Well, I’m never going to be like that with him, I promise myself. I take a step back till I’m leaning against the side of an armchair, watching the scene play out as if it had nothing to do with me. I’m never going to be part of a group of girls all vying to catch his attention, jumping up and down, practically screaming: Look at me, Luca! Look at me! The more I see that, the farther I’ll walk away from it. If Luca wants me, he’ll have to come and get me.
And if he doesn’t—his loss.
Brave words, I think sarcastically: even my vin santo tastes a little bitter going down, probably from the acid at the back of my throat, watching Luca flirt with the girls as he kisses them all goodbye on each cheek. Let’s see if you can stick to those brave words, Violet.
Over the rim of my glass, I catch Maria’s eye. She’s busying herself behind the table with the tray on it, stacking the empty plates that held biscotti. But she’s looking right at me, her beady little eyes sharp and dark, and I have the strangest feeling that she knows exactly what I’m thinking.
She must have seen so much go on here, I think. Luca’s dad, the playboy prince with his girlfriends … the principessa, visibly lonely and unhappy, but clinging on to the castello as if it were all she had left … a family tragedy in miniature. Maria’s gaze shifts away from me, and I follow it, to Luca, who’s hugging his mother goodbye; she’s clinging to him too, as dramatic as if he were leaving for a month instead of just going out to dinner with a friend called Fabrizio. (I understood that much. I was listening jealously to see if he’d name a girl he was due to meet.)
Luca waits patiently while she clutches him, kisses him, pats his cheek, muttering “mio bellissimo figlio,” “my beautiful son,” something an English boy would loathe and detest with every fiber of his being. Luca doesn’t seem to mind at all: Italian boys are clearly very used to being complimented in public by their mothers. Finally he detaches himself, kisses Catia goodbye, and looks over at me.
I realize I’m between him and the main door. I actually start to slip behind the armchair, as if I need a barricade between me and Luca; I’m frightened, physically frightened, of what might happen if he kisses me in public. Not that we might become overcome with passion, nothing that silly, just that I might give myself away, cling to him like the principessa just did …
“Violetta,” he says softly, and before I know it, he’s crossed the room to me with two brief strides of his long legs. He takes hold of my shoulders, looks down at me. I brace myself. But he doesn’t kiss me at all. He just says, equally softly, “A presto,” releases me, and walks out of the salon.
There’s silence for a long moment as we all watch him go: then, like air whizzing out of a balloon, we all deflate. No more excitement for us. The hot boy has left the building.
“Time for us all to go,” Catia says. “Andiamo, ragazze!”
“Enjoy your dinner,” Elisa says, and I don’t think it’s just my imagination—I think that for some reason, she’s directing this at me. She looks straight at me, with a mocking gleam in her eyes. “I stay here, I will have dinner with Donatella. To keep her company.”
Maria, collecting glasses, nods approvingly, and the principessa looks touchingly happy not to be dining alone.
“Nice,” Kendra mutters, just low enough that Elisa can’t hear. “Way to show you’re good daughter-in-law material.”
“Bene, bene,” Catia says casually, but I detect a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes; she, too, knows what Elisa’s tactics are, and approves of them. With practiced efficiency, she herds us into saying our goodbyes and thanks to the principessa; we don’t even bother with a goodbye to Elisa, who has turned her back on us anyway. We flood out of the house, through the huge iron gates, to the jeep. Paige is talking nonstop, a stream of near-incoherent babble about castles and princesses and just having been kissed by a prince.
I wait, during all the drive back, and all the time I’m eating the minestrone soup that’s our starter at dinner, for Catia to bring up the subject of me getting stuck in the passage at the castello. Ask me if I’m okay, speculate about how it could have happened, express concern that I might have been really upset. But she doesn’t mention it at all, which I find telling. We go straight to the dining room when we’re back at Villa Barbiano, and I don’t have any time alone with the girls to talk over what happened. I’m not even sure how much I want to tell them anyway: my head’s spinning, and I’m acutely aware that I met these girls only a few days before.
The cold truth is that I’m effectively alone, surrounded by near strangers. Kelly, the girl I’m closest to, seems lovely, and we’ve started to bond, but I couldn’t honestly call her a friend yet, not after being roommates for just a few days. Paige and Kendra are fun and good company, but I have to remember that we’ve been drawn closer than we would normally be by Elisa’s mean behavior; without that, we might still be circling each other warily, unsure as to how much trust we can place in the hands of girls we barely know. I remember Paige and Kendra sniggering as Mum made that scene with me at Heathrow. My first impression of them was that they were snide girls, quite happy to mock someone else’s public embarrassment. I put that behind me, partly because we needed to maintain a common front against Elisa, but now the memory floods back—Paige commented on it, too, when we met for the first time at Pisa airport, actually rubbing it in.
Would she do something like shut me in a secret passage for a joke, a prank? Would she want me out of the way because she’s obsessed with Luca’s being a prince, hoped Luca would come back from Florence, and knew he and I had spent a lot of time together in Central Park? I thought neither Kendra nor Paige saw me and Luca kissing that night—they seemed too absorbed in their own flirtations—but what if one of them did, and resented it, and tried to make me look like an idiot when we visited the Castello di Vesperi? Or what if it’s both of them together?
Or am I completely and utterly overreacting? Is there something wrong with me to doubt these girls?
I should talk to Kelly about who slipped away from the group when I stayed behind in the portrait gallery, I decide. Work out who could have had the opportunity to set that trap for me.
And then I think, But that’s assuming you can trust Kelly. How do you know it wasn’t her? What if Kelly’s jealous of you because you’re English too, but you’ve got more posh social skills than she has? What if she wanted to take you down a peg by shutting you in the passage and giving you a scare? It was Kelly who came to find you, leading the way. Maybe that’s because she knew where you were, and wanted to let you out, be your rescuer, make sure you were really grateful to her and would take extra care helping her out in the future.…
I look around the dining table as we spoon up our minestrone soup, considering each face in turn. I’m seeing each of them from a different perspective, like the moment in films where the killer is unmasked and you realize with horror that it’s someone you know and like, someone you’d never suspected, someone who’s swinging a shiny hatchet sharply toward your unprotected skull.
Kelly, next to me, is still flushed from the excitement of the afternoon and evening, and from the vin santo at the castello and the glass of red wine we’ve been poured with dinner. She’s carefully tilting the bowl of minestrone away from her, as I’m doing, the way you’re supposed to tilt your soup bowl when you’re finishing the last drops. I have no idea why, but it’s considered polite, and Kelly’s a quick learner; she saw me do it and followed me seamlessly. She senses I’m glancing at her and flashes me a quick smile, thinking I’m checking up on her soup-drinking etiquette.
Her smile’s so open and unguarded. I can’t believe someone could play such a nasty trick on me and smile at me like that. I look across the table, at Paige, whose big brown eyes are wide, her mascaraed lashes and dark brown eye pencil making them look huge; I can practically see the white all around her irises as she rattles on about the castello, the bats, the history, being in a real castle with a real prince, or at least a prince-in-wa
iting; she’s been talking nonstop for so long it’s like background music now, almost relaxing. But is Paige cleverer than she seems? Playing the dumb blonde could be a really good technique, not just to charm the boys, but also to make sure people underestimate you, so you can get away with things for which you’d otherwise be blamed.
Kendra, sitting opposite Kelly, is quite the opposite of the dumb blonde. She’s sharp as a whip and cool as a cucumber. I doubt that Kendra’s ever been underestimated in her life. Which is why I find it very hard to believe that Kendra would have done something as clumsy as shut me in a secret passage, running the risk of being caught as she locked me in. It doesn’t seem to fit; if Kendra wanted to sabotage someone, I think she’d do something much more subtle. And much more effective.
And then I look at Catia, sitting at the head of the table, poised as always, with her streaked blond hair, her dark red lipstick, her big gold hoop earrings dangling almost to her shoulders. I simply can’t see Catia making an excuse, slipping away from the principessa, pulling open that door, waiting behind it for me to come along, and then locking me inside the passage. It seems impossible. And why would she do something like that to one of her paying guests?
Because she wants Elisa to start dating Luca, says a sharp little voice inside my head. And Elisa told her that you kissed Luca at Central Park. Daughters come first, way before paying guests.…
My head’s spinning. And not just from all this frenzied speculation. The room’s going in and out of focus, and I’m finding it hard to breathe. My spoon clatters onto my soup plate, and I put both hands on the table to help me balance, telling myself I’m just having a moment of dizziness, overexcitement. My eyes close, because it’s too much effort to keep them open. I slump back against the back of my chair, my muscles slackening.
I just need to rest, I tell myself. I’m really tired for some reason … really, really tired.…
And then an awful surge of nausea rises up inside me, jerking spasms in my chest. Unmistakable. Despite the weakness in my muscles, I manage to push myself up to my feet and stumble out of the dining room in the direction of the downstairs loo. I barely have time to make it there before I’m heaving into the bowl; I didn’t have time to put the seat up first, and I have to contort my body extra-hard to get my face twisted over the water. The vomit sprays out of my mouth. I taste the vin santo, sour now with stomach acid, and another heave of vomiting is extreme. I start to cry in sheer misery and helplessness, fumbling for the toilet paper, trying desperately to wipe myself clean.
People are crowding behind me now, exclaiming in horror and concern. Someone—Kelly, I think—kneels next to me and holds back my hair. Voices rise around me, but I can’t make out individual ones or what they’re saying; I’m too feeble, too dizzy. Eventually I stop throwing up, because there literally isn’t anything more in my poor abused stomach, and they wipe my mouth with a damp cloth and try to help me to my feet, but my legs won’t hold me up, and I collapse again. Someone exclaims about my lips: they’re blue, apparently.
That can’t be good, I think. Blue lips. Someone should probably call a doctor. But I’m so dozy now, so knocked out by whatever’s happening to me, that I can’t really panic the way I suppose I should, or register much beyond whatever my body’s decided to do next. Right now, that’s lying down on the floor. The tiles are cool under my cheek. The lights are really bright, but I’ve closed my eyes now. I can rest. They’ve flushed the loo and the worst of the smell has gone. My stomach hurts, though, and I can barely breathe.
Someone’s shaking my shoulders, yelling at me to wake up, but I’m a very long way away, as limp as a corpse, and I don’t want to wake up anyway, because my stomach’s really hurting now and I sense that the more conscious I am, the more pain I’ll be in. Leave me alone, I say inside my head. Leave me alone, I just want to go to sleep.…
And despite the bright light in the ceiling directly overhead bouncing off the shiny white bathroom tiles, that’s what I do. I flop forward onto whoever’s shaking me, like a giant rag doll, and pass out as if there were a bottleful of sleeping pills dissolved into the minestrone I just ate.
Coffins and Entombed Nuns
Maybe I’m dead.
The thought is not as scary as it probably should be. I’m so calm, so comfortable. The coffin lining is soft beneath me, and it’s fairly roomy; I’m touching the side with my right shoulder, but that’s okay. I don’t feel cramped. Of course, it’s pitch-black, but that’s strangely comforting. I roll over and realize there’s a pillow under my head. How very nice of them to put a pillow in my coffin. Really thoughtful.
Memories of vampire and zombie books I’ve read trickle slowly through my mind, people waking up in coffins, screaming their heads off as they realize they’ve been buried alive, pounding at the lids, clawing their way out to the surface. Honestly, I think, yawning as I cuddle into the pillow.
Silly them. When it’s so lovely and cozy in mine. I could sleep in here happily for the rest of my life.… No, wait a minute … not the rest of my life, that’s obviously wrong.…
The other thing that’s wrong is that when I yawned just now, my throat hurt. Really, really badly. Like if I coughed, it would be so painful I’d think my head was coming off. And clearly, when you’re dead, you don’t feel any pain.
So maybe I’m not dead after all.
I am obviously very dozy, because that thought is not as comforting as you’d expect.
I swallow. Ow. My throat’s as sore as if someone strangled me till I passed out. Now, that would be Gothic. Or serial-killer-ish. Perhaps, I reflect, I read too many novels. The pain in my throat reminds me vividly of the events of what was probably last night, because it feels as if I’ve been sleeping for a while.
No one’s hovering at my bedside; no one’s coming in to bother me. This is lovely. Either it’s still the middle of the night, or I’ve just been left to sleep after my pukefest of yesterday evening. I shudder as I remember it. You can tell yourself as much as you like that you can’t help it if you start to vom, that it’s just something your body does over which you have no control, that last night you weren’t chucking up minestrone because you’d been an idiot and drunk too much, that it wasn’t your fault in any way. You can keep saying that, and I do, but in the end it comes down to the fact that everyone else in the Villa Barbiano saw me sobbing on the floor of the downstairs loo with puke everywhere.
At least Elisa wasn’t there, I think, clinging to this one little piece of consolation. At least she didn’t see me like that. She’d probably have taken pictures on her phone and shared them with everyone she knows. Sent them to Luca, even.
I bury my face in the pillow with embarrassment. Why did I ever wake up? I should just go back to sleep, for days and days, and by the time I do eventually emerge from my room, so much time will have passed that everyone will have forgotten all about it.…
My stomach’s churning as I remember last night. It can’t have been something in the soup that made me puke like that. I was really, really sick, and no one else was.
Unless they got sick afterward, of course.
And it couldn’t have been the biscotti and vin santo, because we all had that, too. From the same plate, and the same decanter.
Okay, now I’m definitely not going to get back to sleep. My brain’s spinning.
How on earth did I get that sick?
Oh God, and what if Catia called my mum to tell her what happened? She’s probably already jumped on a plane to come and get me!
Shoving the pillow behind me, against the wall, I haul myself slowly to a sitting position. It hurts, more than I had expected. It’s not just my throat that’s sore. My esophagus aches all the way down to my stomach, which is equally painful. It’s as if all that violent throwing up, all those cramps, have bruised the entire inside of what my biology teacher would have called my upper digestive tract. I’m thirsty; I want some water, but I have the unpleasant feeling that drinking anything, swallowing any
thing, is going to hurt a lot.
Still, I’m awake now, and restless. No wonder I was happier when I thought I was dead. I pull the sheet off my legs and swing them slowly over the edge of the bed. I heave myself to my feet, and gasp, because standing up sends tremors through my body, and my stomach really is very sore indeed. Patting the wall with my hands, I work my way along it to the window, and the shutters, which I unlatch. Light pours in, white and clear: I squeeze my eyes shut, letting the sunlight filter through my eyelids, getting myself accustomed to daylight.
Well, it’s definitely not the middle of the night.
I look down, opening my eyes gradually, and see that I’m wearing a nightie. Someone undressed me, took off my stinky vomitty dress and my underwear, and put a nightie on me while I was unconscious. Somehow, that realization is particularly hard to bear, the thought of my naked body flopping around, all my squishy bits on full display as someone—Catia? Kelly?—pulled off my bra and knickers. The humiliation just never stops. I stand there biting my lip, feeling increasingly thirsty and miserable, holding on to the side of the shutter for support, wondering whether I should just follow my first idea and stay in bed for days until everyone’s forgotten all about the events of last night.
The bedroom door opens: Kelly’s standing there.
“You’re up!” she exclaims. “Wow! Great! How are you feeling?”
“Pretty awful,” I say, trying very hard not to cry.
“I bet! Do you need the loo?”
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