Belladonna

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Belladonna Page 27

by Moline, Karen


  We’ve left the reality of all that behind, at least for now. The expanse of our vast properties is consuming us"trying to sort out how best to have it run smoothly, that is. We can take nothing for granted.

  The big plantation house was already structurally sound and we had started renovations months before, remember. We assembled as much of our New York architectural team as possible, set up camp, and had crews working around the clock; we wanted them finished and gone. Who knew when we might need to move in, if indeed we ever did?

  Luckily for us, Sir Patty showed up when he did.

  Unluckily for him.

  The Pritch knew what those names meant as soon as he heard them. They were the members of the Hellfire Club. It had really existed, he explained, a small ensemble of degenerates in the mid-eighteenth century, and any schoolboy knew of their exploits and debauched revelries, led by one Sir Francis Dashwood. That would be the code name of their leader, we assume.

  The Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe, the members of the Hellfire Club fancied themselves, and they met in caves under the ruins of Medmenham Abbey, not all that far from London. It didn’t surprise Pritch that the members of this Club would take their names from the original Hellfire members, protecting their anonymity; their own perverse little joke, I suppose. Nowadays, some people claim the original Hellfires weren’t so bad, but Pritch, who always assumes the worst about human behavior, never believed it. Why, even Churchill himself had written a little ditty about them:

  Whilst Womanhood, in the habit of a Nun,

  At Med’ nam lies, by backward Monks undone.

  They’d had a motto, too, Pritch added: Fay ce que voudras" “Do as you wish.”

  It figures. But how are we to find out the real names behind the code names? Simple, Pritch told us. He’d start his discreet investigations in London, now that he had Sir Patty’s name. Round up the usual suspects who’ve been known to associate with the Cresswell family. Monitor Sir Patty’s phone calls. Of course, he personally wouldn’t be doing a whole lot of talking since his stroke. No matter" he’d be sure to have lots of visitors, and the ever-so-competent nurses whom Pritch had sent over from the posh agency would be supervising all visits when they weren’t rummaging through the mail and sucking up to the family. “They’re already absolutely indispensable,” the Pritch told us, gloating.

  “He’s sure to pop off any day now,” the Pritch added, sounding positively cheery during our last phone call. “Just you wait till the funeral. That’s when we’ll move in for the final push.” He cackled. “Someone important is bound either to go to the service or to pay a condolence call. Just you wait.”

  And so we wait. In the meantime, I survey with justifiable pride our newest acquisition, which sprawls out over the verdant rolling countryside of eastern Virginia. La Fenice is a working farm"even if it has been sorely neglected for the last decade"with hundreds of cows, horses, oxen, bulls, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese, and endless fields of hay, oats, and alfalfa. We quickly fix up the old overseer’s house about a quarter-mile down the hill from the big house; it’s where our assorted collection of spies "we prefer to call them “security”"live. Two are waiters from the club; two others arrive, only slightly shopworn, after years in Washington, D.C. All are confirmed bachelors of a certain age and irreproachably trustworthy. So says Jack. So we hope. They have the savvy to laugh at the plaque Belladonna chose to hang over their front door, the one that reads TANTALUS HOUSE. They know that Tantalus was the son of Zeus, condemned by his arrogance and transgressions to stand in Hades, where water would recede when he attempted to quench his thirst and food disappear when he tried to fill his gnawing belly.

  Tantalized forevermore. No wonder Belladonna thought of that myth.

  I like this quartet a lot. They’re pleased with the work and the landscape unfolding around them. Their house is cleaned and their cooking provided by some of the wives of our gardeners. We give them the funds they’ve requested and leave them to their own devices. Orlando checks in to make sure everything is copacetic. Besides, it’s hard not to like men who have given themselves code names pinched from nursery rhymes: Winken, Blinken, and Nod, and Hubbard. “I’m the Old Mother,” Hubbard tells me, and I leave it at that.

  Their first job is to oversee the building of a series of gates, in addition to reinforcing the huge wrought-iron gate at the main entrance and the dilapidated house guarding it. After the renovations are finished, another one of Jack’s semiretired spies, a man with the delectable name of Thibaud Winfrey, moves into it with his wife, Anita. The Winfreys are quiet and unassuming and keep their eyes on everything, eager to have useful work to do, logging in all our callers. As soon as any car or truck arrives at the gate, identification is checked and a call made up to the house for verification. Just to be sure, there are cameras hidden in the eaves of the gatehouse to take photographs of every vehicle entering and exiting the driveway; cameras hidden in the lovely sculpted light fixtures lining that driveway to the house; cameras by the pool and the maze and the gardens.

  Old habits, you know. We don’t appreciate surprises.

  Thibaud loves to cook gumbo, and Anita is rarely seen without her knitting. They are as unlike the dreaded Markus and Matilda as"

  No no no, I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to think about the last time we lived in an immense, isolated house. Not Leandro’s house. The other one.

  Unlike the house in Belgium, though, it would be impossible to put fencing around our vast amount of acreage, so we’re thrilled when we meet Stan Penrose, the head groundskeeper. He has a kennel full of bloodhounds to keep him company when he and his guys tramp all over on their daily rounds, keeping the lawns in order, clearing the forests and underbrush, and checking on the indigenous plants and animals. Orlando is very pleased with this concept; it’s a built-in security patrol. When Orlando says that we want to expand the kennels and start breeding the bloodhounds, Stan’s face lights up with pleasure. Stan is the spitting image of Calvin Coolidge, a man of few words and simple tastes, but he knows the land, and we feel that we can trust him, too, without having to divulge our reasons for constant patrolling. In fact, I have a feeling he will be as good a friend to Orlando as Matteo had been, so that is one less worry for me.

  We also put a series of gates and hidden cameras on the service road that the tenants are accustomed to using. So sorry for the inconvenience, we explained, handing out keys. It’s for everyone’s protection. We don’t like trespassers, and there are too many people who are too curious about the Contessa. They’ve no choice but to agree. There are more than a dozen farm families who live in cottages about a mile away from our house, nearer the fields, as well as groundskeepers, shepherds, gardeners, horsemen who live near the stables, and our chauffeur, Templeton. Another Jack discovery, he’s moved above the garage and loves cars almost as much as the conversations he overhears in them.

  We can’t tell them that all this security is not so much to keep people out, but to keep several unlucky few in. Left to rot.

  But before we can deal with the property itself we must make our house livable. We have our team install tiny security buttons, hidden in all the rooms. Hit one, and it automatically triggers a ringer specifying the room; the ringers sound in Tantalus House, in Orlando’s room and my room, of course, in the kitchen and in the guardhouse. That way, someone who knows the code will quickly be able to summon help.

  A little bit of leftover paranoia goes a very long way.

  Belladonna and I decide to have lots of theme rooms, to play in and relax in. One is lined entirely with mirrors, so naturally we name it the Narcissus Room; another has piles of vibrantly colored velvet cushions and a votive-lined shrine, with statues of Buddha, Ganesh, Thor, and Apollo to appease all the gods, for meditation. There is a billiard room, and a miniature electric-train room with dozens of tracks set up for Bryony and her Sam doll to play with. There is a music room, lit by lamps whose shades are made of parchment discards f
rom one of Mozart’s early symphonies, with a grand piano and a harpsichord and an entire setup for a string quartet. Cork lines the walls of the green room, filled with blooms rotated from our hothouses: camellias and lilacs and orchids, a riotous display of ferns and fronds below them. The ballroom has walls and a ceiling of the thinnest hammered copper, which will reflect and slightly distort all the shapes and colors of the clothing dancers will wear in it, spinning them together like a crazy patchwork.

  Belladonna hates the ballroom. She takes one look at it, says it’s beautiful, and refuses to set foot in it.

  We buy, at auction, the entire fifteen-thousand-volume library that had once belonged to the estate of Madame de Pompadour"all bound in colored morocco leather, emblazoned with her crest, the pages gilded"to line the shelves of our own library. Then I disembowel the insides of books that were damaged by years of neglect, to hide cigarette boxes and little objects.

  One of my favorite tricks.

  In the grand salon, gigantic marble tables, groupings of overstaffed sofas, leather club chairs, and several chaise longues carved to resemble gondolas, upholstered in vibrant crimson silk the color of a Belladonna cocktail, are strewn about. The walls are decorated with Marisa’s lovely painted friezes of nymphs and goddesses. A huge Valadier candelabra presides over the salon, with female nudes gracing each stem, dancing with their arms raised as they support the curving gold-leaf candle holders. The formal dining room is equally glorious: The immense glass table, which can seat forty at an intimate dinner party, had been engraved by Lalique and is lit from below, so it seems to glow with inner light. Glass shelves at varying heights hold Minton porcelain, Wedgwood fish plates, Spode game plates, Staffordshire oyster plates, and Bryony’s clay carvings from school. Enormous arched windows overlook the rose and flower gardens, reflecting them in a pale green and silvery light. The smaller family dining room off the kitchen will soon become the choice destination for all the children on the estate: The floor is made from a thick slab of movable marble glass, covering a trout pool. This way, we can tell our guests to fish for their own dinner.

  Upstairs, there are eight guest bedrooms, each a different color. Bryony’s pale pink bedroom has a midnight blue ceiling painted with the constellations, just as she had in New York. Rosalinda’s bedroom connects to hers, and mine is down the hall, near Orlando’s. Belladonna’s bathroom is divine. Even larger than her bedroom, it seems, it has a luxurious chaise covered in zebra-printed velvet and a plush pile carpet to match, and two small sofas strewn with velvet pillows in different animal prints. The freestanding bathtub, on a dais in the corner, is almost deep enough and long enough to swim in, and the piles of towels stashed on shelves above it are of the softest Egyptian cotton. The door handles are made from molds of Bryony’s hands, and the walls are covered with some of Belladonna’s favorite photographs of the Italian countryside. Smaller, silver-framed family photos sit atop Belladonna’s dressing table. Bryony’s favorite coloring place will soon be sprawled on the floor under this pink marble table, as Belladonna reclines in the chaise and reads aloud one of Madame de Pompadour’s fifty-two books of fairy stories.

  Belladonna’s bedroom is equally wonderful, though, all white and silver, with shimmering silver curtains in front of white linen blinds embroidered in silver thread with several of Voltaire’s pithy maxims. Her vast bed is topped with a white fur spread and heaped with dozens of pillows, each a different shade of white and the palest cream. The light fixtures are made of mother-of-pearl and hollowed-out sea urchins’ shells. They glow, soft and delicate.

  Unlike Belladonna as she is right now, hard and unapproachable.

  The gardens, on the other hand, are expansive and welcoming. The rose garden is delicious, beds of different-colored blooms edged with nasturtiums and parsley to keep the aphids away. I love to sit for hours in the scented flower and herb garden: the freesias smell like plums and the iris smell like apricots; the honeysuckle and clematis crawl up over lattices; the lavender, rosemary, sweet woodruff, and lemon verbena compete crazily with one another. There are mint and myrtle plants, yellow jasmine and violets. Marjoram and oregano and basil spill over clay pots. And everyone is instructed to stay away from the oleander.

  Oh ho, the whiff of a killer!

  Belladonna sounds so sweet.

  Belladonna spends days reading Pompadour’s medieval gardening books so she can create one special garden plot. In it, all the flowers have a special significance: a fig tree for “I keep my secret”; lemon geranium for “unexpected meetings”; morning-bride for “I have lost all.” Rhododendron spells “Beware"I am dangerous.” A Judas tree for betrayal, dozens of peonies for anger. Laurel for treachery.

  We dub it the Hellfire Garden. The gardeners wonder to themselves, I know, when Belladonna gives them detailed instructions about precisely what she wants, but they are good at their jobs and they know enough to keep their mouths shut and do her bidding. Even they, though, are forbidden to touch one corner of the Hellfire Garden. That’s where she keeps the mandrake.

  Mandragora officinarum, the preferred talisman of spell-casters, wrapped in a shroud like a mummified corpse, is almost as much fun as the Atropa Belladonna. A nice long root can grow to be almost five feet long and look like a man. Well, nearly. It’s practically impossible to cultivate it in this climate, but Belladonna’s going to try, soaking the ground around it with honey water, as Caterina told her to. Caterina had explained everything when the two of them used to sit in the kitchen in Italy, chopping basil for pesto sauce. She said that the mandrake has magical powers, that on the surface it grows like a big rosette almost flat on the ground, with long leaves and short-stemmed bluish purple flowers and fruits that nestle in the heart of the rosette like tiny little tomatoes. But it’s what’s under the ground that counts, the twisted root itself.

  “Dig it up only at sunset,” Caterina said. “Do not tug violently on it or it will scream. Wrap it in a shroud and keep it in the dark.”

  I stay away from the Hellfire Garden. Everyone does. We prefer the other gardens or the lawn itself, with hammocks and comfortable chairs strategically placed at beautiful vista points, and where Rodin statues stand silent sentinel as Andromeda had in front of the Club Belladonna. A curving gravel path leads to the pool, its azure tiles like those at Ca’ d’Oro, with a pair of gigantic cherubs presiding at the deep end, water pouring from their upturned urns into the pool itself. The pool house has a small padded room for judo practice, changing rooms, a sauna, and a steam room scented with eucalyptus. Still farther down another path is a wide staircase of carved limestone, pots of giant hydrangea arranged every few steps. It is flanked by two narrower stone staircases with an endless trickle of water carving a fluid trail down into the fish ponds below, down to the grotto and its folly. Resembling a dollhouse for grown-ups, the folly is a cozy little cottage with a thatched roof; inside, a terra-cotta tiled floor is scattered with several small Moroccan prayer rugs. A huge fireplace and its celadon-veined marble mantel dominate one wall. Rocking chairs and a large daybed, strewn with one of Belladonna’s favorite piles of embroidered cushions in a jumble of brilliantly colored velvets and silks, fill the room It is where she goes to hide when she wants to lock the door and be left alone to plot. She is the only person here whose moods are not soothed by the water cascading in gentle streams just outside the windows.

  She cannot he soothed by the sound of water. Only by the sound of him, screaming in the blackness as we leave him to rot in the dungeon where he belongs.

  The original members of the Hellfire Club had their caves dug out of limestone by slave laborers, who then used the stone to pave the local roads, the Pritch told us. In the caves, their own private dungeon, the walls would perpetually ooze moisture, and footsteps crunching on curving gravel paths in the darkness, winding around in the cool dark air lit only by a few dim torches flickering eerily in unseen air currents, sounded loud and menacing.

  It’s the crunching sound that is the terror,
worse than the sudden chill like the fingers of a ghost. The crunching sound and the dull thud of the thick wooden door clanking shut, and the echo of footsteps dying away until there is nothing left but the ravenous darkness. Maybe in the cell there is a small covered pot with a lid, to piss in. Maybe there is a stale hunk of bread. Maybe not.

  Sleep tight, sweetheart. Who knows when we shall come to check on you again?

  It is then that the screaming always starts.

  No, the most important rooms in La Fenice are not gorgeously decorated and filled with marvelous things. They are unknown to all but a few, hidden behind a secret panel in what used to be the wine cellar. Actually, the wine cellar is still there, keeping our thousands of cataloged and dusty bottles in mint condition. Anyone who comes down for a bottle of d’Yquem to drink with dessert would not suspect that nascent terrors are lurking behind the claret.

  In the dungeons, we’ve carved out our own simple structure. There are no windows opening onto lush countryside; there are only small pitch-black rooms with rough brick walls and low ceilings, smelling of damp and desperation even before anyone is left inside them. There are thick wooden doors with metal bars across a tiny square opening. There are hooks in the walls so he won’t be able to escape.

  We don’t speak of the dungeons. It is enough to know they exist.

  I‘m sure you’ve realized that I’m leaving out a lot of the picky, aggravating details about our move. Suffice to say the trip down to Virginia, right after Christmas, was not pleasant: Belladonna taciturn and morose, as she had been for weeks; Bryony fretting in response to her mother’s state of mind, dressing and undressing Sam until I thought the poor doll would fall to pieces. Although Bryony’s not quite seven, she’s both precocious and prescient. In fact, she is often better at managing her mother’s moodiness than any of the rest of us, including Matteo. It worries me that this lovely little girl willingly tries to share the burden of her mother’s struggles. Children are often so generous by nature. Still, I watch Bryony carefully to see any signs of her father’s character emerging by default.

 

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