Sophie's Secret

by Anne Weale

  ‘Perhaps it has,’ said Sophie. ‘Couples don’t have to be blissfully happy to feel bereft when one of them dies. How old is Chiara?’

  ‘Twenty-two, but she behaves more like sixteen. She’s been impossibly spoilt but has somehow managed to survive it and become a very sweet girl. You’ll have to be firm with her, though. Given the smallest encouragement, she’ll come up here and chatter for hours.’

  For the next hour or so he gave her a thorough briefing on what was expected of her. Then he departed to lunch with his family.

  ‘You’ll meet the rest of them later. Rather than sitting through a long formal luncheon downstairs, I am sure you’d rather have a light lunch up here and get on with the process of settling in. I’ll be out this afternoon, but I’ll look in about four-thirty to see how you’re getting on.’

  After he had gone, Sophie wondered if the truth was that his aristocratic relations would not find a foreign employee an acceptable presence at their table. But he was right: she was happier eating up here.

  At that moment the house telephone started ringing. When Sophie had answered it, ‘Pronto, sono Sophie,’ a man’s voice replied that he was the chef, and what would the signorina like to eat today? She had only to state her wishes and they would be fulfilled.

  At the end of a delicious lunch starting with asparagus mousse followed by trout with almonds and stuffed courgettes, Sophie’s final treat was a generous slice of zuccotto—a cake made of sponge, ice cream, chocolate and cream.

  I can’t eat like this every day, she thought, enjoying the last mouthful. Perhaps it’s the three aunts who polish off most of the fattening dishes. Marc and Chiara don’t. It would take more than a morning run to keep him lean if he ate like this every day.

  She had been offered wine with her meal but had asked for spring water and camomilla instead of coffee. Italian coffee was strong and she didn’t want to drink a lot of it.

  After brushing her teeth in the washroom that Marc had said was for her use only, she checked all the stationery and equipment in her office. There were several things she would need in order to work in the way she found most efficient. After making a note of them, she went to his room to check the list of shops he had mentioned.

  Sophie had once read that a man’s office was an indication of his character as well as his position. Here were none of the usual status symbols: the paintings by recognisably important artists, the photographs of encounters with statesmen and royalty, the antique humidor or the silver box for cigars, the trifles from Tiffany or Cartier. The most striking features of this room, after its views, were the wall of books and the wall of pictures and posters, even including some postcards which had obviously caught its occupant’s eye.

  Both walls confirmed that he was a man whose life was spent travelling, sometimes to parts of the world which had nothing to do with his commercial empire. There were books about primitive people living in remote places, and paintings by unknown artists. As she scanned the pictures her eye was arrested by one only recognisable for what it was by someone who knew every inch of this city.

  It was a pen-and-wash drawing of a Venetian cat sleeping curled in the metal folds of the skirt belonging to a female figure at the base of an equestrian statue of an Italian king on the Riva near her hotel. But not many people would recognise the border on the sculpted skirt unless, like herself, they had spent long hours near that spot.

  She wondered what had prompted Marc to buy that particular piece of art. Did he like cats? Or was it the contrast between the cat’s soft fur and the burnished metal which had appealed to him? Later, she would ask.

  The computer on his desk was, she knew, for his private use, and not linked to the one on her desk or accessible to anyone without permission. She was a little surprised he should allow her to use it.

  Sophie was familiar with most of the applications in widespread use, and as Marc had written down the path to the list she needed she had no difficulty in finding it and printing a copy.

  She couldn’t resist finding out how well organised he was on his computer. All the other areas of his life were serviced by people like his butler, his boatman, his chef and a worldwide retinue of paid retainers who, if they weren’t efficient, were replaced by people who were. But how successful would he have been if he hadn’t been born into money?

  It was the work of a moment to find out that he had a very large number of items stored on disk. After ten minutes’ browsing, she was impressed by the way he had them organised. It was possible someone else had tailored the arrangements for him, but she didn’t think so. It had all the hallmarks of a customised set-up, devised and used by a man with a brilliant mind in total command of the technology he was using.

  During the afternoon various telephone calls and faxes required her attention, including a note from Audrey LaRue wishing her well in her new job.

  At four o’clock, while she was typing a letter to Merle, she heard Marc’s footsteps on the staircase. When he had looked at the messages and given her some instructions for dealing with them, he said, ‘But all that can wait till tomorrow. First, I’ll show you some more of the house…the rooms that are only used on special occasions.’

  The larger staterooms were awesome in their splendour, with chandeliers, huge paintings and ornate gilded furniture. The only room having any claim to comfort was a bedroom with papered walls and a curtained bed with some pretty porcelain displayed in the alcoves on either side of it.

  ‘This is where, by tradition, the brides of my mother’s ancestors had their first experience of the pleasures, or otherwise, of the marriage bed,’ said Marc.

  He turned to the wall that the bed faced. ‘There’s a curious story attached to this looking-glass. As you see, it’s a much finer example than the one you feel has been vandalised in our New York office.’ There was a hint of mockery in the glance he turned on her. ‘This one has hung here for several centuries—except for one short period when it was moved to another room in which an important guest was to sleep for a few nights. During the first night she had a peculiar experience.’

  He turned away to admire the artistry of the reflective glass frame surrounding the time-misted centre panel. Sophie, impatient for him to go on, watched the reflection of his face. When their eyes met in the mirror she found she couldn’t look away.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘The visitor didn’t sleep well. She was sitting up in bed by the light of a candle when something strange happened. She was the unmarried daughter of a middle-European king who had lost his throne, and her lady-in-waiting was sleeping in the next room. The princess insisted she came and slept with her.’

  ‘Do you mean she’d seen something frightening in the mirror?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘It frightened her. It wouldn’t have frightened me. I don’t know how you would have reacted.’

  She suspected him of prevaricating to tease her. Perhaps the whole story was a tease.

  ‘What did she see?’

  ‘They both saw it. They left the candle alight and eventually the princess slept while the lady-in-waiting read. According to written reports of what happened— in the notes and letters people wrote before they could gossip by telephone—she was a level-headed young woman. Rather like you, probably.’ Again the dark eyes reflected in the misty glass held a glimmer of mockery.

  ‘I should have blown out the candle and gone to sleep,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Perhaps the princess snored or the book was interesting. At any rate, some time later she glanced at the mirror and saw and heard much the same as the princess had seen and heard…two people making love, in a different bed, in a different room. This room.’

  ‘I think you’re inventing this. To me it sounds pure tarradiddle,’ Sophie said, using a word from her childhood.

  ‘I promise you I’m not. Ask Chiara—ask my aunts when you meet them. Half Venice knows the story of the Palazzo Cassiano’s haunted mirror.’

  Not wholly convinced, she
said, ‘If such a thing really did happen, or they claimed it did, the princess and her attendant were either dreaming or hallucinating. It sounds about as believable as that story of the two women who claimed to have seen Queen Marie Antoinette when they were visiting Versailles.’

  A thought struck her. ‘I’m sure you don’t believe it. If you did, when you were younger you’d have spent the night here to see for yourself.’

  ‘When I was fourteen I did, and very scary it was— far away from the rest of the household in the small hours. Various people have tested the legend, including my mother when she was young. She had a group of friends to keep her company.’

  ‘But none of you saw what the princess thought she had seen?’

  ‘Disappointingly, no. But the legend persists.’

  ‘As ghosts stories go, it’s rather a nice one,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Actually, no,’ he said drily. ‘What the lady-in-waiting saw was different from what the princess saw. She, being an elderly spinster, was shocked by the erotic nature of her vision. Nowadays my aunts watch similar scenes on TV and think nothing of it. But this was in 1843 and-’

  He was interrupted by a bleeping from his shirt pocket.

  ‘Excuse me…somebody wants me. There’s a house phone in the corridor. Which reminds me,’ he added, leading the way, ‘I must give you a bleeper. In a house this size it’s as essential as a watch.’

  Sophie followed him back the way they had come and stood at a polite distance while he checked with whoever had bleeped him.

  Then, to her amazement, he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s Domenico, our major-domo, with a message for you. There’s a gondolier at the street door, asking what time you stop work. I gather you’ve set up another date with him tonight?’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘NOT to my knowledge.’

  Sophie couldn’t believe that Paolo could have made such a maladroit move as to call for her on her first day at the palazzo. She felt furious with him.

  ‘It wasn’t a “date” last night,’ she added crisply. ‘Please ask Domenico to tell him I can’t come down now and not to wait for me.’

  But what Marc said to his butler was, ‘The signorina will be down in five minutes. We’re on the first floor and she has to fetch her purse from the office.’ Then he replaced the receiver. ‘It’s knocking-off time anyway. He may have come to take you back in his gondola. You must introduce us. I’m curious to meet this guy.’

  Inwardly Sophie was fuming. But there was nothing she could do but accept the situation and make sure Paolo never repeated his faux pas.

  She debated explaining to Marc about knowing Paolo years ago, but she knew this wasn’t the right moment. Not while they were hurrying up a staircase he climbed two steps at a time while she had to run to keep pace with him.

  She was breathless when they reached the top floor, and it didn’t mollify her when Marc said casually, ‘New York has made you decadent. By the time you’ve been here a month, you’ll whizz up and down our stairs and think nothing of it.’

  Trying not to pant and determined not to be nettled, at least not visibly, she said pleasantly, ‘I’m sure I shall. They’re good exercise—which I’ll need if lunch always ends with a pudding as rich as today’s zuccotto.’

  ‘It’s not generally realised that the French learnt the art of cooking from the Italians,’ said Marc. ‘It was Catherine de’ Medici’s cooks, who took their arts to France when she married the French king Henri II, who gave French cuisine its impetus.’

  ‘I’ve met Frenchmen who don’t agree with that theory,’ said Sophie, picking up her shoulder-bag.

  ‘Do you want to touch up your lipstick before we go down?’

  She suspected him of deliberately trying to exacerbate her embarrassment.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she said composedly.

  Paolo, wearing his gondolier’s clothes, was waiting for her in the courtyard inside the street door. Domenico was with him, but he went away when he saw his employer and Sophie descending the stairs from the first door.

  Paolo’s straw hat was on the stone table near where he was standing. ‘I got your note,’ he told Sophie as she came down the last steps. Then his gaze shifted to Marc.

  Before she could introduce them, Marc introduced himself, by name and as her employer. At the same time he offered his hand. There was no condescension in his tone. His manner was as friendly as if socially they were equals.

  In fact they were not unalike. They could have been half-brothers, Marc the son of an aristocratic marriage and Paolo born outside marriage to a girl from one of the city’s poorest quarters. Their heights were different, and their features, but both looked unmistakably Venetian. Faces like theirs could be seen in paintings of La Serenissima’s citizens from the centuries when it had been the gateway between Europe and the riches of the East.

  ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything, but I thought…er…Sophie might like to ride back with me. The vaporetti are crowded at this time of day,’ said Paolo. She guessed it had been on the tip of his tongue to call her Kit.

  ‘I intended to walk,’ she said. ‘It’s not far.’

  Marc said, ‘I would have walked with you and shown you the stationery shop where we buy our supplies. But I expect you can find it by yourself. Enjoy your ride in a gondola. If you weren’t an attractive blonde you would have to pay through the nose for it.’

  For a moment he seemed about to turn away and go through the door at the foot of the stairs. Instead he gestured for her to go first through the street door and followed her.

  Being called an attractive blonde made Sophie bristle. Although, on her holidays with Merle, days in the sun had bleached her hair to a much lighter shade than her present degree of fairness, she didn’t think of herself as a blonde, and certainly not in the pejorative sense of being the dizzy or dumb blonde implied by his tone.

  She was feeling annoyed with both of them when they reached the end of the street where the gondola was moored.

  Paolo sprang lightly into the well. ‘I’d better lift you down. Put your hands on my shoulders.’

  As he spoke Marc took hold of her bag’s strap. ‘I’ll take this and pass it to you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  It wasn’t the first time a gondolier had put his hands on her waist and lifted her into his craft. Paolo’s father had done it. She remembered his florid face, his nicotine-stained teeth and the smell of tobacco and wine on his breath.

  Paolo’s face was the colour of teak, his teeth were white and he smelt of the clove-scented toothpaste called Pasta del Capitano they had used when she was a child. The faint whiff of it brought back those years with the poignancy of a grief which had never quite healed.

  The Italian set her on her feet, taking hold of her hand until she was seated on the sofa. Then he took her bag from Marc, dropped it lightly on her lap and stepped past her to his place on the stern.

  Marc gave them a farewell wave, his expression sardonic. She hoped he would walk away but he stayed where he was. Using his single oar, Paolo propelled them in the direction of the Santa Maria della Salute, the church like a giant wedding cake at the eastern end of the Grand Canal, and she did not look over her shoulder to see if Marc was still there.

  She was thinking that if it hadn’t been for the man behind her she could have been walking through the city with the other one, perhaps stopping for a drink in a street caffè and hearing the rest of the story he had been telling her.

  Apart from agreeing that it was a beautiful evening, Sophie was a silent passenger—at first because she was angry and then because the soothing motion of the gondola and the beauty of the scene before her combined to calm her annoyance. It reminded her that where she was and what she was doing was something people trapped in the world’s many ugly cities would consider a taste of paradise.

  By the time the canal had widened into the glittering expanse of the bacino and the long line of elegant buildings along the Riva w
ere beginning to be tinted with the rose glow of evening, her irritation had subsided.

  Very near her hotel there were unadorned wooden stakes, poor relations of the painted pali outside the palazzi, driven into the bed of the lagoon as moorings for gondolas. Instead of steering towards them, Paolo kept the bow pointing parallel with the Riva.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Sophie, turning to look at him.

  From his place on one side of the stern he smiled down at her. ‘I’m taking you for a drink…but not at the clipjoint prices the tourists pay.’

  For a moment she thought of insisting that he drop her off on the Riva, but decided it would be better to remonstrate when he didn’t have part of his mind on the water traffic.

  Although it bore no relation to the rush-hour traffic snarls in New York or London, at this time of day the bacino was criss-crossed by the white wakes of enginedriven craft. Gondoliers had to be more watchful now than in the days when Paolo’s grandfather had been plying his trade.

  The broad esplanade of the Riva was cut into sections by canals crossed by small hump-backed bridges. As they glided beneath one some tourists leaning on the parapet took snaps of the good-looking gondolier. Without turning round, Sophie felt sure he was flashing his white teeth at them. He had always played to the gallery, she remembered, but not in an unpleasant way. The grownups had told him off, but pinched his cheek or patted his head as they did it.

  In the smaller canals it was quiet, except when they came to a blind bend and Paolo’s warning ‘Ohé!’ would ring out.

  Where two canals crossed, they gave way to another gondola carrying two portly couples.

  ‘You can’t be short of a bob, love,’ one of the men called to Sophie in a broad northern accent. ‘We’re going to be skint after this lot. They know ‘ow to charge in this town.’

  Sophie smiled but said nothing, wondering if Paolo would understand what skint meant.