I saw a blur and heard a sickening, dull thwack. Hogarth made a mewing sound, then fell on his side. I heard another thwack, and another and another.
There was so much blood, seeping out of the cracks in his head. He was going to be very upset at the bloodstains on his collar and his handkerchief, I told myself, and then realized with a wild thrill that Hogarth was dead.
She dropped the poker and closed her eyes and wavered, and I caught her as she swooned into a dead faint. I carried her over to the bed just as Matteo ran in with Moritz’s shotgun in his hands. He stopped short at the sight of Hogarth sprawled so unceremoniously on the carpet. Bryony was still fast asleep.
I didn’t tell him that she did it. I told him that I did.
“Check his pockets, quick,” I said. We were in luck. Another passport, a driver’s license, a thick wad of money, and the keys to his car. This was too good to be true.
Except he was dead. They were all dead. And there was no one to tell us the truth about Tristan.
The beginning of our journey was fraught with nervousness.
We quickly packed some of Belladonna’s clothes and the emerald necklace and Bryony’s baby things and bottles of formula into small bags and suitcases, grabbed the suitcases Matteo and I had packed already, dug up the sandwiches we’d placed outside, and loaded everything into Hogarth’s car. We gently carried Belladonna, who was still unconscious, and covered her with blankets on the backseat. I held Bryony in the front, and Matteo got behind the wheel. He drove like he’d been in a car just yesterday, speeding out the gate I quickly unlocked without a backward glance and into the village and down the road, till we found a larger village with a train station. Namur, it was called. There we stayed in a little hotel while I performed my magic on the passports. Belladonna woke up, and we told her we were going for a little trip, but she was still so deeply in shock that I didn’t think she understood a word we said. She fell back into a deep sleep, and we debated which way might be safer, whether they checked your papers more closely in the train or at the border. We decided to risk the drive to France, because it wasn’t that far. We didn’t dare breathe until we were waved through customs by a bored guard. Besides, we still had the thick wad of Hogarth’s money, and I could still smell a man in need of a bribe.
It was a scent you never forgot.
We drove on to the city of Nancy and booked ourselves into an innocuous hotel. We needed better passports, so I flexed my rusty muscles and pretended I was back picking pockets in Bensonhurst. It was easy once you got into the swing of it, like shifting gears in Hogarth’s car. I followed unsuspecting tourists who looked vaguely like the three of us, and then helped myself.
I went off on my strolls while Matteo stayed with Belladonna and Bryony in the hotel, and I amazed myself with how quickly I readjusted to life on the outside. Despite everything, I was starting to have a good time, buying pastries and magazines and marveling at the clothes and the cars and the radio sets and the smell of cigarettes and yellow beer in the tabac on the corner. It was so much more pleasant to focus on innocent tourists than what we had left behind.
After two days we were ready to go, with all our papers in sparkling order. We decided to leave the car, and booked first-class passage on the train to Basel. It was much closer than Geneva. If His Lordship had arrived in Belgium"and we were living in terror that he had"he’d probably figure we’d be heading for Switzerland as quickly as possible.
Our train trip to Bern was mercifully painless. We checked in to a nice pension, recommended by our taxi driver. In the morning, we called the Swiss Consolidated Bank, Limited, and inquired about the status of account number 116-614. We were told the account holder must present him or herself in person, and we explained this to Belladonna, who didn’t acknowledge us. This was the first time she’d been out in the world for nearly twelve years, but she did nothing but lie in bed in a daze.
I couldn’t say I blamed her.
We couldn’t afford to wait till she was better, so we sat her up and dressed her carefully, and we bundled Bryony up for the chill March air, and we took a taxi to the bank. Matteo stayed with Bryony in the vast outer lobby, and Belladonna and I were ushered into an office paneled in mahogany and presided over with somber solicitude by one gray-haired Monsieur Etienne de Saint-Soissons. We stated the account number and told him the first deposit had been placed in May of 1935. Monsieur Etienne nodded and disappeared to confer with someone else. Then he came back, sat down behind his desk, and slid a piece of paper over to us.
The account was now worth nearly 3 million pounds sterling"at least $12 million. A staggering sum in 1947. More than enough to buy our freedom, and then some.
Monsieur Etienne coughed discreetly and I braced myself for the punch line. Surely he must need some form of identification, and we had only bogus passports. Certainly nothing that said Isabella Ariel Nickerson.
Isabella Ariel Nickerson had been given up for dead a long time ago.
“You need identification,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. He nodded.
Belladonna, who appeared not to have heard a word he said, suddenly stretched out her left arm to the startled banker. Then she peeled off her glove and showed him the ring on her finger. The ring she could not remove. But if you looked at it very closely, you could see the slightest hint of something darker underneath. A tattoo.
Monsieur Etienne looked carefully at the ring and her finger, and then smiled.
“How may I be of service?” he said brightly.
The sky is a pale light blue and we have drunk all the bourbon in the bottle.
“I knew it wasn’t you,” Matteo says. “Hogarth, I mean.”
“Thank you, fratello mio” I reply, but his words are scant consolation.
“Why did you go to Merano?” Guy asks. I thought he’d sound more shaky, but nothing we can say to him is going to lessen his love for Belladonna.
“We didn’t want to go too far, because she wasn’t up to another long journey,” I say.
“We spoke Italian,” Matteo adds.
“I overheard some tourists talking in a café, debating whether to go to the spa in Montecatini or Baden-Baden,” I go on. “It made perfect sense to take the waters. We’d go to some out-of-the-way spa in Italy where no one would think to look for us. I asked the night clerk at our pension about it, because I’d heard him speaking Italian with a northern accent I remembered from the war. He told me about several places, and that his cousin’s wife’s brother used to work at one in Merano. It wasn’t too terribly far away; it was small and quiet and had lost its luster after the war. But he said the water was still good for the kidneys.”
And whatever else ailed us.
“That’s when you met Leandro,” Guy says.
“Yes,” Matteo says. “And he took us in.”
“Whatever happened to the emerald necklace?” Guy asks.
“Ah,” I reply, “that necklace.” I look at Matteo. “I asked her about it just before we were to leave Bern for Merano. She asked to look at it, so I got it out from the sock I’d hidden it in, and she held it in her hands for a few minutes.”
“The color of her skin was practically the same color as the emeralds,” Matteo says softly. “Then she told us to get rid of it. She didn’t want to think of it or see it ever again.”
“I took it and went out,” I continue, “with those beautiful bright stones sparkling in my fist. I wanted to throw them down the sewer, but I couldn’t. I told myself something good should come of them, to undo the evil that had brought them to her. So I wandered around for a while, and found myself in a tiny little church. I don’t know when the last time was I visited a church.”
“Probably when they kicked you out for drinking the sacramental wine and trying to steal anything that glittered,” Matteo says.
“Probably,” I agree. “But as I sat there in this crumbling church I figured out what to do. I went to a hardware store and bought some very fine needle-nose pliers, an
d then I went to a stationery store and bought some envelopes. I sat on a bench in a park, tucked under the shadow of a large tree, and dismantled the necklace. Then I put the pieces of the necklace in the envelopes and dropped them in collection boxes in every church I could find. I couldn’t risk the whole necklace being found and being gossiped about.”
“Tomasino, you are too much,” Guy says.
“There’s one thing I did terribly wrong,” I say. “I burned Hogarth’s passport. I didn’t think to write down any of the particulars, like his address, because we were in such a hurry to get to Switzerland. It could have been useful in the search, to help the Pritch.”
“It probably was a fake name and a fake address, you know,” Matteo consoles me. “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
No, of course it doesn’t, because we found them, all of them. The members of the Club.
“But what I’d like to know,” I say, “is why His Lordship never showed up those last crucial months.” What had His Lordship been doing when Belladonna was pregnant? Where had he been?
Guy and Matteo look at me, and I yawn to cover my stupidity. Botheration. I forgot for half a second.
I can go down to the dungeon and ask him myself.
21
The Root of
All Evil
“Matteo!” Bryony shouts happily when she sees my brother that afternoon. Luckily, she doesn’t seem too perturbed when he tells her that her mother isn’t feeling very well and that he came to check on her.
“Mommy’s usually in her room anyway,” Bryony says, then turns away quickly and runs off to find Susannah.
Matteo looks at me, and I shake my head. I wonder how she’ll handle what we’re about to tell her once Guy leaves the room he’s hiding in at Tantalus House and moves back into the yellow bedroom. She’s too perceptive not to know then that something is really very wrong, but perhaps her joy with the presence of her adored uncle Guy will ease the impossibility of our situation.
And so when Bryony comes home from school two days later, Matteo and I are waiting for her as she flings down her books. “Darling girl, we need to talk to you,” Matteo says. “We have some good news and some bad news.”
“Is Mommy dead?” Bryony asks, her voice quavering, and I feel my heart near to bursting with the thought of who is sleeping down below, under her very feet.
“No, my angel, she’s not. But Dr. Greenaway said she’s got a virus called mono, and she’s gong to have to stay in bed for a very long time. That’s the bad news. Are you going to be brave and help her get all better?”
Bryony nods, but her divine little face is so flooded with distress mat I instantly smile brightly and say, “But don’t you want to hear the good news? Do you remember what happened the time that Mommy told you she had some good news and some bad news?”
“No,” she says, her lips quivering. “I don’t remember.”
“Well, then,” I say. “Go to the veranda, and you will.” Bryony walks slowly outside. “Uncle Guy!” she screams, flinging herself into his waiting arms and bursting into tears.
“What’s this?” he asks her softly, kissing her hair and holding her tightly as she sobs into his shoulder. “Don’t cry, my scrumptious little poppet, don’t cry. Mommy’s going to be okay. I promise. After all, you and your mommy got me all better, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Bryony says, her tears dissolving into hiccups. “Are you going to stay forever?”
“For as long as I possibly can. So don’t let’s think about it, because I only just arrived, and I missed you terribly, terribly much.”
“How much?” she asks, delighted.
“As much as all the wags of Basilico’s tail,” he says.
“I’ll go find him,” she says, slipping away from his embrace and running off.
“Thank you, Guy,” I say, sighing. “We’ve all become such splendid liars, haven’t we?”
“What is a he when the truth is unbearable?” he asks. I am spared from having to answer as Bryony comes flying back out to us, Basilico squirming in her arms, the lumbering mastiffs drooling behind them. She and Guy romp around with the dogs, and I wonder for an instant if His Lordship can hear them, even though I know full well that the walls are too thick for him to hear anything but the soft thud of approaching footsteps.
“Come along, Miss Scrumptious,” Guy says after a while, looking at his watch, “I do believe it’s time for us to pay a call upon your dearest mama.”
He is not faking the enthusiasm in his voice, despite how she treated him just after he’d said those three little words, three days before. He has spent almost no time with Belladonna since she asked us to give him the diary, and that was months ago.
“Look, Mommy,” Bryony says, running up the stairs and into her mother’s bedroom, where the radio is playing softly. “Uncle Guy’s here, and we’re going to get you all better.”
Belladonna forces herself to smile. She looks positively awful, I must say, her skin as colorless as the parchment shades of her lamps, and her manner drawn and listless. Only her eyes are madly, deeply alive, sparkling vividly green with a near-delirious distress. If I hadn’t known she’d invented this illness, I’d swear she was truly stricken with mono and ordered by Dr. Greenaway to stay in bed and not get up a minute before he told her to.
“I’m sorry, my darling,” she says, “but you needn’t worry. But I’m just very tired, and I want you to know that if you ever come up and the door is locked, all it means is that I’m sleeping. I’m going to be fine.”
“I know,” Bryony says smugly. “Uncle Guy and I are going to take good care of you. Are we going to get Nurse Sam, too?”
Belladonna shakes her head. “No, sweetie, I don’t think so. I don’t need Nurse Sam when I’ve got you.”
“And Uncle Guy,” Bryony prompts.
“And Uncle Guy,” Belladonna echoes, only to please her daughter. She still can’t meet his gaze, although he hasn’t taken his eyes off her for a second.
Bryony leans over the bed and kisses her mother on the cheek. “There,” she says, “this will help you get all better.”
“Thank you, my angel,” Belladonna says wanly. She is fighting to keep her composure, and wants nothing more than to be left alone, but she can’t very well say that to her daughter’s face. She’s lying enough as it is.
“Now it’s Uncle Guy’s turn. You have to kiss her and make her all better,” Bryony tells him in a singsongy voice. “Kiss her kiss her kiss her better better better.”
Belladonna’s eyes meet Guy’s at last, and they stare at each other, not knowing what to say. Please, Guy wants to say to her, please don’t turn me away any longer. Please, I can’t bear it, knowing who he is and what he’s done to you. Please let me in. I hate him as much as you do, and he’s my"
He leans over and brushes his lips briefly against her forehead, a gesture of ineffable tenderness.
“Please,” he whispers to her, “please.”
“Guy,” is all she can say, mouthing the word without speaking it.
He lifts up her hand and kisses her palm, then smiles at Bryony when Belladonna doesn’t pull it away. “Let’s go play with the dogs some more,” he says, summoning all his strength to keep his voice light and playful. “Tallyho, tallyho, biff whack whack!”
“Chickens and fishes and the olde Union Jack!” Bryony sings as she skips out of the room.
“Tell me a story,” he says, looking pointedly at Belladonna, “or I won’t come back.”
We fall into a bizarre routine, as we have settled into so many others. Without fail, Guy, who has settled into the yellow bedroom, takes Bryony to school, and Belladonna gets up and goes down to the dungeon.
“Where’s my baby?” she asks His Lordship in a dull monotone, sitting there in the dim light, the lantern at her feet. That’s all she says to him. She doesn’t ask him why, or anything about her captivity or the members of the Club. Day after day, she goes down the stairs to sit for hours on a
little stool opposite his cell and ask about her child.
Guy knows she’s down there, and in his frustration he often gallops around the plantation on Hermes, but he always meets Bryony when the school bus drops her off at the gate and Thibaud lets her in and gives her a praline, a touch of N’Orleans, he says. She and Guy go up to see Belladonna, back in bed, listening to the radio and rarely speaking. If it’s a fairly good day, Bryony is permitted to do her homework in her mother’s room. Then she goes out to play with Susannah or at another friend’s house, or for an expedition with Guy. Belladonna stays in her room with only the voices on her radio for company, and the rest of us eat dinner on the veranda when it’s not too cold, and we talk about everything and nothing, as if there weren’t a man chained up behind the wine cellar, down below in the darkness.
We try to pretend that life is going on as usual. When she can bear it, Belladonna allows Bryony and Guy to read her a bedtime story, because it gives her daughter so much pleasure. Or sometimes Belladonna watches them play cards. Guy is teaching Bryony how to play gin rummy and poker, and she is showing a remarkable talent for bluffing her way out of a useless hand.
Sometimes, after Bryony has gone to bed, Belladonna gets up and goes down to the cellar once more.
Where’s my baby?
It is her version of what he used to say to her.
Who are you? Why are you here?
Guy has so far refused to go down to his father. I can’t say I blame him. Both he and Belladonna are locked in their own personal dungeons, battling the same monster.
Today I sneak down, tiptoeing as carefully as I can, and stand behind the door to the dungeon to listen.
“Your baby would be ten years old,” His Lordship is saying to her. He’ll say anything to torture her. He wants to hear the sound of her voice. “No longer a baby.”
“Where is he?”
“Have you thought about our little meetings here?” he asks. He sounds perfectly calm, as if he were the master and she still his slave. “That you, by taking pleasure in my captivity, are no longer any different from me?”
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