Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

“Is no place to put guests.” She surprised me with the force of her interruption. “These rooms are not good rooms. Things happen here.”

  Uncertain what to say to that, I asked, “What sort of things?”

  Teresa looked at me, her eyes intense. “Things happen.” And then shutting off that line of talk, she turned. “I must go and take care of the others.”

  I made one last attempt at friendliness. “At least you have help today.”

  “Come?” she asked me, which sounded like ‘co-may’ and clearly meant ‘pardon.’ She’d stopped by the door and was frowning.

  “Your husband, I mean. He got back last night, didn’t he?”

  “No, signorina.” Her frown had frozen over with professional reserve. “My husband has not yet come home.” And then she sharply turned and left the room before I could respond.

  Defeated and confused, I sat and poured my tea. “Buon giorno, Giancarlo.” That’s how Alex D’Ascanio had greeted the man on the terrace in the small hours of the morning, I was sure of it, and yet . . . I shrugged. I might have been mistaken. After all, I had just woken up, I might have still been half-asleep. I was pondering this when another short knock sounded at my door.

  This one sounded like Rupert’s. I called out, “Come in.”

  Den put his head round. “Morning. Are you decent?”

  “Well, mostly.” I wasn’t in the habit of entertaining male visitors in my dressing-gown, but he’d already shut the door behind him and I had very little option but to pretend that I was more sophisticated than I actually was. Tightening the belt of my dressing-gown, I thanked him for my breakfast. “It was sweet of you to remember.”

  “I’ve been called many things in my lifetime,” he confessed, “but never sweet.” For all his smile was suggestive I felt quite sure that, with Den, the flirtation was only a habit, and harmless. I didn’t feel threatened at all when he crossed to examine my breakfast tray. “Not bad. Teresa did a good job.”

  “You can have a roll or something, if you like. It’s far too much for me.”

  “No thanks, I’ve had mine already, downstairs.” But he did help himself to a seat in the armchair that faced me. Stretching his legs out, he looked round the room. “Very nice. I can see you’re not suffering.”

  “No.” It was my turn to smile.

  “This was her suite, I take it? The first Celia Sands? Well then, likely you’ve got the best rooms in the house, except maybe for D’Ascanio’s own. I’d imagine they’re pretty impressive as well, if his grandfather did the decorating.” Even sitting, he couldn’t keep still. Reaching out a hand he felt a corner of the heavy fabric draping the table beside him, then turned to the trinkets arranged on its top: a porcelain box, a bowl of coloured glass, a tiny herd of silver elephants. Den picked each item up and flipped it over, felt its weight.

  Trying to make conversation, I asked, “Do you visit all your actors at this hour?”

  “What? Oh, I don’t, no. Consider yourself privileged. Actually,” he said, realigning the elephants, “I came to ask a favour. I’ve lost Rupert, you see, and—”

  “He’s probably gone for a walk. He usually does, after breakfast.”

  “The point is,” said Den, “he’s not here, and I wanted to measure the theatre this morning so I could do the marking out in our rehearsal room, and I need someone else to help me hold the tape. I’d have asked our host, but he’s conveniently absent as well, and as Maddy and Nicholas haven’t put in an appearance this morning I didn’t think I should go knocking on either of their doors, if you know what I mean.” His blue eyes danced mischief. “So that just leaves you.”

  “I’d be happy to help.” I’d been hoping that someone would offer to show me the way to the theatre. After all of the pictures I’d seen I was dying to see the real thing. I’d even thought of trying to find it myself, although I had only the roughest idea of where it might be in the grounds, and the world’s least reliable sense of direction. I’d be much better off with Den leading me.

  Or at least, that’s what I thought.

  vii

  WHEN we set out after breakfast it became apparent that Den, who’d led Rupert and me so unerringly through the confusion of back streets and alleys in Venice, found the garden paths here a bit difficult.

  The layout of the gardens wasn’t quite as bad, I don’t think, as that of the house, but it had the same feel of the labyrinth—built on many levels, with enclosed and private spaces, some with shrubberies and fountains, others so completely wooded that I felt like I was walking through a forest in a fairy tale. Not minding being lost, I breathed the fresh and unfamiliar scents surrounding me, the dampened stones that lined the pathway, and the flowers and the trees whose names I didn’t know. If Bryan were here he’d have named them all for me—the tall spindly ones with the elephant bark and the ones with the thick shiny leaves and the sprays of star-like flowers, white and yellow, hanging heavy with perfume. Bryan was clever with trees, as with birds, and some of these looked like they might have come straight from his part of the world, spiky and strange and decidedly tropical.

  Den, who’d travelled more than I had, might have known what they were, but I didn’t like to bother him when he was navigating. Not that he was having much success. As we stepped into the sunlight once again, into a level and orderly grove of small fruit trees contained by a classical border of columns and arches, Den reached for his hand-drawn map, frowning.

  “Well, this should be the orchard. Which means right through there is the rose garden . . . yeah,” he said, looking ahead to the next level down, where a tidy green pattern of hedges trimmed low to the ground ringed the beds where the rosebushes waited to bloom. “And that means,” he went on, “that we’ve taken another wrong turning.”

  I smiled at his impatience. “That’s all right, I’m quite enjoying this.” I’d never been high on a hillside like this with the morning breeze cool on my face and the clear unspoilt blue of the lake far below me, its broad surface ruffled with streaks of pale silver that stretched to the opposite shore. I liked to look down to the lake and see the soaring points of cypress trees descending like the spears of giants, nearly black against the mingled greens of other trees. My gaze drifted sideways to take in the larger view. “What is that place, then?” I pointed to a narrow house whose rose-washed walls and tiled roof were only just now visible above the copper beeches at the bottom of the orchard.

  Den consulted his map once again. “The Villa delle Tempeste, it says here. That means the ‘House of Storms.’ ”

  Appropriately named, I thought. The Villa delle Tempeste had been where Galeazzo kept his wife. She’d been an actress, too—Francesca Tutti, whom he’d married in his younger days, before his work had brought him fame. She’d acted in his early plays, although she’d never quite achieved the level of success or immortality that Celia the First had. Francesca Tutti had been very much an actress of her time, and when the fashions had changed she had faded from view like all those silent film stars talking pictures had displaced. Why she’d stayed with Galeazzo through his infidelities I didn’t know. Certainly there didn’t seem to have been much love lost on his side; in his later poems he’d written about Francesca rather savagely. They’d had one child that I knew about, a son—Alex’s father, I presumed, still finding it strange to be able to put human faces to the people that I’d read about—and perhaps that alone had been the reason why Francesca Tutti hadn’t left Il Piacere, why she’d stayed on in the Villa delle Tempeste.

  I raised my hand to shade my eyes and took a closer look. The shutters stood open at one of the upper floor windows, a small sign of life.

  Den, beside me, bent close to the map. “OK, I see what we’ve done. We have to double back, then take the second turning at that little fountain with the dolphins.”

  I turned from the villa, and followed him. This time we found the right path.

  We were back in the woods again, climbing through a tangle of slender-trunked trees stained w
ith olive-green moss. Here the path was paved with grey stone cobbles, rounded carefully to shed the rain, and the gurgle of swift-running water, unseen but quite near, chased us up the short flights of steps meant to make the climb easier.

  “No one told me,” said Den, “that I’d have to go into training for this job. What’s with D’Ascanio and stairs?” But I could tell that he, too, was impatient to get to the top; that he shared my excitement.

  And then finally the trees thinned, the path levelled out and we stood at the edge of D’Ascanio’s theatre.

  viii

  THERE are moments that lodge in the mind, as though somewhere a shutter has snapped and the whole thing’s been captured; not only what you’re looking at but everything: the things you smell, the way you feel, the angle of the sun, and at that moment you feel certain, you just know, that for as long as you are living you’ll remember every detail. I’d had such a moment the first time I’d gone out onstage for a curtain call and seen people applauding in place of the darkness. I could never look at empty seats beneath a theatre’s house lights without feeling that again, just as I knew that I would never smell a pine tree without thinking of this place.

  It was a theatre-in-the-round, set in a hollow ringed by cypresses and pines. The hollow’s grassy banks sloped downwards in a circle much too perfect to be natural, divided into quarters by four flights of steps descending from the pathway round the hollow’s rim to where the stage lay nestled at the bottom.

  Galeazzo, with his love of all things ancient and romantic, had built a wooden stage, with rising banks of seats beneath the tent-like shelter of a pointed roof on pillars, which left the stage and seats exposed to open air while keeping the rain off the heads of the actors and at least part of the audience. Those who opted for the less expensive seating on the grass had to take their chances with the weather, though the sloping lawn still offered them an unobstructed view.

  Here at the top I could see the larger sweep of scenery, across the placid narrows of Lake Garda to the perfect snow-topped mountain peak that marked the farther shore, but as I started down the nearest of the four long aisles, venturing deeper into the hollow, that view gradually narrowed until, looking up from the bottom, I saw only treetops and the great blue bowl of sky.

  I turned to continue on down to the stage, while behind me Den said to be careful. “The renovations aren’t done yet, don’t forget, and this would not be a good time for you to break a leg.”

  But the stage certainly looked sturdy enough, and there weren’t any barricades or warnings to keep off it, and I couldn’t resist the temptation. It was not a very large stage—maybe forty feet or so in diameter—and instead of being raised above the audience it sat in a depression at the centre of the rings of seats, so that those in the first row were actually looking down a bit at the actors; a rather unusual arrangement, but a practical one given the layout of the theatre since it guaranteed that everyone—those sitting under cover of the roof and those who’d spread their blankets on the grass—would see the play.

  It felt odd, though, to have to climb down to a stage. The proper way to reach it, of course, would have been to begin my approach from the dressing-rooms and backstage areas, coming out through the tunnel-like gangway that opened out under the section of seats to my right. But since I hadn’t started in the dressing-rooms, I had to go the slightly harder route of swinging myself over the edge of the first row of seats and dropping the short distance onto the circle of boards.

  I’d never played a theatre-in-the-round before. Simply standing in one gave me quite an incredible feeling, exposed on all sides, with no elaborate scenery to hide behind. Rupert had once said that theatre-in-the-round was theatre stripped down to its essence, its primitive form, and standing here now I could see what he’d meant. When Thespis of Icaria, five centuries before the birth of Christ, had first stepped away from the chorus to say a few lines on his own, scandalizing the audience and changing forever not only the role of the actor but the whole nature of drama in theatre, he might have been standing on a stage much like this one.

  Although, I amended, he wouldn’t have had all those lights pointed down from the rafters. He likely wouldn’t have even had the rafters, come to think of it.

  “Let’s hear a soliloquy,” Den said. He’d taken a seat in the front row to watch me, arms folded, expectant.

  I took the dare. “Which would you like?”

  “Oh, anything. Surprise me.”

  I surprised myself. The first great speech that came to mind was not from Shakespeare, but from Sophocles—Electra’s opening lament. I hadn’t spoken it since I’d left school, and yet the words were somehow there and flowed with ease, seeming fitting and right for this open-air stage with the hills sloping up on all sides to the trees, and the breeze blowing airily under the high pointed roof. I made it midway through:

  “ ‘. . . while I behold the sky, Glancing with myriad fires, or this fair day. But, like some brood-bereavèd nightingale, With far-heard wail . . .’ ” I faltered, then. “ ‘With far-heard wail . . .’ No, sorry, it’s gone. I don’t remember what comes next.”

  A pause, and then the answer came rather impressively out of the depths of the gangway behind me: “ ‘Here at my father’s door my voice shall sound.’ ”

  And Rupert strolled out of the shadows to stand at the edge of the stage. He was smiling an odd little smile. “Very good, Celia. Very good indeed.”

  Recovering from my initial shock at hearing his voice coming out of the darkness like that without warning, I calmed my racing heartbeat with a hand on my breastbone. “Don’t do that! I nearly went straight through the roof.”

  “Sorry,” he said, but he looked more amused than contrite. “Fancy your remembering Electra after all these years. What made you think of that?”

  I pushed back my hair, no longer the woman in mourning, no longer performing. “I don’t know, it was probably all that talking you two did about the Fourth Crusade in Venice. You know, about the sacking of Constantinople and the library burning and all those Greek plays being lost in the fire. I’ve got Sophocles in the subconscious.”

  “And very appropriate, too.” Hands on hips, Rupert surveyed the setting. “What do you think of it, Dennis?”

  “Sorry, I’m still recovering,” said Den, looking down from his seat. “That was terrific, Celia, it really was. Rupert, why didn’t you tell me?”

  The reply came back faintly indignant. “I said she could act.”

  “Yes, but I thought—” Den abandoned the sentence and leaned forwards, shaking his head. “Wow.”

  He sounded so sincere I couldn’t help but feel a tiny flush of pride. Taking a sudden and intense interest in my feet, I mumbled my thanks, but I hadn’t the chance to do more than that, really, because just then an angry shout shattered the peace of the morning.

  I raised my head as Den and Rupert turned to face the hillside, where a giant of a man was thumping down the steps of one long aisle towards us, calling out words that could only be curses and waving his arms like he meant to do murder.

  I sidled a step towards Rupert. “Roo?”

  “Don’t worry, darling. He probably thinks that we’re trespassing. We’ll get it sorted.” But even he didn’t look altogether certain of that.

  Neither did Den. The big man was closing the distance between us with frightening speed, still shouting out phrases I didn’t understand, his hands clenching now into fists. Den stood and called back something in Italian, but he might as well have thrown a pebble at a charging rhino.

  And I could do little but watch as the man came on, now at the edge of the outer circle of covered seats, now halfway down the aisle, now nearly at the front row.

  Rupert, very quietly beside me, told me, “Faint.”

  “But Roo—”

  “For once, my love, just take direction, will you? Faint.”

  I dropped. I could have done it more dramatically, and maybe landed a little more softly, but given the ci
rcumstances and lack of preparation it wasn’t too bad. As though a soundproof door had slammed, the tirade stopped.

  A moment passed in silence before Den, catching on, started in on the stranger in his turn, accusingly. I didn’t understand a word of what was being said, and from my prone position, eyes closed, I couldn’t see anything, either, but Rupert, crouching down beside me, told me everything was going fine. “Good girl,” he said. “Well done. Now just stay down there for a moment, and—”

  Another man’s voice, still far off, joined in. “Pietro!” That was Alex D’Ascanio, surely, I thought. I half-opened my eyes to be certain. At the sight of the figure in jeans and black jacket striding down the grassy slope, I struggled to sit. “Roo, I’m getting up.”

  “All right, but slowly, now. Don’t spoil the effect.”

  He needn’t have worried. The big man had his back to us, and wouldn’t have noticed if I’d turned a cartwheel. And anyway, I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to have Alex D’Ascanio thinking of me as a weak, helpless woman. Standing, I rubbed the fresh bruise on my shoulder and watched Alex coming down between the seating sections, looking like an usher who’d been sent to deal with some disruptive member of the audience.

  The man named Pietro launched an opening barrage of what I assumed were excuses, gesturing towards us with contempt, but Alex didn’t appear to be much in the mood for explanations. His voice, his eyes, were very cold. With one sharp word he made the man fall silent.

  It was not an easy silence, though. And when the glowering Pietro finally pulled his stare from Alex’s, I sensed that he had merely shouldered arms and not submitted. As if to underline that point, he didn’t leave the way he’d come but dropped to the stage and stalked straight to the gangway, past Rupert and me.

  I hadn’t got a good look at his face till now. A nasty face, with sullen eyes and bulldog jaw and heavy eyebrows drawn together darkly. Not a face I would have liked to have met in an alley; or anywhere else, for that matter.