arena came music: singing and laughter and the shuffle and scrape of a thousand dancing feet; here in the patio, only the splash of the fountain made any sound. Even the old crone was silent, staring malevolently out from her nest of black shawls; the boy stood beside her, his fat hand lovingly holding her skinny fingers, his jaws moving mechanically in his bulging face. The Grand Duke leaned back against his marble seat, his arms, black cloaked, spread like a raven's wings along the full length of it, his splendid head bent, staring down at the shimmering rugs beneath his feet. He said at last, and his voice was huge, and deep and soft as velvet, with a sudden note in it like velvet torn across: “That will do. Tell La Madre that my kindly interest in
her
welfare prompts me to suggest that she should retire at once. My barge will take her back to Barrequitas now, and return for us later. You will go with her. Say good night to my guests.”

The boy made a round of hand-kissings obediently, his chubby buttocks quivering with the shock of each smart bringing-together of his chubby heels. To La Bellissima he murmured a few words and she held his hand for a moment and smiled at him kindly and answered him, in French. The old woman poked out two fingers from her shawls and comprehended them all in a gesture of dignified, if not very gracious, farewell. The boy caught up a last handful of sweets and stuffed them into his mouth, the attendants lifted the palanquin, the cortège departed. “My dear, stap one's vitals,” said Mr Cecil, “what a gruesome pair!”

“Few of my relatives are precious to me,” agreed the Grand Duke. “But La Madre and El Bienquisto, I confess, jostle for position at the bottom of my list.”

“How would one
cook
him?” said Mr Cecil, fascinated. “One can't think of anything else. He'd look so splendid on a menu—Blanquette de Bienquisto …”

“Stuffato d'Isidro,” suggested the Grand Duke.

“Grand Ragout de Garçon Juanese …”

“Bambino bollito …”

“Or, Boiled Boy in White Sauce.…”

“And now, Winsome,” said Cousin Hat, “you have seen the mother of your idol. How did you like her?”

The narrow hands fiddled with a folk-weave pleat, the gooseberry eyes filled with tears. It had been—disillusioning: a terrible old woman and after this long and bewildering day, almost more than one could bear. “She's old,” she said at last, bleakly. “And after all—Juanita may have taken after her father.…?”

“Well, no,” said the Grand Duke. “I must admit that she favoured her mother's side—if favour is the word for it; for, with all deference to her sainted character, my dear aunt Juanita was by no means a charmer.”

“La Madre would be—your great aunt?”

“My great aunt, yes. And great, great grandmother to the boy. She married a brother of the then Grand Duke, my grandfather, a monstrous old party known to his very face as Pedro the Vile. The Grand Duke, I mean: her husband had no time to be vile, he was polished off much too soon.”

“Polished
off
?”

The Grand Duke shrugged. “One can only suppose so. My family have splendid health—why should he die young? He'd offended by marrying La Madre, as she's called now, a woman of no breeding from the Toscanita plain. The family has died out—assisted also by Duke Pedro, I take it; he would have no love for his brother's vulgar in-laws and they certainly came by a chapter of most curious accidents.” He shrugged again. “I confess that I long to apply the same routine to their one survivor. But the people would object—she has a veneration value for El Margherita's sake: La Madre, The Mother of Juanita. We produce her at these fiestas. They would miss her.”

For Winsome too, despite all, she had a veneration value. “La Madre! To think one has actually talked with the mother of a saint!”

“Except that you didn't exchange a word between you,” said Cousin Hat.

“It's true that one couldn't quite understand …”

“No one understands her nowadays,” said the Grand Duke. “Except the boy. For my part it's years since I even made the attempt. I try never to speak to her.”

“Yet she lives in your palace?”

“She has apartments there: she's had them for over seventy years. Old Pedro took a fancy to the infant Juanita: otherwise, no doubt, mother and daughter would have followed Papa. However, the palace is large, thank God, and I never need see her: just on high days and holidays. For the rest, she keeps to her quarters and sits spinning mischief and spoiling what's left to spoil in her great-great-grandson.”

“Her mental faculties …?”

“Are unimpaired as you see,” said the Grand Duke, dryly. He laughed. “It by no means escapes La Madre, in fact, that for two pins I would seat the Well-Belovéd on his bicycle and send it spinning down the hill to Barrequitas; not pausing at the quay. But alas!—like La Madre herself, El Bienquisto would be missed.” He added, not looking at anyone: “He is my heir.”

There was a rather chill silence. El Patriarca, not very well understanding what was going forward, nevertheless recognised a note in his master's voice, and launched once more into social chit-chat regarding the delights of the Domenica di Boia. The discomforture of El Pato, no doubt, they had found extraordinarily buffant?

“El Pato?”

“The Arcivescovo, you know. We call him El Pato, or sometimes El Anitra—the duck.”

Well, actually, said Mr Cecil, they had not found that frightfully buffant; no. “Would you say just a trifle decrepit for practical jokes? And ill?”

“Ah, ill, yes.” El Patriarca touched his own forehead. “He will die very soon.” For some reason this appeared to add richly to the entertainment.

“You do not understand my country,” said the Grand Duke heavily, from his seat. The cat had sprung on to his knee and he sat caressing it idly, the jewels winking as he ran his ringed fingers through its short white fur. “These people are very childlike. Many of them do not read or write: you may teach them but they will forget, you may speak but they will not listen: they do not want to know. We must reach them, therefore, by signs; and even the signs must be strong and clear and in their own language, such as children understand.”

“But need they be cruel?” said Miss Cockrill.

“Cruelty is a language that everyone understands.”

“And so, to teach them, an old man must be tortured?” She leaned forward, boldly, looking him in the face. “To teach them what? Why was it necessary?”

His hand tightened on the loose fur behind the cat's head, pulling it back till the blue eyes were Siamese slits, the thin lips a grin over the pointed teeth. He let the skin go and the cat purred contentedly on. “You heard what the Archbishop said in his sermon today?”

“Everyone heard that.” She answered a little at random, her eye was seeking Mr Cecil's eye: she was, it appeared, for some undisclosed reason, anxious to be left alone with this terrible man. And welcome, thought Mr Cecil, unable however at the moment to do anything about it. “Do you suggest that I should remain silent,” the Grand Duke was suggesting smoothly, “while the Grand Duchess of San Juan el Pirata is rebuked before her people?”

“I see.” Miss Cockrill looked ‘Jane Seymour' up and down, just once, and returned her eyes to his. “So all your anger was on account of your wife?”

“I, also, was rebuked—in the matter of Juanita.”

“Everyone wants her canonised. Why not agree?”

Slit eyes and the grin again. He said coolly, however: “I have agreed. If on the Fiesta di San Juan she gives us a sign …”

“That's just an excuse. You know she won't give any sign.”

Really, thought Mr Cecil, the sooner one obeyed Miss Cockrill's injunctions and left that intrepid woman alone with her prey, the more confident one would feel of surviving till morning. He developed an imperative longing to see over the Pavilion. If La Bellissima would be so prodigiously kind …? And the Patriarch, no doubt, could explain many details to them both.…? But the Grand Duchess shrank into the shadows of her veil, the Patriarch hissed and frowned. It was not permissible to withdraw without express command. That he too would have been thankful to absent himself from this explosive atmosphere was apparent from the anxious eye he bent upon his lord, and the burst of chatter which ostensibly covered his horrified interest in what, in only vaguely understood English, appeared to be going on. Mr Cecil sighed, and resigned himself to calamity. The Grand Duke said coldly to Cousin Hat: “Very well, then. Juanita is unable to give a sign. In that case she is not a fit subject for canonisation.”

“Why should she give a sign just because you ask her?”

“The whole island asks her. For one reason or another, the whole island desires her canonisation.”

For one reason or another. A sign from Juanita, Juanita welcomed at last by Mother Church into her Communion of Saints and, ‘for one reason or another,' what joy in San Juan! A people, now poor and happy, made rich and happy. Tomaso di Goya no longer need fight and scheme for rights no one cared two pins for, but, rich and happy too, might marry his gentle Lorenna and know again the pure joy of his glorious craft. El Gerente could retire from the intricacies of smuggling combined with police work to prevent the said smuggling, and spend his life in the sun with his lovely daughters; his relatives might cultivate their funghi and press their wine, confident in an enthusiastic market.… Innocenta would walk again in her convenuto, the Arcivescovo go serenely forward, his life's work done, to the release of death. And, thought Cousin Hat, ignorant of all these private longings, how happy might Juanita make even her casual visitors! The Back-Homes could levy claim without delay upon table and crumbs, Fuddyduddy would have had it all ‘thrown in'; and Winsome might enter her convenuto or, made rich with the profits of her sole rights in El Margherita's diaries, launch out on a life of her own: clad from head to foot in folk-weave and opals, with jabots of real Valenciennes, a chauffeur for Busy Bee and a gardener to wield Brothers Spud and Hoe and Hogarth and Trusty-the-Spade. And she … Dick was an old fool, but he was devoted and kind; if he were growing into old-buffer habits it was only from being too much alone and he could soon be cured. A man: a man with a man's strong hand at the helm, with a man's broad shoulders to carry the burdens, a man's big, faithful heart. How strange, she had said to Dick, if a crack-pot hysteric on a tea-table should bring about at last her release, and his reward. And now this obstinate Duke … She said to him, fretfully: “But why insist on this sign?”

He sprawled against the back of the marble seat, one arm spread along it, the other hand continuing mechanically to ruffle the cat. “Shall we say—that it will make up our minds for us?”

“Your minds are already made up. The people for. You against.”

“Very well, then, it can make no difference.”