Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  Bending his head he examined his watch. “You will excuse me, there’s something I must do before dinner. Teresa starts serving at seven exactly—you remember your way to the dining room?” This question, expectant, he directed at Madeleine. “Yes? Then you can show the others? Thank you. I shall see you later, then.” And with that he nodded politely and left us, the dogs keeping close to his heels as he entered the house.

  Nicholas lowered his voice this time, drawing on his cigarette. “You see? What did I tell you? Not the world’s most social bastard, is he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Madeleine, “I rather like him.”

  “Yes, well, you would. Women always mistake silence for substance.”

  “The problem with you is you never give people a chance,” she replied. “And anyway, Nicky, the poor man did well to be civil at all after your making fun of him.”

  “Oh, the hell with that.” He brushed it off. “If a chap can’t laugh at himself . . .”

  Rupert, always keen to get out of the way of a conflict, moved me along with a hand at my back. “Would you like another drink?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Our martinis freshened, we walked off a short distance to stand by the parapet, looking down into the gardens, a fantasy landscape of manicured hedges and footpaths and fountains and thickets of trees, tumbling down the steep hill till it vanished from view in the dark of the soldier-like cypresses ringing the lake.

  “And what did you think of our host?” Rupert asked.

  I wondered uncomfortably whether his sharp eyes had noticed my interest in Alex D’Ascanio. “I don’t—”

  “Come on, let’s play your game. What role from Shakespeare would you give him?”

  I smiled. “Oh, Roo.”

  “I’m curious.”

  Leaning on the parapet, I thought about it. “Hamlet.”

  “And why Hamlet?”

  “I really don’t know. It just came to me, that’s who he is.”

  He accepted this. “And Madeleine?”

  I glanced over my shoulder. She and Nicholas were still talking, but more amicably now, and Den had joined them. “Cleopatra,” I said without thinking. Always loving the wrong man, I thought. First Caesar, and then Antony, and both had been unfaithful to her.

  Rupert saw it, too. He smiled. “ ‘O, never was there queen so mightily betrayed!’ ” he quoted softly. “Is that the idea?”

  Actually, watching Madeleine watch Nicholas, another line from Shakespeare’s play had risen to my mind, more plaintive. Why should I think you can be mine and true?

  Only I didn’t quote it out loud.

  Nicholas took hold of Madeleine’s hand with a lover’s touch. I looked away. “Something like that,” I told Rupert, and lifted my drink.

  The knock on his door was expected.

  “Your wife, sir,” said Thompson, and ushered her in.

  “Ah, Francesca,” he greeted her, rising. “You do surprise me. I would have expected you long before this.”

  She sat. “I have been busy.”

  “Yes, I hear you have. A doctor, is he not?” His smile reminded her that he, too, had his sources of intelligence. “I’m glad you have not been too lonely, while I was away.”

  “No more than you have,” she replied, crossing swords with the skill of long practice. “I have seen her.”

  “And?”

  “She’s very beautiful. Young for you, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Very.”

  “She’s an actress?”

  “She has a rare talent. Like you had.”

  She noted the past tense, as he had intended, but smiled all the same. “Then you will have to write a play for her, caro, as you did for me.”

  An underhanded thrust that hit its mark, but he refused to let her keep the advantage. He parried back, “Perhaps I will.”

  A play for Celia . . . his imagination grasped the thought, and turned it like a sculptor turning clay. Of course. And he would build a theatre also, where he’d always longed to build one, in the little hollow with the pines . . .

  “You’ll come and see your son?” Francesca asked him, rising.

  Wakened from his reverie, he said, “Of course. No, better still, the two of you must come tonight to dinner. Bring your doctor, if you like. I might behave myself. And complicated conversations do improve my appetite.”

  iv

  WE didn’t dress for dinner in the traditional sense, but the grandeur of the dining room—the room I’d glimpsed earlier on my way down—seemed to demand something smarter than the everyday. Even Rupert wore a jacket, which he rarely did outside his club, and only then because it was required.

  But then, this was the sort of room that in the thirties had been meant for elegant women in long bias-cut satin gowns, and gentlemen in dinner jackets. It was not a room to lounge in, not a comfortable room, but in its day it must have been the height of fashion. The walls were black lacquerwork, polished like mirrors, and heavily gilded with gleaming bright gold. And the ceiling that arched overhead in a pattern of shells was gold, too. The effect was like being inside an exquisitely designed Chinese box.

  All along the outside wall were opaque leaded windows cut in stylized geometric shapes, reflecting back the soft light from the room. I’d thought at first that they were made of painted glass, but Alex had informed me they were actually alabaster, and the masterpiece of one of the many skilled artists his grandfather had brought here to work on the estate. “I’ve been offered money for these windows, many times,” he’d told us. “And they’ve recently been featured in a book of great twentieth-century art.” So I wasn’t surprised that there weren’t any draperies to cover them.

  The trestle table could have seated twenty people easily, though only six chairs had been set around it—rounded tublike chairs with black-and-red tapestried seats that in spite of their stylized appearance weren’t too bad for sitting, so long as you kept your back straight. I’d been placed at one end of the table, closest to the doorway to the corridor, with Den and Rupert to my left and Nicholas and Madeleine to my right. Alex D’Ascanio sat at the other end, facing me. Behind him, two gilded shell-shaped niches in the lacquered walls held the marble heads of a man and a woman, strongly illuminated, while at his shoulder a second door connected to the kitchen passage. Through this door from time to time Teresa came and went, bringing new dishes and clearing the old ones.

  She didn’t look overly pleased, and I wondered about this until Nicholas, catching me looking, leaned over and said, “I don’t think it’s her job to serve at table. The maid served us last night.”

  So the missing maid hadn’t shown up yet. And I was guessing, from the black look on Teresa’s face, that her husband, Giancarlo, had not come home, either. As we’d sat down to dinner Alex had apologized again for our not being met at Desenzano, and it was clear he’d been embarrassed by Giancarlo’s unreliability, but something in the resignation of his tone had led me to believe that this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened. Which made me feel deep sympathy for poor Teresa—she was probably wavering, I thought, between wanting to wring her husband’s neck and being worried to death.

  I showed her a smile and said “Grazie” when she came to take my pasta plate, replacing it with a dish of roasted chicken and potatoes, but this time she didn’t respond, merely nodded and moved on to Nicholas.

  Ignoring her with the casual ease of someone accustomed to servants, he looked across at Rupert. “So now that we’ve assembled, what’s the plan? When do we start?”

  Rupert looked at Den for confirmation before answering. “We thought day after tomorrow, on Monday, if that’s all right. We’ll begin with a read-through, go over the schedule, see where we stand. That suit everyone? Lovely, then that’s what we’ll do.”

  Madeleine set down her fork. “And where are we rehearsing? In the theatre?”

  “No.” That was Alex. He shook his head. “No, there’s still work to be done on the stage. I w
as thinking perhaps in the ballroom. I’ll show you,” he offered to Rupert and Den, “after dinner. It’s a nice room, very large and bright, and I can have some chairs brought in, whatever you need.”

  I still hadn’t reasoned out why my mind associated him with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so as the meal went on I tried to study him more closely without being obvious, keeping my head down so no one would notice and lifting it only to pretend an interest in the marble heads set in the niches just behind him. I wasn’t having any luck until I saw him following in silence something Den was telling Rupert, and it hit me. I could see the intellect at work, and something else, a private kind of loneliness, and I suddenly felt very sure that I’d found the connection, that what had made me think of Hamlet was my sense that this man, too, was driven on by some internal force, and yet stayed always on the outside, looking in.

  I was forming that thought when his head turned a fraction without any warning. His quiet gaze levelled on mine.

  The contact was brief. But I couldn’t help feeling, as he looked away unsmiling, that I’d once again been caught doing something I shouldn’t have.

  Den, having finished going over things with Rupert, leaned close to me and murmured, “You don’t need to look so damned guilty.”

  I looked at him, surprised, because I didn’t think he’d been aware . . .

  “You’d need a superhuman appetite to finish that,” he said. And with the smile of a conspirator he nudged his plate discreetly towards mine. “Here, let me give you a hand with those last few potatoes.”

  We were making the transfer when something, a tingling warmth on the side of my face, warned me someone was watching. Against my better judgement I glanced up, and for the second time my eyes locked with Alex D’Ascanio’s. Only this time I thought that his mouth moved a little in what might have been the shadow of a smile. And this time it was I who was the first to look away.

  v

  I woke suddenly in darkness in the puzzled and disoriented state that came from sleeping in a strange bed in an unfamiliar room. I lay there a moment or two in confusion, unable to see much of anything, but gradually the outlines of the furniture and window-frames emerged from the shadows like a slowly developing film, and I relaxed as I remembered where I was.

  The room was cold. I hadn’t locked the French windows and one of them had come unlatched and drifted partway open, letting in a breeze that stirred the curtain. Shivering, I rose and went over to close it, and it was as I stood there at the open window that I first noticed the sound.

  That might have been what had disturbed my sleep to begin with: the thrumming of an engine faintly underscored by the rolling crunch of tyres on gravel, coming on as careful as a thief. And then the sound abruptly died and for a minute, maybe longer, all was silent. I was putting out a hand to shut the window when the slumbering walls of the villa caught the echo of a car door’s slam, and shortly after that I heard the scuffing steps of someone climbing, not the way we had come up at the front of the house from the gates at the entrance, but here at the back, climbing up to the terrace from somewhere below in the gardens.

  Whoever it was wasn’t taking great pains to be quiet. I rather expected the dogs to start barking, and when they didn’t I wondered why. Maybe, I thought, they were very sound sleepers, and after all I didn’t know where their master’s room was, it might be round the other side of the house where the dogs couldn’t hear . . .

  On cue a feral growl rose low from underneath my balcony, and then was hushed by someone saying, “Zitto.” A man’s voice. Alex D’Ascanio’s voice.

  I couldn’t close the window now, I thought—he’d surely hear me, and I didn’t especially want him to know that I was awake and aware of his being there.

  The climbing footsteps had reached the terrace, now—I could tell by their flattening tone and the change in their rhythm.

  The voice beneath my balcony said calmly, “Buon giorno, Giancarlo.”

  The footsteps stopped dead. Giancarlo’s reply was a short burst of words in Italian that, although I didn’t understand it, was nonetheless easy to interpret. Bryan said much the same thing when I came up behind him and spoke without thinking . . . and then he’d accuse me of trying to give him a heart attack.

  Alex D’Ascanio didn’t seem very remorseful. He took his sweet time stepping forwards, and even the clicking of the dogs’ toenails at his heels was leisurely. I didn’t think he’d moved too far off, but the next time he spoke his voice was indistinct.

  I didn’t have any desire to witness him tearing a strip off an employee, and anyway it wasn’t any of my business, so I started very quietly to pull the window shut. I didn’t want to be obvious, didn’t want anybody to see me and think I was one of those women who nosed about, spying through windows. But one of the dogs growled. The sound brought my head up and made me stop, motionless, as both men turned their heads to look.

  It took me a minute to work out which man was which—they were much the same height and build, and in the end I only managed it because of the dogs, whose circular pacing kept bringing them round to the man on the left. At his knee, the dark shadowy figure of one of the greyhounds paused, poised with its nose pointed straight at my window, like a setter who had scented game. I didn’t dare move.

  Alex angled his head up to look at my balcony, too, but he mustn’t have seen me because he once again said something to the dog before returning his attention to Giancarlo. The dog, though, sure of what he’d seen, kept watching me, and so for safety’s sake I stayed exactly where I was, trying to keep still. Another few minutes, I thought wryly, and that wouldn’t be a problem—I’d be frozen here, the night air was that chilly.

  Come on, I urged the men silently, finish talking and move off, so I can close this window and get back to bed.

  Giancarlo seemed to be doing most of the talking, gesturing a good deal with his hands, as though he were explaining himself, while Alex stood with hands in pockets, head tipped as he listened. Whatever excuses he was getting from Giancarlo, I could tell he wasn’t pleased. He interrupted halfway through, impatient, and shrugging his shoulders he made a remark that was sharp and abrupt.

  Giancarlo hovered in silence a moment, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, then opting for a dignified retreat he turned and came across the terrace, plainly heading for the doorway to the dining room, beneath my window. I shrank back without thinking, and the tiny movement brought another growl from the greyhound.

  Alex didn’t seem to notice. Instead he appeared to be looking at something. I followed his gaze and saw nothing at first, but as the night breeze stirred the shadowed mass of trees a small light showed, a tiny dab of yellow in the blackness at the bottom of the garden. Curious, my eyes came back to Alex.

  He stood for a long time and looked at that light, then he gave a command to the dogs and walked off with his back to my window. The dogs, left behind, settled down on the terrace with protesting whines. Alex didn’t go into the house. I heard footsteps on stone, but retreating this time, as he went down the steps that Giancarlo had climbed minutes earlier. And then that sound, too, faded and finally stilled and the silence wrapped around the house more closely than before.

  vi

  MORNING brought the sunlight and a symphony of birdsong. I’d never heard so many birds, all calling gaily back and forth to one another from the trees beyond my windows to the hedges and the rooftops and the hills behind the house. Bryan had once tried to teach me to recognize bird calls—he’d always been brilliant with things like that, knowing which species would nest in which hedgerows and such—but for all my gift of mimicry I’d been a very disappointing pupil.

  Even now, after all his instruction, I still couldn’t tell if that twittering song belonged to a sparrow or a finch. I was lying there trying my best to decide when a knock at the door interrupted my efforts. A single knock, too formal to be Rupert’s. I combed my hair straight with my fingers and rolled out of bed, reaching for my dressing-gown. The
mirrors in the bathroom reassured me as I passed. I didn’t look too terrible for someone who had slept in fits and starts. Belting my dressing-gown tightly I went through into my private sitting-room and unlatched the door to the landing, to find Teresa on the other side, unsmiling, with a breakfast tray. “Buon giorno.”

  “Good morning.” Surprised, I stepped back to let her by. “What’s all this?”

  “Is not for everyday,” she warned. “Is only for this morning. Signor O’Malley asked me would I do this specially.” Den must have worked his charm—her tone implied that if Signor O’Malley were to ask her if she’d mind moving the villa a foot to the east, she’d consider it.

  I couldn’t help smiling as she set the tray on the tea table near the sofa. Not technically ‘in bed,’ perhaps, but close enough. That had to be what all this was about, I thought—my telling Den in Venice that, if I were rich, I’d have someone serve me my breakfasts in bed. Teresa, of all people, I thought, would probably have understood the sense of luxury I felt in being served instead of serving, but her face was so dour that I didn’t try to explain. I only said, “Signor O’Malley is a very thoughtful man,” and thanked her.

  “Prego.” She moved to the window to open the blinds, her features still set in a look of supreme disapproval.

  It occurred to me that, even if she didn’t think me a fitting occupant for Celia the First’s suite, I could perhaps pacify her a little by showing how much I appreciated being here. “These rooms are so lovely,” I said, with a tentative smile. “And the bed—”