Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) (38 page)

“Nor I, in truth,” he said in husky agreement, “though the regret remains.”

She was still for the space of several breaths. Finally she said, “Is there nothing else we can do, nowhere we can go to — to get away?”

“Running, hiding, looking over our shoulders, is that what you want?”

“It’s better than being apart.” Her voice was low but firm.

The breeze from the open door drifted around them, shifting Violet’s hair across her back. Allain caught the warm skein of it in his hand, lifting it to his lips. Finally he said on a sigh, “Perhaps. It may be that a place can be found.”

“
GILBERT IS IN VENICE
.”

Allain made the announcement on his return from the market. Violet was lying on a chaise longue in the salon, nibbling on a piece of the dry bread Signora da Allori had recommended for morning sickness. She sat up quickly, then closed her eyes as nausea swept over her. She choked a little as she said, “You saw him?”

“Not I. I had a report from friends I asked to watch for him at the frontier. He was seen going into the Hotel Principessa.”

“You — had him watched?” Her voice sounded strange even in her own ears.

He paused in the act of removing a dress glove to search her pale face. After an instant he tugged the glove from his fingers and tossed it into the hat that he had set on a side table. He said deliberately, “It seemed a reasonable precaution.”

“And only just, of course, since he had us followed before.” She paused to give him time to comment. When he made no effort to do so, she went on. “Or did he, Allain?”

“What are you saying?”

There was a faint imperious shading in his tone as he spoke. Things had changed between them in the days since the two men came. They had both tried to pretend that the words spoken, and unspoken, made no difference. Both knew it was a lie.

“I have been thinking,” she said slowly. “Were the men in Paris really sent by Gilbert, or were they a part of this — this danger you spoke of?”

“Does it matter?” He turned away as he removed his coat and took the button links from his cuffs before beginning to turn up the sleeves.

Her voice strained, she said, “You know it does.”

He looked straight ahead for long moments before he faced her. “I suppose it does. If Gilbert did not send the men who followed us there, then you came to me because of a misconception.”

It was a long moment before she answered. “I meant only that Gilbert was not quite the villain I had thought, that he had some reason for his failure to understand what took place.”

“Ah,” Allain said, his voice soft. He moved away again, going to the windows, where the heat of the sun was growing minute by minute. His face was quite blank as he reached to close the shutters, plunging the room into sudden dimness.

“That wasn’t what you meant, though, was it?” Violet went on. “You must have guessed the men were not sent by him, yet you allowed me to think otherwise. Why?”

“How was I to tell you without explaining everything?”

“It was easier to keep me in the dark, and to accept whatever benefit might come of it.”

“If by that you mean your surrender, then yes.” He removed his hands from the shutter knobs and turned to meet her gaze without evasion.

“But don’t you see that it changes everything?” she said earnestly.

“What I see is this,” he said slowly. “If I had told you then, I would have lost you. Gilbert was going to take you away; I saw it in his eyes that evening at the ball. I thought that if I could have you for one night, just one, I would be able to support being without you for all the nights that would come after. That was a mistake, not my only one, but perhaps the most grave.”

Her voice low, she said, “I had thought better of you.”

“Did you?” A wry smile touched a corner of his mouth. “I’m flattered, and glad. But in my defense I will say that, though I may have guessed the men that night and later at the train station were not sent by your husband, I couldn’t be sure — can’t be sure even now. I have never been attacked before. The cause of it at this time might be the war and its consequences. Or it might not.”

She put a hand to her face, rubbing at her eyes, pressing her fingers to her head that had begun to ache. “Or it could be that you are still making excuses.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered, his voice quietly reflective, drained of emotion, “and it could be you are searching for a reason to return to Gilbert, after all.”

“No!” She drew back as if she had been struck.

“You see,” he said as he moved toward her, “this doubt between us is a sword that cuts both ways. It hurts you, but I am not immune to its pain.”

She nodded in weary agreement, exhaling softly as she lay back on the chaise. “I know. And I am sorry for it.”

His clothing rustled as he knelt on the floor beside the lounge where she lay. He picked up her hand, carrying it to his lips, then cradling it between both of his. “I can’t bear that we should hurt each other. It may be that in trying to keep you safe, I am destroying the love and trust between us. If I do that, then the sacrifice you made for me will be meaningless and the love we have shared without worth.”

He stopped, his gaze wide as he searched her face. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead not caused by the heat of the day, and a faint tremor in his hands. He moistened his lips before he went on.

“Because of these things, I leave the decision to you, then, knowing that your concern for the child you will bear must be even more vital than my own. Will you hear who I am, and what, or will you remain in safe ignorance of it?”

She reached to spread the fingers of her free hand over his, where he clasped her other one. With love and resolve plain in her eyes, she said, “Tell me everything and tell me quickly, while my courage lasts. I want to know all of you, though it means the end of life itself. How else am I to know my child, if I never know his father?”

He drew a breath, then let it out in a single gust. He gave a fatalistic nod. His voice was not quite steady as he said, “It began nearly two years before I was born, in the year 1825 — or perhaps it really began long before, but came to a head in that year. My father had been unhappy in his marriage and his position for some time. His wife was sickly, and he had no living children of the marriage…”

He went on, the words coming easier and with more clarity as the narrative took on shape and form. He presented the facts without embarrassment or pride, and without subterfuge. It was not a long tale in its essence. But it changed everything.

When he had fallen silent, Violet sat still, staring into space. She felt stunned, as if at some unexpected blow. She was not disbelieving so much as reluctant to allow herself to believe.

This was not a tale she could record in her journal. She might never be able to put it on paper, never speak of it to a single person, never even whisper it to the child in her womb when it was fully grown.

Her heart felt leaden inside her. She could sense all the half-formed plans and unfinished dreams she had not really known she was building begin to wither and fade slowly from her mind.

“Don’t look like that,” Allain said, his voice rough.

She brought her gaze back to his face. Her lips trembled into a smile as she lifted her hand, smoothing the lines of anxiety that creased the skin between his brows, trailing her fingertips through the damp curls at his brow.

“No,” she said quietly, “it’s all right. I’m all right.”

His features eased only a fraction. “Tell me what you think. I must know.”

“I think that I love you, that I’ll always love you.”

He bowed his head, and his lips were warm against the coolness of her fingers still in his clasp. As he looked up he answered, “No more than I shall love you.”

She thought the words had the sound of a vow, the only one she was ever likely to hear. It was, in its way, enough.

“I also think,” she went on after a moment, “that we should leave Venice at once.”

“But your condition — what of that?”

“Is that why you have delayed? I am generally quite healthy. The morning sickness is normal, nothing to be concerned over.”

“I’ve been thinking that perhaps the countryside would be best, instead of any city where I might be expected to go. Signora da Allori has a sister who owns a villa near Florence. Savio will take us there with a letter of introduction, and with suitable precautions and disguises, unless you would hate such things. It waits only for your approval.”

It would be an easy journey, perhaps too easy. “If you are satisfied, then I give it my blessing, of course. But — you would not forfeit your safety for my comfort?”

“Willingly,” he said, his gray eyes steady. “But you forget that your safety also depends on mine, and will until our child is born.”

“Then,” she said simply, “I will trust you to keep us all from harm.”

It was at the villa that Allain finished the miniature of Violet that he had started in Venice. The small portrait was the best thing he had ever done, or so he maintained. The inspiration was in her smile, he said, that faintly superior and mysterious smile of interior knowledge.

Violet had not known she could look that way, so beguiling, so serene. She accused him of flattering her outrageously for his own purposes. He denied the charge with vehemence. The painting was perfect, he said, an exact likeness. The villa and the country life obviously agreed with her.

He was right about the last.

The villa was ancient, with broken roof tiles, tawny building stones that were crumbling to dust at the edges, and jagged cracks in the high walls that surrounded it. From the windows could be seen long views of rolling hills covered with gray-green olives, verdant vineyards, and with umbrella pines standing sentinel on the ridges.

Inside, the ceilings were painted with nymphs hiding among clouds, the walls were hung with tapestries that shivered in the cooling breezes through the open windows. Opening from the kitchen and its adjoining dining room was a walled garden. This retreat had the long arcade, the gnarled roses and luxuriant grapevines, and sublime silence of a cloister.

The villa could not be called convenient. Every drop of water for cooking and bathing had to be carried from the fountain in the center of the garden. The stable was a tumbledown ruin where chickens and ducks nested in the feed boxes. The nearest village was nearly three miles away and it was only a cluster of houses around a church. Violet loved the place anyway, loved it for its age, its imperfections, and its sense of having sheltered other lives, other lovers, over long ages.

She and Allain spent most of their days in the walled garden. He set up his easel under the grapevine arbor where the mosaic floor gave him a fairly level surface and the light was good. They had a table and a number of comfortable chairs set up there also, and ate their meals there as often as not.

There was such peace and security within the old walls where the only sounds were bird song and the hum of bees, and the cool trickle and splash of the fountain. The plants growing against the crumbling masonry and in large pots were kept clipped and watered by the villa’s caretaker, a young man named Giovanni whose father and grandfather had also tended the house and garden in their time. Giovanni was always somewhere about, dipping water from the fountain and carrying it for the housekeeper, Maria, who was his mother, bringing eggs from the stable or onions from the kitchen garden beyond the wall, plucking yellowed leaves from the roses on the walls or cutting the grass under the huge silver-gray olive tree that grew in a corner. When Violet glanced in his direction, he always smiled and inclined his head in a gesture that seemed more a salute than an indication of subservience.

With Giovanni’s help, she identified many of the plants that grew in and around the villa, from the ancient and enormous apothecary’s rose to the sweet basil and oregano, sage and shallots and mint growing in the garden’s geometric-shaped beds.

Giovanni was soft-spoken and exquisitely polite, a nice-looking youth near her own age with curling black hair, liquid brown eyes, and brawny shoulders developed by his outdoor work. He kept a market garden in his spare time, where he grew vegetables and flowers that a cousin took once a week to Florence, some twenty or thirty miles away. In the spring, he said, when the huge old roses in the garden bloomed, he collected the thousands of petals as they fell. He extracted their perfume, as had his father and grandfather before him, and this essence he bottled and sold also.