Night of Fire

by Barbara Samuel

  At the unexpected airlessness of her lungs, she pressed a hand to her ribs, and the letter she had tucked into her bodice crackled against her hand.

  It brought back the steadying sense of the Count himself, and her panic ebbed as quickly as it had arrived.

  It did not matter how he looked—if he were old or young or stout or lean or even as fat as a little troll.

  She had come because she had never felt such an affinity with another mind in all her life. She wanted to sit and talk with him in perfect freedom—her Basilio, her dearest friend.

  Her spirits soared once again. She had done it!

  A long stone stairway cut into the hillside led down from a gate in the villa walls to the road. A figure emerged from the gate and began to descend, his figure casting a sharp shadow against the gold walls. "Is that him?" Cassandra asked her companion. "Is that the Count?"

  He looked at her, the large dark eyes dancing mischievously, as if he knew a secret. " Si." He pulled the wagon to a halt and nimbly got out, circling quickly to assist Cassandra. She put her hands in his and jumped down in the dust, then looked up to see if she might catch another glimpse of her friend.

  The sun was in her eyes, and even when she raised her hand to shade her view, she could only make out the vaguest details. Tall, moving with a limber, eager step down the stairs, his boots tapping quickly on stone.

  In excitement, she moved forward, smiling. "My dear Count, is that you?" she cried.

  "Lady Cassandra?" He took another step, hesitated, and then slowly took the next one, and the next, moving into the shadows only ten feet above her, where she could see him. There he paused, staring down at her with the same shock that must have showed on her own face.

  A hundred times over the long journey, Cassandra had imagined this moment. She had imagined laughing, running to greet him, perhaps even sharing a quick, proper embrace.

  Instead, they were both immobile. Her smile faded, and the airlessness of moments before returned.

  Whatever she had imagined, she had never, ever dreamed that he would be the physical personification of those beautiful, sensual words.

  But he stood there, young—no more than thirty—and tall, with a lean, limber sort of grace that made her remember the lyric turn of phrase that was so much a part of him. His hair, thick and black, tumbled in loose, glossy circlets to his shoulders. His face was sculpted by the hand of Michelangelo himself—that wide white brow and aggressive nose, the sensual mouth—but statues she thought a little wildly, were always pale gray. Basilio was color itself. His lips deep wine, his cheeks rosy, his eyes and lashes and brows as black as that hair.

  In that single, stunned moment, a wave of foreboding washed through her, so violent that it nearly made her ill, and she felt she must dissolve now into weeping for all that could have been and could not be.

  Would not be.

  He stared back at her, then they both moved at once, she racing upward, he down. They met, hands outstretched, then tangled. Cassandra felt the power of those long, white hands capturing her own, and closed her eyes.

  "Basilio," she whispered, a little dizzy, then opened her eyes again and saw that she had been right: her friend of the wild and gentle and unhappy heart was there in the depths of his eyes.

  And she saw that he was deeply, deeply dismayed.

  Torn, too, for his hands were tight on her hands, his fingers moving over hers as if to absorb their shape and size and texture immedi-ately, as if they would be stolen away. His fingers were strong, the palms callused—she had not thought a poet could be so virile, so powerful.

  Suddenly, he lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them, one and then the other. His eyes closed as he did it, and then, at last, he spoke.

  "I thought… you are a widow… I thought you would be older." His voice was musical, haunting like a cello. He lifted a shoulder and gave a little laugh. "Instead, here you are—so beautiful, you stole my words right out of my mouth."

  "I did not mean to mislead you," she said. "If you would like me to find other accommodations, I will do so."

  She expected him to laugh at that, to brush it away, but the wide mouth sobered and she saw he seriously considered the possibility. "No," he said, almost sadly. "I have waited too long for my good friend to come to me here. Please stay."

  "I thought you would be a middle aged man, graying and beyond…" She lowered her head, hiding what she had nearly blurted out. "I thought we would meet—" she put a hand to her brow—"there." She closed her eyes at the loss of that small part of her dream.

  He took a step down to stand level with her, and lifted her hand to his chest. "No, my friend, it is deeper still. Soul to soul, si?"

  She raised her head. "Yes."

  He smiled a little. "We are both surprised. But we will go on now as we were. Forgive me for seeing first your mask, not you."

  Masks. Yes. He was still only her Basilio, beneath that mask of beauty. "Only if you will forgive me."

  "Done." He stepped back and called to the wagoner to bring her bags. "Come. You must be dying of thirst."

  Basilio led her to the courtyard, his heart pounding in a combination of joy and dismay that was so intense he thought the emotions might burst from his skin. She swirled to look over the wall in her violet traveling coat, a slim figure as graceful as a bird. Her hair, a coppery mass of curls, could not entirely be tamed, and wisps fell down her white neck and over her cheek, and he felt a clutch of pain at the impossible beauty of her. Not merely lovely, or fair and pleasant. Not pretty in the way of some women, given life by the joy in their eyes.

  No, Cassandra was dangerously beautiful— beauty given an edge by the soberness of her red, red mouth, the intelligence and intensity burning in her very dark brown eyes.

  He should have sent her away immediately. Instead, he joined her at the wall and they stood there, side by side, looking toward the sea.

  "This is what you described to me," she said. Her voice was throaty and sure, without the tricks of amusement and flirtatiousness he had grown to expect from women.

  "Yes." He found himself at a loss again and scowled, clasping his hands behind his back. Never mind the rest: he was a gentleman, and she was a guest in his home, a guest who had come at his invitation. "Have I done it justice?"

  "It is as vivid as you promised," she said and lifted her eyes to the horizon. "I did not anticipate the aroma."

  He breathed in, smelling sea and the sweetish heat of sunlight on olive leaves. "What is different?"

  She tilted her head toward the sky and closed her eyes, and Basilio found his gaze on her long white throat. "It smells—" she paused, then lowered her chin "—like your letters."

  He imagined her on some gray English morning, lifting his letter to her nose and inhaling the scent. He always did it himself, when hers arrived. "Your letters smell of woodsmoke."

  A rattling of dishes made them turn. A servant pushed a wheeled cart over the bricked courtyard. Basilio gestured to the table covered with a white cloth, set beneath the spreading branches of a tree where the shade would protect her from the bright Tuscan sun. "Would you like some refreshment?"

  "So formal," she murmured and nodded. "Yes, thank you."

  There was a bowl of fresh ripe olives, glistening with washing, bread and oil and soft white cheese in a crock, tea and wine, and water in a jug cooled in the well. "I did not know if you would drink a hot beverage on a hot day, or if wine so early would shock you." He poured a glass of water first, and she accepted it gratefully.

  After drinking deeply, she gasped in pleasure. "That's marvelous!"

  "We have a good mountain well. More?"

  She drank another straight down, and he found himself looking at that throat again. He looked away, busying himself with cutting the bread. "Do you remember when you said your salon might shock me?"

  "Yes, I do. And you promised to shock my English palate. Will this do it?"

  He laughed softly. "No. It is only delicious." He pl
ucked an olive out of the bowl and gave it to her, watching in pleasure as she popped it in her mouth and tested it. The dark eyes widened in approval.

  "My pride was wounded when you wrote that," he continued, and dipped bread into the pool of herbed olive oil on the plate.

  "Was it?" She smiled. "Is that why you returned the challenge?"

  "Yes. And why I sent the postcard from Venice. I hoped it would scandalize you." He bit into his bread.

  "Did it?"

  Cassandra laughed, pulled off her hat, and flung it into a chair. "I am not easily shocked, sir."

  "Ah. Pity." He put a hand over his heart. "I had hoped I'd redeemed myself."

  "However"—she plucked an olive from the bowl—"even I was a bit flushed over that artwork."

  He laughed, and it shook loose the sense of doom that had stolen his joy over her arrival. Impulsively, he reached over the table and took her hand. "I am very glad to have you here, my friend."

  Her smile was as easy and relaxed as his own when she tightened her fingers around his hand. A sharp heat, sweet and dangerous, sparked through him, but he pushed it away.

  She said, "And I am so glad you invited me, Basilio It is all right if I call you Basilio?"

  He smiled. "Of course."

  A sense of alignment came to him, a sense of rightness. Whatever else transpired, it was good that he had written, that day so many months before, to this woman.

  After lunch, Basilio excused himself to tend to some business brought to him by his steward, and Cassandra was led to her room. She thanked the woman who had shown her there, and with relief closed the door. She felt a faint headache at the base of her skull, brought about by overstim-ulation of her senses. Never had she experienced such a battering of sensuality, not even in Martinique.

  The room was both a continuation of that splendor and, in its silence, a relief from it. The bed was a variation of a four-poster, the posts fashioned from iron curved into fanciful shapes and painted with gold.

  It was piled with pillows of red and gold and amber, the colors of fire, which matched the draperies and the coverlet. Silk fringe trimmed everything.

  She smiled, brushing her hand over the fabric, and wandered to the doors which led to a small stone balcony that overlooked the same view as the courtyard. She plucked pins from her hair as she admired it: green hills close in that faded to high blue mountains, and a snippet of endless sea to the horizon. She had never seen anything so lovely.

  Basilio.

  His name whispered down her spine, a name that was as lovely as his words. She closed her eyes with a little shudder, thinking again of his mouth, the tumble of curls, his graceful hands, the flash of his eyes when he laughed.

  She should leave. He had clearly been dismayed at the sight of her, and she'd sensed his hesitation when she offered to stay elsewhere, as if he, too, felt the danger of this meeting.

  Rubbing her hands through her hair to free it, she turned and dropped the pins on a little table, then began removing her clothes, managing to strip down to her chemise with a bit of wiggling. From a jug, she poured water into a porcelain basin and washed her face and arms and neck, puzzling about that odd sense of warning.

  The only threat she could imagine was if Basilio's beautiful face hid twisted hungers or brute violence. It seemed highly unlikely, but even if it were true, she was no innocent in such matters, thanks to that husband who had made her a happy widow. She was perfectly able to take care of herself.

  A bitterness that never entirely disappeared drew up her mouth as she blotted her face dry. She had been foolish indeed in her choice of husband. It had not been a romantic joining; she did not trust love. After observing her older sister's romantic excesses, Cassandra had decided women should never allow emotion to rule their lives: it was a sure path to ruin. A woman's lot was difficult enough without adding that complication, so she relied on wit and reason.

  George had seemed the ideal husband: an earl from an old, old family, with fortune and fine manners and an agreeable countenance.

  She rubbed her neck. The fortune had been an illusion, for he'd gambled a good half of it away before their marriage, and managed to lose the rest in the year before his death. The manners had only been a pretty game. But the worst of it had been the perversity of his sexual appetites— something she could not have foreseen or avoided in her virginal ignorance. Only the old family had proved to be true at all.

  Ah, well. She had learned more than she wished of men's abuses, but he'd kindly died and left her free.

  There were worse fates—and look where it had led her.

  Tugging back the coverlet, she slid into the silky, fragrant bed and settled into the pillows. Such luxury, she thought sleepily, the headache receding as she let go of the long days of travel and sank into the soft feather mattress. Behind her closed lids, images flickered—the Tuscan sky, the ripe olives between Basilio's fingers, the wagon-master singing. The images moved slower and slower, like the swing of a pendulum, until they ceased their flashing and burned on one clean, perfect image: Basilio's curls tumbling forward as he bent to kiss her hand. The image slid with her into sleep.

  When she awakened much later, Cassandra called her maid, who was full of complaints and dire warnings as she dressed Cassandra's hair and helped her don a gown of green brocade she'd brought specifically for this night. Cassandra only half-listened, her gaze captured by the haze of light falling on the hills beyond her balcony.

  The long gold fingers pointed out valleys and crags and high outcroppings of white rock that had been hidden earlier, and she felt a stab of excitement over what else might be revealed in another hour or another day. In the middle of Joan's complaint about the servants who'd slept all afternoon, she said,

  "Joan, look there. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in your life?"

  "I like the view out my mum's window better."

  Cassandra brushed the girl's hands from her and moved to pull the drapes aside. A soft wind, considerably cooler than it had been earlier, touched her face. "I shall need my shawl, I believe. The gold." When Joan fetched it, Cassandra tossed it over her arm and slipped out, a quick eagerness in her step that she'd not felt in years.

  With a sense of wonder, she realized she was as close to giddy as she ever allowed herself to be. It was a surprisingly pleasant sensation, and as she walked down the cool hallway to the main salon, she hummed lightly under her breath. The strange foreboding of earlier seemed as distant as England itself, made of old fears and lingering guilts, no more.

  Though she heard servants about, Cassandra did not see anyone else as she made her way through the rooms, poking her head into a salon, then a library which tempted her mightily—did he keep the manuscripts here?—but she forced herself to keep going. The rooms were arranged around the gardens and courtyard, every window open to the astonishing view of fields and groves falling away to the sea.

  She emerged into that courtyard. The paving stones were warm beneath her slippers, even as shadows crept out from the building from the westering sun. With a rush of anticipation, she realized that not only the moon would slide into the sea, as Basilio had promised, but the sun as well. It was a sight she had not seen in many years.

  There was no one here, and Cassandra wondered if she ought to go back to her room until Basilio had returned. But she was too restless to be able to tolerate the slow quiet of that view. She would explore the gardens instead.

  But just as she turned for the path, she heard a burst of laughter and Basilio himself came through the break in the trees, his hands filled with some ruby-colored fruit. A man walked with him, perhaps the steward, but Cassandra could only stare at Basilio. His coat and waistcoat were gone, leaving his simple shirt to blow against his body the tie loose enough she could glimpse his chest and part of a sculpted shoulder at the opening. The thin fabric of his sleeves billowed white and full against his forearms.

  She wanted to run to him, run and greet him with the fullness of her p
leasure. Instead, she forced herself to remain still by the wall, as if she were captured once more by the glory of colors drenching the landscape—but it was Basilio who filled her vision, who made her chest hurt. Words from his letters spilled through her mind, now lent richness because they echoed in his physical voice: I labor to capture the music of the night. Imperfectly. Always imperfectly.

  When he saw her, his unguarded face blazed with light. He called out happily, "Cassandra! Come see what I have brought you!"

  Unable to quell a smile of happiness, she moved toward him, unable, too, to keep her feet from flying over the bricks. He hurried toward her, lifting his hands with his prize, his laughter spilling out into the late gold day.

  The perfection of moments, Cassandra thought, and then saw what he carried in his long-fingered hand.

  "Plums!" she cried happily, and took one from the many.

  "Take more! They came just this minute from the trees. I picked them for you."

  She gathered more out of his palms and held one in her fingers. "It's warm!"

  He laughed and bit into one, those white teeth splitting the skin, juice spilling on his lip. "Taste it!"

  Cassandra stared at him for a moment, overtaken by a vivid, intense wish to lick that syrup from his lip.

  She brought a plum to her own mouth, and bit into it. It exploded against her teeth, spilling hot dark juice into her mouth, as warm as sunlight, sweeter than sugar. "Oh!" she cried.

  Trying to keep it from dripping down her chin, she bent over, laughing, and sucked from her fingers.

  "Wonderful!" she cried, and tossed the pit aside to devour another greedily. A tiny stream of juice trailed down her hand and she laughed again. "Messy!"

  His eyes glittered. "This is why we are alive. Plums!" He extended his hand, and she saw that his fingers were also juice stained. "Come. Let's gather more for the others. You will like even more taking them off the tree."

  There was no way to resist him, and though it was utterly unlike her, Cassandra tossed her shawl over one shoulder and reached out to allow him to grasp her sticky hand with his own.