He does have a penchant for rings, after all.
She looks at Matteo and then at me, and bites her lip before hurrying off upstairs. She tells Orlando that she is too unwell to see Bryony or Guy until further notice.
Guy and I are sitting on the veranda, watching the fireflies chase one another in the twilight. I am thinking of Italy, of the scent of the fields of sunflowers and the stream of hot gushing water at Saturnia, and I suddenly remember something.
“Leandro had a sculpted marble panel in his hallway, of Achilles on his way to Troy,” I tell Guy. “He told us the myth behind it, that Achilles wounded the local king with his spear. The wound wouldn’t heal, so Achilles went to an oracle for advice. She told him he would reach Troy only if the king he’d tried to kill would consent to guide him.”
“Sleeping with the enemy, in a manner of speaking,” Guy says softly.
“Sort of,” I reply. “It turns out that the king had also consulted an oracle. He was told that he, the wounded, could cure what had wounded him.”
“You mean, only the wounded himself could cure the enemy who’d wounded him.”
“Exactly.”
“Why did you think of this story just now? Is it meant to be about me and my father? Do you think he somehow can heal me? Should I venture down into his lair to mumble a few pithy words?” Guy asks me sadly. “Wish him a bon voyage to hell?”
“I don’t know, Guy,” I say wearily. “I don’t know what to think or do anymore. I was just thinking of Saturnia, of taking the waters, and I remember Leandro telling us that at such places even the most bitter enemies would lay down their weapons in order to heal.”
“What did Belladonna say when he told her that?”
I think hard, remembering. “It was Matteo who said that he could never lay down his sword next his enemy’s, I believe, and Belladonna agreed with him. And that’s when Leandro said, ‘They will come to you if they don’t know who you are.’ It’s what gave her the idea for the Club Belladonna. I’m sure it is.”
“I think what you’re really trying to tell me in your very Tomasino way is that I must face my father, sooner or later.”
“He’s not going to be a happy camper when he sees the ring,” I say.
Guy looks at his ringless fingers and then at me, venturing a ghost of a smile. He pulls a chain out from beneath his shirt. On it dangles the thinnest gold band. “Does anything escape your notice?”
“I should hope not,” I reply smugly, trying to hide my hurt that he and Belladonna had excluded me from their wedding ceremony. Hubbard must have arranged everything at Belladonna’s request"the paperwork and blood tests and the justice of the peace slipped, unnoticed, into Tantalus House. “Too bad Bryony wasn’t there. Maybe there’ll be a proper ceremony someday, and she can be the flower girl.”
“I’m very sorry, you know. Terribly sorry, as a matter of fact, that you weren’t there,” Guy says. “But it couldn’t be helped. It was done with in a flash, I’m afraid.”
“She doesn’t want you to wear the ring in case anyone catches on"is that it? Anyone except him.”
“Quite,” he says. “I keep it on a chain around my neck.” He pauses. “If only Bryony could see it. She so desperately wants a papa.”
“Yes, I know. But were you surprised that Belladonna, well …”
“I wish you could have seen my face. But she didn’t actually come straight out and ask.”
No, she wouldn’t. Asking a man to marry you is not a very Belladonna thing to do.
“She knocked on my door, came in and sat all hunched up in the silk chair the way she used to, and didn’t say anything for the longest time. I was happy just to be able to look at her, you know. Then she cleared her throat and asked if I would do her a favor,” Guy goes on. “’Of course I would,’ I told her. ‘I’d do anything.’ I watched her grow paler and paler, as if she were having some private conversation with a demon only she could see. Then, suddenly, her cheeks flooded with color, and she asked me to get dressed, straightaway, and meet her in front of Tantalus House. She ran out of the room, and I threw on my clothes and ran after her. Hubbard and that odd chap named Winken met me at the door, and before I knew it, we were married. I was so astonished that I didn’t have time to think. I took her to be my lawfully wedded wife, or whatever it is you say in this bloody country, and Hubbard gave me a ring.” He sighs. “She closed her eyes, twisted off the ring she usually wears, then allowed me to slip the wedding band on before replacing her own ring. You’d never notice it unless you looked very carefully indeed.
“As we walked back to the house afterward, I gave her my word that I would never touch her as a husband touches a wife, unless she wanted me to,” Guy adds. “She didn’t say anything until we got to the staircase, and then she turned and looked at me, finally looked at me. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, and ran up the stairs.”
His voice cracks, and my heart melts. I pull out one of Leandro’s cherished handkerchiefs and blow my nose, sentimental softy that I am. Guy is not old and full of memories of a cherished love, as Leandro was. No woman has ever given Guy anything worth savoring, I realize, looking at the emotions flitting across his features. No woman ever threw her arms around him and loved him with the true kind of passion he deserves.
No woman is ever going to do that to me, either.
“He’ll know she hasn’t touched me,” Guy says. “Oh, he’ll know all right, the bastard. How long can he stand it down there?” He buries his head in his hands. “How can he stay so bloody calm?”
“He belongs to the darkness,” I reply. “It’s what spawned him.”
“But he’s what spawned me,” Guy cries.
“Then let him be what heals you.”
Guy takes a deep breath and stands up. “Bloody hell, I’m going down. It’s got to be done.” He pulls out the chain around his neck, unclasps it, slips on his wedding ring, and bids me good night.
I follow at a discreet distance as he slowly makes his way down the stairs, tights the lantern, and sits on Belladonna’s little stool, his hands clasped in front of him. His father wakes at the sound, catches a glint of gold in the pale light, and laughs with his horrible raspy voice.
“I thought I would be spared the pleasure of hearing you speak to me again,” His Lordship says. “Obviously, you are not a man of your word.”
“That, I learned from you.”
“Is she everything you’d hoped her to be?” he sneers. “You needn’t be pretending to me with a ring around your finger. In fact, you could have asked your elder brothers what she can do, how well she’s been trained to serve me. I lost count how many times they both had her.”
His brothers, and all the members of the Club.
“You’re lying, you filth,” Guy says.
“Why should I lie about such a thing?” His Lordship says sarcastically. “It was one of my proudest moments, to have provided such temptation to my own flesh and blood. Why, Frederick had, on one splendid occasion, the opportunity to perform with her before an eminently distinguished group of gentlemen.”
“At the auction three years after you kidnapped her and tricked her and bought her,” Guy says bitterly. “Frederick was one of the two top bidders, wasn’t he?”
His Lordship leans back and is silent, and Guy realizes suddenly that his father has no idea how much this son has been told about the members of the Club.
“I know everything,” Guy says, his voice at that moment sounding astonishingly like the one he most despises. “Terribly sorry to inform you that she kept a diary, and she gave it to me to read. She wrote it all down on tiny scraps of her watercolor paper you so thoughtfully provided, and Tomasino copied it. They never caught her doing it; you never found her after she escaped.”
His Lordship’s eyes glitter, and he stands up. “How touching” he practically spits out. “I don’t suppose she wrote down how much she enjoyed it.”
I won’t give in, Guy tells himself, his words are his only power. He
finds himself staring, appalled beyond all reckoning, into his father’s face, not knowing what to say or do. Then he suddenly blurts, “Why did you marry my mother?”
“Your mother? Because she was weak and passive and malleable. She worshipped me, at least until the first night of our honeymoon,” His Lordship replies, “and by then it was rather too late for a girl of such heretofore-virginal innocence to go crying home to mummy, bleeding and soiled.” He smiles and examines his nails. “But the truth, I must confess, was that she possessed an altogether-splendid fortune. How it must pain you to realize that your very own mother was in large part responsible for my having the wherewithal to have procured your very own wife.”
“My wife came to me, and asked me to marry her,” Guy says, lying only slightly, “which is not something you can boast about.”
“Do you think your wife would have dreamt of marrying you had I not trained her properly in the first place?” His Lordship taunts.
Guy quickly backs away from the cell, hurrying off into the darkness before his father can manage to say another word.
Matteo wants to go home, but he knows it’s not fair to leave me, not with everything so unsettled. Nor is it quite yet the time to give Belladonna our two wedding presents.
The first present is the result of a private counseling session with His Lordship, one he had to have known was coming, sooner or later. I’d judged correctly that Belladonna would not be able to face him quite so soon after the wedding ceremony, so we asked Orlando for help, to try to get it over with as quickly as possible. Orlando knows what to do that will be effective without leaving a visible trace that might make Belladonna suspicious.
But His Lordship won’t crack, no matter what we do to him. When Orlando turns to us wretched hours later, lines of weariness aging his face, and shrugs, I’m afraid we must concede defeat. His Lordship is lying on his side, moaning and mumbling. Matteo leans over his face, then straightens up and leaves the cell.
“What was he saying?” I whisper.
“It sounded like ‘carrots,’” he replies.
Carrots? What on earth could he mean?
We wind our way upstairs, shattered beyond all reckoning. I wearily climb the steps to my room, then collapse. “Carrots,” he said. Something about carrots. “Stop thinking about it, and it will come to you,” the Pritch told me. They will come to you if they don’t know who you are. Was there ever a Club Belladonna? I ask myself as I fall into a deep sleep. Will there ever be peace?
When I wake up, I know what His Lordship meant.
Carrots. The carrots in the garden in Belgium.
Your baby died and we buried him near the woods, on the other side of the carrot patch.” That’s what I could barely make out Hogarth murmuring to her, just before"
I call the Pritch’s office immediately, and they promise to alert the team in Belgium right away. Now, they have a specific place to continue their digging.
I think I am about to crack, like Hogarth’s head.
When one of the Pritch’s team, someone who calls himself Jay, calls three weeks later and soberly informs me that they’d found a tiny skeleton in a plot of garden near the woods, and a pathologist had confirmed that the remains were human, I thank him and hang up. I tell Matteo and Guy, and we try to think of what to say as we go up to Belladonna when Bryony is asleep and give her the news. She sits in her bed, dumbfounded.
“I don’t believe it,” she says eventually. “I want my baby back, and I’m keeping him here until he tells me where Tristan is.”
“How can you go on with this when the child you do have is suffering so?” Guy cries, and she turns to look at him with that horrid blank expression. “If ever you bothered to think of any person besides yourself, you’d notice how Bryony’s changed. She never sings anymore; she’s lost her exuberance, worrying about you. She thinks she’s done something wrong, something that made you ill, and you’re punishing her. It’s a terrible thing to do to a child.”
Belladonna wants to ask him what he knows about children, but bites her lip, suddenly remembering his sister, Gwennie. There is a fleeting look on her face, as if she’s about to crumple and give in to him, Guy, her husband, who loves her and her child so profoundly. For an instant, her features change, and I realize I am seeing her as she must once have been, when she was eighteen. Before they found her, and tricked her. Before everything. And then the mask reappears, and she is as brittle and hard as ever. I blink, wondering if I’d imagined it.
“Besides, he told you already,” I reply. “You’re the only one among us who doesn’t believe the evidence. The Pritch himself said to me that he wouldn’t be retiring if he thought there was a hope in hell of finding Tristan. And that if your son wasn’t found in Morocco, he wasn’t ever to be seen alive. I don’t think even His Lordship could"”
“Could what?” she interrupts. “Could put the corpse of another baby in a grave and steal my own just to torture me? How do you know? How will you know for certain?” Her voice doesn’t rise when she gets upset; it darkens and gets lower. So low, she is almost starting to sound like him. “Why did you have to kill Hogarth?” she says in a furious whisper, very nearly a hiss. “He was the only one who could have told us what they did with my baby. Why oh why did you do that to me?”
Oh ho, now she’s done it. I feel that tight band of pain constricting my heart heat up like a branding iron, boiling my blood and leaving a searing image on my brain. In fact, I am so appalled at being falsely accused and of what our lives have become that I lose control.
“How dare you say that to me now?” I hiss back. Matteo places his hand on my arm, but I shrug it off and stand up so that my soliloquy sounds more dramatic. “How dare you? Do you think you’ve somehow got a monopoly on suffering that exempts you from concern about anyone else in the world, especially those who care the most? Do you think Matteo and I don’t suffer every day of our lives because of what some man did to us? Do you think Guy doesn’t suffer every day with the knowledge of who his father is and what that man’s done to you, and that you used him by marrying him? Just who do you think you are?”
Who are you?
She is not used to confrontation my darling Belladonna. She is staring at me with the horrid blank look that usually fills me with dread, but I ignore her and keep right on going. I can hold it in no longer.
“You’re the one who killed Hogarth and conveniently blocked it out of your mind,” I tell her, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “You’re the one who suddenly decided to pick up the poker and whack him in the head. I was the one left behind to clean up the mess.”
Then I realize what I’ve said, and I sit down so hard the chair squeaks in protest. I hunch forward and bury my face in my hands. Oh, Tomasino, how could you be so wicked? I’d sworn I’d never tell her that, no matter what.
The crickets outside her bedroom window don’t care what we’re talking about. They chirp on. A warm wind blows in from the windows and caresses the nape of my neck like the fringes of a white silk scarf Hogarth liked to toss over his shoulder.
“Is that true?” she asks Matteo, her voice sounding as if it’s coming from deep underwater.
“Yes,” he says with a sigh. “I would have done the same thing, under the circumstances.”
She gets out of bed, turns off the radio, and goes to the dungeon, back down to where he is waiting for her, to torment herself with the knowledge mat she killed the man who could have told her the only thing keeping her from plunging over the abyss into the shadows where His Lordship dwells.
After that, things are not the same between us. She is scrupulously polite when we see each other, but it is as if we have become strangers. I can’t sense or anticipate her needs anymore, and I miss her terribly even though we are still living in the same house. Matteo speaks to her as I once had, but he is anxious to leave for a long visit to his family, and sits down with me by the pool the afternoon before his departure so we can figure out how he can give her the second wed
ding present we’ve concocted and then spooned carefully into a little white jar.
“You’ll give it to Guy, without fail?” I ask hopefully at the end of our conversation.
“Yes, and if it hasn’t started to work by the time I come back, I’m going to start making His Lordship’s meals myself,” Matteo says as he envelops me in a tight embrace. He is the only person I can bar to have hug me like that. He’s nearly as big as I am, after all. “And I hope you know that I’m going to do my best to convince Annabeth and the children to move down here, when this is all over.”
“Yes, it’s a remarkably healthy environment,” I say sarcastically. “Such a lovely, welcoming hostess. All that splendid fresh air down in the dungeon.”
“I don’t know why I put up with you,” Matteo says affectionately. “It will be the best thing for all of us, for Bryony to have more children to play with, and then you’ll have four other people to fuss over.”
He knows how bad I am feeling about Belladonna’s ignoring me, and I feel a sharp pang of jealousy. He was always the one who could manage her when she got in a state.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” I tell him, and he waves as he walks away toward the house, where he will find Guy and have a brief conversation. Guy will wait for her until she comes up after yet another fruitless hour with His Lordship. I am hiding in the bushes near the veranda, where he will sit her down. I need to hear what he’s about to say.
“What do you want?” she says rudely when she sees him.
“Matteo’s going home for a few weeks,” he says as he motions to her to sit beside him. She does, eyeing him warily. “He and Tomasino asked me to give you a wedding present.”
She turns her head away. “Don’t,” she whispers.
“I must.” Guy leans back to soak in the fragrant night air, willing her to stay calm, to stay beside him. “Has my" Has he asked you about your ring?” he asks eventually, and she slowly shakes her head no, unwilling to meet his eyes. “Or why I’m here? Or how we met? Or how you found him in Morocco?” Her head is still slowly shaking from side to side, as if she’s a marionette without strings. “Haven’t you wondered"as I have"that it is more than slightly peculiar for a man trapped in a dungeon to have absolutely no curiosity about what brought him from his swank hidey-hole in Morocco to this place, Lord only knows where, hunted down and trapped by the very woman he’d lived to conquer? Why doesn’t he care?”
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