by Lucy Foley
‘It’s the woman,’ he murmurs, nodding towards the drapes. ‘The men don’t like it, Captain.’ He lowers his voice further. ‘They are scared of her.’
‘Of her? That helpless creature? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘They don’t think she is helpless, though. They think …’
‘What?’
‘They think she is responsible for the storm.’
The captain scoffs. ‘These are grown men, and yet they are acting like children, worse – old women, with their superstitions. It’s so ridiculous that I cannot credit it. And what has convinced them of this?’
The lieutenant shrugs. ‘Well, sir, some of the men …’
‘Yes?’
‘Some of the men have noticed the marks around her ankles. They say – I’m not sure this is true, I don’t know about such things – but they say that one who had been meant for burning would bear such marks. They have decided that she is a witch.’
‘The Genoese do not engage in such practices.’
‘No, sire,’ says the lieutenant slowly, ‘but we are not in Genoese waters yet.’
‘And do you believe any of this?’
A pause.
‘Well?’
The man sighs. ‘It has to be said that a few strange things have happened since she came on board. I have never seen a storm simply appear in the way that one did. It was … unnatural. And where we found her, so far out to sea. A normal person – especially not a woman – wouldn’t have swum so far and survived.’
The captain shakes his head. ‘And so you condemn her, for being brave? What sort of barbaric notion is that? We live in a modern, enlightened society. The Pisans or the Venetians might believe such nonsense, but never us.’
The lieutenant tries again. ‘And she wasn’t—’ he coughs, ‘wearing any clothing. That, surely, cannot be normal in a woman of decency.’
But herein lies his mistake. He watches as his captain’s eyes glaze over at the memory of that pale nude flesh, and his gaze travels, inevitably, towards the curtains once more.
The lieutenant knows there is one more thing he might try. ‘Sire,’ he says, carefully. ‘There is also the matter of your fiancée.’
It was the wrong thing to say. The captain explodes. ‘How dare you speak to me in that way?’ He rises to his full – and not inconsiderable – height. ‘How dare you insinuate that I am in some way lax in my duty to her? My care for this helpless woman in no way affects my deep and long-lasting love in that regard.’
The lieutenant takes his leave, apologizing all the way.
When Hal looks up from the page the light has assumed the bluish quality of early evening. The trees about him are ink impressions, the air is cooler. He is also certain that he is not alone. He looks about, and then sees her emerging from the shadowy gardens below. She looks otherworldly in the strange light: her skin paler, her hair brighter.
She has not seen him yet, he realizes: he is hidden in shadow. He moves forward.
She stops. ‘Oh.’
‘Hello.’
‘I didn’t realize you had come up here.’
No, he thinks – undoubtedly if she had she would not be here.
‘I wanted to find a quiet spot.’
She nods. ‘So did I. And I wanted to see what the view was like.’ They look together in silence, and he sees that lights are beginning to come on along the darkening stretch of coast. Then she glances at the journal in his lap. ‘What were you doing? Reading?’
‘Yes.’
Hal can tell she is curious, in spite of herself.
‘What is it?’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘just an old book.’
He sees that she is frustrated by his reticence, that she wants to know more.
‘Can I take a look?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ he says. ‘It was given to me in confidence.’
‘Oh.’ He sees that she is stung, a little embarrassed. For a second, this knowledge gives him a kind of cruel pleasure. And then he takes pity on her. ‘It’s a journal,’ he says.
‘Whose?’
‘Someone long dead.’
‘Your friend?’
He stares at her. ‘What?’
‘You told me about him, in Rome. You told me he wrote.’
Did he? He must have done so. Yes: now he remembers. It was when he felt at liberty to share it with her, because he assumed he would never see her again. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘this isn’t his, though.’
‘What was his name?’
‘His name was Morris.’
‘How did he die?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ It comes out more harshly than he had quite intended. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘There isn’t any point in speaking of it now. It happened so long ago.’
She nods. ‘Except, you aren’t writing. You told me that you’d stopped, after he died.’
Her tenacity is a surprise. Only this morning he was thinking how weak she seemed, how flimsy and yielding. Perhaps this is his comeuppance.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘that’s right.’ And then he remembers something from that night, something he can use, as a way of throwing it back to her. ‘Your father was a writer.’
‘Yes,’ she says. Now she is the one who appears wary.
‘You never told me his name.’
‘I don’t think you’ll know it. He wasn’t famous outside Spain.’
‘You’re Spanish?’ He looks at her. With the blonde hair, somehow, he would never have guessed. And yet it would explain the accent, with that foreign element beneath.
‘I was.’
It is an odd thing to say. ‘You aren’t now?’
She is wrong-footed. ‘Yes – but I mean that I’m an American, now. That is how I think of myself.’ She glances up at the sky. ‘It’s getting dark. I think we should go back to the yacht.’
He almost smiles. She is just as good at this game of obfuscation as he, perhaps better.
When he stands, she takes a quick step back. And then, as though feeling this might reveal too much, she steps forward again. It is too late, though, because suddenly the thing quickens into life between them, strong as it had been in Rome. Stronger, perhaps, because before there was no knowledge of how her skin would feel against his. It is a relief when she turns away.
He follows her back down through the dusk-laden garden. She wears a very simple linen dress, but with the reverse cut away to reveal the expanse of her back, the stippled line of her spine. He knows suddenly that he wants to put his hand there, to feel the soft warmth of her back. At one point she looks over her shoulder to check that he is following, and he nearly stumbles, caught out.
The scent of the flowers is stronger now, as though the dark has kindled it. ‘What is that?’ he asks, and it comes out as a hoarse whisper, as though the perfume is another secret between them. ‘That smell?’
‘Star jasmine,’ she says, as though she has had the answer ready for him.
Forever after, he thinks, his memories of this spring will be steeped in the scent.
*
‘Tonight,’ the Contessa announces, after supper, ‘I thought we would play charades. I will divide you into teams, and give you each your challenge. You will be playing famous characters from the real or imagined past – and we must all guess who they are. The way I play it is that the teams must confer, and whichever team presents the winning answer is spared. The others must drink a glass of anis.’
She is already setting out the tiny crystal cups, pouring measures of the syrupy liquid into them. There is no time for dissent before she has paired them all off. Earl Morgan and Gaspari, Truss and Giulietta, Aubrey Boyd and Roberto – who tries to protest, to no avail. And then, with a strange kind of inevitability: Stella and Hal. She passes him a slip of paper.
He reads it, and then shows it to Stella, so that only she can see.
Lancelot and Guinevere. When he glances up toward the others, he catches Truss watching him. He feels pinioned by the
man’s gaze. Truss smiles, revealing that row of white teeth, and Hal smiles back, but it is a physical effort: the muscles in his face are taut as rubber bands.
Earl Morgan and Gaspari are first. Interestingly, Hal thinks, all the subtlety of the performance is Gaspari’s. Morgan’s performance is strained melodrama, and without the benefit of his rich voice it all feels rather thin. Hal finds himself wondering how many takes it requires to portray him at his scene-stealing best. When Morgan plunges an imaginary blade into Gaspari’s back, and Gaspari turns with a look of agonized betrayal, Aubrey leaps from his seat. ‘Julius Caesar,’ he shouts, in delight. ‘Caesar and Brutus.’
The little glasses are passed round to the losers. While the others grimace Hal savours his, enjoying the warming liquorice taste.
Aubrey Boyd is Titania, smoothing imaginary gossamer skirts over his lap for his lover to lay his head in, and Roberto – clumsy, scowling – is unintentionally hilarious as Bottom. Then Truss and Giulietta make an interesting pairing as Samson and Delilah. As on screen, Giulietta is magnetic: by turns seductive, devious, righteous. It is as though the character has been poured into her, filling the empty spaces. Truss merely suffers the performance, as though he is indulging the game of small children, but there is something between them, a tension, that makes it interesting.
Their turn will be next. Hal turns to tell Stella how he thinks they should do it, but she has risen from her seat. ‘I’m sorry to break up the game,’ she says, ‘but I’m very tired. Please—’ as the Contessa makes to stand too, ‘don’t worry about me. I’m going to go to bed.’
Her
I am anything but tired, as I make my way below deck to the cabin. I feel that I have come very close to danger. As soon as our names were called together, I had to extricate myself. Perhaps it is irrational, but I felt that had we had done it, acted out our parts, everything would have been visible. That night in Rome. The thing that is between us now, that made itself known in the garden this evening – though neither of us would acknowledge it. But I saw his face when I turned back to him.
I have taught myself better than this. People are lazy. They see, usually, only the thing that you choose to show them. And I have learned that the more they think you say, the less you can get away with revealing. This has suited me well – I have become adept.
Yet with him it is different. It isn’t just that I think he sees through this performance – which I am beginning to suspect he does. It is that I find myself wanting to tell him more. I haven’t spoken of my father in more than ten years. I haven’t even alluded to that former life. Yet this evening, when the two of us were alone, with the quiet of the garden all around, it was all I could do to remain silent. I wanted to keep talking.
That night, Hal has a strange dream. He wakes disorientated and aroused. Gradually, fragments of it come back to him. It was her, Stella. That night in Rome. His sleeping self remembers, no matter how hard he has worked to forget it.
He sits on the side of the bed. At least it makes a change from the other dream. But he needs to get a hold of himself. A married woman. It could have no future. He had his chance for that sort of happiness with Suze, and he ruined it. And there could be no happiness in this. But then perhaps this is why he is drawn to her, because he knows there is no future in it. Later, he will remember these attempts at rationalizing the irrational, and he will smile at them. But later still than that, they will hold no humour for him.
Unable to get back to sleep – and half worried that if he does he will dream again of her – he sits on the bed, groggy, and tries to bleach his mind of thought. Eventually, to distract himself, he picks up the journal and begins to read.
THE NEXT TROUBLE to befall the ship is the pestilence. Several of the men, overnight, are overtaken with a terrible illness: bouts of vomiting and delirium. Men – brave men who have fought many a bloody battle – lie on their backs wishing aloud that they might die and be spared the horrors of the sickness. There have been various contagions before that have spread quickly among the men: the sharing of quarters, food and space are no help in such cases. And yet none have spread with such ferocity as this disease. And none of the men, this time, are left in any doubt as to the cause.
The lieutenants meet again. ‘We must find some way of getting her removed from the ship. Without the captain discovering how, of course.’
And so a plan is hatched. The captain’s evening meal will contain several teaspoons of a powerful morphiate from the medical supplies. Then the men will take the woman back to shore in the tender – and leave her there. They will be kind, they decide, they will send her on her way with food, and water, and the clothes on her back. It is a brave plan, because none on board are in any doubt now about the scope of her power. But so long as they treat her well – or at least not ill – they hope to be spared.
It works well. The captain lies in his berth in a drugged stupor. They will tell him, when he wakes, that he must simply have been exhausted. He will, no doubt, be too embarrassed to investigate the matter further.
Under cover of darkness the tender leaves the ship at anchor, makes the short journey to the shore and back again. The woman was surprisingly acquiescent when they explained what they must do: she merely nodded her head and gathered her cloak about her. She looked particularly young then, and – if the men didn’t know otherwise – rather harmless. If they didn’t know that she was something other than what she seems, they might have known something like guilt for leaving a young woman on her own on a deserted shore, vulnerable to men, beasts and nature itself. But none among them allows himself to feel this. And none of them turn to look at the small figure left upon the beach. She is no more to them now than a problem solved.
Only one difficulty remains. How to explain the matter of her disappearance to the captain. They will simply have to pretend that they, too, slept the sleep of the dead and woke to find that she had left. Swum away, perhaps.
But the captain’s reaction, when he wakes and hears that she is gone, is something for which none of them had been prepared. He is like a mad man – or as one lieutenant privately decides, less human than that – more like a wild animal. His eyes shine with a strange, crazed brightness. He stalks the length of the ship, searching everywhere for her, in impossible places: under men’s bedrolls, inside the foodstores, within the arsenal. When one of the lieutenants bravely goes to him and tries reasoning with him, he shrugs the man off with such violence that he is thrown to the floor. It is a sad and terrible thing to watch: that such a great man should be brought to such a low place by mere sexual infatuation.
For a day, they observe him like this, wondering what – if anything – they can do about it. Eventually, it is decided that it would be best to let him sleep on it, in the hope that some vestige of reason will have returned to him in the morning. But when the day dawns, calm and bright, they discover that he has played them at their own game. The tender is gone, and their captain has deserted his ship.
An odd thing seems to have happened. Somehow the remnants of Hal’s dream must have become tangled with the words on the page. Because, as he was reading, the figure of the woman in his mind began to change. Became someone he recognized. Became her.
15
San Fruttuoso
The next day’s destination is San Fruttuoso, a tenth-century abbey set in its own bay.
‘You have seen it in the scene in which the captain goes to pray,’ the Contessa says, ‘to ask advice from God. And several of my ancestors’ remains are interred in the crypt there – though whether any of them are his is unknown.’
Hal makes a quick note of this. It would be an interesting detail for the piece: a nice foil to the modern glamour. Even though, no doubt, it will then be edited out.
‘So he might not have made it to the Americas?’ Aubrey asks.
‘Well,’ the Contessa says, carefully, ‘it isn’t absolutely known. Certainly all mention of his name disappears after a point, from the records kept a
t the time. So …’ she looks to Gaspari, ‘we thought that it would be an interesting ending to the story.’
‘Ah, and there is a hike that one can do,’ she says. Hal has the distinct impression that she is suddenly eager to move on from the subject of her ancestor. ‘It begins here in Portofino, and goes up over the top. Spectacular views. Is anyone brave enough to do it with me?’
Hal and Aubrey Boyd offer to at once. Aubrey’s eagerness is a surprise, because he always appears so indolent.
The Contessa is pleased. ‘Anyone else?’
‘I’d like to do it,’ Stella says, suddenly.
Truss turns to her. ‘And do you plan to walk it in your high heels, my dear?’ he says, lightly. ‘Or perhaps in your bare feet? I don’t imagine there’s anything in your wardrobe that would be appropriate for a hike.’
‘I have some plimsolls with me.’
‘Where did you get those?’
‘I bought them.’
Truss looks momentarily bemused. ‘Well, if you’re sure, Kitten.’
‘I am.’
She does a good job of keeping herself in check, Hal thinks. But if one is watching at exactly the right time, he has noticed, it is possible to see the electric flare of emotion beneath the surface. A flicker of unease, a silent, tiny spark of anger. She is like this with her husband. When he insists on her doing this, or not doing that, or eating exactly the thing he has selected for her. There is an instantaneous rebellion, immediately quashed.
The first part of the climb is straight up out of the town. The air is thick with the pungent scent of wild garlic. Hal’s calves burn, and his shirt sticks to his back. He has always thought of himself as fit, but it is more challenging than he would have expected.
Aubrey Boyd is appalled by the ascent.
‘I thought you said,’ he gasps to the Contessa, ‘that this was a walk? This isn’t a walk – it’s a prolonged heart-attack.’