‘Lady Abroad’ then offered us a nice free advertisement, for our Swiney Godiva Hair Essence, ‘a universal favourite on the Continent’, and for Mr Rainfleury’s dolls, as ‘highly prized as Irish cut glass by foreigners’.
I flung the newspaper in front of Darcy. ‘Look – let us hope that Mr Millwillis is reading that! That’s another month we’re free of him.’
She gave it the barest glance. ‘Look at the time!’ she cried. ‘The lottery draw is in half an hour. Come along, I’ll need you to translate for me when I win.’
I was disturbed by the avidity on her face as she waited among the patient Venetians for the draw, and by the fury when her ticket was not chosen.
On the way home, she bought a sheaf of cartelle for the tombola notturna from the lady seated at the newspaper-lined table in the shadow of the Procuratie Vecchie.
And when I launched into the first words of my speech about our money, she simply held up her hand. ‘Not now, Manticory.’
With her other hand she was scrabbling in her crocodile reticule, which was crowded to the brim with losing cartelle.
‘Has Darcy cast a spell on you, Manticory?’ Alexander asked me in the dark.
I had pulled my head from the pillow, having renounced the waves of wanting, and was contenting myself with adoring his profile and stroking his hair, having insinuated one of my legs across his thighs.
‘All these months, and it is never the right moment, is it?’ He brushed my caressing fingers aside. ‘All I hear are Darcy’s reasons why you should not speak – it’s Ida, then it’s Millwillis, then it’s the lottery she’s just about to win and must not be distracted from. Has she Medusaed your mind, turned your brain to stone?’
‘There is a contract,’ I answered at last. And finally, slowly and hesitantly, I told him about the document that bound me to the Swiney Godivas and the Corporation.
‘A contract? Why can it not be undone?’ He picked up one of my curls and pushed a finger down it, separating the strands in a smoothness of motion.
‘Like this,’ he said. ‘Contracts are not stone. You’re of age.’
‘My sisters don’t know about the contract. I came across it . . . by accident and I never told them. Which was cowardly, I know. But if I break up the Godivas . . . what would be the fate of my sisters if I left them to the tender mercies of Darcy and Mr Rainfleury and Tristan? I would not know where to start with—’
‘You never know how to start, do you?’
Abruptly, Alexander disentangled himself from my limbs, rose and paced naked round the room, running his fingers around the faces in the violent paintings on my walls. The sun was beginning to rise. He picked up his clothes and thrust his limbs inside them angrily.
Wherever he lodged officially, he hardly ever slept there, rising from my bed early in the mornings to creep down the servants’ stairs to the garden.
I’d made him a copy of the gate key by then.
He rifled in a pocket and handed it back to me now, saying, ‘This is not as I pictured it should be between us, Manticory.’
‘Why does it make such a difference, whether I have separate money or not?’ I pleaded. ‘There is nothing to stop us being together, really, is there?’
What I meant was that I accommodated every wrong thing, his unknown lodgings, the secrecy, the lack of a defined future. I accommodated even the act of love. At first I had made love with Alexander because it kept him coming up the stairs, and my bed was the only place we could be alone together. The parts I enjoyed best were still the tender preliminaries, which had become increasingly abbreviated before he turned me on my belly.
‘Nothing to stop us,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘Nothing. If you but knew.’
‘Well, tell me then, what I should know.’
He turned away from me.
‘Where is it you are going? Home?’
I had kept Elisabetta’s palazzo under surveillance many times but I never saw Alexander walk back into it or out of it. I had taught myself to believe that he slept in his studio, wherever that was. He never invited me there. Alexander, who owned and knew everything about me, did not answer questions about its whereabouts. I pictured a narrow divan and a shared water closet on the stairwell, with everything ordered as elegantly as his clothing and his hair, which never tousled even on our most vigorous nights.
Elisabetta looked prosperous in her clothes . . . so he stinted on himself, giving her all his earnings so that she might go about in every possible elegance? It made little sense, unless he did it from conscience – yet he seemed to feel no guilt towards her; only resentment.
Alexander’s silence on where he lived made me sympathise with the shadow-wife Berenice had been all those years, the wife without rights either to recognition or information. Nor did I own Alexander; his presence in my life was as fragile as this, our first real difference of opinion.
In the dawn light, his fairness now took on the purity of ice, his hair white as a shroud, the shine of his eyes flat as glass. I remembered how the first time I met him in Dublin the snowflakes had glittered unmelted in his hair.
‘Where are you going?’ I begged him again, holding up the key like a wand.
He did not answer.
I threw the key across the room and curled up in the bed, listening to his light footsteps on the stairs.
Was he on his way to Elisabetta’s palazzo? I pictured a dangerous journey for him. He did not quite reach her as he had left me. Along the way, he lost a leg to gangrene and an eye to an attacking gull. In my elaborate fantasy, he did not die, but he became less than he was, and needier. He could no longer paint or go about the world, so he needed the comfort of love. And he realised that the person he needed around him was myself.
The vivid strength of my fantasies only reminded me of my pallid impotence. And at the same time as I cursed Alexander, I was in dread of something happening to him.
Revenge is an imprecise tool, of course.
‘. . . And my entire share of the money should be put in my own account. It is impossible that anyone could hold us legally to that contract. We can have a lawyer unpick it now I am of age myself. You see, I have read it . . . I shall stay in Venice – and—’
Until that moment Darcy had lain in her bed like a marble knight on a tomb. She had listened to my speech in silence, allowing my voice to falter and dwindle.
‘You read it, did you? Poked your nose among my private papers, did you?’ asked Darcy with quiet menace.
She surged up from under the bedlinen, striking the back of her head against the wooden bedstead. ‘Oh you shall stay in Venice, shall you? And you made all these grand plans on your alonesome, is it? Or did you perhaps plan a romantic escapade for yourself ? And that romantic escapade is functioning to a nicety for you, is it? That you came into my bedroom so early to disturb me with it?’
Her voice grew sweet and husky. ‘Manticory, we have not had a sitting for those dainty bronze busts in how long? I have a fancy to sit for Mr Sardou this afternoon. I shall send for him. I believe it would calm me.’
Darcy has his address? I thought. How is that, when I do not?
I told myself, She has Elisabetta’s address. That is not where he lives.
‘I shall see you in the drawing room at four,’ she told me, rising from her bed and thoughtfully consulting her image in the many mirrored panels of her room.
‘But you did not answer me about the money,’ I protested.
‘No, I did not.’
Darcy left the house soon afterwards. She was gone all morning, and came back full of gaiety. I guessed she had collected on a ticket at the tombola, or bullied her tailor over his account.
As the hour for the sitting approached, Darcy sent Oona, Berenice and Pertilly on separate and extensive errands about the town.
Alexander arrived at our apartment as the sun was draining out of the afternoon, his eyes darting with questions. Darcy had detained me beside her for the previous hour so I could not intercept
him at the gate or in the hall. I’d had no way to let him know that I had carried out the speech designed to engineer my independence – or to explain the attenuated result.
Darcy said, ‘Ah Mr Sardou, how good to see you and your sketching block too. Today I think you should concentrate on Manticory and myself.’
She turned her head in profile.
‘Draw!’ she commanded. Alexander crouched on a footstool and began to weave grey lines on paper.
‘You are a friend to this family, and I have decided to trust you,’ she told him. ‘Mr Sardou, I fear I must burden you with some painful revelations. Everyone gives out that Ida is the mad sister of the Swineys, but I must tell you that Manticory here is the one who gives me the greatest trouble. It is the old problem with the red hair, I suppose, the old whore-itch. She has tried to cover it with a veil of false modesty, but poor dear Manticory, well, she’s a broiler. I regret, always fussed up and humid about some fellow or other.
‘You flinch, Mr Sardou? I’m so sorry. I suppose she’s been making love at you too? I feared as much. She will keep doing that to men. No matter what I do, I fail to put the shame on her entirely. Please don’t let me stop you working, Mr Sardou.’
I could not read the thoughts concealed behind Alexander’s expressionless face. Was it a mask of contempt for Darcy’s manipulations? Was he remembering that it was I who had summoned him to my compartment on the train? Was he wondering what kind of decent woman would offer herself to a married man – or any man – so frankly? It was I who had given him the key to the palazzo gate and asked him to obtain the necessary items to ensure that our pleasures were fearless.
Could it be that he was even now asking himself, Was I really the first for her?
Darcy leaned towards him and took his hand. ‘Pray do not think badly of our wild red Manticory, Mr Sardou. It is an animal thing in her. An abnormality of nature. She can’t help it. Look, she cannot even speak.’
The fact that I could not seemed to confirm everything that Darcy said. Alexander’s head was averted. I could not see if his pale eyes were stained by the images Darcy had painted for him.
Darcy leaned forward confidentially. ‘I actually had to drag Manticory away from a man on a bridge when she was only thirteen years old!’
‘It wasn’t like that!’ Even I was aware that my broken tones and my blush seemed more like guilt than any other thing.
‘So she always says,’ purred Darcy, ‘whenever I’ve had to rescue her from a bridge or pull her from an adulterous bed at the last minute or even after it. Ah, yes, all this has come to pass. A great grief to me as her elder sister, I assure you.
‘Oh, Mr Sardou, you’ve hardly done a thing on the bust today. Not even a proper sketch. Are you leaving already? Such a shame.’
Alexander bowed to Darcy. He opened the door. Then he shot me a single look from under his lashes, full of complicity and understanding. He told Darcy, ‘I will not listen to such foul things about Manticory. It is not my business to hear them.’
My skin prickled with relief. He had not believed her. Of course he had not. And now he was leaving, out of loyalty, to stop her polluting the air with any more of her filth.
I rejoiced, Darcy’s intervention will bring us back together.
‘Watch his dust,’ mocked Darcy. ‘The long legs on him wishing to carry him so fast in the opposite direction of you, Manticory. No, stay, Mr Sardou. I have a few more things for you to hear, even though, of course, you have somewhere else to go.’
Alexander turned, visibly apprehensive.
Darcy rose and put her arm around me so that I smelled the acridness of her armpit. In tender tones she said, ‘You’re no great things yourself, Manticory, but at least you’ve shown a charming lack of interest in money until just this morning, as it happens. So you’ll be sorely disappointed to hear that it turns out that our dear artist here is something of a fortune-hunter! Did you know that he made a point of marrying an heiress? I have been to call on the lady this morning, a pleasure I’ve delayed far, far too long.’
Alexander’s pale face filled with dark-red blood.
‘So charming and attractive she is! May I compliment you on your lady wife, Mr Sardou? You say nothing, but of course I can. A perfect Venetian nymph. She speaks excellent English, Manticory. In spite of the fact that people like myself are naturally retiring, the lady and I got along quite famously. Such a wonderful hostess, she is. Lucky Mr Sardou, at home he has the finest of eating and drinking.’
Darcy watched my face keenly for pain. I could not hide it. That Alexander was fed by Elisabetta was hurtful to me.
‘The lovely Mrs Sardou wanted to know every detail about us! She told me she was quite convulsed with curiosity to see a Swiney Godiva show, and that somehow the pleasure had evaded her. When I told her about how her husband has shown such a passion for drawing you in particular, she was inspired to thank me for the information, the loving wife that she is. So understanding, so quick.
‘Why that demented look, Manticory? Love! It’s a class of feeling that men and women have for each other. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.
‘And I’m sure you already know, with you and Mr Sardou being such friends, the happy news his wife told me this morning. She is expecting their first child! Starting to show a little under that lovely dress of hers. No? You had no idea, Manticory? It seems that our Mr Sardou is as full of secrets as a priest’s ear. I had always thought him rather bleached-looking, like a man without bowels. But anyway, there was a baby in him the whole time,’ she sniggered.
Alexander held tight to the door handle, looking as white as her description.
Darcy irrigated him with more of her venom. With an awful smile, she told me, ‘Mrs Sardou informed me, in confidence of course, she now plans to keep him on a tighter leash. He’s a light character – you could blow him off your hand, she says. She’ll be cutting his living allowance now so as to stop him from floating too far. Keeping him short of the old folding – well, apparently it always works to keep him close to home. Only thing that does, apparently. There was an actress in Rome, you see . . . and a singing prodigy in Paris before her. He has a taste for showgirls, she says. Showgirls he can’t afford. Naturally, he’s never really earned from his art. Everything he makes he spends on his tailor. An eternal infant, she calls him. But so fondly! He’ll have to be educated into being a father now, she says, and start behaving like a proper married man of their class.
‘And, Mr Sardou, one last thing. For this thing is all of a piece. There’s a contract, you see, that binds Manticory to the Swiney Godivas. Recent events have made me believe that you know of it. Why, even if I were to be so irresponsible as to wish to free Manticory to pursue her own perverse destiny, there’s nothing I can do. Her behaviour since childhood dictates that I must keep her near to me, as she is not to be trusted in the world alone. There is something missing in her, something of decency, something of continence that binds a proper woman to her chastity . . . that I would hate to have to prove in a court of law on account of the embarrassment it would bring down on her – the man on the bridge, and all such and so forth. Indeed, even you your pale self might have to stand up and swear to how she has comported herself with you. I would hate to have to do it, and let it become a matter for the vulgar press, who already have a great interest in us. But I would, to protect Manticory, if I had to.’
She would. I saw that he knew it too, in the set of his lips and the way that his eyes travelled frantically around the room except in my direction.
‘So, Mr Sardou, I must tell you to go hunt a fortune elsewhere, or reconcile yourself to a long marriage, for it’s my belief you’ll never get your hands on Manticory’s money. The Swiney Godivas are not disbanding now or ever. The tide will go out on hair, which it will never do, before there is an end of us.’
Alexander did not say goodbye. He opened the door and left, stiff-necked as a fighting dog.
Chapter 40
I heard the porton
e close downstairs. Alexander was no longer in the palazzo.
Darcy laughed. ‘Don’t you just hate the sound of a door slamming?’
It is not true, I told myself. There is no baby.
But Darcy had seen the belly. Alexander had not denied it.
‘A baby?’ I asked, stupidly.
‘Would you like to keep up, Manticory? Yes, your Mr Sardou’s wife is positively wide with child.’
Elisabetta must have tricked him into a baby, I told myself.
Probably it is not even his. She has a lover in Paris.
I could not look at Darcy. I could see only Alexander and myself, before Darcy said what she had just said, before he had walked out, to go home to his pregnant wife.
A fragment of anger, sharp and slender, broke free from my heart and then stabbed me. The baby was real. The marriage was real. Alexander and I, our being together, that was the thing that was not real.
And Alexander was a coward.
Darcy had done him a favour, telling me about his baby and about his financial dependence on his wife, supplying with malice the truth he’d lacked in courage to admit to me. Had he meant to break free of his wife, if I could supply the wherewithal? He had returned the key to our gate when he heard about the contract that kept my teems of money in thrall to the Corporation. Returning the key was all the decency and honour he thought necessary in parting from me.
I had a sensation in my chest from the Harristown days when Darcy used to sit heavily upon my back to crush the poetry out of me.
‘You seem out of sorts, Manticory. Why is it that I am always the one who brings bad news?’ Darcy was musing. ‘And the one blamed for it? Don’t be looking knives at me, Manticory. Haven’t I just done you a great favour myself ? It is ironic, is it not, that the most suspicious sister, the one who always doubted our true patrons, should prove the most gullible of all? You accused Rainfleury and Tristan of making clowns of us. But who made a clown of your heart? You do not look as if you are appreciating the irony, Manticory.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 32