Vintage Love (104 page)

She left Raphael to talk with the old man and went upstairs to see Aunt Isobel. She found the old woman in her room, standing by the window and looking weary and upset.

Aunt Isobel came to her, “Where have you been? I’ve been worrying about you!”

“I went to meet Father Anthony,” she said, not going into any of the unpleasantness which had taken place.

“You don’t tell me any of your plans,” her aunt said unhappily. “For all the good I’m doing I might just as well be back in London.”

“Please,” she said. “It will be all right. Soon I hope we’ll be going home.”

“Not as long as that girl is missing,” Aunt Isobel said. “You have taken it on yourself to rescue her.”

“She is my sister! I can’t do less!”

Aunt Isobel gave her a troubled look. “What happened between you and Henry?”

She hesitated. “There was a little misunderstanding.”

“What sort of misunderstanding?”

Della sighed and turned away from her aunt. Then she said, “It was one of those ridiculous situations. Raphael was in my room talking with me. Something was said and he impulsively kissed me. At just that moment Henry happened to arrive in the doorway to see us.”

“So that is what happened!” her aunt exclaimed.

She gave her a guilty look. “I promise you the kiss was innocent enough. I’m so like Irma that I sometimes think Raphael becomes confused.”

“I wouldn’t accept that as an excuse, and neither would Henry,” her aunt said acidly.

“It was a fuss about nothing,” Della protested.

“I see!”

“As soon as I can find Henry I’m going to tell him how sorry I am and ask him to forgive me.”

“You’ll not have that opportunity for a few days at least,” her aunt said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because Henry received word from London of an urgent matter involving his firm. It has to do with a client in Naples and he left for there while you were out.”

Della was stunned. “I don’t believe it!”

“It is true,” her aunt said. “He told me to explain to you and said he’d be back in three or four days!”

“How could he leave me knowing the predicament I’m in?” she lamented.

Aunt Isobel said, “I expect he thinks Prince Raphael will look after you.”

“He’s done it to punish me!”

“Perhaps.”

“But it isn’t fair. He knows I’m in real danger! How could he just go off and let me take my chances.”

Aunt Isobel sighed. “I’m sure he was badly hurt.”

“He didn’t give me a chance to explain.”

“Too late now,” her aunt said. “You’ll have to wait until he returns to Rome.”

Della sank into a nearby chair. Dolefully she said, “Everything is going wrong.”

“This grim old house depresses me,” Aunt Isobel said. “I cannot sleep at night.”

“If only Irma hadn’t been abducted we’d have been on our way back to England,” Della said.

“Let me ask you something,” Aunt Isobel said.

She looked up at her. “What?”

“Have you been wandering about the house in the middle of the night?”

Della was startled by the question. She said, “No. Of course not. Why do you ask?”

“I have wandered out of my room in the night,” Aunt Isobel said. “Twice I have seen a figure in the hall which I took to be you. Each time it went along the corridor and suddenly vanished, as if it had dissolved in the air.”

She stared at her aunt’s wrinkled, worried face. “That is utter nonsense!”

“It isn’t,” her aunt insisted. “And if you want my opinion of what it means, it means that Irma is already dead and I’ve been seeing her unhappy ghost.”

Della jumped up. “Don’t say such things!”

“I believe it,” her aunt went on. “I only had a glance at her face and I was sure it was you. Now I realize my error. I was watching a ghost. Irma’s ghost!”

“That’s nonsense talk!”

“You think so? Well I saw some phantom figure with your face. If it wasn’t you it had to be her phantom!”

She stared at the older woman and wondered. This was an amazing utterance from one who scarcely ever strayed from fact.

Della told the older woman, “You must have been dreaming.”

Aunt Isobel said, “I was afraid you might say that.”

“I was not in the corridor and Irma, as you well know, is a captive somewhere. How else can it be explained?”

“As I’ve told you. I think they’ve killed her!”

Della shuddered. “Don’t say that!”

“It is what I think,” the older woman said. “This old palace has a curse on it. Prince Sanzio said so. I’ll not rest until we’re safely away from here!”

Della saw it was not a time to argue. To discuss this further might put Aunt Isobel into a highly nervous state and she had no wish to do that. She was sure her aunt had been suffering from nightmares and because of her insomnia was now mixing up fact and her dreams. The whole business had been a strain on them all and must be especially hard on the older woman.

There was nothing to do but listen to the story and make no definite comment. Once again Della regretted the stupid scene which had put Henry in a frame of mind to go off on an errand for his firm without first warning her. Only now that he was gone did she realize how much she counted on him.

She kissed Aunt Isobel on the cheek and begged her, “Please don’t make yourself ill with worry!”

Then she went on to her own room. But she could not rest. She changed into another dress and went downstairs to find Prince Sanzio in his wheelchair by the fireplace of the great living room.

The old Prince said, “Raphael has gone. I believe he plans to stop by and see Barsini.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said. “I’m sure Barsini is much more involved in this than he revealed to me.”

“Irma was a happy girl before she met that wicked man,” the old Prince sighed.

“Let us hope that she soon will be back with us arid ready for a fresh start.”

The old man frowned. “I do not know. Sometimes I fear they have lied. That she may already be dead.”

“Don’t think that!” she protested. But at the same time she was recalling what her aunt had said. Was it possible that the phantom figure she’d seen had been the ghost of the murdered Irma?

“You have been most kind to an old man,” Prince Sanzio told her. “I fear I brought a great deal of trouble upon you when I brought you here.”

“You could not have done anything else,” she said. “I wanted to find my missing sister. It is grimly ironic that I should find her and then lose her almost at once.”

She had barely finished dinner when a messenger came with a letter from Prince Raphael. She opened it and read it quickly. In it he asked her to come at once and join him at the main entrance of the Sistine Chapel.

She went at once to Prince Sanzio and showed him the letter. “It is evident he must have discovered something!”

The old man examined the note. “It looks genuine enough,” he said. “It is on Raphael’s notepaper.”

“I must go at once,” she said. “Will you explain to my aunt?”

“Of course,” the old man said. “I will have Guido summon the carriage for you.”

She left the palace filled with the hope that Raphael had finally solved the mystery. The fact that he wished to meet her within the area of the Vatican suggested that perhaps the stolen treasure had been restored to the Church officials.

It was still daylight and she enjoyed the street sights as the carriage took her toward the Vatican conclave. She left the carriage near the Bronze Gate and after passing the Swiss Guard on duty there she made her way to the entrance of the Sistine Chapel. But there was no sign of Raphael!

She stood there glancing around at the hordes of tourists coming and going. But nowhere did she see the Prince’s tall figure and handsome face. She began to worry that she had been the victim of some hoax. The letter could have been forged. It might not be too hard for someone to get some of Raphael’s personal notepaper and use it for their own purposes.

Troubled by these thoughts and fearful that she might have walked into a trap, she was about to hurry back out to her waiting carriage when a scholarly-looking young man wearing thick spectacles and the broad-brimmed black hat and black robes of a priest came to her.

“Miss Standish,” he said with a smile. His English was perfect.

She stared at him in surprise. “Yes. How do you happen to know me?”

The priest smiled. “From the excellent description given of you by Prince Raphael. Also I have several times had the pleasure of meeting your twin sister, Irma. The likeness is startling!”

“Did Prince Raphael send you to meet me?”

“Yes,” the priest said. “May I introduce myself. I am Father Joseph Walker. I am from London and I’m here taking advanced studies in theology.”

“How nice to meet someone from home!” she said.

“Prince Raphael felt you might enjoy my showing you around a little. He will not be here for a while. He is having a meeting with one of our Church officials.”

Her hopes rose. “Has it to do with the Madonna?”

The eyes behind the spectacles fixed on her. “The stolen Madonna of St. Cecilia?”

“Yes.”

“I cannot be sure,” he said. “I am only a humble priest. But I can tell you the Prince must have important business since he is at this moment talking with a cardinal.”

She smiled. “I’d enjoy seeing the Sistine Chapel while we’re waiting.”

“You have never seen it?” Father Walker said.

“No.”

“Then let us delay the experience no longer,” he said.

Della was astonished by the distance of the chapel from the main entrance. Father Walker led her along at least a half-mile of marble corridor with inexplicable twists and turns. The chapel was down a winding staircase with occasional windows on the wall looking out on grim stonework. She had the sense of descending into a deep fortress of stone.

Father Walker bade her follow him through a low door and she found they were in the chapel at one side of the altar. She had the impression that the many other tourists there were gazing at her in awe. Then she suddenly realized that she had entered underneath Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment. This to the right of the frightening figure of Charon forcing the damned from his boat.

The priest said in a low voice, “It may seem gloomy at first. But it is a place of unbelievable beauty.”

“I know,” she said in an awed whisper.

The windows of the chapel were set high and the towering walls were painted a third of the way to imitate drapery. The priest knelt on the marble steps of the altar and she with him.

She then followed him back a little and he pointed upward. She gasped at the splendor of the ceiling painted by Michelangelo.

“The task took him many years of his life,” Father Walker whispered in her ear. “He was thirty-three when he began the ceiling and started the Last Judgment.”

“I have never seen anything so powerful,” Della said. “Nothing like it in England.”

Father Walker smiled sadly. “I’m afraid not.”

She went back to study the Last Judgment. At first it had seemed rather dull in color. But as she moved in on the painting and studied it at close range the majestic figures stood out. It struck her that Christ was more occupied with cursing the doomed than welcoming the saved. She stared at the macabre faces of the resurrected corpses.

Under Father Walker’s guidance she moved on. She noted the gold, blue and scarlet figures on the side walls.

“We are proud of our Vatican art and treasures,” the English priest said.

“Rightly so,” she agreed.

“When there is a theft such as that of the jeweled Madonna, it is greatly lamented,” Father Walker said as they started back along the marble passage to the entrance.

“I hope it is soon returned,” she said.

“That is kind of you,” he said. “I most heartily pray this will be case.”

“What a long way,” she said, as they continued along the marble corridor.

“There is a door ahead which leads to a shortcut,” Father Walker told her. “We can take it. It is here on the right.”

He went ahead to a side hall and led her down its short length to a heavy, iron door. He opened the door for her, saying, “Please go first, Miss Standish.”

“Thank you,” she said, impressed by his friendliness and good manners. But the minute she stepped through the door it was slammed closed after her. And there was no sign of Father Walker and no handle to open the heavy door!

Della turned and, pounding on the door, shouted, “Father Walker! Let me out of here!”

Her words echoed mockingly in the stone tunnel with its arched roof. She began to tremble, shocked that she had come to danger in such a holy place. But she was no longer sure of anything. Was Father Walker truly a priest? Not likely! He was surely an imposter who had baited her into coming to the Sistine Chapel by using a false message from Prince Raphael.

The light in the corridor was murky and she groped her way forward wondering what she was faced with now. In a moment she stood before another door, a wooden one with an iron handle. She opened the door and found herself in a candlelit room.

A thin voice from the far end of the room called, “Enter, my child!”

Mystified and frightened, she went on into the room, which was richly carpeted and hung with crimson tapestries on all its four walls. At the very end there was a square mahogany table with a candelabrum whose white candles burned with tiny, yellow tongues to lend an amber tint to the high-ceilinged room.

As she took this in she saw an old man hunched in a chair by the table. The chair was ornate with a high back and the old man wore the red robe and cap of a cardinal. By his chair there sat a huge brown mastiff with a black-marked face. The great dog’s burning, amber eyes fixed on her angrily and it rose with a growl as she slowly approached.

“Down, Bruno,” the ancient Cardinal said in a thin but authoritative tone. The great beast glanced at him dubiously and then with a show of sullenness crouched down beside him again. The Cardinal’s thin old face showed a smile. “Bruno is my protector and overly fond of me. He is suspicious of all intruders. You must not mind him.”

“I’m sorry to be intruding,” she apologized. “I didn’t know what was on the other side of the door. I was in the Sistine Chapel and as we left my guide suggested we take a shortcut. To my surprise I found myself trapped in the corridor outside your door.”