A Bed of Earth

by Tanith Lee

  D.H. LAWRENCE

  Twilight in Italy

  BEATRIXA

  ONE MORNING, ANDREA, lord of the house of Barbaron, entered his library, where he saw to house business and commerce, and found a man there.

  At first Andrea took him for one of his secretaries, both of whom were young men. But then the room’s other occupant passed through a beam of light, hung from one of the glazed windows. And Andrea made out that he was dressed in fashionable, quite opulent garments, what any young man of a wealthy family might wear—which was nothing like the plain gown of a clerk.

  His hair was plentiful, and worn long, below his shoulders, and the sun fired it up like new gold. It was a mane of hair, too. For a second Andrea glared at it, for he had for some years been without the front and crown of his own.

  Then it came to him he did not know this fellow. Who was he, strolling so idly in the sunshine of the Castello’s private library, between the gilded books, some illustrated by great painters, some in copper-print, some as large as a four-year-old boy—all costly.

  “You there—what’s your name?” called Andrea briskly. He waited for the young man to quail. Andrea had now been titular head of Barbaron for eighteen years, he was surely known here by sight, and by each of them in the house. Yet among all the great quantity of Barbarons who lived with him in this massive sandstone palazzo called Castle—the cousins, uncles, nephews, sons, and all their adjuncts and hangers-on—this one, distinctive man Andrea did not recognize. That was possible, maybe. Despite his clothing, might the loiterer not be one of the higher servants, one whom Andrea had never had occasion to note before?

  If that were the case, what was he doing in here?

  “What’s your business?” Andrea shouted.

  The young man had not answered his first question. He did not answer the second. Instead, not even glancing at Andrea, he stepped around a cabinet of books and disappeared.

  Andrea cursed. He strode forward. He had been always thickset in his twenties and thirties, and was bulky now, bull-like. He swung into the space beyond the cabinet, and saw only the empty floor, patterned by sunlight and a design of quince trees done in chipped marble.

  For some minutes Andrea thumped about the room, trying to rediscover the intruder. The library was ample but not gigantic. It had only one pair of doors, of carved ebony and not very silent. They had not sounded. Had the damnable rogue got out through a pane of the glazed windows, some of which might be opened? He would then have landed in the fetid Canal of the Triumph below. Ridiculous enough, but there would have been a splash. There had been no splash.

  Just then, Messer Oliviotto, Andre’s secretary, came in. The doors growled as usual.

  “Did someone pass you, going into the lobby?” said Andrea. His color deepened and he was frowning, so Oliviotto took care.

  “Why, no, Signore Andrea. No one, that I saw.”

  Andrea sat down at the table, scowling. He never liked to be outwitted, and those who had played mild practical jokes on him in his youth had soon learned not to.

  The secretary assumed his own place cautiously. He began to arrange his accounting slate, pens, ink and paper, taking a great interest in them.

  Andrea said, “A man was in this room but he’s left it now,” looking narrowly to see how ’ser Oliviotto would react. But the secretary only looked as blank as his paper.

  Andrea pushed the sense of strangeness away from him and pulled his ledgers forward.

  He did not remotely think he had been mistaken. He was even half inclined to admit that something uncanny had occurred. But he would waste no further time on it.

  Elsewhere, however, Andrea Barbaron’s only legal daughter was about to have a similar experience. Although really in every way, it was quite unlike. Since what Beatrixa would see was, like herself, a child.

  Castello Barbaron stood quite high above Silvia, on a sloping street (one of the few Venus boasted) that ran before the southwestern façade, the Triumph Canal stretching at the building’s other side. Approachable therefore both from front and back, each face of the house was ornate.

  It was a modern palazzo of its kind, not seventy years old, but built on the core of an older house, the original Castello. Masonry ascended, cut by tall windows, clung with carved stonework. Arcades ran across the lowest floor, facing both street and canal, on each arch of which, by night, lamps of vermilion glass were lit.

  Out from between the arches there now stepped a little girl.

  This was incongruous, somehow: the small, childish figure in its tiny version of an adult high-waisted gown, the mass of the Castello behind.

  She was, too, a serious-faced child. A type of introversion in her seemed to have expelled all evidence or chance of prettiness. Fawn of skin, from her swarthy father, her hair was a clouded, curling chaos of black. She held a wooden doll, but the way things that have been forgotten are held.

  She looked around, and pointed one set of toes in a minute, silk shoe.

  Then a guardsman in Barbaron’s colors came from the arches after her.

  “M’donna Triche, where is your nursey? Eh, now, you shouldn’t be out here.”

  The child looked at him haughtily. (Her toe-pointing dissembling had failed.) She said, “I am Beatrissa Barbaron” (she could not always quite pronounce her own name, but went on steadily), “and I have things to see to.”

  “Indeed, M’donna. I understand. Let me lead you back inside so you may see to them.

  “Thank you, no,” said the child.

  She was insufferable, yet not. She was scarcely more than an infant, and normally kept close. The guard smiled gravely, and signaled to another: Best hurry and find the nurse. Then he paced after Beatrixa at a slight distance, as she turned into the alleyway that ran by the palazzo.

  Here were kitchen women of the house, standing outside, arguing with a seller of fowls. One said, “Watch she doesn’t fall in the canal, or the lord will have your hide.”

  “My eyes are wide open,” said the guard.

  Beatrixa went through the arch that marked the alley’s end.

  Sunlight scalded before her in a sheet across the canal. Out of the brightness, the mooring-poles stood up black, each carved with the Tower of Barbaron. A shrine to Neptunus stood there too, with a fish-head and a wallflower left in its lap by one of the Barbaron maids.

  The guard repressed the urge to call a warning. The paving here was only seven feet across, and beyond the water-steps it ceased.

  But Beatrixa stayed beside the Neptune shrine, looking out over the lit water.

  There was no traffic for the moment on the canal. The noises of the City were amassed and seemed far off.

  What was the child looking at?

  The guard thought it ethical to approach her after all.

  “What can you see, M’donna Triche?”

  Beatrixa exhibited vast and stealthy patience.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  But now her eyes were following something, as the guardsman thought, along the surface. In the fierce sunlight, certainly he could see nothing, but children were always imagining things. Unless it was a swimming rat.

  She had been up on the gallery that ran about the middle floor of the palazzo. The nurse had taken her there to play, for the south-facing garden and the courtyards were at present too hot. Great, dark-yellow blinds had been pulled down anyway along the gallery, where pots of lilies gave off a stupefying scent. The nurse soon fell asleep. Then Beatrixa dislodged the edge of a blind, and peered out at the canal, to watch what boats might pass.

  The sun had not yet moved over the house, and no shadow fell on the water. But then a curious thing occurred. A shadow did seem to settle there, and suddenly Beatrixa was able to see straight through it, and so down, down into the depths of the canal.

  Fascinated, leaning between the marble-hipped posts of the railing (as she was told never to do), Beatrixa stared.

  There in the water, she could now see a most bizarre and
elongated movement, and instantly she took this to be the serpent-dragon which lived in all the canals and lagoons of Venus. But then she saw it was not that, but a slowly twisting current, of a deep, mixed purple-amber, like spilled dyes. And in this flashed a host of little fish, like glinting needles sewing in and out. And then, walking among them, about twenty feet down under the water, she saw the other child.

  Beatrixa was very young, five or six by then, but she knew humans and animals, save fish, could not stay long beneath water. (The treasure-divers in the Laguna Silvia trained themselves to do this very thing, and might have produced such an apparent underwater child—but Beatrixa had not yet learned of the divers.) Anyway, there was something else.

  The child in the canal was a boy, her own age, and very well-dressed. He had long golden hair—even in the water it was gold. And it flowed down his back as if just combed. His clothes stayed close to his body. That is, the current did not disturb them, make hair or sleeves or anything else stream about, as with everything underwater it must. And this Beatrixa grasped, even though she did not know that she did. Also, at that moment, the boy under the canal stopped still and raised his head, and looked right at her. And then he lifted his hand, mildly, waving to her, almost smiling. He had all the beauty of face she did not, but even though he was, as she was, only five or six years old, it was a very male beauty, and almost feral. More, it was the beauty born of some different place. … And then she realized, too, that where anyone else would swim under the water, he walked, quite grounded, as one did on the earth.

  Beatrixa crept quickly from the gallery. Her nurse never woke. The little girl ran swiftly down the stairs of the Castello, the narrow and the broad. She was winged-footed as the god Mercurius, patron of messengers and thieves.

  The lesser left-hand door, to the side of the great one, stood ajar, or she could never have got out. The guardsmen had done this? It was a coincidence, perhaps. Now, as she peered through the blinding light on the canal, Beatrixa thought she could still see the boy in the water, but she was not sure. Then she was less and less sure. And then, suddenly, she did see fully what she was looking at, and a sharp brief cry escaped her.

  “Yes, M’donna Triche, now I see it too. A horrid rat. Shall I throw a stone at it?”

  She turned to the guardsman and vented (as if she were her father, Andrea) her disappointed fury. “No! Don’t dare! You are a wicked godless man!”

  “Where do they learn these phrases?” he asked afterwards, ruefully.

  From the world, of course. From which all things are generally learned. Unless some other plane intervenes as, in this case now, it had.

  Less than a month after this, Andrea went to visit his only daughter. It was the afternoon of the day he heard the story of the Eel.

  Going into the big room where the nurse and the child slept, Andrea braced himself a touch. Children, even his own (especially they?), tended to irk him. It was their slowness and gullibility. Even as a child himself, he had felt something of this about other children.

  Triche was the only daughter his wife had produced, after a bevy of sons. He was aware this wife had lost most of her looks by then, and was getting on in years—she was thirty when she conceived Beatrixa—and maybe that was the reason why the sons were handsome and the daughter not.

  Nevertheless, every time he was confronted by Triche, which was not often, he became conscious that there was something to her after all.

  Her nose was certainly too long for beauty, and her face too narrow. It was not even, he thought, precisely a child’s face, nor was her hair, so rich and unruly—when it was combed, her screams could be heard over half the palazzo. But her dark, intense eyes might one day be reckoned wonderful. Oh, they would be, for she would be the most-marriageable daughter of the house of Barbaron.

  She looked, he thought now, like a Roman maiden in an ancient mural. Slender, smoky, from another time.

  The nurse had gone out.

  “Now, how are you, girl?” said Andrea, bluffly.

  And he noted all at once the contempt with which the child accepted this. She was no fool, either, then. Perhaps she would, for a woman, be clever.

  “I hear you’re out of sorts. But the physician says there’s nothing amiss with you. Your mother and your nurse have asked your father to speak to you, therefore I am here. And I am a busy man, Triche. So, be quick and tell me.”

  All this in a jovial, threatening way. He took slight enough notice of the vaporings of either servants or wives. This though, was another aspect of his duty. His daughter belonged to the house and must be kept in good working order.

  “I’m well,” said the child. Dismissive, as he had meant to be.

  He scrutinized her, approving her manner despite himself. She was like him. That would do her no harm.

  “You’re a minx,” he said.

  “What is a minx?”

  “Never mind.” He sat and beckoned her over. “Tell your father why you’ve been acting so oddly.”

  “I have never been.”

  “Yes. Saying you’ve eaten your food, hiding it, and then throwing it off the gallery into the canal—what is that for?”

  “To feed the fishes.”

  “There are few fish in the canals. They prefer the lagoons.” He remembered, not expecting to, the Eel.

  Andrea frowned at her, but the child was not intimidated. She said, “I won’t, not again.” Now she sounded depressed.

  “The fish weren’t grateful for their dinner?”

  “No.”

  “What about this habit of yours of getting up at night and wandering about the house? The guards and maids have been finding you at every turn. And your cousin-uncle Gualdo found you asleep in the little sala. Why there?”

  “I thought—I was lost. Nurse says I walk in my sleep.”

  “I don’t believe that, Beatrixa.”

  “No,” she said. Her respect for his acuteness peculiarly pleased him. Yes, she was no fool and did not like to be treated as one.

  “Very well, if you won’t say. But you must stop it all. From this instant. Do you understand, Triche?”

  “Yes, Dadda.”

  Now, astonishing him, a rush of actual elation went through Andrea at being awarded this babyish name for a father. In his forties, he did not suspect himself of any softening or sentiment. But, well, she was his only girl. And so young.

  “You’re a good child. I know the honor of Barbaron will be safe in your hands. As safe as if you were a boy, and trained to it.” He said this to please her in turn. Perhaps he meant it, too. It was the highest accolade he could give her.

  And her head went up proudly.

  “I am Beatrixa Barbaron.” She knew she had received her worth. She even got her name right.

  Andrea leaned over, kissed her on the forehead and stood up.

  She was very small but that bright glance of her eye was so like his own, in expression if not color. And in the black maze of her curls as sunlight traced them, was a sheen of his own redder hair, what was left of it. All the boys were dun-haired, and fair-skinned like their mother.

  “Wave me off from the stair,” he said, coy as a suitor.

  Serious and concentrating, Beatrixa did so. Even when he reached the stair’s bottom, there she was at her door still, sedately waving.

  If only females stayed this easy of persuasion, and this wise.

  Andrea did not feel altogether too unsatisfied, but through the rest of the afternoon the other thing, which could have nothing whatsoever to do with Beatrixa, recurred in his mind more than once—the Eel.

  The story of the Eel—it was not merely an eel—had been told to Andrea by his more pragmatic secretary, Lanto. Which was surprising in itself. But obviously, Lanto, who said he had heard it in the printing-shop from a reliable source, was shocked. It was a shocking story.

  “But you judge it a fact?”

  “Yes, Signore Andrea. I’d trust the old man. He said he saw two doctors rowed out that morning,
and later they came back, with gowns thick in blood. The old fellow lives near Aquila, you see. The wanderliers are also full of the grisly tale.”

  “They always have something.”

  Lanto lowered his eyes. He had gone pale, as anyone would, just thinking of it.

  “What does the Ciara family have to say?”

  Lanto said, “They keep quiet. He was up to his neck in vices, sir. Everyone knows it now. Ever since that affair with the della Scorpia girl—but that was twenty odd years back. I recall they said she was too afraid of his reputation to wed him, and that was why she ran away.”

  Andrea nodded curtly, a clue that he had heard enough. He did not want to talk about any of it. Especially not that. It was done, long over. But he thought too, Things surface …

  And as they went on with ordinary business, now and then those things kept surfacing also in Andrea’s mind, punch them down as he would.

  What had become of her, Meralda della Scorpia, that he had given to the Lord Ciara all those twenty-four years ago?

  In the Palazzo della Scorpia, they believed, as much of the City did, she had run off with the artisan Lorenzo Vai. But Andrea of course knew otherwise.

  He had not cared much at the time. He had assumed Ciara would violate the girl, shame her, and send her back to her own with the brand of slut on her forehead. Something of that sort. Oh, even then there had been gossip about Ciara. But he would not do so very much with a girl of high family.

  The wanderlier of their boat, Lorenzo and the girl’s, Andrea’s men had been instructed to silence. But he had gotten away from them, and maybe it was he who later spread the legend that Meralda and her lover had been tortured and slain on Eel Island for the vengeful delectation of Lord Ciara, their bodies then slung into the lagoon.

  In the intervening years, Andrea had had dealings with Ciara only once, a matter to do with Barbaron trade in Candisi and the Levantine. Ciara had been smooth as oil. He always was. And Andrea had given no sign of anything either. But the agreement had gone as if oiled, too.

  Andrea did not worry unduly over the girl. No, it was not that. If she had been his intended bride, he would probably have raped, decidedly whipped, and maybe starved her a while, to show her her fault. If she had been his progeny, everything but the rape. A high family, in such a situation, might also be inclined to pack such a daughter off to some scummy nunnery that did not refuse such goods, and leave her there to rot. Thus, it seemed excessive to him only if Ciara had killed her. The manner of her death, though, sometimes that did trouble Andrea. Not then, but as time went on. As Lanto said, that particular lord of Ciara had become known for his depravity. Even the Ciara house had last year seemingly cast him out, for he had spent all his recent hours on his island.