“Both. Is your brother here, too?”
“No, I wish he were,” I reply. “He got married, and he lives with his family in New York.”
“How nice,” she murmurs.
“Yes, it is nice, but I miss him something awful.”
“It’s not the same without him,” Belladonna says. She’s come up from behind us, so silently that we both jump out of our skins at the sound of her voice. “Hello, Laura.”
She doesn’t extend her hand to be shaken; she still hates being touched. It is unusually hot and she is holding her glass, full of iced tea, against her wrist to cool down her pulse. An old southern ladies’ trick, or so I’ve been told. Southern belles aren’t supposed to sweat. Too dainty, or something ridiculous like that. How they manage to procreate and spawn the hideous specimens of the human variety we’re to meet in three days’ time at our party is beyond me.
“Hello, Contessa. Thank you for having me,” Laura says, her cheeks flooded with color. She’s terribly nervous, I realize, and I see no hint of her penchant for pouting. Belladonna, unsmiling and visibly stiff, hardly seems pleased to see her at all. “And thank you for inviting my friends. They’re arriving the day after tomorrow, I believe.”
“What are their names?” I ask, although I know them perfectly well. We must pretend that we don’t know anything at all about Laura"at least not anything she might have told us in the Club Belladonna. “I know you’ve told us, but I’m afraid my memory isn’t quite what it used to be.”
“There’s Hugh. Hugh Trevenen.” She blushes; we know what that means. “And Guy, Guy Lindell. He’s Hugh’s best friend.”
“We look forward to making their acquaintance,” I tell her.
“Thank you,” she says. “It means more to me than you know. We haven’t been in America together for nearly a year, you see.”
“Ah,” I say, “and where were you the last time you met?”
“New York.” She shakes her head slightly. “Guy took me to the Club Belladonna. It was a fantastic place in an appalling neighborhood, and the most extraordinary thing was that I met her, Belladonna herself. Afterward, when I thought about it, it was like a fanciful dream. She wore these amazing masks and costumes and gloves with rings over them. I was astonished when I received an invitation to her private office. It was almost as if she had been reading my mind, she seemed to know so much about me. When I told her my dream was to sing, she let me. In her club, can you imagine! Then she offered to send me someone in London who"” She stops, embarrassed.
“Ah yes, I’d heard that she helped women who needed her,” I say. “In unusual or unfortunate circumstances.”
Laura laughs sharply. “Yes, you might call my husband an unfortunate circumstance.”
“You needn’t speak of him,” I say quickly. I look at Belladonna, who nods imperceptibly. “But you will talk to us of Leandro? It would please us very much to hear about him.”
“Do you want to know how I met him?” Laura asks.
“We’ve been wanting to hear it for a long time.”
“Really?” Laura looks dumbfounded. Belladonna has hardly said a word to her.
“Really?” I say. “Take your time. We have nowhere to go and nothing to do but listen.”
I see Laura visibly unwinding; she wants to please her hostess, yet she doesn’t quite understand why. It’s not about their shared past It’s as if she has instantly fallen under a kind of spell. Belladonna hasn’t been welcoming; in fact, she’s bordering on hostility. To tell you the truth, she’s scary. It’s the set, blank look on her face, as if she were wearing a mask of frozen politeness that is in reality covering a terrifying void. You want to do anything in your power to make that face change, or disappear to a place where it can’t hurt you.
“It was because of my stepmother,” Laura says, folding her hands in her lap and staring down at the perfectly manicured ovals of her nails, willing herself to stay composed. My heart flops, and I prepare to succumb with a happy sigh, any lingering doubts I may have had about her selfish petulance evaporating like the light in the evening sky.
“My mother died of blood poisoning after a difficult pregnancy,” Laura goes on. “The baby died, too. Sophie, I called her, even though I wasn’t allowed to see her. I was only seven and a half, but old enough to remember.”
“It must have been hard for you when Beatrice died,” I venture, thinking back to Laura’s sarcastic comments about her friend at Merano, and wondering if she had forgotten what she’d said all those years ago.
“Excruciating, which made me bitter. Worse for Leandro, of course.” She turns to look at me. “I never forgot what I said to you in Merano, Tomasino, because I was ashamed of myself.” She takes a sip of wine, unaware that she is shredding a biscotti into crumbs. “Beatrice had fallen in love with a partisan who hid at Ca’ d’Oro between trips to Rome, and she’d gotten pregnant. Some of the locals said he was a spy, a collaborator, but I know that was malicious gossip spread to hurt Leandro and damage his reputation. They couldn’t bring him down, you see. Beatrice would never have allowed herself to be with a man who wasn’t honest, of that much I am certain.”
“So the lady Beatrice was actually a paragon of virtue after all,” I say.
“She was a woman, for what that’s worth,” Laura says, biting her tips.
“You miss her,” I say.
“Awfully. And it’s nearly ten years, which I find hard to believe. Afterward, Leandro didn’t like to talk of her. It was as if he closed his heart. Until he met you.” She ventures a glance at Belladonna, who is rocking quietly, staring out at the sunset. “I’d get so angry at him"at her, too, for dying when she was so young and strong"that I almost hated her.”
“And you lashed out,” I say.
“Yes. Everybody lashed out at Leandro. He was an easy target, powerful enough and rich enough to have the kind of enemies who’d have done the Borgias proud.”
“I wonder if he felt he was being punished,” I say.
“Punished for what, exactly?” Laura asks.
“Punished for being ruthless, and successful, and fantastically wealthy. Karmic retribution, you know, for exceeding your station in such a manner.”
“Daring to play God,” Belladonna says to herself.
“I never asked him anything like that. It wasn’t any of my business,” Laura says. “Once the war was over, I went straightaway for a visit, but I felt myself such a useless reminder of Beatrice, of what he’d lost. When I found myself pregnant with Rupert, I needed to be back home. Mostly we wrote each other, after my son and then my daughter, Cassandra, were born.”
“Where does your stepmother fit in?” I switch right back to the subject of the wicked witch. “When did your father remarry?”
“As soon as he could,” Laura says, her voice bitter. “Four months exactly after my mother died. He gave up; he couldn’t cope on his own. He knew nothing about children, and was grateful any woman would take him on with me and Spencer, my little brother. Instead of a new baby, he got a new wife. Except Viveca was as unlike my mother as any woman could be.”
“The claws came out, I take it.”
“Yes. She told my father either her or us, and so he chose her. We were shipped off to boarding school in Switzerland the day after the wedding. If we were really bad, according to Viveca, when we came home during the school hols, we’d be banished to the nursery, where everything had been set up for poor dead Sophie. And then we’d be left there with nothing to eat and no one to care for us.” Laura laughs ruefully. “Spencer and I would console each other that we’d grow older and escape somehow. The hardest thing for me to understand was how my father could abandon my mother’s memory so completely. I thought they had been happy together.”
We sit in silence for a while, Belladonna rocking and staring out into nothingness.
“When I was fifteen, Viveca tried to have me committed,” Laura blurts out, then puts her hand up over her mouth. “I don’t know why I’m tel
ling you this. No one knows but Leandro.”
See what I mean? Anything for an approving nod from Belladonna.
“What happened?” I ask gently.
Laura leans back and closes her eyes. The expression on her face looks surprisingly like Belladonna’s, only for an instant. “Viveca said I was incorrigible. If they’d signed the papers I imagine I would never have been let out of that place,” she says, her voice hard. “But I overheard them plotting. When I got back to school, Beatrice saw me in tears. I told her everything, and she went straight to Leandro. He called upon a friend, a judge in London, who had me adopted as a ward of the state until I could be emancipated. Then I went to Leandro’s, until the war started. So you can imagine what he meant to me.”
“A lot more than your own father.”
“Leandro must have dug up something, either about my father or Viveca, to make them capitulate. I could never figure out what, and he certainly would never tell me,” Laura goes on. “I believe the judge must have had some interests in shipping, or owed Leandro a favor, to have been so accommodating. Who knows what men like that got up to"I certainly don’t I can barely follow how and when they meet one another.”
“Who indeed,” I murmur. I look over at Belladonna, but I can’t read the expression on her face in the twilight.
“But I got my own back,” Laura says.
I’m not surprised. I’d always thought her a sly fox. “What did you do?” I ask.
“Beatrice did it, really. A classmate of ours was the daughter of a journalist, and Beatrice got to him, and he went to the clinic where they were going to have committed me, posing as the father of a troublesome child. He wrote an exposé about parents who dump their children"not naming names, of course, but causing immense embarrassment because everyone in our circle knew whom he was writing about.”
“Viveca must have really loved you then,” I tell her.
“Oh, the look on her face kept me going for years. Even more than the grateful look on my brother’s. It was then I realized that the meek and the feeble can avenge themselves.”
“If ever the powerless discover power,” Belladonna says carefully to the evening stars, “they often realize that vengeance is deeply satisfying.”
“Yes,” Laura says. “Deeply.”
The cunning little cow!
“Where is your brother now?” I ask.
“In Singapore. He’s got his own family, and he’s quite happy there, although we rarely see each other. It’s better for him to be far away.”
“And Viveca?”
“Still in Gloucestershire with my father, spending his money, hating me. The only thing that gives her pleasure is knowing how unhappy I am with Andrew.”
“Andrew is your husband, I take it,” I say. She nods. “Why, then, did you marry him, if I may ask?”
“You’d think I’d have learned, but I suppose I married someone who is like my father, really. Outwardly charming and loving, but underneath he’s a, well…” She sighs. “I was such a fool. I found out through the journalist that I had quite a sizable fortune in trust.”
“Sounds more like you married a Viveca type.”
She pats a nonexistent stray hair, that familiar gesture. “On our honeymoon, Andrew said he wanted to take me somewhere special. Silly me, I thought it might be a swanky private nightclub, but it turned out to be the best-known brothel in Paris. There in the drawing room were dozens of half-naked girls, sitting on the sofas, laughing and chatting and flirting with the men, serving them drinks. I’d never been so shocked in my life. ‘Monsieur Andrew,’ the girls greeted him, ‘where have you been?’ I can’t believe I was ever so naive.”
“I once heard of a client who was so beloved in his favorite brothel that when he died, all the girls carried on the day of his funeral with their private parts draped in black crepe,” I offer, trying to lighten the conversation. “Mourning as they knew best.”
“Tomasino,” Laura says, trying to smile, “you really are too much.”
The sky is now a deep azure, and we sit in not-unpleasant silence. People are never what they seem. The selfish, bitchy Laura of Merano seems no more tangible than a dream. And although it is not yet apparent to Laura, with the telling of her tale in the balmy twilight, relaxing on a veranda that reminds us of Tuscany, she quite unwittingly allies herself with Belladonna’s forays into the vengeful realm.
“Well,” Laura says eventually, as if reading my mind, “no one compares with Leandro.”
“No,” I say. “No one does.”
Two days later, Belladonna is walking her horse back to the stables after a long ride when she hears noises. Noises of a particular sort, ones she hasn’t heard in a very long time. That’s odd, she thinks; not yet panicking that some interloper is on her property. She hitches her horse to a rail outside the stables and peers inside. She doesn’t see anyone who should be there"not Frederick Firkin, the normally reliable stablemaster, or his son, Clive. They love the horses too much to let anything happen to them. Something must be going on. She quickly lifts one of the potted geraniums near the main entrance, pulls up the loose brick there, and hoists out a lovely little pearl-handled snub-nosed two-shot Derringer wrapped in a small pouch. She checks the gun and releases the safety. Like I said, you never can be too careful.
There are still noises in the stable. She creeps forward, pistol in one hand and riding crop in the other, not making a sound, to see what or who it can be. She peers carefully in each stall as she walks slowly toward the back wall, until she hears a man’s deep voice laughing softly, and a woman’s giggling in response. And then she sees them: the body of a man, his buttocks exposed, with bits of hay sweat-glued to them, his back bare and tanned and strong, a woman’s arms around him as he leans close to kiss her again. Her hands are stroking his back and her nails are very red, just like Andromeda’s.
The sight of those crimson nails infuriates Belladonna more than anything else. She tucks the crop into her belt and fires a shot into the roof of the stable. Its resounding explosion sounds louder than a cannon being fired on the battlefields of Manassas.
The couple start instantly. The man rolls over in a flash, and the woman beneath him quickly pulls her clothes up to cover her nakedness. The man hurriedly pulls up his trousers as his eyes slowly trail over Belladonna’s body, and he smiles broadly, despite the pistol pointed at his face. His eyes are dark blue, flashing with pleasure at the sight of this equestrienne standing above him in all her glory: her hair curling into ringlets after the exertions of her ride; the well-worn leather of her boots, splattered with mud and molded to her legs; her snugly fitting riding britches and pale blue polo shirt; the clove-colored kidskin gloves holding the gun firmly; the fury blazing in her green eyes.
“Just who the hell do you think you are?” Belladonna asks.
“I’m Guy, of course,” he says as he languidly buttons first his trousers and then his shirt He has an English accent and an altogether-insupportable air of sexual confidence.
“Yes, of course. Silly of me to ask,” she says between clenched teeth. “A Guy. How clever. Whatever could I have been thinking?”
“Guy Lindell, at your service, madam,” he goes on, unabashed. “I have the great honor to have been invited to La Casa della Fenice by my dearest friend, Laura Garnett, along with my other dear friend, Hugh Trevenen, whom I believe is expected at some point this weekend.” He turns to his lover, her cheeks still flushed with passion. Or embarrassment. “And this is my other friend, Miss Nancy Conrad.”
“Miss Nancy Conrad. Your other friend,” Belladonna says. “I’m touched. Who, pray tell, invited you, Miss Nancy Conrad, onto this estate? Certainly not its mistress.”
Nancy is much too flustered to answer. “I did,” Guy says, as Nancy looks at him in consternation and finishes dressing, “and this impromptu, ah, situation, is quite my fault. We dropped our bags at the house and were so entranced by the glorious surroundings that we took a walk. I alone am responsible for
having taken the shameless liberty of asking Miss Conrad to accompany me here.”
Belladonna frowns. “Surely Laura Garnett has stressed to you that there are several rules that all guests of this estate are expected to obey.”
“Ah yes, she did.” Guy pulls on his boots with a grunt. “But are you the lord high executioner of King Henry, Virginia?” he asks sarcastically, pointing to the pistol. “Or perhaps a mere slave to the household rules? Let me guess, you’re the governess, or the riding instructor. No, wait, I’ve got it"you’re an early-arriving guest, off on her daily ride when she is unpleasantly surprised by the sounds of pleasure in the stable. How shocking!” He stands up, brushing a stray piece of hay from his trousers, and buckles his belt. “Do forgive me, but I suppose we must be going.”
“Not so fast,” Orlando says as he runs in, his own pistol in band. I am right on his heels, Stan and the barking bloodhounds beside me. Nancy stifles a scream, and Stan hushes the dogs.
Orlando looks at Belladonna, and she signals nearly imperceptibly that she’s all right. She hadn’t pushed the panic button, after all, but Stan heard the shot and summoned us.
“Certo?” he asks, and she nods.
“Oh dear,” says Guy, immediately figuring out what he’s done. He’s a clever one, this Guy. I remember him well from the Club Belladonna, sitting on the banquette with Laura. Yes, Guy, who’d come for the first time to the Ball of the Elements, with Peregrine somebody and Celeste something, those fashion people. They’d been talking about a socio-pathic squire. Schultzie, his name was, he of the lascivious lederhosen. Botheration. I’d meant to find out more about Guy then, but I’d been distracted, the first time by Annabeth and the second time by Laura herself. And the Pritch had been instructed to follow up on Laura’s husband, not her friends. Double botheration. I must be slipping.
“I’m afraid I’ve offended my dear hostess,” he goes on, bowing with a flourish. “I do most humbly beg your forgiveness.”
“Beg all you want,” Belladonna snaps, “you won’t get it. Even if you are a friend of Laura’s and invited here with my permission.” She hands her-pistol to Orlando and pulls the riding crop from her belt. Nancy hides behind Guy, trembling.
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