The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  I wondered where the podestà got the idea that Pietro and Ginevra had gone abroad and whether there was any basis to his supposition. I find myself wondering whether they could have gone to England. Perhaps Pietro received a commission to create a floor there and he thought it was a good idea to get out of town for a while. He might have thought it was a good opportunity to get his daughter out of town while Barbagianni was spreading rumors about her.

  I’m interrupted in these conjectures by the receptionist, Sylvia, coming to tell me that the library is closing in half an hour, early for the festa, and that if I want to copy anything she’ll be pleased to help me. I ask whether the library has a scanner I could use to transfer material directly into my laptop, and she tells me she has one in her office that I’m welcome to use. As we go down to her office I try to think of a way to ask whether she overheard what the police said to Bruno without implying that she was an eavesdropper, but then she solves my problem for me. “Imagine, I was so silly before. I thought perhaps the professore was in trouble with the police!” She laughs at herself as she opens the door to her office. “But it was nothing like that—just a little…how do you say? Una scappata of his son’s.”

  The word can mean escape, or flight, but I realize from her demeanor this isn’t what she intends. “An escapade?”

  “Sì, a little joke.”

  “What kind of escapade?” I ask.

  “He was using his father’s credit card to buy train tickets,” she says, shaking her head. “I did the same thing when I was younger because I wanted to go with my boyfriend to ski in the Alps. Stupid, yes, but harmless. I hope his father won’t be too angry with him when they find him.”

  I nod in agreement, but I’m thinking that Orlando wasn’t trying to go skiing. He was probably trying to leave the country.

  By the time I’ve finished scanning the records I want into my laptop, it’s four o’clock. The bus to the Piazza della Libertà is just pulling out as I come out of the archives and I know, from watching the comings and goings of the bus from the window, that there won’t be another for half an hour. I can probably walk to the stop at the English Cemetery and catch up to the bus there.

  After consulting my map, I walk west and then north, a route that takes me past the synagogue. Its nineteenth-century Moorish design was generally overlooked in the art and architecture classes I took here, but I had visited it often—if only so I could write home and tell my mother I was still going to temple. Florence’s Jewish neighborhood is small compared to Rome’s, but I’m happy to see that there’s still a kosher restaurant on the Via Farini. I’m less happy to see the elaborate security booth and armed guards installed in front of the synagogue.

  I continue walking north alongside a neighborhood park full of speckle-trunked sycamores and children waiting their turns for a ride on the carousel. This area feels more like a regular middle-class neighborhood that you might find in Brooklyn or Queens than an art capital of Europe. One block north of the park I run into a wide avenue and find myself directly across from the English Cemetery. I check the times on the bus stop and see that I’ve got fifteen minutes until the bus arrives, just enough time for a quick visit to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Zoe’s not the only one whose love affair is in need of a little kindly intervention.

  Even on a summer afternoon, the English Cemetery feels gloomy, an effect, I think, of the many cypresses standing like gaunt, black-coated mourners above the graves of displaced foreigners. The graves of these Swiss exiles (despite being known as the English Cemetery, it was founded and is still owned today by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church), Russian princes, and Anglo-Florentines exude a melancholy mixed of mortality and homesickness, the sadness of being buried in foreign soil.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sarcophagus, held aloft by six columns, seems to float above these sorrows, perhaps because the fifteen years she lived here with Robert Browning were a reprieve from the half-life she endured until she fled her father’s house. Her presence here in a foreign grave seems more victory than defeat. “I love Florence,” she said in her last days. “I cannot leave Florence.” And she hadn’t.

  I notice that someone has left a small bouquet of wildflowers tied with a pink ribbon and wonder whether it’s Zoe’s gift to the poet. I wish I had something to leave as an offering, but when I close my eyes I realize that all I’ve got is the memory of Bruno’s lips on mine and a simple wish. Let it not be too late. And then, as an afterthought, I silently tell EBB that, after all, I’m the same age now as she was when she met Robert Browning. If she could get off her invalid’s couch and defy her draconian father at that late stage, why can’t I start over again with my poet?

  Ginevra, too, I think as I wander farther up the cypress-lined path, must have fled the court-induced marriage her father was trying to coerce out of Lorenzo Barbagianni. Why else would she have disappeared in the middle of her own trial? Perhaps her flight was the reverse of EBB’s. Perhaps she did go to England and meet the English poet to whom she later addressed the poems I’ve read. And really, why couldn’t it have been Shakespeare? The timing was perfect. Ginevra disappeared from Florence in 1581, a year that the young William Shakespeare was absent from Stratford and unaccounted for. Some scholars—most recently Stephen Greenblatt—believed he was a private tutor in the north of England during that time. If Ginevra’s father had received a commission to lay a pietre dure floor somewhere nearby…

  I am so deeply engrossed in this line of conjecture that I trip over a slab of marble embedded in the ground. When I look down at the offending tombstone, I am more than a little shocked to find the name of the poet whose biography I have been happily reinventing: William Shakespeare.

  “Well, that can’t be,” I grumble out loud, “he’s buried in Stratford.”

  I hear laughter come from behind one of the graves—an unnerving sound beneath the gloomy cypresses—but then a gray shape unfolds itself from the marble tombstones. It’s an old woman dressed in the same shades of white and gray as the weathered marble: a long homespun gray robe, a soft white cloth tied over her head, and, despite the warmth of the day, a gray and white alpaca poncho woven in Incan patterns. A specter in gray and white that could be the spirit of the cemetery, except that when this woman smiles there’s nothing remotely sepulchral about her round, dimpled face and clear blue eyes. They seem to defy both her old age and the gloomy atmosphere of the cemetery.

  “My predecessors,” she says, wiping her grass-stained hands on her robe as she comes over to stand by me above the gravestone, “and descendants of the poet.”

  I look down and read the entire gravestone: “Beatrice Shakespeare and Claude Shakespeare Clench, last descendentes of William Shakespeare.”

  “Descendentes?” I ask.

  The nun chuckles. “Italian stonecutters,” she explains.

  “Were they really the last descendants of William Shakespeare?”

  “Well, only in a misogynist sense. There are more descendants; they just don’t carry the name. Are you another Shakespeare scholar come to prove Will visited Italy?”

  “Another?”

  “Yes, there was a lovely American boy who frequently came to this grave site this past fall. I made him come into the library for tea so he wouldn’t ride the bus back half frozen, and he told me his ideas about Shakespeare and an Italian poetess who lived in one of the old villas up in the hills. A bit fanciful, I thought, but he read me some lovely poems by the Italian poetess.”

  “That must have been Robin Weiss,” I say, imagining Robin in the thin jackets he wore in winter crouched here at this grave site with the lonely cypresses as his only companions. “I’m sorry to tell you…well, he died this spring.”

  “Oh, no, the poor lamb! Was it drugs? I’m afraid he often smelled of cannabis when he came to visit.”

  “No, it wasn’t drugs. He fell from a balcony at the college where I teach.”

  The nun’s face, which had looked so smooth a moment ago, crease
s into a maze of lines. I’ve aged her a good ten years by thoughtlessly blurting out the news of Robin’s death. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No,” she says almost sternly, “of course you should have. Now I can pray for his soul. I’m just a little shook…Was it…? Did the poor boy take his own life?”

  “That’s what the police decided—” I stop when I see the nun’s chin begin to wobble and dig a tissue out of my pocket. She blows her nose loudly and shakes her head as if trying to shake her tears away.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that I thought the conversations we had were a help to the boy. I could see he was troubled, but if I had thought he was in that much trouble—”

  “You mustn’t blame yourself,” I say, laying my hand on her arm. “I don’t think Robin did kill himself. I think someone might have pushed him. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. If I had listened…” I stop, startled at how close I am to tears.

  The nun’s soft hand steals into mine. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she offers. “I think we both could use one.”

  I’m about to say no—I can see by the angle of the sun slanting through the cypresses that it’s growing late, and I’d promised Bruno I’d look for Ginevra’s poems—but then I look down at the nun’s softly crumpled face and realize I can’t possibly run off after dropping such a bombshell.

  “Tea would be nice,” I say.

  We introduce ourselves on the way down to the gatehouse. “Sister Clarissa,” she says, “of the Anglican Church.” And then, with a sly smile, she adds, “Clarissa Dalloway that was.”

  I laugh and then feel instantly ashamed to have regained my humor so soon after telling her about Robin. But Sister Clarissa seems pleased at my reaction.

  “Yes, I know. My mother was a fan of Virginia Woolf. I’ve always suspected she married my father so that she could name me after her favorite literary character. If she’d had a suitor named Woolf, I’m certain my name would be Virginia.”

  We’ve reached the gatehouse, which contains on one side a little souvenir bookshop. She ushers me into the other side, into a room filled with books. “This is the library,” she says, moving a stack of books off a small deal table by the window and plugging in an electric kettle. “I live upstairs, but I find it’s cozier to have tea down here. And such interesting people come to visit. So you’re a teacher at Hudson College. In English literature?” she asks, offering me a seat.

  “Comparative literature,” I answer. “My specialty is the Renaissance sonnet—English and Italian.”

  “Ah, the sonnet. ‘What lips my lips have kissed,’” she quotes from Edna St. Vincent Millay, “‘and where, and why, I have forgotten.’”

  I’m beginning to learn not to be surprised at Sister Clarissa’s un-orthodox literary interests, but her next statement does startle me.

  “Did Robin’s death have anything to do with that boy he loved?”

  “You knew about that?” I ask, abashed that even a nun knew that Robin was bisexual while I didn’t.

  Sister Clarissa smiles. “He talked and talked about William Shake-speare’s love for the young man and the Dark Lady of the sonnets, and I surmised after a while that Robin himself was in a similar triangle and that it was tearing him apart.”

  “He may have been,” I allow. “There’s this girl at the school now who says that Robin was involved with another boy at the villa last year…” I stop, not wanting to give away Orlando’s name, but Sister Clarissa is clearly well informed.

  “Orlando, wasn’t it? My favorite Woolf character”—I try not to gape. A nun who’s read and admires Woolf’s gender-switching adventurer!—“and the girl…Zoe Demarchis, isn’t it? They were here today.”

  “They?”

  “Orlando and Zoe. They didn’t come together. Zoe was here first—” The teakettle whistles and Sister Clarissa’s attentions are occupied for several excruciating minutes of tea preparation before she’s ready to continue her story. “Oh, yes, what was I saying?”

  “Zoe Demarchis came first…”

  “Yes, she came to put flowers on Elizabeth’s grave. She was crying and I wondered if I should go talk to her, but I thought I’d give her a little time to herself. Then Orlando showed up—”

  “Did it look like they had planned to meet?” I ask.

  “Oh, no, I think not. She looked quite startled to see him, but, now that I think of it, he didn’t look surprised to see her.” Sister Clarissa’s blue eyes narrow, thinking. “No, I’d wager he came to find her. That he knew she’d be here. Zoe always came here last year when she was upset…. Has something happened at the villa?” she asks, training hersharp blue eyes on me. While I’d like to spare her the news of another death, I realize I’m not likely to get anything past her.

  “Yes, a woman died last night—an American woman.” And then, feeling that I owe Mara this much, I add, “She was a friend. She fell down a flight of stairs in the garden, but I’m afraid the police might have reason to think that Orlando pushed her.”

  “Oh, no, I can’t believe that! He’s a little wild, perhaps, but I can’t believe him capable of that. No, dear,” she says, patting my hand, “you must have that part wrong. But, yes, Orlando was very upset. Maybe he saw someone else push this woman.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want you to think I was eavesdropping, but just like today when I overheard you, I happened to be doing a little bit of weeding near Elizabeth’s grave—I like to keep it nice because it’s where the tourists head first—”

  “Yes, and what did you hear?”

  “Orlando was saying that he had to find out where the poems were—the ones Robin had found last year—and that no one would be safe until he did.”

  “Did it sound as if he were threatening Zoe?”

  “I think he was warning her. He kept saying that if she knew something, she should tell him.”

  “And did she?”

  “No. She said—and this I heard quite distinctly—that he was the last person she would tell the whereabouts of the poems.”

  “And what did Orlando say to that?”

  “Oh, dear, this is going to sound like a threat, although I didn’t think of it as one at the time. I just thought the boy was angry, and of course I didn’t know about poor Robin.”

  “Sister Clarissa,” I say, grasping the nun’s soft, plump hand. “Please tell me exactly what he said.”

  “He said that if she didn’t tell him where the poems were, she would be in danger—that she was making the same mistake that Robin had made.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  I CATCH THE BUS OUTSIDE THE CEMETERY, BUT WHEN I GET TO THE PIAZZA DELLA Libertà I learn I’ve just missed the bus that goes up the hill and because of the festa there won’t be another one for an hour. I remember, though, that when I was a student I sometimes hiked up the hill with a couple of girls from Cornell who claimed it was the best way to burn off all the pasta we were eating. They set a brisk pace that got us up to the villa in under thirty minutes. Surely I can make it in forty and still beat the bus and hopefully reach Zoe before anything happens to her.

  The difference between nineteen and thirty-nine, though, proves to be more than ten minutes. Although I walk a lot in New York, it’s all on flat terrain. I’m winded in the first ten minutes and after fifteen the backs of my thighs feel like someone’s holding a match to them. Every time I look up, the brick wall that borders the road seems to curve into infinity as if I’ve entered some Dantesque punishment in which professors who don’t listen carefully enough to their students are doomed to tread in an ever-looping circle, their backsides licked by the flames of hell.

  When Zoe said to me on the bus this morning that she and Orlando had made up last night, I should have wondered what had prompted the sudden reconciliation. She had also said that Robin told her everything. From what Sister Clarissa told me, it’s clear that Zoe must know something about wher
e the poems are—or at least that Orlando thinks she does. Sister Clarissa also said that Zoe had left upset and crying and that Orlando had tried to follow her, but then he had stopped at the gate and stayed behind while she boarded the bus. I had asked whether, by any chance, there had been a policeman near the bus, and she hadn’t remembered. It seems, though, the most likely explanation of why Orlando hadn’t followed her. He could easily have waited, though, and taken the next bus.

  By the time I make it to the gates of La Civetta, I’ve worked myself into a lather of sweat and anxiety. The hollow eyes of the owls carved into the iron gates stare at me accusingly. When I press the buzzer and shout my name into the metal grate, I half expect to be denied entrance, but the gates swing slowly open onto the viale.

  I don’t go down the viale, though, but turn instead into the narrow path that leads to the little villa where the students are housed, the original Convent of Santa Catalina before Lorenzo Barbagianni resettled the nuns in the Valdarno. In one chronicle I read, the nun claimed that the move was prompted by the sisters’ desire to expand the wool production of the convent, but it occurs to me now that Barbagianni was punishing the order for the testimony of one of its nuns in Ginevra’s lawsuit against him. As I approach the heavy wooden doors I think of Ginevra running here, scared and bleeding, seeking refuge. But when the door swings open, instead of a black-robed nun, a gaggle of teenage girls in navel-baring shorts and skimpy T-shirts spills out into the stone-paved courtyard.

  “Excuse me,” I say raising my voice to catch their attention. “Do any of you know which room is Zoe Demarchis’s?”

  “The best room, of course,” one of the girls answers, rolling her eyes at her friends, “because she was here in the fall and has seniority.”

  “And she had to have a single because of her asthma and food allergies—like a roommate might slip peanuts into her mouth at night.”

  Poor Zoe, I think, she’s obviously not popular with the other students—at least not with the girls. “I see,” I say with a level, humorless stare meant to discourage any more criticism. “And what would be the room number?”