I think about it and eventually shake my head.
“You haven’t got much liquid in you, I suppose,” she says, considering this. “It’s all come out already. Ooh, I should get you a glass of water. The doctor said you should be drinking fluids when you woke up. And when you keep that down, you’re supposed to have yogurt with salt in it to balance your tummy out again.”
I nod. She goes off to the bathroom and by the time she returns, I’ve sat back down on my bed again, feeling wobbly at the knees. She hands me the water. I sip it slowly, wincing with every swallow, as she says earnestly:
“Luckily, the doctor came really fast. He lives down in the village and Catia got hold of him right away. He said it was lucky too. You were really sick. He pumped your stomach, to make sure you’d thrown everything up, and then he washed you out with the stomach pump.”
I raise my hand to my neck, touching the band of muscle there. No wonder it feels bruised.
“They put a tube down my throat,” I say, realizing what must have happened.
“It was so awful,” Kelly says, shivering. “You were completely out of it, which was the only good thing. I helped. Well, I was holding back your hair and stuff. And Benedetta was brilliant.”
I can believe that. Benedetta is the cook. Earlier this week she had us learning how to make pasta dough. She doesn’t speak a word of English and rattles away in Italian so fast that sometimes I literally cannot distinguish a single word, but the cooking demonstration was tons of fun.
“It was really important the doc got there in time,” Kelly’s saying. “You have to do the pumping and washing thing almost straight after people have eaten whatever bad stuff that’s poisoned them for it to work. Otherwise, you’d have had to go to the hospital.”
“I don’t understand what did it,” I say, handing her back the empty glass.
“Well”—she frowns deeply, looking very concerned—“that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the problem. Benedetta’s in a right state. She was really worried that it was something she made that gave you food poisoning.”
I shake my head.
“It can’t have been,” I say. “We all had the minestrone. We all had bread from the same basket and grated cheese from the same big piece. I didn’t have anything here that anyone else didn’t eat.”
“I know.” Kelly grimaces. “The doctor went through everything you ate here with Catia and Benedetta. But he thinks you can’t have had whatever made you sick long before you started upchucking.”
“Lunch was ages before,” I say. “It can’t have been that.”
“No.” She turns the glass in her hands. “We all had the biscotti and vin santo at the castello.…”
She’s still looking down at the glass, revolving it slowly between her palms.
“Look,” I ask nervously. “Do you happen to know if Catia rang my mum at all?”
A couple of hours later, the doctor has been summoned to check me out, given me the all-clear, and gone again. Catia has flapped around me like a worried hen; she did ring my mum to say I had food poisoning, and got the full force of Mum’s panicked maternal instincts. I can’t help smiling a bit—even though she told Mum I’d been resting after the doctor came to pump me out, and that he’d said to let me sleep it off, Mum’s been calling practically every hour. Catia looks very, very tired. She brought me the house phone and practically dialed the number for me, desperate to give Mum the reassurance she needs that I’m alive and well.
I was dreading the call—Mum panicking about me is always really exhausting—but the good part is that I barely had to talk at all. Mum’s flapping made Catia’s look like amateur hour; she rattled on for half an hour, barely pausing to take a breath. I put the phone on speaker, propped it on a pillow on my chest, and lay back as her voice streamed out, sympathizing, worrying, suggesting ways to rehydrate myself, reminiscing about a trip to Jamaica in her modeling days when she ate dodgy shellfish and was the sickest she’d ever been in her life, and the stylist and the photographer were sick too and they had to postpone the shoot for a couple of days because they were all weak as kittens afterward. Mum had looked positively gaunt in the photos because of all the weight she’d lost throwing up and, you know, the other end too. They hadn’t had retouching in those days and they could barely use the photos because she looked like a skeleton—that was before being so thin was all the rage, of course.
She’d been on the verge of flying out to see me—she’d practically booked a ticket to Pisa for the first flight out this morning—but then she’d thought, No, Violet wouldn’t want me to make a fuss—I give a particularly enthusiastic murmur of agreement at that bit—but she’s been on tenterhooks, and so relieved the doctor’s saying I’m okay, but I must make sure to rest up … unless I want her to come and get me and take me home to recover? There’s a flight this evening; she could easily make that. She’d just throw some clothes in a bag.…
That’s the only point where I need to stir myself and reassure her that no, I’m fine, I really am, that whatever I ate is long gone now, that I’ll be back to my studies here tomorrow, and please, Mum, please don’t make too much of a fuss. It takes a long time to keep repeating that so she can hear it and take it in. But after thirty minutes of pleading with her not to come over, let alone take me back home, she runs down like a toy with its batteries slowly going dead. I mumble what feels like endless “I love you’s” and even more “I miss you’s,” say “I’m fine” over and over again, and finally stab the red Off button, shove the pillow under my head, and slump back, exhausted.
I’m so not ready to go back to London.
“Hey,” Kelly says, pushing open our bedroom door. Her laptop’s tucked under her arm, and she’s carrying a bowl, which she places on my bedside table. “Here’s the yogurt with salt in it. Benedetta says it’s just what you need to get your stomach lining back to normal. She went down to the village and got special probiotic stuff for you first thing this morning.”
I wrinkle my nose.
“No, really,” she says seriously, putting the laptop on her bed. “I tried some. It’s not bad at all. She says once you get that down and digested, she’s making you some lunch in bianco. That means ‘white,’ and it’s what you eat here when you have a bad tummy. It’s, like, rice that’s boiled with veggies, no fat or anything. Oh bollocks, what did I say?”
Because I’ve involuntarily retched at the mention of vegetables.
“It’s just, when I was throwing up,” I say feebly, “there were all these little bits of carrot and celery from the minestrone coming out of my nose. I don’t think I can face veggies for a little while.…”
“I’ll pick them out myself,” Kelly offers, sitting down on her bed, facing me. “Before I bring it up.”
I’m weak and feeble, and tears of gratitude actually prick at my eyes when she says this. Dutifully, I reach for the yogurt bowl and put a spoonful into my mouth. My body is very disoriented by the violence of my pukefest. I don’t know whether I’m hungry or thirsty, or if I need the loo. So I have no idea how it’s going to react to the yogurt. Kelly watches me alertly as I swallow the first spoonful; its cold, slippery texture is very gentle on my sore throat, and the taste isn’t bad at all—she was right. We both sit there for a few minutes as the yogurt slides down to my stomach, waiting to see if it’s going to come right up again. But it doesn’t. It feels good, actually.
I manage a grin for her.
“It’s nice,” I say. “Thank Benedetta for me.”
“I tasted it first,” Kelly says, watching me carefully. “You know I said I tried some.”
I spoon some more yogurt into my mouth and swallow it slowly.
“Thanks,” I say, just as carefully.
“I don’t mean to sound paranoid,” Kelly says. Her red hair’s brushed back into a ponytail, and she pulls the ponytail around to one side of her neck, stroking it absent-mindedly, like she’s concentrating hard on what she’s about to say. “But I think you should be careful about what
you eat and drink from now on. You were really sick. And no one knows what caused it. I’ve been looking stuff up on the Net. People can eat from the same plate of mussels and clams and some of them get sick and some don’t, ’cause you can get a single dodgy one. But what we all had—there’s no way you could have got so sick from that.”
She twists her head to look at her ponytail now, as if its ends are hypnotically fascinating.
“Unless,” she adds, “someone put something in what you ate or drank.”
My throat’s already feeling much better; though it hurts to swallow, the yogurt is really nice and soothing. So my voice is much clearer when I say:
“Yes.”
Kelly lets her ponytail go, and her eyes meet mine. They’re clear hazel, framed by pale sandy lashes, and full of sharp intelligence.
“At the castello,” she clarifies, making sure we’re both on the same page. “Because I heard what the doctor was saying to Catia. I’m really managing to understand a lot of Italian—I’ve got this whole course on my MP3 player, and I’ve been listening and listening to it. He was saying it was something you must’ve just eaten.” She grimaces. “ ’Cause, you know, it came straight back up. I mean, it didn’t have time to go through you and out the other side.”
I grimace too, setting the spoon back in the bowl as my stomach rumbles a bit.
“Sorry,” she continues. “But I had to say it. And Benedetta thinks the same. She says whatever it was, you ate it only an hour or two before you started upchucking.”
Kelly gets up and walks over to the bedroom door, which is ajar. She closes it, makes sure it’s shut, and comes back and sits down on the bed again.
“Violet,” she says very seriously, “I told Benedetta that your lips went blue when you were puking, and she went all funny and freaked out. She thinks there’s no way this could have been an accident, and she’s sure the doctor thinks so too. She says that happens when people eat yew berries. They’re, like, really poisonous.”
Very Difficult and Very Messy
“Yew berries,” I echo slowly.
Kelly nods. She’s watching me very closely, checking to see if I’m going to freak out at the suggestion. But actually, I’m glad that someone’s put a name to what’s going on. And that I’m not alone with it.
“I don’t want to go home,” I hear myself say. “If my mum knew this wasn’t just food poisoning, she’d whip me back to London in about thirty seconds flat. And I really don’t want to go back yet.”
“I wouldn’t either,” Kelly says. “Not if a boy like Luca were after me.”
I blush.
“He isn’t really after me,” I mumble.
“Violet.” Kelly rolls her eyes. “I saw you two sitting in the window seat. I know what it looks like when two people have just been snogging, okay? You were all …”
I’m dying to know what she’s going to say. I want to hear that Luca looked completely dazed and blown away, that he had stars in his eyes and was staring at me as if I were the most beautiful girl in the world.
I am tragic.
“… disheveled,” she concludes.
I can’t help grinning, which definitely helps; at least it’s a moment of light relief.
“I get that you don’t want to go back to London,” she says, shifting as she leans forward on the mattress. “But don’t you see that the reason this happened to you is probably because of this whole Luca thing? Because you’ve made someone really jealous?” She lowers her voice. “Like Elisa! She’s obviously dying to get in there and be a flipping princess! Honestly, if I thought Paige were capable of poisoning you with yew berries, she’d be at the top of my suspect list, the way she was going on yesterday.”
“How do you even poison someone with yew berries?” I ask, feeling like Kelly’s steps and steps ahead of me. She’s obviously been doing nothing else since I got sick but talk to Benedetta and go online to research this theory of hers.
“Boil them and make a decoction,” Kelly says promptly. “Just a few drops would be plenty. And there are loads of yew trees around here. I checked. It’s really toxic to horses, for some reason. Hang on a sec.” She grabs her laptop, flips it open, and reads: “ ‘Symptoms include staggering gait, muscle tremors, convulsions, collapse, difficulty breathing, coldness, and eventually heart failure. Fatal poisoning in humans is very rare, only occurring after eating a lot of yew foliage. The wood is also poisonous. Some bow makers are reputed to have died from the frequent handling of the wood in their craft.’ ”
She looks up from the screen.
“That’s Wikipedia,” she says. “But the New York Times website had lots of other symptoms, including vomiting and blue lips.”
“It feels really creepy to think of someone making this stuff,” I say slowly. “You know, they’d have to have boiled up the berries, I suppose. Done it in advance.”
“Exactly!” Kelly shuts the computer with a snap and pulls her legs up onto the bed, crossing them. “You couldn’t just whip this stuff up in a second—you’d need time, and a place to do it, somewhere you wouldn’t be seen. Violet, this is scary. I know you don’t want to go home. I mean, I think you probably should, to be honest. But I do get why you don’t want to.”
She looks at me really seriously.
“I think it must have been in your glass of vin santo,” she says, her Italian accent already sounding better than it did just a couple of days ago. She’s a quick learner. “It would be easier to put it in liquid. Did you leave it alone at all?”
I nod. “On a side table when I was looking at this book of watercolors. Who came back in from the terrace when you were all out there? Anyone?”
Kelly’s ahead of me; she’s already thought this out. “I didn’t,” she says. “Kendra might’ve—she wandered away to the side of the terrace, and I didn’t see her for a bit. I’m sure Paige was there the whole time—she was sucking up to Luca, doing all that hair-flirting she does.”
Jealous as I am of anyone cozying up to Luca, I can’t help sniggering at the term “hair-flirting.” It’s perfect.
“And Elisa?” I ask.
Kelly raises her eyebrows.
“She went back to get her cigarettes,” she says. “And I remember thinking she was gone longer than you’d expect, because I thought she’d shoot right back to make sure Paige wasn’t all over Luca.”
I’m not surprised. Not at all.
“And earlier?” I ask. “When someone shut me in the passage?”
“Okay,” Kelly says. “I thought about that, too. I was up ahead with Catia and the principessa, but Paige and Kendra were sort of dawdling behind. They could have sneaked back and done it. But they’d have had to do it together, unless one of them said she was going off to look for the loo, I suppose. I really don’t see Paige going off by herself, though, do you? Or letting Kendra go off without her? She’d freak about getting lost.”
I nod. That’s spot-on about Paige’s character: she hates to be alone. Even if she’d needed a loo, and found one, she’d probably have wanted Kendra to stand outside so she could chatter to her through the door. It’s not proof of anything, but it sounds right.
“I saw Catia the whole time,” Kelly’s saying. “But the principessa did go off for a bit. She said she was going to check that Maria was bringing the drinks to the Gold Salon. She must have been gone about ten minutes.”
My heart drops. I stare at Kelly, my mouth gaping open.
“The principessa? I totally assumed it was Elisa,” I say.
“All I’m saying is that she wasn’t there the whole time on the tour,” Kelly says. “And she could possibly have got up and put something in your drink without Catia seeing.”
I’m speechless. This idea had never entered my head before.
“All that stuff about you looking like her husband’s sister,” Kelly’s saying. “That was pretty strange. She definitely went on about it a lot.” She pulls on her ponytail again. “Basically, if you’re going to stay, you need t
o be really careful around Elisa. Make sure she’s nowhere near anything you eat or drink. And,” she fixes me with a stern look, “you shouldn’t go near the Castello di Vesperi, or the principessa, ever again. It’s just not safe for you.”
But that’s why I’m here! I want to protest. In a deeply weird way, the entire scene at the castello yesterday, plus my poisoning, has only confirmed what I thought when I looked at that portrait in the museum in London: that there’s a mystery centering on the Castello di Vesperi and the family that’s lived there for centuries, a mystery of which I’m very much a part.
I’m not going to tell Kelly about the girl in the portrait. Let her keep thinking I’m staying here just because of Luca.
And despite the gravity of the situation, despite the fact that someone—maybe Luca’s mother!—has made me very sick, I can’t help smiling at the thought of Luca.
Even if the portrait didn’t exist, I find myself thinking, even if that weren’t a reason in itself to be there, it’d be worth staying in Italy just for the chance to kiss Luca again.
Luigi, the art teacher, holds up his brush, and we all do the same. I’m not quite sure why we’re mirroring his action, but Luigi is very compelling, more than capable of making four excited girls calm down and concentrate on what he’s telling us. I think it’s partly because he’s very serious. Either he doesn’t have a sense of humor, or it’s extremely well hidden. This, as I’m perfectly aware from years of a girls-only school, is a crucially important quality for male teachers. There aren’t that many of them in a girls’ school, and unless they look like the back of a bus, they inevitably become huge crush-objects. Little girls follow them around in packs, giggling madly, turning bright red and running away when the teacher turns to look at them; older girls wear the shortest skirts and tightest tops they can get away with, and do a lot of what Kelly calls hair-flirting. Male teachers are usually pretty good at coping with the flirting techniques: the best way to get under their skin, forge a special bond with them, is to share their sense of humor, make them laugh.
Flirting in Italian Page 19