The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

“Rose, I told you to be careful,” a voice admonishes me. “And now look!”

  I turn around and see Mara standing at our table, her arms open wide. “It’s gone! Your Hermès scarf ring is gone.”

  I sigh and leave Bruno to make my way back to my seat, scanning the petal-strewn table, and then, pulling out my chair, I spy the glint of silver. “It’s just been moved to my chair, Mara…” I begin, and then stop, because I’ve noticed that what I thought was my napkin rolled into the ring is actually a piece of paper—the same type of yellowed parchment I found in Robin’s package back home.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  MARA PEERS OVER THE TABLE TO SEE FOR HERSELF THAT MY HERMÈS SCARF ring is safe, but before she can see it I slip the rolled parchment out of the ring and into the fold between my shawl and dress. Then I hold up the silver ring for her to see. “It’s definitely mine,” I say. “Here are my initials.”

  “Well, you’re lucky,” she says, frowning at the espresso cups being laid out on the table. “You really should put it away someplace safe.” “You’re right,” I tell her. “In fact, I’m going to take it up to my room right now.” I turn to say good night to Bruno, but he’s vanished into the crowd. Mark hasn’t returned and Daisy Wallace has also left. I suppress a niggling suspicion that she’s gone off to find Mark. Really, it must be the atmosphere at La Civetta that breeds jealous thoughts—or these magic petals strewn across the tabletops and floor.

  I leave Mara looking for Gene, and Leo Balthasar trying to negoti-ate decaf American-style coffee from the waiters. As I walk through the pomerino toward the villa I see that all the interior lights have been turned off, no doubt so that they wouldn’t interfere with the light show in the garden. The library—also known as the Sala dei Ucelli because of the frescoes of birds that adorn the ceiling—is lit only by the moonlight coming in from the windows. I can just make out the profusion of painted songbirds fluttering through the branches of a painted grove and, at the top of the domed ceiling, a great horned owl, its wings spread and talons extended, about to descend on its unsuspecting prey. I consider switching on a lamp and reading my mysterious missive here, but the room has always made me uneasy. As I cross the tiled floor I can hear the parchment crinkling under my shawl, and the sound, like mice running through dry brush, makes me feel like the owl’s prey. Better to wait for the privacy of my own room.

  When I enter the rotunda, though, I see that it’s empty, and although it’s also unlit, the moonlight pouring through the oculus is so bright, I can see clearly. I find I can’t bear to wait any longer. At the foot of the steps I take the parchment out and unroll it. The sonnet is written in the same antiquated hand that penned the poem I read in New York. The drawing that forms the border is in the same faded ink, only now instead of lemon trees the poem is framed by roses shedding their petals. I read as I walk up the steps, the sound of my footsteps keeping time with the meter of the poem.

  I long for thee more than the wind can know,

  More desperately than roses for the sun;

  I crave the grace thy kisses can bestow

  Upon my fallen self’s scarred flesh and bone.

  My violation was no fault of mine;

  My lowborn fate turned woeful in this bed

  In contradiction of divine design;

  My blood announced my anguish as I fled.

  But on these very stairs once streaked with shame,

  Thy trail of petals starts, leading up to

  Our destiny to merge; pink wisps proclaim

  Perfection greater than what Adam knew.

  For blood is fleeting but love’s perfect rose

  Blooms from eternity, as sunlight knows.

  I pause at the top of the stairs and read the poem over again. The opening line echoes the closing couplet that’s on the rim of the fountain, as do the rose wisps in the eleventh line, suggesting that the poem is either by Ginevra or by someone imitating her. Here, though, the bed strewn with roses has become the site of violation, the rose petals have been transformed into the blood of defiled virginity, and then that blood is turned into a marble trail to lead her lover to her bed.

  I look down at my feet. At the top of the stairs the pattern of rose petals ends at the border of narrow carpet that lines the hallway. I hook my foot under the edge of the carpet and kick back a corner. Yes, the pattern continues under the rug. I look down the hall toward my bedroom—the nuptial suite with its frescoes of garden and grove and its cassone painted with traditional wedding scenes to celebrate a marriage. If the poem in my hand really was written by Ginevra de Laura in the sixteenth century, then perhaps the pattern of roses embedded in the bedroom floor, in the hall, and down the steps of the grand staircase was commissioned by her to commemorate her own deflowering in this house and to turn the shame of that blood into a path her lover can follow up to the bedroom to find her.

  It’s far more likely, though, that such a fanciful idea came from Robin Weiss’s fevered imagination and that he has concocted these poems out of the myth and gossip that surround La Civetta. The floor, the wall paintings, and the cassone were probably all there before Ginevra de Laura was even born. Certainly the cassone must predate her, since cassoni went out of fashion by the early sixteenth century and the wall paintings look like they’re from the same period. As for the floor…well, I suppose it’s possible that the floor is later, because pietre dure became popular in the late sixteenth century. But I shouldn’t have to depend on stylistic clues alone. The villa’s archives include the ac-count books and inventories of the Barbagianni family going back to the fifteenth century, when the villa was built. I should be able to find out when the bridal suite was painted, which bride brought the painted cassone into the house as her dowry, and when the tiled floors were laid. Even if they were created during Ginevra’s time, it seems unlikely that she, a mistress, not a wife, would have had anything to do with their commission.

  Whoever has written these poems has finally made a mistake by including a detail that can be verified or disproved through a little historical research. I decide to go back to my room and turn in for the night so that my head will be clear in the morning. As I turn down the hallway, though, I’m startled to see Daisy Wallace coming out of my room. I imagine she must be startled to see me as well, but if she is, she recovers quickly. She squares her shoulders and approaches me, head up, very much as if I were the intruder and she were the lady of the manor. Her attitude makes me wonder whether she had been totally honest when she claimed her family had no interest in La Civetta. It also makes me feel sufficiently wary of her that I tuck the sonnet back into my shawl before she can see it.

  “Was there something in my room that interested you?” I ask when she’s reached me.

  “Your room? Oh, I didn’t realize it had been assigned to you. My apologies. I wanted to see it because it was Lucy’s room. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that she was my great-aunt?”

  “No, I haven’t forgotten. I also remember you saying that no one in your family wanted anything to do with this villa. I’m surprised you’re so interested in Lucy’s old room.”

  Daisy looks pale, but then I realize that the moonlight has bleached her face, her blond hair, and her white dress so that she looks like an apparition. “I’ve been reading Lucy’s letters,” she says, “and she mentions several times that she believed the room was haunted. She said that at night she could see the figures on the walls moving and that she heard sounds coming from the cassone at the foot of the bed. She believed that a young bride who was brought to this house was murdered on her wedding night because her husband discovered she wasn’t a virgin and that he stuffed her body into the cassone and returned it to the family.”

  “Then what’s the cassone still doing here?” I ask.

  Daisy opens her mouth but says nothing.

  “And as for the moving figures on the wall,” I continue, “I think you have to remember Lucy’s drinking problem.”

  “It’s not that I t
hink the room is actually haunted,” Daisy says, recovering her composure. “Obviously, Lucy was imposing her own feeling of imprisonment at being forced to marry against her wishes and made to move to a foreign country.”

  “I didn’t realize she was forced to marry Sir Lionel.”

  “Yes, the marriage was arranged by her mother, who liked the idea of having a titled son-in-law. And Sir Lionel liked the idea of her money.”

  “It sounds,” I say, “like the plot of a Henry James novel.”

  “But these were real people. That’s what you academics never get. Lucy had dreams of her own. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and came to Europe to study art. Instead she ended up embalmed in this museum.” Daisy sweeps her arm in an arc to indicate the rotunda. I had thought, earlier in the evening, that her pale, loose dress made her look like Rossetti’s Mary, but now she looks like one of Burne-Jones’s hungry sylphs reaching up though the water to drag an unsuspecting sailor down into the watery depths.

  “So, what did you make of the room?” I ask. “It seems like an awfully pleasant prison to me.”

  “Have you looked closely at the paintings on the walls and on the cassone?” she asks.

  “No,” I answer, “I haven’t had the time.”

  Daisy smiles. “When you do, I think you’ll see what I’m talking about. They’re downright creepy. I can’t imagine what kind of sick mind would put a young bride in there. It almost makes me believe my father’s story about the steps…” Daisy looks down toward the marble steps I’ve just come up and I see her eyes widen. As I turn I almost expect to see someone coming up them—some apparition conjured out of Lucy Graham’s alcoholic delirium—but instead I see that the steps are stained with crimson drops. I’m trying to reconcile these pools of red with the faded pattern I saw before, but then a current of air—stirred by the opening of a door in one of the rooms leading into the rotunda—spirals up the steps and the pools of red quiver like raindrops falling into a pool. Only when one strays over my foot and I feel its velvety caress—so like the petal Bruno stroked over my eyelid earlier tonight—do I realize what they are. I kneel and pick one up and hold it out for Daisy to see.

  “Look, they’re just rose petals,” I say.

  “But where did they come from?” she asks, her eyes still wide. “They weren’t on the steps when I came upstairs a few minutes ago.”

  I touch the back of my head and feel a bare thorn embedded in my hair. “It’s from the rose I was wearing in my hair,” I tell Daisy. “Its petals fell while I was climbing the stairs.”

  Daisy nods, accepting my explanation, but as she says a hurried good night and heads down the hall in the opposite direction from my room, I have the feeling that the fact that the ghostly phenomenon has come from me is no relief to her. Looking down at the petal-strewn steps, I have to admit, it doesn’t make me feel any easier either. Nor, as I make my way down the darkened hall, do I find that I’m able to dismiss from my mind Daisy’s hysterical description of the paintings in my room. I could, of course, choose not to examine them now, but her account has piqued my interest, and when I open my door I have, for just a second, the unsettling impression that the figures on the walls are waiting for me. I turn around in a slow circle, scanning the scenes, looking for where the narrative begins. I find it, I think, in the large painting on the right side of the bed, where a courtly young man, expensively dressed in gilded tunic, embroidered tights, and a hat adorned with peacock feathers, takes his leave of a beautiful young damsel in a walled rose garden. The youth passes through an arched doorway and then reappears in another painting on the east wall wandering through a dark and mysterious forest. The sequence appears to proceed clockwise from the perspective of the bed.

  I look around for a chair to stand on so I can examine the pictures more closely, but all the furniture in this room is too fragile and expensive looking, so I go into my old room—the convent room—and drag back its serviceable desk chair and place it under the painting of the forest. Even when the painting is at eye level it’s still hard to make out the details, so I climb down from the chair and get my flashlight (Always pack a flashlight, my mother’s voice had reminded me while I was packing back in New York; you never know when your hotel might catch fire) out of my suitcase and, back on the chair, shine the heavy metal Maglite into the branches of the painted grove.

  Immediately a hundred amber eyes stare back at me from behind the tangled branches. The trees are full of sharp-taloned owls hunting for prey. Beneath them the youth looks vulnerable and lost. When I shine my flashlight on him the light catches the glint of fear in his eyes and the gleam of tears on his dewy cheek. An innocent—and yet there’s something in his stance and his richly adorned clothes, his cloak tossed jauntily over his milk white shoulder, the sparkle of jewels on his fingers, those gaudy peacock feathers in his hat, that makes him appear arrogant and callous. Looking back at the previous scene I can’t tell whether he’s been rejected by his lover or he’s rejected her, but it’s clear that having been exiled from the garden of love, he’s chosen to reject all bonds of civilization for the lawless wilderness. How lawless becomes apparent in the next scene, in which the youth watches from behind a tree as an armored knight appears on horseback chasing a naked woman.

  Of course, I realize, it’s the story of Nastagio degli Onesti from Boccaccio’s Decameron, a common enough theme for Renaissance wedding cassoni and nuptial suites despite—or maybe because of—its grisly content. Dragging my chair to the fourth painting, which is between the garden windows and directly across from the bed, I should be prepared for the gruesome scene. No wonder Lucy Graham partially concealed it behind the curtains.

  The story, as I remember it, tells of a young nobleman, Nastagio degli Onesti, who, rejected by his beloved, runs off to lead a wild and ir-responsible life in the woods outside Ravenna. While wandering there alone, he sees a knight on horseback pursuing a naked woman. Then, to his horror, he watches what happens when the knight catches her.

  I push back the curtains and shine my flashlight on the scene. The knight, having leapt from his steed onto the back of the screaming naked girl, lifts his sword and slits her in two from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. The hunting dogs snap and growl over her scattered entrails. Horrified, Nastagio watches from behind a tree, while the yellow-eyed owls descend from their perches to snatch their share of the offal.

  Oh, yeah, this must have been a pretty sight for the blushing bride to contemplate from her nuptial bed while waiting for her new husband to ascend from his drunken revelries downstairs to the bridal suite.

  I’ve read that the story is not directed solely at a female audience or meant to cow young women into obedience. It’s the future bridegroom, Nastagio, who learns how the knight, rejected by his lover, killed himself, causing, in turn, his beloved to kill herself and condemning the both of them to reenact this grisly cycle of butchery and resurrection each day just at nightfall. Learning this, Nastagio invites his family and the family of his beloved to a banquet at which the horrified dinner guests witness the gory scene—reenacted here on the west wall of the chamber. When Nastagio explains the knight’s story, his beloved agrees to bed with him immediately, but Nastagio, a changed man, says he wants an honorable marriage.

  I get down from my chair and approach the final scene, on the left side of the bed, which is covered by a tapestry. The tapestry itself depicts a familiar trope of courtly love: a young man in richly embroidered doublet and hose offering a rose to a blushing maiden. She reaches for the rose shyly, her gracefully long fingers resting on the air like a dove perched on a branch. I expect that the painting under it will be the traditional last scene in the series—the marriage of Nastagio degli Onesti. It should be another garden scene, ordered and calm. Instead, when I hold back the tapestry and shine my flashlight on the wall, I surprise two naked figures in a lewd and compromising posture. Nastagio degli Onesti, his pose cruelly echoing the pose of
the knight disemboweling his beloved, mounts his fiancée from behind as the horrified banquet guests look on. In this version of the story, Nastagio takes his fiancée at her word and avails himself of her offer of a night of unmarried lust. He has learned not obedience from the knight’s tale but bloodlust. Moving closer to the picture I see that the guests have the same yellow eyes as the owls in the forest scene and that only some of them are horrified. Others are laughing and pointing at the ground beneath the copulating couple, where the hunting dogs have come to lap at the blood that pools beneath the violated virgin. Bile rises to my throat. It’s by far one of the nastiest pieces of pornography I’ve ever seen. I drop the tapestry over it, struck by the contrast between the sweet scene on the tapestry and the ugliness it hides. Instead of masking the scene beneath, though, I feel now as if the corruption from the painting is seeping up, polluting the innocence of the two young lovers. The proffered rose now seems obscenely red, its stem fleshy and thick, its thorns threatening to the maiden’s white hand that reaches for it. I’m forced to agree with Daisy Wallace’s verdict that whoever installed a new bride in this room—in the fifteenth century or the twentieth—was a sadist.

  I no longer feel so comfortable in the room. I double-check the locks on the door leading to the hall and the one into the convent room. I leave the windows open for air but close and lock the slatted wooden shutters. Even then I feel on edge as I sit down at the dressing table. I take the rolled-up parchment out of my shawl first and flatten it so I can put it in a file folder in my book bag, but as I’m smoothing it out I realize that there’s a thin sheet of tissue paper clinging to the back of it. When I peel it away from the parchment, I realize it’s the same kind of airmail stationery as the note Robin included with the last poem. And it’s in Robin’s handwriting. A note from the dead, then.

  “This house is stained with the blood of innocence,” it reads, “that will never bloom again.”