“Testing you? Whatever do you mean, Molly dear?” the Contessa said, unnecessarily rearranging her Grecian-drape Grès dress, then shooting a look at Urbino. He was standing next to Dr. Vasco, Sebastian, and the Borellis.
“To find out if I’m a charlatan or not! I don’t blame you! There are plenty around. But I’m the real, honest-to-God thing.” She seated herself in a green lacquer chair. “If someone will favor me with a gin, I’ll tell you what I mean about testing old Molly.”
Urbino poured her a generous portion.
“Thank you, dearie. I hope you don’t hold anything against me.” She took a sip of the gin and fixed the Contessa with her magnified eyes. “There’s blood all over that room, Countess Barbara, and don’t try to tell me no! Someone has been clawing at the walls. And a crumpled body of a woman was lying on the floor by the foot of the bed! Eyes of an innocent doe, staring up at the blessed orb of the world she’ll never see again.”
Dr. Vasco gave Molly a glare of resentment. Gemma started and seemed about to repeat her collapse earlier in the conservatory. She had come down a few minutes before with Robert and Angelica, assuring everyone that she felt much better. Angelica sat on a nearby walnut divan, a quilt arranged around her. She appeared unmoved by Molly’s comments—if she had indeed heard them, for she had her heart-shaped face nearly buried in a novel by Miss Braddon. Robert, however, who stood between his ailing mother and fiancée, asked his mother if she was all right. Gemma was now staring at her aunt Bambina, whose eyes were turned down in what seemed to be admiration of her small, patent-leather shoes.
“I—I’m fine, Robert.”
Robert then turned to Molly, his olive skin becoming a shade darker.
“You should watch your tongue! Stupid woman!”
Molly flushed.
“Molly doesn’t mean to upset anyone,” Gemma said. “She—she’s just doing what comes naturally.”
The woman in question beamed.
“I don’t know what your game is, Mrs. Wybrow,” Robert said, “but I don’t like it. My mother is too polite to tell you what she really thinks—and so is everyone else!”
His sharp blue eyes swept the room, pausing briefly but pointedly on Sebastian.
“Oh my,” Sebastian said, standing up straighter and adjusting his purple cravat. “I may be in for it. And Viola, too. We brought the ghost to the feast!”
Viola, now dressed in a plum-colored robe with deep sleeves, gave Urbino a questioning look. It was as eloquent as any words could be, asking if it might not be time to give the help she had offered earlier. Thus reminded of the help he himself should be giving, he stepped forward.
“Let me freshen your drink, Robert. Then I’d like to show you a book I’m sure will interest you.”
“My drink’s fine,” he said with less than good grace.
“It’s something the Conte found in Cairo about the theft of St. Mark’s body,” Urbino went on, hoping to distract Robert by appealing to his medieval side, so often at odds with his up-to-date skepticism. “Privately published by a Coptic priest. In Coptic, but the Conte had a monk from San Lazzaro degli Armeni do a translation into the Italian. Both versions were bound in the same volume by the printing press there.”
Since another monk from this lagoon island had been the one to clean and authenticate the Caravaggio, Urbino wondered how much he was doing to smooth things over. But Robert didn’t give any indication that he associated the island with the Caravaggio Room.
He said, somewhat begrudgingly, “I hope the translation can be trusted,” and opened the book at random.
He seemed on the point of temporarily losing himself in the account of the miraculous transport of the corpse of St. Mark to Venice, when Molly said to the group at large, “A young lady’s body, I said, but—but actually there were two. The bodies of two most sweet and lovely ladies, both young, but one in the true beginnings of her verdant spring. It was almost as if—as if they were competing for my attention. Sometimes the impressions come so thick and fast they’re like a whirligig!”
Almost regretfully Robert pulled his attention away from the book and closed it.
“There are too many distractions at the moment,” he said. “I’ll read it up in my room, if you don’t mind.”
He rejoined Angelica, who was grasping her own choice of reading material with tense fingers and gave him a tremulous smile.
“Venice is called a serene city, Countess Barbara,” Molly was now saying, “but it’s very violent from what I feel and see.”
“Or read about in a guidebook,” Sebastian said.
“I was looking down at the two faces switching back and forth,” Molly said, “and then I saw pieces of another woman’s body, a woman not young at all. In a sack and lying in the lagoon.”
“The murder near the Casino degli Spiriti,” Filippo said. “The two gondolieri who murdered the old woman and stole her money.”
Molly peered at him blankly through her thick lenses and said, “I could see from the shape of the woman’s head that she was generous and trusting, probably prone to walking in her sleep.”
Dr. Vasco, who had been looking at Molly with a combination of bewilderment and uneasiness, now said in a strained voice, “You’re interested in phrenology, signora?”
“Oh yes, Dottore. And also somnambulism, mesmerism, and—and all the untapped powers of our minds.”
“I’ve studied them for decades myself.”
“A marriage made in heaven, it seems,” Sebastian said not too quietly.
“The young don’t understand these things, Dottore,” Molly said. “Don’t let it bother you.”
“It doesn’t, I assure you, signora. Shall we go over there,” he indicated a corner dominated by a papier-mache Buddha, “and talk over what we have in common?”
He bestowed a quivering smile on her. Dr. Vasco, who had so obviously disapproved of Molly earlier, now appeared to exude only congeniality as far as she was concerned.
“Delightful, Luigi, if I may be so bold as to call you by your first name! But first a wee bit more Beefeater.”
With a brief detour to the liquor cabinet they went to the Buddha’s corner, where they soon became involved in an enthusiastic but inaudible conversation.
Gemma and Bambina both watched the couple intently, as if they might be able to make out what they were saying if they only concentrated hard enough. Mamma Zeno showed an equal, although more covert, interest from the folds of her clothes.
The Contessa, Urbino noted with some discomfort, was looking at him with a frown. Surely she couldn’t hold him responsible for Molly’s disturbing comments to the group earlier and possibly now to Dr. Vasco? Short of removing the woman completely, perhaps locking her up in the Caravaggio Room, what could he do?
“Barbara dear,” Oriana said, “why are you frowning like that?”
“Oh, was I frowning?” the Contessa said and relaxed her face. “It must be this storm. Pounding and whining away like this.”
The storm had indeed not let up in any way, but if possible had become worse. At this moment something more substantial than the rain hit against one of the windows. Urbino suspected that it might be something dislodged from the garden beneath the windows. The same thought must have occurred to the Contessa, for she said:
“I’m afraid the garden is going to get all torn up. But I suppose that’s the least of my—or anyone’s worries. The Ca’ da Capo was severely damaged back in sixty-six. It took years to make the repairs. I pray God we’re not in for another bad time.”
“But this place seems solid,” Sebastian said. “Little chance it’ll break off and float down the G.C.”
“We don’t joke about floods in Venice. Solid, yes, but I have nightmares about the pilings. I see them slipping and sliding and breaking like matchsticks!”
She involuntarily shivered.
“Ah, yes, the acqua alta of sixty-six,” Oriana said with a little smile. “I spent it in a tiny apartment on the Riva degli S
chiavoni with a wisp of an artist I thought would blow away. Filippo and I weren’t engaged yet—or were we, dear?”
Filippo smiled at her indulgently.
“Who knows?” he said.
Angelica was looking with disapproval at Oriana as she continued her description of the charms of the acqua alta in sixty-six. Robert, now seated next to his fiancée on the divan, seemed lost in his own thoughts—rather unpleasant ones, to judge by the expression on his good-looking face.
Urbino, seeing a way to help divert attention away from Molly and her visions or flashbacks or whatever they were, decided to carry on in the manner started by Oriana. When she finished her anecdote of the storm, he began one of his own. It was secondhand, however, for he had moved to Venice more than fifteen years after the acqua alta, but he had heard it so many times from his housekeeper, Natalia, that he had come close to making it his own.
It was about an eccentric old woman who persisted in believing that her treasured Tintoretto had floated to safety from her decrepit palazzo in San Polo and not been stolen by thieves and later recovered in a storage room on the other side of the Grand Canal. For the rest of her life she lit votive candles in front of the painting, which despite its subject—a bare-breasted, fiery-haired Mary Magdalene—became known as “The Miracle of the Flood.”
When Urbino finished, it seemed that things would continue smoothly. Filippo next described his own impressions of the acqua alta, spent in the company of more than a dozen cats that had sought shelter with him in his palazzo and refused to leave afterward.
It soon became clear as one tale followed another that they were the group’s way of exorcising their uneasiness over the growing intensity of the storm. Urbino was reminded of the diverting stories of the lords and ladies in Boccaccio, which in turn inevitably reminded him of the house party in the thirties that had ended in the mysterious death of Renata Bellini, four of whose blood relatives were now in the room.
It was therefore with some renewed nervousness that he pulled himself away from his own thoughts and looked around the room. Everyone showed varying degrees of interest or its absence, from the intense look on Molly’s pinched face to the bored one on Angelica’s pale one. Mamma Zeno now seemed half asleep, sunk into the cushions of her chair, and Dr. Vasco, with a fixed smile, kept nodding at what were all the inappropriate places.
When Urbino looked at Viola, he was startled to find her staring at him, and he got the eerie impression that she, too, was thinking of Boccaccio and the other house party. His suspicions were proved correct when she slipped over to him and whispered, “Déjà vu.”
Gemma, speaking in a weak voice, had just made her own contribution about her experiences in Florence, where the acqua alta had been even worse, when Molly, her eyes behind the thick glasses opened wide, burst out:
“Fiddling while Rome is burning! Dancing when the barbarians come sweeping in! Chatting away with the plague outside! It all comes down to the same thing in the end. This isn’t the first time this building of noble lines and noble residents has listened to stories while a storm was building up. And why do I think of the name Boccaccio? Does it mean something? And Signor Urbino mentioned a stolen painting! Is it the one in my room? And—and Signor Filippo, you spoke about cats! Are there cats in the house? Are they dead or alive? Oh, everything’s all mixed up in my mind!”
“No wonder about that,” Sebastian said in a stage whisper to Oriana. “The girl has drunk half a bottle of B.E.! It’s a wonder—”
“You’re saying too much!” Gemma cried. At first Urbino thought she was speaking to Sebastian, but she stood up and glared at Molly. An expression of discomfort then came over her face. It was as if Gemma had spoken involuntarily, or at least without thinking, and was now regretting it.
“I’m sorry, Molly.”
She went over to the little woman and took her hand. She bent her head and said something to her in a voice inaudible to Urbino, who was standing the closest of anyone to the two of them. The Contessa’s face was white and strained as she watched the two women.
Gemma squeezed Molly’s hand, and in the several moments before the dinner bell blessedly sounded, the two women gave every appearance of understanding each other completely.
6
Dinner was, at first, a surprisingly calm affair. It was as if everyone was weary from what had gone on in the library and was determined to get through the meal as smoothly as possible. There was little general conversation, and the diners broke into shifting patterns of talk, avoiding anything disturbing—and this included the bad weather, which continued to assault the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini and, beyond it, the vulnerable city.
It was a sign of the Contessa’s foresight, as well as her uneasiness, that she had had the table set with her own Pembroke family china and crested glasses and not the Cozzi china that had been in the Da Capo-Zendrini family since the eighteenth century.
Urbino remembered her comment about three ailing women under one roof, and considered them now in turn as they went through the ritual of dinner. The Contessa herself looked weary as she addressed Mamma Zeno, who, although the oldest person at the table, seemed in many ways the most vital. It was all in her quick dark eyes, eyes that were still hungry, and in the way that she seemed to relish her food.
Angelica, by contrast, looked out at the dinner table with a dull, uninterested gaze and picked at her food. She probably couldn’t wait to get back into the cozy intrigues of Lady Audley’s Secret. Most likely she had another Victorian novel or two stashed away in her room, along with several boxes of bonbons. Every once in a while Filippo, who was sitting on one side of her, would address her, but her responses were so minimal—weak smiles and even weaker nods—that he soon gave up to bestow his attentions on Viola.
Robert, the thoroughly modern man of relics, had the pleasure of listening to Sebastian rant on about Canterbury and materialism like some latter-day Chaucer. Robert said as little as possible, which was more than enough for Sebastian’s diatribe.
Gemma was very still, and kept observing everyone around the table in an almost furtive manner. Her face had a grayish cast and there were dark smudges beneath her eyes and in the hollows of her temples that even the Contessa’s carefully calculated lighting couldn’t conceal. Although she was eating more than Angelica, it seemed to be only to keep up appearances.
It fell to Oriana’s lot not to have the attention or the ear of any of the gentlemen, but instead that of the energetic Bambina, who both ate and spoke with a kind of nervous avidity. Her eyes darted all around the table in an almost desperate manner, and her gestures were so dramatic that at one point Urbino feared she was about to fling some petits pois into Oriana’s inviting décolletage.
The only people who genuinely seemed to be enjoying themselves were Molly and Dr. Vasco. They forgot all about the food and drink for long minutes as they earnestly—and in low voices—conferred on topics they obviously felt were of little interest to the group at large or to Viola and Mamma Zeno, who sat on either side of them. Vasco gave every appearance of being fascinated by the little Englishwoman.
“I must say, Urbino,” Oriana declared, escaping with evident relief from Bambina’s nervous volubility, “that our dear Barbara didn’t keep the proportions right for the weekend. All too many women and all too few men.”
“We’re a perfect mixture,” Urbino said, marveling at his cool ability to stretch the truth to such thinness. “Besides, it’s not a dance. We don’t need to be paired up. But if we did, you wouldn’t end up a wallflower.”
“Ever gallant, Urbino, managing to defend Barbara and pay me a compliment at the same time. What would we women do without you?”
“Indeed,” said Viola, who had been listening to their exchange. “He makes himself indispensable.”
“True enough, Viola dear,” Oriana responded, “but I warn you: Barbara is equally indispensable to him.”
“Only Barbara? That puts the rest of us women out in the cold.”
“Perhaps,” was the limit of Viola’s agreement, although she might have committed herself further if at this moment Oriana hadn’t suddenly shrieked and stood up. Everyone broke off their conversations.
“Thirteen! We’re thirteen for dinner! Thirteen for the weekend! How could you do this to me?”
She collapsed back into her chair and reached for her water tumbler. She knocked over her wineglass. A red stain crept across the cloth.
“Déjà vu encore,” Viola had time to say to Urbino with an arched eyebrow before the Contessa responded to Oriana’s outburst. For a moment he didn’t know what Viola meant, then remembered the wine Andrew Lydgate had spilled across his shirtfront at the original house party. He looked over at Vasco, who, back then, had predicted to the Conte that Lydgate would do just that because he wanted him to. Vasco’s mouth was tight and grim.
“Don’t take it as a personal affront, Oriana,” the Contessa said with a nervous laugh, her eyes on the growing stain. “These things sometimes happen.”
“Thirteen for dinner doesn’t just ‘sometimes happen’! Not with you! And not when you’ve been as nervous as a cat for months about this house party.”
The Contessa colored deeply and gave Urbino a silent plea for rescue.
“Let poor Barbara off the hook,” Sebastian said before Urbino could step in. “Viola and I are the guilty ones. We added Molly to the feast,” he said with an unmistakable air of pride. “She was so irresistible.”
From the look Oriana gave Molly it was evident that she found the woman as resistible as poison in the present circumstances.
“But we’re really not thirteen,” Sebastian went on, trying to suppress a smile. “There’s Lucia, Mauro, and about half a dozen other staff.”
“They don’t count in situations like this!” Oriana snapped back, as if there existed a book of rules on superstition. “Believe me, if there wasn’t a deluge out there, I’d leave immediately!”
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