Three-Cornered Halo (29 page)

“Old woman? What old woman? Do you mean Juanita?”

“No, no—La Madre. When she said that you showed a suspiciously kindly interest in Don Isidro's welfare. I mean,” said Cousin Hat, again, anxiously, “getting him a bicycle, smuggling it over here for him when bicycles aren't allowed, taking steps yourself to make sure he didn't ride it at night.…”

“El Bienquisto's bicycle,” said the Grand Duke, “is at the bottom of the harbour.”

“Oh, the bicycle, yes,” said Miss Cockrill. “I know.”

“So what has the bicycle to do with my not using the thurible?”

Nothing, of course, said Miss Cockrill, it had nothing to do with it at all. And she thought of him, kneeling there so indomitably, heedless of the excitement and danger seething about him: kneeling there, motionless, hands clasped, chin buried in the folds of the great, black velvet cloak: looking up steadily at the vision, standing, as motionless, in her circle of light. “But you couldn't put down the bicycle lamp,” she said.

Cristallo, the white cat, got up and stretched himself. He placed each white paw in turn before his nose and pretended to himself that the paw was stuck and he must now get as far away from it as he possibly could. He did the same with both hind paws and then turned round three times, settled back into his former position as though he had never moved, and fastened his blue gaze on the fountain again. Not until he was still as a statue once more, did the Grand Duke speak. When he did, it was to say with the deep anxiety of a small boy caught using three nibs for an impot: “You don't mean it showed?”

“No, no,” said Cousin Hat, shocked. But she was also much relieved. “I couldn't help—well, just deducing it.”

“Oh, of course not.” He went off into one of his tempestuous gales of laughter. “A true sister of my inestimable friend, Inspector Cockrill. Worthy of Scotalanda Yarrrda itself. So you deduced the bicycle lamp. What else have you deduced, may I ask?”

Well, the rest of it was mostly just common sense really; wasn't it? said Cousin Hat. “There was a new batch of La Bellissima's friends coming over, for example. You mentioned it, I remember, that night at the Pavilion. She came over with them, I suppose? As a maid or something?”

“As a lady's maid, yes. And took to her bed, poor thing, the moment she got here. The crossing in the vaporetto,” said the Grand Duke, gravely, “must have upset her. Even driving from the boat to the palace, she was obliged to huddle in a corner of the carriage, her face buried in her handkerchief; most distressing.” The little French friends, however, he said, had been most assiduous, it had been charming to see them so considerate of their poor handmaiden: insisting upon attending, themselves, to all her needs, giving no trouble at all to the palace servants: really, he doubted if anyone else had so much as set eyes on her. Fortunately, however, she had felt well enough to venture out for the fiesta High Mass and go down, packed into the carriage with the rest of them. A happy coincidence that they should all have elected to wear Juanese dress that day. It meant that she could go well-wrapped up in her cloak and veil.

“And so could they?” said Cousin Hat.

And so could they.… So nice for them to be free to move about in the crowd, unrecognised, up there in the galleries; looking down from all sorts of vantage points upon the scene—and the people—below.

The only thing was, said Cousin Hat, that up there, above the clouds, as it were, they would have missed the rain of pearls? And when everyone in San Juan was treasuring one of these precious relics.…

“I dare say they each managed to acquire a pearl or two,” said the Grand Duke, laughing. But he had been speaking of their—their sick friend. It had been a risk, he said, taking her out for an airing so soon after she got up. She had had to go back—well wrapped-up again, of course—and straight to bed. They were taking no chances.

“Evidently,” said Cousin Hat, dryly.

And for the rest, there was, of course, as Mr Cecil had pointed out, a convenient niche up there above the High Altar; not too far, oddly enough, from the gallery reserved for personal friends from the palace. And of course no one had been particularly looking up there till the vision made its appearance.… And then at the end, when attention (equally of course), was focused there and it might have been a little awkward to make her exit.…

“Yes, I see,” said Cousin Hat. “By that time, everyone was scrambling about for pearls.”

Yes. They made magnificent pearls in Catalonia, said the Grand Duke; of fish-skins, a tremendous advance on the oyster. Economical too; and the people would appreciate that—Juanita in life had tempered her charitable outpourings with a marked degree of personal thrift. But the little French friends, he said, had had a splendid time, dispensing her greatest and last.

“I see,” said Cousin Hat again.

“I wonder if you do,” said the Grand Duke. He leaned back on his marble seat, as he had leaned that other evening up at the Pavilion, his great arms with their richly embroidered sleeves spread out on either side of him, his head bent, looking at her from under his black brows. He was dying to tell. “You have one more wish,” he said, insinuatingly.

Miss Cockrill dithered between humouring him, and showing off. She wondered what her brother the Inspector would have done; and settled for showing off. “If you mean that I should ask you to tell me who ‘Juanita' was,” she said, “of course I know
that
.”

“I don't think you do,” said the Grand Duke. “You can't.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” said Miss Cockrill. She put down her glass of champagne on the inlaid white table, she sat up very straight on her inlaid white chair, she gave a tweak here and there to the good linen dress. When she was composed, she opened Juanita's fat diary and placed it on the table beside the champagne. “After all, it's all here,” she said.

“It's all in the diary?”

“Between the lines: between the crossed-out lines, I mean. For example …” She laughed. “Once again, I remember Innocenta's translation best. ‘My adhesion to Santa Fina was from first times of childcap.' But what Juanita has written and crossed out, you know, is quite different. She translated. ‘My attachment to Santa Fina
dates from the year of my Vision
.' The year she decided to go to San Gimignano, she means? When she came back with her table?”

“Yes,” said the Grand Duke.

“Yes. And that other bit—the bit we were quoting just now. What Juanita originally wrote, what she later crossed out, was this …” She translated again, slowly, holding up the book to the light of the hanging lantern. “‘In my youth, I was very beautiful. My uncle, the Grand Duke, delighted in dressing me up in jewels and pretty clothes, I—er—I washed, bathed, whichever it is, in perfumed waters and spent all my time in dancing, which was my delight.' And then she crosses it all out and just says that when she was young she took too much pleasure in jewellery and clothes. So interesting!”

“Quite a little study for the psychiatrist,” agreed El Exaltida.

“Quite a little study for the ordinary, common-or-garden observer of human nature,” said Cousin Hat. “A young girl, spoilt and pretty and pleasure-loving, and a favourite with the tyrannical old uncle.… And at the age of seventeen, she suddenly develops a violent devotion to a saint (whose shrine is in a place conveniently far away) and declares that she must go there, forthwith. Taking with her only one—devoted—companion, off she goes; and for a journey that would normally take a matter of weeks, even on foot, she takes a year, arriving back ill and exhausted—the excuse being that she had to carry home a tea-table. Having got the table home, I suppose, poor girl, there was nothing to do but to lie on it; by then she had this tiresome reputation as an æsthetic, she couldn't just go back into circulation as a bright young thing. And of course we know her to be given to self-dramatisation, so it may have come easily. But I wonder,” she reflected, “whether in fact she ever went to San Gimignano at all?”

“Only the nurse could have told us that,” said El Exaltida.

“But the nurse never returned. She ‘died abroad.' Well, so she may have,” said Cousin Hat, “but I'd love to know when.”

“That I can tell you. She died about thirty years later, having lived to a great old age. Handsomely supported, I hasten to assure you,” said El Exaltida, “by the Grand Duke Pedro, and subsequently by my father.” But never reconciled, apparently, he said, pityingly, always longing for home.…

“Of course,” said Cousin Hat. “Poor old lonely exile—staying there only from a sense of devotion and duty: always longing for home. Always longing for home, thinking of home, talking of home—and talking in her own language, of course: at her age she'd refuse to learn any other.…”

“So that anyone living with her …”

“Anyone brought up by her …”

“From babyhood …”

“Would speak fluent Juanese,” said Cousin Hat.

In the still evening, a breeze stirred and blew softly through the courtyard, trailing the scent of orange flowers. From far, far below them, a tinkle of music fell like breaking glass against the monotonous murmur of the fountain; where the little town lay at the hill's foot, a milky way of lamplight pricked the blue darkness as though the night heavens had been turned upside-down. The Grand Duke sat with his chin in his glittering hand and looked at Cousin Hat and Cousin Hat looked back at him. “A woman who would now be about fifty,” she said. “Just the age Juanita died at; just the age of the ‘vision'.” Brought up abroad, but brought up in a loving tradition of San Juan el Pirata and speaking fluent Juanese; financially dependent upon the Dukes of San Juan; in constant, though secret, communication with them.… A child of their house.…” She mused over it. It was all very obvious and logical, she said; but it was just sheer luck that when the time came that they had need of her, Juanita's daughter should take so closely after her saintly mama.

“I still owe you one wish,” said the Grand Duke, handing Miss Cockrill into the carriage; and he bowed his tremendous bow, and kissed her hand.

“I will come back and claim it,” said Miss Cockrill.

“To the half of my kingdom,” he promised, smiling.

“I have got half any normal kingdom round my neck,” said Cousin Hat, rather crossly. She waved most lovingly to the little Grand Duchess, standing, slender as the stem of a rose, in her rose-pink dress; but she said to Mr Cecil as they clip-clopped off behind the rose-crowned horse: “What on earth am I supposed to do with the thing?”

Oh, but put it up the spout at
once,
dear, said Mr Cecil.

Above them, the Palatio was a cobweb of ice in the cold, clear starlight; below them the town was hot with movement and colour and light and noise. The streets were packed with a seething mob of people, delirious with joy, there was music and dancing and eating and drinking and laughter and singing, and the name of El Margherita was on every lip. For Juanita had her halo at last: a somewhat three-cornered affair, it was true, pulled this way and that by the preferences of Grand Duke and people and the blesséd one herself; but a nimbus none the less, in whose bright light shone the answer to all their prayers. Their Grand Duke was lifted beyond all malice with his lovely wife at his side and an heir assured; their saint was above all mere canonised saints, whose superior humility would be acclaimed far and wide, further and wider than could ever have been the case had she accepted a commonplace official recognition from Rome: their saint, their Juanita, who popped back to see her people and sort out their affairs for them just as she had in her lifetime; who left tangible, if not very valuable, proof of her visit, and took care to do it all in the presence of disinterested touristi, agog to go forth and spread the glad news to the world.… Already the Grand Duke had declared his intention of endowing a shrine, pearl-studded, in the shadows above the High Altar—there was a convenient niche there to hang it on—which would serve as a focus for the veneration of thousands upon thousands of pilgrims bringing in their wake fame and prosperity for San Juan.… Already the Gerente's cousins, under the supervision of Guido and Tomaso, were busy with improvised melting pots, with price tags and tickets, with artificial roses, with snippets of as many yards of brown serge as, reassembled, would have clothed a community: with the erection of wooden booths at all strategic points—outside the Duomo, the Colombaia, the Palatio, in the hall of the Bellomare Hotel, down on the quayside landing-stages, aboard the vaporettos themselves.… And Winsome Foley was happy and Innocenta was happy and the Convenuto was assured; and Lorenna was happy and Tomaso was happy; and Guido was happy and his Pepita was happy with all her many daughters. And the Back-Homes would be happy with their message for the Women's Club; and Fuddyduddy had had his money's worth.… And Major Bull would be happy. And Mr Cecil would be monstrous happy, stap his vitals and odds-fish, dispensing snuff to a society in rose-embroidered waistcoats with lace jabots and cuffs; not to mention monstrous rich. And Cousin Hat would be happy.…

The old horse picked its genial way through the crowd, accepting an apple here, a honey-cake there. Cousin Hat and Mr Cecil, fresh from the glories of the Palatio, bowed graciously to left and right. The Grand Duke had thoughtfully provided them with a handful of left-over fish-skin pearls and these they distributed as largesse, and so won their way at last through the main street, along the quay-side with its line of sea-going goats, and so up the opposite hill to the hotel. El Gerente waved gaily to them from the gates of the gaol; an amnesty had been declared in honour of the day, and he was surrounded by a large crowd of dear old smuggling pals, recently his involuntary guests. Pepita was dispensing wine, assisted by her daughters; all except Giulietta and her familiar, Manuela, who had renounced all dreams of the boards and were up with the rest at the Colombaia imploring to be permitted to enter the novitiate. Innocenta and Miss Foley had barricaded themselves in and were frantically chopping into suitable fragments, old table-napkins which—despite evidence to the contrary—Winsome had persuaded herself, Juanita
must
have used.… They passed Tomaso di Goya with Lorenna on his arm. Miss Cockrill stopped the carriage. Tomaso came over and stood before her with bent head. She showed him the notebook. “I have El Exaltida's permission to black this entry out.”