2008 - Recipes for Cherubs
Page 10
He walked with an unaccustomed spring in his step because Father Rimaldi had given him some very good news indeed. The priest had returned from a visit to the enclosed order of nuns at Santa Lucia, some miles away. Father Rimaldi had persuaded the nuns to take Signor Bisotti’s youngest daughter, Ismelda, off his hands in the coming autumn. Of course, nothing was free in this world, and in return for his trouble Father Rimaldi had demanded a payment of sorts, and that was why Signor Bisotti had agreed to commission Piero di Bardi to paint a scene of feasting cherubs to be hung in the church. That didn’t come cheap, but what was money in exchange for a life without Ismelda?
Signor Bisotti sighed with satisfaction. Ismelda had been a trial to him ever since she was a baby and lately she had been even more tiresome than usual. Now that she was older it was harder to cover up her peculiar ways. Only last week she had made a slingshot, hurled a pomegranate over the wall and hit one of the old sisters from the Santa Rosa convent.
She was a noisy, foul-mouthed child, always up to some mischief or other. He had even had to move her from her upstairs bedroom into a downstairs room which faced on to the internal courtyard, because the upstairs rooms had balconies overlooking the piazza. God forbid that the nosy townspeople should see the sort of things that she got up to when she wasn’t being watched. She was far safer downstairs with the added protection of bars on the window and the door being locked at night.
Why in God’s name couldn’t she have been more like his eldest daughter, Marietta? She was a good, biddable girl, suitably married now and hopefully soon to produce grandchildren, although she was taking rather a long time in doing so.
There had been only one dark cloud on his horizon and now that little problem was about to be solved. By the time the first leaves began to fall and the cooler winds blew up the narrow valley, he would be free. Ismelda would be safely incarcerated with the holy sisters at Santa Lucia convent, who would knock some sense into that thick skull of hers.
It wouldn’t be plain sailing and there would be opposition from one quarter. Maria Paparella would not take kindly to losing Ismelda, for they were as close as if they were mother and daughter. Maria had seen to all the child’s many needs since the death of his wife. Thinking of Maria dented his rising optimism. She had the most formidable temper he’d ever seen in a young woman, and telling her that Ismelda was going to be sent away to the nuns would not be an easy matter.
Still, she was a servant and servants did as they were told, did they not? That was the trouble in these modern times; the peasant people were getting above themselves. Why, that blasted little dwarf, Bindo, had actually had the nerve to climb into the garden of the Villa Rosso this morning. It was just as well for him that he had managed to escape, though how he had was a mystery. When Signor Bisotti was a boy, a cheeky half-wit like that would never have dared to insult a man of Signor Bisotti’s standing. He was another one who could do with being locked up and the key thrown down a deep well.
Once Ismelda was safely out of the way he would be able to pursue his own happiness and, if fate smiled on him, that happiness might have a little to do with the widow Zanelli. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, a trifle broad in the beam but still on the right side of forty, with just enough time to give him a son and heir.
He was optimistic about his chances with the widow, particularly since he had only this morning instructed Piero to use the two Zanelli girls as models for the cherubs in his painting.
Life was looking good. Of course, he would have to smooth the waters between Maria and his intended bride because there was some animosity between then. Women were like that, were they not? Illogical creatures falling out over the least trifle. He was sure, though, that with his finely tuned skills of tact and diplomacy all would be fine – after all, he didn’t want to gain a wife but lose the best cook in Santa Rosa. Maria would calm down in time; she’d have her hands full running around at the widow Zanelli’s beck and call. And she’d be looking after the two sweet Zanelli girls, which would surely take her mind off losing Ismelda.
As he passed the turning to the Via Dante he wondered if Piero di Bardi had slept off his hangover and returned to his own house. He had every confidence that the man would come to his senses; he was desperate for money.
Signor Bisotti stepped up to the door of the widow Zanelli’s house, smoothed his thinning hair and polished his front teeth with his forefinger.
He was looking forward to an afternoon with the widow Zanelli; she really was very accommodating to his needs. He pulled back his shoulders and smiled. This afternoon he would think only of pleasant things. Temperamental artists with their gobbledygook talk about essence and aura, half-witted dwarves and badly behaved daughters one really could do without.
16
The early-morning air was soft, fresh after the rainfall and heady with the smell of flowers. Catrin stood in the overgrown kitchen garden where the scents of burdock and parsley, thyme and rosemary mingled with the horrid smell of henbane. Beyond the kitchen garden there was a low archway she hadn’t noticed yesterday, and she stepped through it into a small paved garden enclosed by high walls overgrown with ivy.
In the middle of the garden there was a waterless fountain, where a small, naked stone cherub perched precariously on a plinth. His mouth and eyes were choked with moss and his body was green with age and years of weathering.
She clambered over the surrounding wall of the fountain, stepping carefully through the layers of rotting leaves and rubbish beneath her feet. She ran her hand along the cherub’s outstretched arm and closed her eyes, and for a moment the cherub felt almost real to her touch. She could feel the ripple of his tiny muscles, the bend in the elbow, the delicate outstretched fingers.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could breathe life into this little cherub, see the old stone turn into warm flesh, the cheeks grow pink and the dead eyes come fluttering open.
The twitching of muscles, a lazy yawn and then, with gathering life, the cherub’s wings would stir, move slowly, then faster, making currents of air all around her.
And then she would watch in wonder as he made his first attempt to fly, tentative, then gathering in confidence, rising higher and higher…turning to take her hand, both of them hovering above the ruined tower, startling the rooks and then soaring up together, up into the blue skies over Kilvenny.
She opened her eyes and sighed. Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t quite right in the head. A stone cherub was hardly likely to fly, however hard she wished. She often had peculiar thoughts. Once in a Scripture lesson she’d been daydreaming and Sister Lucy asked Catrin what she was thinking and she’d said that she was wondering if rain were really angel pee. Mary Donahue had fallen off her chair in a fit of laughing, and Sister Lucy said angels were not earthly beings with bodily functions, thank the Lord, and she took away three of her house points for vulgarity. Catrin had kept quiet about her thoughts ever since.
She brushed the cherub’s cheek gently with her fingers, marvelled at the detail of his face, the enigmatic smile, the slight flaring of the nostrils. She clambered back over the wall and sat down on one of the weathered stone benches set around the garden.
A desolate air hung over everything; there were cracked terracotta urns, some upturned, others broken and spilling out earth, and the flagstones were green and slippery with lichen; yet it must have been beautiful once. She imagined what it would be like to sit here listening to the gurgling of the fountain, watching the sun glint off the water and rainbows dance in the spray.
As she sat daydreaming she noticed a door on the far side of the garden and went over to investigate. She lifted the latch and a familiar smell hit her at once: the whiff of ingrained incense and the smoky holiness of church candles.
Stepping inside she automatically put out her hand to search for the holy water stoop to bless herself, and there, set into the wall, almost as if her hand knew where to find it, was a roughly carved stoop filled with ice-cold water.
The silence and coolness of the chapel soothed her and as she knelt there she thought suddenly of Sister Matilde. The nun would love Kilvenny Castle; she was fascinated by everything about history.
“I adore old things,” she’d once told Catrin’s class. “The feel of a worn step beneath my weary feet, a step where thousands of feet have trod before me, sends a delicious shiver up my spine. Or that feeling of immense joy one gets when standing in the shade of an ancient building in a sun-soaked piazza watching water play over the upturned faces of stone cherubs.”
Catrin looked back at the window and watched a sunbeam worm its way in through a small hole in the stained glass and dance playfully across the altar. The smell of incense grew suddenly stronger and mingled with the mustiness of old prayer books and damp hassocks. She glanced at the tiny saint and remembered something else Sister Matilde had said.
“How glorious it is to kneel in the early morning and watch the light slip through a stained-glass window and see the early shadows play across a lonely saint in a cool chapel.”
It was almost as if this were the very place that Sister Matilde had described, and just now everything here felt familiar to Catrin, as if she had been coming here to kneel like this for ever.
If what Aunt Ella had said about ringing her school was true, it was hardly likely Sister Matilde would come rushing down here to save her. She wondered how long it would take Aunt Ella to track down her mother and tell her to come straight to Kilvenny and pick her up. Hell’s bells, her mother would be furious if she had her holiday ruined and had to come all the way back from Italy. Catrin would never hear the end of it and she’d have to spend another boring summer in London.
Then she had a truly awful thought. What if her mother contacted Arthur Campbell and asked him to look after her until she got back from Italy? She shivered, and cold fingers of fear flew up her backbone. She hadn’t considered that possibility, and yet it was the most likely one because he was her godfather. She hated Arthur Campbell and his wife; an afternoon in their company always seemed like a lifetime, and the thought of staying with them for the whole summer was too awful. Arthur Campbell was a horrid shrunken old tortoise with wily eyes and a prickly beard, the feel of which made her shrivel when he kissed her.
She would refuse to go there.
That was rubbish and she knew it. You didn’t refuse Arthur Campbell anything.
An hour ago she would have done anything to escape from Kilvenny as soon as she could, but now she was having second thoughts. She didn’t want to stay here with moody Aunt Ella, but it would be better than being under the beady eye of Arthur Campbell.
As she closed her eyes and prayed, the image of Maria Paparella came to her as clearly as if it had been painted on the back of her eyelids. If only she could speak to this smiling woman and ask her advice, Maria would be able to tell her what to do. She looked kind and motherly but there was also a look about her that said she wouldn’t put up with any nonsense. There she was again, thinking stupid thoughts: how could someone who had been dead for hundreds of years possibly help her?
She dropped her head onto her clasped hands and tried to concentrate on her prayers but her mind kept conjuring up Maria Paparella’s face and she imagined a comforting hand reaching out from the page of the book to touch her, the feel of warm brown flesh against her cheek, the smell of fresh bread and the sweet scent of cinnamon. So immersed was she in her thoughts that she was unaware of the chapel door opening.
Tony Agosti stepped inside and dipped his fingers into the stoop of holy water, then his hand hovered halfway to his forehead as he saw Catrin praying in the lady chapel. She looked almost ethereal as she knelt there, the sunlight turning her face to gold.
It hardly seemed possible that this frail little girl could be Kizzy’s daughter. Kizzy had always been so vivacious, always bursting with unrestrained energy, but her daughter was a ghost of a girl, as insubstantial as the morning shadows. He was overcome with compassion for her, poor little kid to have been sent somewhere she wasn’t wanted. She must feel wretched, abandoned and desolate. If Ella had an ounce of kindness, she should realize that the kid needed a bit of human kindness shown to her, no matter what had gone on in the past. God, if he could have laid his hands on Kizzy Grieve’s beautiful neck he could quite easily have throttled her.
The hissing of the candles stirred Catrin from her reverie and she turned and saw Tony watching her intently from the doorway. He smiled suddenly, a smile which transformed his face from the solemnity of a medieval saint to a court jester, a smile which took the chill off the chapel.
He lit four candles, placed them at the feet of the little saint, and knelt down next to Catrin, hands clasped, eyes closed, lips moving in silent prayer. She looked sideways at him; he was a very handsome man, his dark eyelashes throwing shadows across his sculpted cheeks, a nose like that of a marble saint. His eyelashes flickered momentarily; he turned his dark eyes on her and smiled, edged closer, wiped a smudge from her cheek with his thumb and whispered, “My daily duty is now done, and for the next hour or so I am a free man.”
“Duty?”
“Now that Nonna rarely gets out, I come across to light candles for her, one for her husband and one each for my parents.”
That made three candles. He had lit four and she wondered who the fourth one was for but was too shy to ask.
She followed him out into the garden and they sat together on a bench opposite the fountain.
“Damn, you know I love this place, it’s so peaceful and has such a feel of history,” he said with a sigh. “I often wonder about all the different people who must have lived here over the years.”
“What sort of people, do you think?”
“Well, if I close my eyes I can hear the swish of a long dress as a grand lady passes through the gardens.”
“Would there have been grand ladies living here?”
“Of course. Your family, the Grieves, were very wealthy people in the olden days. If you’d lived here then you would have worn fine clothes and learnt to embroider and play the harpsichord or something like that.”
“Ugh. I should have hated it. I don’t like dressing up and being all ladylike, and I’m hopeless at needlework.”
Tony chuckled. “You take after your Aunt Ella, then: she was a tomboy.”
Catrin pulled a face; she didn’t like to be compared with grubby Ella Grieve.
“Ah, you could do worse. Ella can be a funny old stick, but she’s got a heart of gold underneath all that bluster.”
“She swears too much,” Catrin said.
“That’s because she spent too much time with the fishermen when she was little and picked up bad habits, but hey we’ve all got our faults. Do you know something, Catrin Grieve?”
“No, what?”
“I for one am really glad that you turned up here out of the blue and flushed her out of hiding.”
“Why do you think she shut herself up in Shrimp’s for all those years?”
Tony shrugged. “I don’t know. She had her reasons, I suppose. Damn, those roses smell beautiful today. I bet it smells better here now than it did hundreds of years ago.”
“Why would it?”
“Well, it would have stunk in the olden days.”
“What sort of awful smells would there have been, do you think?”
“Rotting food, the smell of dead rats, and there were no pr
oper toilets, for a start.”
“A bit like Shrimp’s smells now, then,” Catrin said with a sniff, and she wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“I suppose so.”
“I’d rather we didn’t talk about bad smells any more. Is that the tower?” she said, pointing across the gardens. “Aye, that’s where the nursery used to be.”
“The nursery?”
“When Ella’s parents were first married they moved into the castle, and once the children came along they used the tower as the nursery. It suited Mrs Grieve having the children away from the main house, as it were, looked after by a nanny. She hadn’t a lot of patience with small children, according to Norma.”
“Did my mother stay in the nursery when she was little?”
Tony shook his head. “No. There was no money for a nanny when your mother was small; she slept up in the room where you are now. Besides, she didn’t like the tower. She thought it was haunted.”
“Is it?” Catrin asked nervously.
“Maybe. They used to say that the Grieves locked the mad members of the family up in the tower and their ghosts come back to haunt the place.”
Catrin looked at Tony in alarm, and he smiled. “I’m only teasing.”
“Good, because whenever anyone talks about the Grieves they talk about the mad ones.”
“There’s a fine line between madness and genius, and I think the Grieves had a bit of both in their blood.”
They were silent for a few moments and then Catrin said, “This garden is very different to the rest of the gardens.”
“That’s because this is the Italian garden.”
“Italian?” she said with interest.
“One of your ancestors had this garden specially made. Italian gardens always had water as the main feature.”
“It’s a real shame that the fountain doesn’t work any more,” Catrin said wistfully.
“I can remember it working when I was younger. Mr Grieve, Ella’s father, had it restored years ago. I used to come and sit here for hours with my nonna. Maybe one day we can try and get it going again?” he said enthusiastically.