Belladonna

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Belladonna Page 52

by Moline, Karen


  “Yes, my scrumptious little poppet,” he says, “she is,” and they sing nonsense songs all the way home. As soon as the car stops, Bryony jumps out and runs up the stairs to her mother. Belladonna is sitting on the chaise by her bed, reading, and she holds her arms out to her daughter and clasps her tightly.

  “Do you still have mono?” Bryony asks fearfully.

  “Just a tiny little bit,” Belladonna replies, but she is able to smile for real, and Bryony bites her lip, a gesture so familiar it brings tears to my eyes. “Uncle Guy helped me get better.”

  Yes, she is getting better, but it is hard to heal when there is a man in the dark, muttering and cursing and pulling at his chains until the skin on his arms is raw and bloody. I can’t go down there anymore; I am of no use to anyone. Each day, though, Matteo reports to me that His Lordship seems a tiny bit more lethargic. That is as we’d hoped, wanting him to sicken so gradually that nothing seems out of the ordinary. Considering where he is, of course.

  Belladonna and Guy have not gone to the dungeon at all, not since Guy first went to her in the Narcissus Room. He has moved back into the yellow bedroom, but either she goes to him at night or he steals into her bed, then leaves before Bryony awakens. It is too soon to tell Bryony anything, even though she will be delirious with joy when that moment finally comes.

  I think they are both afraid their happiness is too fragile to tempt.

  Matteo tells me one October afternoon that His Lordship is starting to look much worse. I tell Guy that His Lordship seems to be unwell, and am not surprised to see him steal slowly down the stairs, hand in hand with Belladonna, several nights later. I’ve never seen her touch a man like that, I realize. It seems so natural, so right, even in the fetid air of the dungeon.

  “Come to gloat?” His Lordship says sarcastically when he sees them. “You don’t fool me.”

  “I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” Guy retorts. Belladonna squeezes his hand and pulls away, moving closer to where His Lordship is staring at her. Then she smiles.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  His Lordship is so astonished at this question that he takes a step back but soon recovers his composure. “I am your lord and master, as you know quite well,” he says, moving closer to her again. “You belong to me.”

  Belladonna turns pale, but she doesn’t flinch. Guy comes beside her and kisses the nape of her neck She turns her head toward his and for the briefest of seconds caresses his cheek with her left palm. The gold of her rings glistens in the light of the lantern, and, had she turned her face toward His Lordship’s at that very instant, she would have shuddered at the savage expression on his features. But by the time she turns back to look at him, not a trace of emotion remains.

  “How sweet,” His Lordship sneers. “I should hate to interrupt such a tender spectacle, but I do believe the lady and I have a bit of unfinished business.”

  Guy feels Belladonna tense, and as she starts to mouth Where’s my baby? he kisses her so passionately that she can’t help responding to him. Quickly, though, she pulls away.

  “Let me go,” she whispers, and Guy moves aside, leaving his hand resting lightly on her shoulder.

  “I know where your baby is,” His Lordship says matter-of-factly. “I have what you want.”

  “That is all you have left, you liar,” she says fiercely, startling Guy. “You are nothing"nothing!” She turns and runs out as Guy calls out her name.

  “Did I train her well?” His Lordship says, his laugh a horrible cackle. “Is she as pliable as you’d hoped, ever so responsive to your no-doubt insatiable demands? Obviously you aren’t man enough to handle her.”

  “She’s right,” Guy replies, shaking with anger. “You are nothing.”

  “I expected rather more substance from a creature said to be my offspring,” His Lordship says, sitting down and folding his arms as if be were a pasha conducting the business of state, instead of a man absorbing a few more shavings of poison with every meal, locked away from the world in hidden blackness. “But, frankly, I must confess that I am slightly more than nothing to you.”

  “Why ever did you have children?” Guy cries. “Was that the only way you knew to kill my mother and steal the remainder of her fortune?”

  “You sniveling, useless fairy. Wouldn’t you like to know?” His Lordship hisses. “It shall give me infinite pleasure to answer that question, though. In fact, I think I shall tell you on the long-awaited day when I inform your beloved as to the whereabouts of her precious baby.”

  Guy backs out of the dungeon, his father’s laughter echoing in the darkness.

  His Lordship is having trouble breathing. He can barely speak; he can only croak for water.

  “Should we get a doctor?” Guy mutters when Matteo tells him. It’s not as if we can pick up the phone and ask Dr. Greenaway to make a dungeon call.

  “Hubbard can probably sort that out, if we have to,” I say dully, “but I don’t think we should.” It reminds me of something she said once, in the Club Belladonna.

  Finita la commedia.

  My brother and I look at each other. There is nothing more to say, although we thought a man of His Lordship’s stamina would surely last a little longer. It has been less than a year, after all. Nothing close to the twelve years she spent, trapped and tortured.

  No, we are not going to tell Belladonna or Guy what is poisoning his father, and who. Let them think that His Lordship is dying of natural causes, choking on his own thwarted, seething rage.

  Malice shining like a star.

  When Guy is upstairs talking to Belladonna, Matteo pulls me down to the dungeon so that we can quickly whisper a few appropriate words in His Lordship’s ear, as he had so often whispered in hers.

  “Who are you?” I ask softly.

  “You are a dead man,” Matteo explains.

  “Why are you here?” I go on.

  “To die a slow death by poison,” Matteo adds.

  “What shall you do?”

  “You shall suffer unspeakable torments before you die.”

  He looks at us and tries to laugh, but it is too late.

  We sit there, huddled in the corner, waiting for Guy and Belladonna. Eventually we hear them, and they slowly approach the cell, their hands clasped tightly yet again.

  “Get up,” Belladonna says to His Lordship, but then she sees the greenish tinge of his skin and drops Guy’s hand to move closer to where His Lordship is lying. His breathing is labored and he is too weak to sit up, but his eyes are glittering with unspeakable malevolence.

  Belladonna sits on her little stool, deeply shaken. “Where’s my baby?” she asks, trying, and failing, to keep the panic out of her voice.

  His Lordship’s lips stretch into a wicked smile.

  “You must get better"I forbid you to die!” she cries. “I. forbid you to die until you tell me where my baby is!”

  There is an awful stabbing pain in my knee, and I put my hand over my mouth so I won’t cry out. Matteo cups his hand around my elbow, but this sympathetic gesture is scant consolation. It is too late to undo what we’ve done.

  His Lordship can barely move, and we stay down there for what feels like hours. Finally, he tries to stretch his hand to her, his horrible hot, dry fingers. Belladonna gets off her stool and moves closer, kneeling, yet not close enough.

  Who are you? His lips are moving.

  Her own lips move to say, I am yours, but no sound comes out of them.

  His Lordship closes his eyes, his body shudders, and there is a terrible rattle in his throat. She peers into his face, into his blank, staring eyes.

  “No,” she says, “no no no"”

  His Lordship is dead, and Tristan is gone forever.

  “We have to bury him,” Matteo says to Guy.

  “No, I don’t want him in a grave. I want him here, so he can tell me where my baby is,” Belladonna says, her voice rising into hysteria. “I want you to brick this up and leave him here in it until he tells me
where my baby is!”

  “Belladonna,” Guy says, her words shocking him into action. “He’s dead. You can’t.”

  “I can!” she shouts. “I can, and I will! Get out! Get out! I’ll do it myself, brick by brick. Now get out and leave me alone!”

  Guy stares at her, appalled, then picks her up in a fireman’s carry, slinging her over his shoulder. She tries to twist away, screaming and pounding him with her fists and heels, but she is too wornout to fight him for long as he carries her past the wine bottles and up into the kitchen.

  “He does not belong where we live and breathe. He will haunt this house if you leave him down there,” Guy says sternly. “I promise you. I won’t have it.”

  “But I want my baby,” she says, and she sounds so brokenhearted that I have to leave the room and sit on the veranda. She doesn’t see me leave. To her, I no longer exist.

  “Come with me,” Guy says as he picks her up again and carries her upstairs as if she weighs no more than Bryony. She buries her head in his neck. Matteo watches them, then beckons me to come with him.

  We dig a deep grave in the woods that night, then wrap His Lordship in a shroud like the mandrake. We carry him up the stairs, out to the veranda, and place him in a wheelbarrow and take him to the grave. We dump him in and cover him with dirt and lye I had thoughtfully asked one of the gardeners to put in the shed for us weeks before. We pack it well, then place stones over the dirt and pack them in, too.

  Wherever the path leads you, you must not give in.

  Matteo leaves for New York, and the rhythm of our lives gradually returns. The mist before my eyes thins until it is barely visible, but I am looking decidedly wan. Botheration. Such a maudlin state does not suit my complexion. So I keep to myself and wonder what will become of me.

  Until Belladonna comes to me one day as I sit reading one of Pompadour’s poetry books in my bedroom. She shuts the door and locks it, and the expression on her face makes my heart skip a beat and the mist come crashing back before my eyes, as if I’d driven into a thick wad of fog. Then she throws a trowel on my bed.

  “You dug up my mandrake and you poisoned him,” she says.

  I shut my book. I can’t lie to her now. “Yes,” I say, “because he was poisoning you.”

  “It wasn’t up to you to make that decision for me,” she says savagely. “How dare you? How dare you?”

  I decide not to tell her Matteo helped me; I don’t want the rest of his life ruined, too. Then she might not let him move in, and he and Annabeth have already sold their apartment and shipped all their belongings. In fact, they’re taking a leisurely drive down from New York and should be here in a day or so. I’ve been counting the hours till my brother would be sharing the same house with me again, for good, and Bryony is thrilled to pieces that Marshall and Charlotte will be living here, too. She will be even more thrilled when Belladonna and Guy decide to announce their “engagement.”

  Her adored Guy will be her father as well as her brother.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Belladonna simply, trying to defy her rage as my heart continues to thump wildly out of rhythm. “It seemed the only thing to do at the time.”

  “Now I’ll never know about Tristan,” she says. “I’ll never find my baby because of you. I will never forgive you as long as I live.” She unlocks the door and goes out, slamming it so hard the Utrillo snowscape she’d once given me falls off the wall.

  “Forgiveness is a gift,” Leandro told us. “It is the only thing that can free us from the weight of hatred….As long as we fail to forgive, we’re holding the hand of our offender. That will always be the hand pulling us backward.”

  Her words crack my heart harder than the poker on Hogarth’s head. It shatters into splinters as dazzling as the diamonds on the heels of a woman’s golden brocade shoe as she wanders around a nightclub, a trail of laughter in her wake.

  It is altogether too unfair. She’s given me no choice. There is only one thing I can do.

  Belladonna watch you die!

  PART VI

  A Final

  Little Ditty

  (1958-1982)

  Belladonna went away

  Demons called her out to play

  No one ever heard them cry

  No one dared to ask her why

  Belladonna watched him die

  22

  All Time Not Spent in

  Loving Is Lost

  Just because I am old does not mean I have forgotten about loving. Leandro said something like that once; I don’t remember where. Botheration. I don’t remember so clearly anymore. It all used to be so clear. Right and wrong and the dog outside the Club Belladonna. Planning and plotting and the sound of chains in a dungeon.

  Leandro would talk to me in the twilight as other people walked around. Someplace near water, I think. The sound of the fountains tinkling sweetly.

  There is a lovely fountain in Firenze, where I live now, in the Boboli Gardens. The Oceanus Fountain, surrounded by a moat and flowers. A little girl with strawberry blond curls used to run around it, laughing, looking for her wishing star.

  “Close your eyes and make a wish,” Hogarth said to Belladonna before he tricked her.

  I close my eyes, but I can no longer wish. It is getting harder to remember. She is there and she is not there. A living ghost, that’s what the Pritch said about her. He’s gone now, too. He walked out of the Witches’ Brew pub and slipped and cracked his head open. The wonderful balding head filled with clever ideas, scheming and conniving, broken and bleeding.

  Or was it Hogarth? His head had been cracked open, too. It served him right, though, didn’t it? Losing his hair and losing his head. He got no less than he deserved. Hogarth and all the rest of them, the members of the Club.

  Concentrate, Tomasino, you have become a silly old fool. The quickness has left me. I’d had a goal for so long, you see. We all had. We kept moving and planning and plotting, and then we found him, and it was all over.

  The secret of perpetual youth is perpetual motion.

  Leandro said that, too, I think, but he died and left us before we were ready to do without him. I had to leave Belladonna. She wanted to blame me, and she didn’t need me anymore. Me, her darling Tomasino. I was afraid she’d never forgive me, not ever, and then I’d have no reason to keep myself alive.

  I clutch Leandro’s cane with the golden head of a lion, and it keeps me from falling when I go out to walk. I used to walk with Matteo to the Boboli Gardens. He had stayed with his family at La Fenice until the children grew up and moved away. After Annabeth took ill suddenly and died, Matteo sent me a message via the Pritch’s office, and after a while I allowed him to come find me in Italy. He, too, was not well, so we didn’t discuss his pain or my own. All I told him was that we could not go to Ca’ d’ Oro"too many memories I was trying to forget. So we moved into a large flat with a wide terrace on the roof where we tended to pots of basil and sat in comfortable chairs to watch the sunsets. Italy was where it all started, after all. Where our lives ended and we were reborn.

  Ihad called Thibaud down at the gatehouse, you see, and told him there was a family emergency, that he had to drive me to the airport and I didn’t want to wake Belladonna. I left with only a few suitcases, several books from Pompadour’s library, my lacquer fountain pens, my cane and cat’s-eye from Leandro, and some small photographs. I couldn’t take too much, or Thibaud might have gotten suspicious. Nor did I want to be encumbered; certainly not with the dazzling assortment of beautiful objects I’d accumulated, especially my Utrillo snowscape. I had plenty of money"buckets, actually. I could buy myself new things wherever I chose to go.

  I flew to New York and called Jack, who met me at Idlewild. We sat in the airport lounge as weary travelers scurried by, and the story poured out As he listened soberly, for some incongruous reason I thought of a conversation we’d once had in the Waldorf, when I’d been so eager to share the details about the Club Belladonna. Then he told me he wished he could have b
een there to help us, and I felt a little bit better. He asked me to accompany him to Horatio Street to say hello to Alison, who was pregnant with their first child, and keep them company for as long as I wanted, but I declined. It was no longer my home. The tunnel leading to the Club Belladonna had been filled in and the interior itself gutted. Nothing remained of its former splendor; the scarlet door had been bricked over. People spoke of that club as they would a ghost. It was as if it had existed only in a fabulous dream.

  I couldn’t bear to see it

  Jack shot me a piercing glance and asked if I wanted to leave anyone a message. I shook my head no.

  “She’ll call looking for me, at some point” I said. “But I’m not telling you or anyone else where I’m going, not even my brother. I know all your tricks, Mr. Winslow; the Pritch’s, too. I won’t let myself be found.”

  “Please don’t do this, Tomasino,” he said.

  “I must” I replied. “Just tell her I don’t want to be found. That, she’ll understand.”

  He knew me well enough not to argue. After he tipped his hat and walked away, disappearing into the passengers in the corridor so seamlessly, I gave him a silent bravo, I got on another plane, and then another, and flew away. You never can be too careful.

  I checked in with the Pritch’s office once in a while, just so they’d know I was still alive and so my brother wouldn’t worry too much. On rare occasions I’d call him, but only after carefully setting a prearranged time, and never at the plantation house. Once, he tried to tell me that he’d explained to Belladonna that he’d been as culpable as his twin, and that she had forgiven us, but I hung up on him.

  I stayed for years in Madagascar, Tunis, Tasmania, Chile, Irian Jaya. I asked tourists to mail my infrequent letters from their destinations, so I was untraceable. I knew how to plot and plan to keep one step ahead of all of them. After a while, I got used to moving around the world, using my large assortment of forged passports. I changed my name so often that I nearly forgot anyone had ever called me Tomasino.

 

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