Just like they’d done to her.
Then he was strapped to a gurney, trussed like a stuffed grouse, and flown off into the night sky, landing nearly a day later on our runway.
He is carried carefully out and then taken into the house. Down the steps, down down, past the wine bottles of the cellar and into the cell of the dungeon.
Perhaps, when he wakes, shackled to the rough brick walls, the dank, sour smell of the dungeons might strike a reminiscent chord. Then he’ll know where he is.
Pritch removes the blindfold from His Lordship, motionless in his drugged sleep, and takes one last look. He comes back upstairs to the kitchen, where Belladonna, Matteo, who’d arrived late last night with Guy, and I wait. We asked Guy to sit outside Bryony’s bedroom and make sure she doesn’t awaken, and he grudgingly agreed. Bryony, who’d been missing him keenly, doesn’t know he’s here yet, and Belladonna won’t acknowledge his presence. Ever since she’d gotten the tapes the Pritch had sent a few weeks before, she’d rarely left her room.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again,” the Pritch says to Belladonna. She doesn’t seem to have aged a day, he tells himself in some wonder, wrapped as she is in that otherworldly aura. Only the faintest lines in her forehead and at the corners of her mouth show that she is harder and more brittle.
“Was my little boy there?” she asks. “Did you see a little boy in Morocco?”
He shakes his head no. “We’ve looked everywhere,” he says. “Been watching him for weeks, mind you. Never saw him with a youngster. Not once. I’m keeping people on it, though. Just in case.”
Belladonna sits down, shattered. “I know you’ve done your best, and I’ll never be able to repay you. For everything,” she says eventually.
We know it’s him, you see. We have no doubts that it’s His Lordship. Belladonna and I listened to the voices of the seven members of the Club on the tapes. I’d heard his voice infrequently, of course, but I’d never forget it. He wasn’t heard on the tapes"but we have him now.
“Can’t say it hasn’t been interesting,” Pritch replies. “Best job I ever had.”
“What do you mean, had?” I ask.
“Must be off,” he says calmly, looking at Belladonna.
“I’ve done all I can, and now it’s up to you. Only you know what to do.”
“I understand,” Belladonna says.
Botheration. Matteo and I exchange a concerned glance. I don’t want to understand; I don’t want to face His Lordship or Mr. Lincoln or whoever he is without the expert guidance of the Pritch. I don’t want to think about the little boy. Please, Pritch, please. Don’t go. You’ve been helping us for so long that"
“Guy will take my place,” Pritch adds. “You need to let him help you. You must promise me that you’ll let him help you. Now more than ever.” He adjusts his fedora carefully on his head, pats his belly, and says good-bye. He insists on flying back to London tonight. I can’t say I blame him.
I walk with Pritch to the plane, and he knows what I expect to hear.
“In my opinion,” he says, “the boy is dead, or not to be found. I’ll send a team to Belgium to explore the grounds, to be absolutely certain.” We couldn’t have risked it before, you see, in case our presence would somehow have sent a signal to alert His Lordship, and he would have known we were on to him. “It’s going to take a while, I fear, if we don’t know quite where to look, but once they know anything they’ll be in touch.”
“There’s something Hogarth said about it just before he died. Something I can’t recall exactly,” I say. “I’ve been trying and trying to remember, but I was standing in the doorway and Hogarth was talking to Belladonna, not to me. It’s no use asking her, because she’s blanked the entire thing out.”
“Stop thinking about it, and it will come to you,” Pritch advises.
“Do you really mink Tristan’s dead?”
“Yes, I do. Wouldn’t be retiring if I thought there was a hope in hell. If he had him or wanted him, the wee lad would’ve been in Morocco. My humble opinion, mind you.”
“The very best opinion there is,” I tell him. “I also want to inform you that a certain pub in Mayfair called the Witches’ Brew has a new owner. The papers are waiting for you in your office. Keep you in Guinness till the end of your days, I hope. It’s the least we can do. You certainly deserve a bottomless pint.”
How I love the lady bountiful act! Even now, when our hearts are so heavy. Pritch thanks me, his voice nearly choking; then he’s off. Who knows if our paths will ever cross again?
Belladonna is sitting in the kitchen when I come back, a mask on the table beside her. She’s wrapped herself in a cloak to ward off the chill below, and her face is as gray as the leather of the gloves she’s slipped on. She’s staring off into some place awful I don’t ever want to see. I sit beside her, and eventually Guy comes down with Matteo.
We’re waiting for His Lordship to wake up.
Eventually, she stands and ties on the mask. Matteo and I get up, too, but she waves her hand impatiently at us, then walks down the stairs.
She wants to see him alone. She wants to be there when he wakes and realizes where he is and who is staring back at him in the dim light of the dungeon.
She is sitting there hours later when he stirs and tries to move. He realizes he can’t, pulling on the chains, that he’s trapped. His eyes focus and adjust to the dim light and he pulls on the chains again, trying to get up. A bright light floods the cell, and he turns his head away. Then he looks back at the light, his eyes adjusting, and her masked face floats into view on the other side of the bars.
He smiles at the sight. No mask could hide her from him.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he says.
She says nothing, just puts the lantern down near her feet.
After an hour or so more, we can stand it no longer, and all three of us walk gingerly down the stairs, down to the smell of fear itself. There is no sound but the echo of our footsteps and our ragged breathing. How could she have endured it? Guy asks himself. How could she not have been driven mad?
She is sitting on a small stool outside the cell, hunched and drawn, as she had been with Sir Patty. She is staring at His Lordship, as he is staring at her, that queer smile on his lips.
“Belladonna,” I whisper, “let us see him.”
She doesn’t move or acknowledge our presence. I pick up the lantern so the light fills his cell. He squints, then recognizes me and Matteo. His smile deepens.
“Let me look at him,” Guy whispers to me. He steps closer to the cell and looks inside.
His Lordship turns his head slightly and sees Guy. Then he starts to laugh. It is a laugh so horrible I quickly put the lantern down and instinctively place my hands over my ears to block out the hideous sound of it. The biting, strange cackle, bouncing back at us off the walls.
He won’t stop laughing.
The light in the dungeon is so bad I can’t really see Guy, but I swear his face is as white as it had been the first time he saw Bryony, when he turned pale under his tan.
I realize my knee is throbbing with pain. Belladonna abruptly stands up and walks out, past the wine bottles and up the stairs. We follow her quickly.
“You know who he is,” Belladonna says to Guy once we’re back in the blessed familiarity of the kitchen. Her voice is flat and expressionless.
“Yes, I know who he is,” Guy replies. His voice is coming from a great distance, the same awful place she was staring at before.
“Tell me,” she commands.
Guy looks at her and tries to smile. Then he tells her.
“He’s my father.”
20
The Unmasking
Below
Three little words: He’s my father.
Three little words: Who are you?
“I thought your father was dead,” she says in a monotone once we’d gotten over the initial blow. We’re out on the veranda, where the night is alive with sounds and crea
kings and the natterings of animals on the prowl. I don’t want to be in the house, knowing he’s there below us. None of us do.
“I did, too,” Guy mutters.
“Why did you assume he was dead?” I ask.
“I think I wanted so much to believe he was that I talked myself into it when he disappeared in 1944,” Guy replies. “My brother John Francis thought at first he’d been a prisoner of war, because he’d gone to the Continent"I can’t remember the exact year"and simply didn’t come back. I couldn’t believe he’d give up his world a minute sooner than he needed to. I don’t know, though. I rather stay out of the way of John Francis.”
“I looked him up in Debrett’s. Your father, I mean,” I say by way of explaining my ineptitude on this topic. Am I losing my touch? Was there some clue we’d all missed? After all this time, the miles and miles and miles of spies, to be undone by Debrett’s?
After Hugh had mentioned the Earl of Ross and Cromarty, I remember going to the library, where I got down the fat red volume listing the lords and ladies of the realm and checked the entry. Four sons, it said, one deceased; one daughter, also deceased. That caught my eye, but the names were wrong. The eldest was Evelyn J., followed by Clarence and Cholmondeley. William Dale and Julia were the two youngest, the deceased offspring. I remember shutting the book, pitying any boy named Cholmondeley, and thinking no more of it. “The names were all different.”
“Yes, they would be,” Guy says. His voice is nearly as stripped as Belladonna’s, as if he were forcing himself to speak from an underwater cavern. “I’m sure my father insisted, just because he could. Only the first of the given names is listed, but we all had several names. That’s what families like mine do.”
“So John Francis is your elder brother’s middle name, or something like that,” I say.
Guy nods. “Evelyn John Francis, Clarence Frederick George, William Dale Arthur; those were my brothers’ given names. Julia Claire Gwendolyn, my sister.”
“You mean your name really is Cholmondeley?” I ask. If the situation weren’t so devastating, I’d be rolling down the hills with laughter. He certainly doesn’t look like a Chumley.
“Cholmondeley Horace Guy,” he replies. “I’ve always preferred Guy, for obvious reasons.”
“Where does Lindell come from?” I say.
“My great-grandmother on my mother’s side. I didn’t want a name that had anything to do with my father.”
“I see.”
We sit in silence for a while longer. I am trying to figure out the chronology in my head. His Lordship found us in Italy in 1943, and took us to Belgium. Belladonna was still trapped in the gloomy gray house where it rained"eastern Scotland, probably. We took our sweet time healing and renovating and dodging Moritz’s stray bullets from target practice, and she was brought to us in the middle of 1946. Bryony and Tristan were born on February 10, 1947. Nearly ten years has passed since then.
What had His Lordship been doing when Belladonna was pregnant? Where had he been? Why did he never show up? What took him to Morocco? Was he planning to take her there? I wonder. Lose her in the desert where she’d never be found?
Botheration. All this feverish anticipation dissipates like fish food sprinkled in the aquarium in the dining room, while he sleeps way down below it. We have caged the monster, but it brings us no consolation. If anything, I am feeling a distinct letdown. Matteo turns to me briefly and I know he’s thinking exactly the same thing.
Now that His Lordship’s been found, we don’t know what to do. Double botheration.
“I’m keeping him here,” Belladonna says suddenly. “For as long as he kept me.”
I am starting to get a very sick feeling. Not in my knee, but clenched around my heart. “What about Bryony?” I venture to say. “And everyone else? How can you keep a man like him locked in a dungeon in the house where you live for the next"”
“I’m going to tell her that I’m sick, with mono. First, we’ll tell her that Matteo has come, and then Guy will arrive, to help me get better,” she says, her voice flat. She doesn’t look at any of us as she speaks, and I realize she’s been plotting and planning this scenario for a very long time. “She’ll become used to my unavailability, but she won’t be unduly upset because Guy will keep her company. When school’s over she can go to camp for most of the summer. Guy will tell her he has to go back to London for business, but he’ll come back to see her on visitors’ day. Then she won’t mind so much.” She is talking of months from now, of Guy as if he weren’t there, staring at her blank features in dazed incredulity. “That’s the way it’s going to be. If any of you don’t like it, or anything else I say or do, feel free to leave anytime.”
She gets up and walks off without a backward glance. She hasn’t said a word to Guy, whose eyes follow her until she is swallowed up by mist. Surely she must realize what he’s"
Oh ho, she is hard. As hard and cruel and implacable as His Lordship. The living legacy of the members of the Club.
It is not quite dawn, but none of us is the least bit tired. I think back to Camp Minnetonka in verdant green Minnesota, When the Pritch first told us of June and her family. When we were sitting on Leandro’s terrace, another lifetime ago. I can’t bear it a second longer, so I hustle to the bar, pull a large bottle of bourbon and some glasses off the shelf, dump some ice in a bucket, then go back to the veranda and pick a few sprigs of mint from a pot near the window. I’m afraid that if I go to sleep, I’ll hear the sound of his chains rattling my dreams.
“May I ask you a question?” Matteo says to Guy, and he nods. “Where did your family money come from?”
“In other words, how could my father afford the extravagant expenditure of one million pounds in 1935?” Guy asks bitterly. “Sugar cane in Haiti, opal mines in Australia, oil wells in Malaysia. Bribery, extortion, blackmail, I expect.”
“Most men of his class didn’t work, though, did they?” I say.
“No, working was beneath them"the gentry, that is,” Guy replies. “My father was quite unusual that way. I don’t know what drove him. I’ll never understand what made him. I don’t want to believe that any of this is true. If I can bear to think about it, I shouldn’t wonder that I don’t go quite mad.” He takes a long swallow of his drink. “The only thing that keeps me sane is the knowledge that she survived it Otherwise…”
“Why did your mother marry him?” I asked bluntly.
“I’ve no idea. I’m sure it was arranged, but my mother was gone long before I could have asked her the particulars,” Guy says. “Her dowry provided much of the capital for my father’s enterprises, I fear. She was only seventeen, and he was eighteen when they married. This was in 1911. John Francis was born a year later, then Frederick, and I was born in 1914. She never was meant to be pregnant after that. So many babies that quickly did her in. He never should have"” He buries his head in his hands. “I wish I’d never been born. It’s been nothing but forty-two bloody useless years. And now this. I hope my father rots in hell.”
Well, His Lordship is certainly about to find out what it’s like to be left to rot.
“Perduto é tutto temp che in amor non si spende,” I say, trying not to think about that for the moment. “All time not spent in loving is lost.”
“Did Leandro teach you that?” Guy asks after a long pause, sighing deeply. “I wish I could have met him.”
“I wish more than anything that he were here right now,” I say fervently. “He’d know what to do.”
“What I want to know,” Guy says carefully, “is how you escaped from Belgium. You said you’d tell me, and I think this is the right time. You’re both here, and I need to know.”
I fill my glass and sip it slowly, conjuring the crumbling château in Belgium and the barbed wire hidden in the brambles tumbling down over the stone fencing. Here, in Virginia, we can breathe; there, it seemed we were encased in a forest so dense and silent it wanted to feed upon our very marrow. There we hid from the world and grieved for o
ur shattered manhood. There she first appeared: Doula, Hogarth said her name was. A special companion to Mr. Lincoln. Keep out of her way, we were warned. Keep the doors locked. Or else.
Guy leans back and stares down at his hands, waiting for me to start talking. His slim, elegant fingers seem meant to caress a woman’s flesh. His fingers so unlike his father’s hot, dry touch. Those hands delighted in pain. Those hands meant to hurt.
Guy hasn’t touched another woman since his romp in the hay.
There can be no other woman once you’ve fallen under the spell of Belladonna.
“We must escape. We must fly,” I told Matteo one day in late October 1946 as we desultorily raked leaves off the garden paths. “We must save her. Do you know what’s weird" I feel better just thinking about it. It’s like it’s given me something to focus on, a purpose. We are rotting away here; you know that. This is no way for the fearless Cennini twins to act,”
“Once fearless,” Matteo replied dully.
“We will conquer it,” I said, scraping my rake on the gravel with an unpleasant rasp. “We survived, didn’t we? We must be men again. We must think like men, like them. Be ruthless, like Mr. Lincoln and Hogarth and all the other ones. The members of the Club, she called them. Now we know what they’re like, so we can outsmart them. We’re smarter than they are. They think we’re dumb and broken" but we’re not. Are we?” I asked him hopefully.
Matteo looked doubtful, but from that moment on he seemed a bit more like his old self. We told her we were plotting, and her eyes widened in fear. “We’re gong to cross the borders, to Switzerland. I swear it,” I whispered to her. “That’s where the money is, in the Swiss Consolidated Bank Limited. After that, we’ll hide out with the babies. Someplace where he’ll never find us.”
She looked shaky because she wasn’t feeling very well, so we nagged at her to put her feet up and leave everything to us. I sounded much more confident than I felt. We needed clothes, transportation, passports, cash to pay for our journey to Switzerland. I assumed I could doctor the passports and identity papers once we pinched them from the three Ms at least; my genius as forgery and counterfeiting a legacy of the Resistance. But the rest of it was the problem"a bit tricky when we didn’t have timetables or a car or gasoline and we didn’t even know the name of the village closest to this château. And there was no one we could turn to for help.
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