by Mary Malloy
“I don’t know,” Lizzie said. “What do you see?”
“Nothing quite of the quality of the Reni or the dell’Arca, but there are some very nice Italian things here and a couple of Dutch or Flemish paintings from the seventeenth century.” He zoomed in to one landscape painting in the Yellow Salon, until it began to break up into pixels on the screen.
“The photographs are better than the scans,” she said. “And one of my students is making some high-resolution enlargements so that we can see things better.”
“Well, even without a good image, I recognize this as Jacob van Ruysdael, and there’s a dandy naval portrait here that looks to be by Backhuyzen.” He turned the screen toward her and pointed out each painting.
“I’m not sure how much they would add to my exhibit, however nice they might be,” Lizzie said. “I really want to concentrate on the specimen cabinet and the exhibition space isn’t all that big.”
Martin agreed that hard choices would have to be made. “These photographs are just tantalizing enough to hint at unexpected wonders to be discovered when you get to the house.”
“Yes, indeed,” Lizzie agreed. “I’m getting very excited to see it. I mean, look at this picture of what they call ‘The Chinese Salon.’ A black and white picture just doesn’t do it. Besides all the Chinese porcelains in the room, I think this wallpaper must be from China.”
She reached over to advance the pictures on the screen until the chapel appeared. “And here’s one you’ll really love,” she said. “I think there’s a corpse stashed under the altar here.”
“I have to put my foot down here, Liz. Every time you get yourself involved with an old corpse, someone tries to kill you.” He had a half-serious tone in his voice but gave her a meaningful look.
She put her hand on his arm. “Jackie made a similar comment to me. She said she hoped this project was not going to be life-threatening, or something like that, and she didn’t even know about the corpse, which must be some saint.” She smiled at her husband and got up from the couch where they had been sitting. “Don’t worry. Whoever that is lying under the altar is not coming home with me.”
Martin closed the computer and stood to embrace his wife. He put his arms around her shoulders and gave her tight hug, before kissing her.
She leaned back to meet his gaze.
“It’s funny too, because those two life-threatening experiences were associated with research projects that dealt with good old English families, seemingly the model of civilized behavior. While these guys—the Gonzagas—Whoa! They have a much more checkered past.”
“Can I come with you?”
Martin was consulting with an architectural firm in Boston at the moment and when Lizzie had first asked about this more than a month earlier he had said he wouldn’t be able to travel with her.
“Do you think you need to come protect me from danger?” she asked.
He laughed and leaned his forehead down to touch hers. “Actually I’m intrigued by the pictures of the house and I’d like to see them with you.” He kissed her on the head. “But I can protect you too, in case that corpse turns out to be something other than the saint they think it is.”
“I am fairly confident that it is not, in fact, whatever saint they think it is.” She rested her cheek against his. “I don’t imagine you can come for the whole three weeks.”
“No, but I think I’ll come for the last week. If Tony is to be believed, the food there is the best in Italy.” He released her. “And I would like to come see that sketch of the collection and have coffee with you next week if you and Jackie meet with Tony.”
“I’ll call Rose today and arrange it.”
Lizzie took her computer to the dining room table and opened it again. “I’m glad you’re coming to Bologna; you can advise me on the paintings and let me know if there are any treasures that would really make the exhibit.”
“If there are, they are likely to be enormously valuable. Do you have a budget to cover the shipping and insurance on a really great work of art? That Ruysdael alone is probably worth a quarter of a million dollars.”
“I have been assured that I can take anything in the house, and that the costs will be covered. Both the Kellihers and the Gonzagas are loaded, and they seem to want this exhibit to make a splash, so I don’t think that will be a problem.” She mentioned that she had stopped into the chapel at St. Patrick’s earlier that day to look at the Guido Reni Madonna and the dell’Arca marble angel. “Really, they are so fabulous that they can represent the fine arts all on their own.”
“I imagine that some of the things you’ll want to borrow will need to be conserved,” Martin said. “You have a pretty tight schedule for that, and for the installation if you are going to open in September.”
“I know,” Lizzie answered. “Cosimo Gonzaga has engaged a conservator from the University Museum in Bologna, but you’re right, it is a short timetable. Once Father O’Toole decided to go forward with this, and the Kellihers agreed to fund it, he was determined to have it open on the actual hundredth anniversary of the founding of the College.”
Martin gave her a wry smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t have suggested it,” he said.
Lizzie returned the look. “I never expected him to take me up on it so quickly!”
When her husband had migrated into his studio, Lizzie called Rose and scheduled coffee with her father for the following Tuesday. Then she opened the calendar on her computer and made a list of people she would need to consult about objects and artworks that would be in the exhibit.
John Haworth was the resident Egyptologist at St. Pat’s, and she sent him an email asking if she could talk to him about the sarcophagus, and attached the photograph she had found in the collection file. Unfortunately, it didn’t show the whole case, only the part from the chest up as the sarcophagus stood against a wall.
She sent another email to George Tesman, her colleague in the history department, who was a historian of the medieval period. This was mostly just a courtesy. George was a detail man. He had been working for years on a book about the household crafts of Flemish people in the Brabant region and he didn’t like to comment on big-picture ideas, or on anything beyond the scope of his own research. Nonetheless, Lizzie thought he might have something to say on the reliquaries in the Gonzaga chapel, and she attached the picture.
Until she had a better list to work with, she would wait to get help with the scientific specimens. Years before, when she was still in graduate school, Lizzie had worked at the Boston Museum of Natural History, and she still had a few old friends there who would love a chance to comment on the rarities in the Gonzaga collection.
Having thought her way through the next steps of her work, Lizzie decided to indulge herself by spending a few hours looking at the letters Maggie Gonzaga had sent to her family in Boston. Roscoe had scanned them all and sent her the file, and Lizzie transferred them from her computer to her e-reader. She settled herself comfortably into the deep cushions of her favorite couch and turned her attention to the woman who had tantalized her in the brief time she had known about her.
The first letter was dated September 13, 1907, which was much earlier than Lizzie had expected. She knew that Maggie had been born on her father’s fiftieth birthday in 1892, after five brothers. She married at the age of twenty in 1912 and moved to Italy. This letter was postmarked Rougemont, Switzerland, and as she read it, Lizzie realized that Maggie had gone to school there when she was fifteen.
“I have missed you since you left,” the teenager wrote, “but I am finding that I love the mountains, they are incredibly grand and majestic.” She described classes in French, German and Italian, and daily sessions with “Madame,” where they drank tea and set tables using all the right spoons and forks.
Besides languages and etiquette, the school didn’t seem to have much of a curriculum, and Lizzie found hers
elf scanning quickly through three years of correspondence. There were gaps when Maggie came home for holidays and summers, descriptions of Atlantic crossings on ocean liners, and some letters addressed only to her father, when her mother joined her in Europe. They were mostly the sort of chatty letters that girls away from home would write in any century—about teachers, friends, and short trips made with her class. They were unusual only in that Maggie wrote very little about clothes, and never about needing money. Occasionally she wrote about visits to museums and the theater, and in those passages Lizzie could see a budding interest in the arts. Maggie loved Shakespeare and convinced her parents to let her spend an additional year in England in order to study the plays and see as many productions as she could.
“What are you reading?” Martin asked, as he passed through the room to refill his coffee cup.
“Letters sent by Maggie Kelliher Gonzaga to her parents from a finishing school in Switzerland.”
“Are they interesting?”
“They start to get more interesting toward the end when she leaves there and goes off to get a real education in England.”
“What was it they were hoping to ‘finish’ at those places anyway?” he asked.
“I think they wanted to put a polish on girls so that they could marry well and be good hostesses.”
“Did it work?”
“In Maggie’s case I’d say that most people would think she married very well.”
“How did she meet her prince?”
Lizzie said she didn’t know, but hoped she would find out as she read on. Martin offered to pour her a cup of coffee and when she had the hot mug in her hand she turned back to Maggie’s letters.
May 29, 1910
Dear Mama and Papa,
Pascale Bourdin, my friend from school, has joined me in London. Thank you for engaging the house for us, but please instruct the landlady that she is not to act like either our mother or our teacher. I don’t know what you possibly could have written to her to make her be so bossy with us, but she isn’t knowledgeable about plays or music, and so if you told her that she should act like a governess please write back and tell her to stop.
If you insist that I must have an older companion than Pascale, I suggest we engage Miss Philippa Reeves, who taught at my school for several years. She is an Englishwoman who returned home to tend to her mother, who recently died. Miss Reeves hasn’t decided if she will go back to Rougemont in the fall, but is in any case looking for employment through the summer. I will enclose her address and references with this letter.
Maggie clearly got her way, as the next several letters described visits to the theater and concerts with Pascale Bourdin and Miss Reeves. They took a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the Shakespeare sights, and then went to Scotland for several weeks when the weather got too hot in London. They met Scotsmen named Duncan and Macbeth, which thrilled all three women, but Maggie was very discreet in her descriptions of those adventures.
In the fall of 1910, Maggie Kelliher and her companions decided to travel to Switzerland to visit their old school, and when Miss Reeves decided that she liked traveling with her two charges better than teaching twenty often less-agreeable girls for a salary lower than what Paddy Kelliher was paying her, they decided to have a grand tour of Europe. They took the train from Zurich to Milan and then developed an itinerary that took them to all the places in northern Italy where Shakespeare had set a play: Verona, Padua, Mantua, and Venice.
Maggie wrote effusively about the food, pledging to learn how to cook while she was in Italy. She was also becoming increasingly interested in Roman art and architecture, especially after a close reading of “Julius Caesar” with her companions. Italian sites were constantly described in Shakespearean terms and she regretted that the Bard had not, like herself, ever visited the country. In Bologna, Maggie and Pascale took a course on Roman archaeology at the university, and traveled with the lecturer Lorenzo Gonzaga into the hills south of the city on several short trips.
Knowing that Maggie would marry Lorenzo Gonzaga, Lizzie paid special attention to her descriptions of her teacher, and wondered if her parents had seen in their daughter’s prose that she was falling in love with him. To Lizzie it seemed obvious. She went from calling him “Prof. Gonzaga,” to “Lorenzo” and then “Renzo.” He was brilliant and had an unfailing eye for discerning ancient sites lying beneath perfectly ordinary landscapes; he had read everything, even Shakespeare in English, and his manners were impeccable.
“I have become quite the Archaeologist,” she wrote on November 8, 1910. “I wish I had studied Latin more seriously. Some of the things we find go to the University Museum, but Prof. Gonzaga has a wonderful collection at his house of Roman and Etruscan carvings of various kinds.”
At Christmas, Maggie was invited to stay at the house on the Piazza Galvani and to meet Signora Gonzaga, Lorenzo’s mother. The letters no longer contained descriptions of activities with either Pascale or Miss Reeves, and Maggie was finally forced to admit, in answer to a direct question from her mother in a telegram, that they had each gone home more than a month earlier.
“I assure you that there is nothing the least bit inappropriate going on,” Maggie wrote on January 26, 1911. “Certainly Signora Gonzaga, a woman with a sterling reputation, can do the job of chaperone just as well as Philippa Reeves.”
When Martin passed through the room on his way to the kitchen, Lizzie quickly brought him up to date on the adventures of Maggie Kelliher. “The plot thickens!” she said gleefully. “Not unlike Elizabeth Bennet seeing Pemberley for the first time, Maggie is at the Gonzaga Palazzo in Bologna and falling for the young master!”
“She stayed with him before they were married?” Martin asked, surprised at the notion.
“Not quite,” Lizzie admitted. “His mother is there and she sounds like a devout Catholic, so I don’t think they are having sex or anything.”
“The plot thins,” Martin joked. “What happens next?”
“I read on to see,” Lizzie said, turning back to the letters.
February 19, 1911
Dear Mother and Father,
I am mortified that you sent Tom here to get me. Do you really think that I cannot be trusted to behave correctly? Do you think that I am not modest, chaste and moral? Nothing, nothing has gone on in this house that is the least bit unseemly and I am bitterly disappointed in you for thinking that I cannot, at the age of 18, make responsible decisions.
The Gonzagas are an ancient noble family, extremely well positioned in the community; Signora Gonzaga is a devout Catholic, Lorenzo is a hereditary prince...
The words came blistering off the page as the angry young woman defended herself. The next letter was from her brother Tom, who at twenty was two years older than his sister. He had taken a leave of absence from college to follow her to Italy.
February 20, 1911
Dear Mom and Dad,
Maggie is awfully mad at me for coming here and she greeted me with the angriest words she has ever thrust my way. She says I have embarrassed her with the Gonzaga family by treating her like a child, but frankly I think both the mother and the son respect you for sending me.
She went from barbs to tears late in the night, telling me that she loves Lorenzo Gonzaga but is confused because he has never declared his love back. Frankly, he is a nice guy, but he must be close to forty. He was married once, widowed and has no children. I think he would like a young and spirited wife, but he is clearly too old for Maggie, and I can’t believe she would really leave us all behind to live in Italy, but she insists she is in love with him. She also says she won’t come back with me.
I asked Signora Gonzaga what sort of invitation she had issued to Maggie and it doesn’t seem that it was ever the old lady’s intention that Maggie should move into their house. She came for dinner one night and never left. This is not to say that they d
on’t seem to love having her. We all know that Maggie can be a real charmer and she has gone all out to win these two over, so I can’t see either Signora Gonzaga or her son asking her to leave.
I’ll write more when I know more.
Your loving son,
Tom
There were no more letters in the collection from before the wedding of Maggie and Lorenzo, so Lizzie was left not knowing if her brother had dragged Maggie back to Boston and the Italian archaeologist had followed, or if she stayed on as the lingering guest in the house on Galvani Plaza until a beleaguered Lorenzo proposed marriage. The former was more likely than the latter, as it seemed improbable that Maggie had ceased communicating with her family; whoever saved the letters had been thorough about it.
Lizzie wished that she had the letters Maggie’s parents had written to her. “But that is the curse of the historian,” she said to herself as she closed the reader, “you don’t get to be the one to choose what’s saved.”
Chapter 8
Cosimo Gonzaga took several days to answer Lizzie’s email, and then he reported that he had never seen the 1677 image before, and that he didn’t live in the house on Galvani Plaza, but was pretty sure that there was no such organization of cases in any room there as was pictured. “My uncle Patrick Gonzaga lives in the house,” he said, “but he is rather infirm at age ninety-two. The collection has been his hobby for most of his life and though his memory of current events is shaky, I think you’ll find he has a lot of information for you.” He added that there was another image from 1677, probably by the same artist, that showed the chapel in the house, and he attached a scan of it. “My grandmother gave the original to my father around the time I was born,” he explained.