She and Allain would be forced to live in sin. Strange, how little meaning those words had in her mind, when once they had spelled scandal and ruin. It could not be helped. Words could not hurt her; only people could do that.
They stopped for the night at a small inn on the outskirts of Milan. Too keyed up to sleep, they made love in the moonlight streaming through the windows, then lay in each other’s arms while the hours crept past.
By midmorning they were on the train as it puffed its way past red-tile-roofed villas surrounded by vineyards whose leaves shone in the sun, past straggling stone-walled villages alive with chickens and children and goats and edged with cemeteries studded with the dark green spires of cypress. They left the hills for the fertile plains. The air blowing in at the compartment window smelled of coal smoke, and also of blooming grass and farmyards. The sunlight streaming in was almost hot. Dust motes shaken from the velvet side curtains turned lazily in its golden shafts.
Violet had been impressed by the ease with which Allain had slipped from French to German, then into the dialect of Venezia, as he dealt with the various agents and officials at the train station. When she said as much, he only smiled. “It becomes necessary when there is no country you call home. Venice comes closest, perhaps, to deserving the name. I have relatives there still, my mother’s people.”
“Will we — that is, did you intend to visit them?” She was not sure she was ready to meet these relatives, whoever they might be.
The understanding in his face was disturbing as he answered, “Only if you wish it.”
“It’s because of your father that you have no true home?”
Allain agreed absently.
She shielded her eyes with her lashes as she asked, “Was he some kind of diplomat, then?”
“Why would you think that?” he asked, his gaze indulgent yet penetrating.
“You seem to have such official connections and — have lived in many places.”
He shook his head with a smile. “My father had a prominent position for some years, though not in the diplomatic corps; actually he left it before I was born. Any recognition I receive is merely because my ancestors tended to marry well.”
“Ah, because of wealth, then,” she commented. He spoke, and acted, as if money were of no consequence.
He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he said, “You might say so.”
“If the benefits of it are now yours, then I suppose your father is no longer alive.”
“Both of my parents are dead, or so I believe. My mother, once a diva of the opera, died in England only a few years ago. My father departed on a pilgrimage of sorts a short time after I was born. He was to return, but was never seen again. We heard rumors for a few years, then — nothing.”
It happened, men who were lost at sea, or else were robbed and killed on some lonely road with nothing left on the body to identify them. Sometimes men lost themselves on purpose, too, to evade family responsibilities or situations they could no longer endure.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He smiled a little. “Don’t be. It was long ago.”
“But your mother? Why was she in England?”
“It was her home, where my father had established her and where she had special friends in the social and theatrical circles. She would not leave it except for brief visits to Italy. She thought, you see, that he might return.”
A chill moved over Violet as she considered the implications of what he had said. His father had apparently taken his mother from her home, her people, and established her in a foreign land. Then he had left her. She was going away with Allain, leaving everything. Would he, could he, ever desert her in the same callous fashion?
“Don’t look like that, cara,” he said, reaching to take her hand. “I will never leave you. But I am flattered that you would care, just as it pleased my conceit that you have thought enough about me to be curious.”
Soft color seeped under her skin, though she met his dark gaze without evasion. Her voice soft, she said, “You have no idea how much I long to know.”
“Know it you shall,” he said in quiet avowal, “all of it.”
Soon afterward, he changed the subject, speaking of the countryside through which they were traveling and the uneasy situation of the Italian peninsula. Violet enjoyed listening to the deep timbre of his voice, was interested in his analysis of area politics, but she could not help wondering if his sudden loquacity was not a diversion. He might intend to reveal himself to her, but the time for it, perhaps, was not yet.
The northern section of the Italian peninsula, so Allain said, had been for centuries the battleground where the kings of Valois and Bourbon in France and the Habsburgs of Austria had settled their differences. Control of various portions of it had been traded back and forth a dozen times over. Since the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoléon I, however, France had been excluded from the area. Venezia, with Lombardy, was still under Austrian rule, but the remainder of the peninsula was occupied by a number of smaller states, including the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Duchies of Parma and Modena, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and, of course, the papal dominions.
There were a great many titles, old and new, associated with the many different regions, and a great deal of jockeying for position among the holders of those titles. In addition, as with the rest of Europe since 1848, there were constant rumors of revolution in the air. It was Allain’s opinion that something, or some man, would eventually galvanize the peninsula into forming itself into a single strong republic. In the meantime the paramount faction, led by the King of the Two Sicilies, was hovering on the brink of committing itself to the allied cause in the war in the Crimea. There was no escaping the effects of that faraway conflict.
They reached the terminal station for Venice in late evening. Everyone surged from the train with much yelling and clanging of compartment doors. Baggage had to be collected and transfer made quickly to the ferry that would take them across to the city in the lagoon, as it was the last one of the day. Violet and Allain had little luggage to concern them; Allain carried his own small portmanteau that was all he had brought with him from Paris, while Violet grasped her rolled parasol in her hand. They had no choice, however, but to join the crush of people. It was the only way to get to the ferry pier.
They were leaving the station gateway in the midst of a crowd of a score or more when Violet was suddenly jostled to one side. She staggered, nearly falling as she tripped on her swaying skirts. There was a scuffle behind her. She spun around to see the crowd scattering while women screamed and babies cried. A small space had been left free. In the middle of it Allain was struggling with two men.
Terror washed over her. Hard on its heels came a rage more white-hot and blinding than any she had ever known. The parasol in her hand was sturdily made, designed for use as both sunshade and walking stick. Its straight silver grip was attached to a steel shaft, and the iron ferrule that finished the other end had the pointed shape of a spear. She sprang forward, swinging it like a sword.
Her first blow caught one of the assailants across the cheek and neck in a welling streak of blood. He turned on her with a growl.
Allain, snatching a glance in her direction, sank his fist into the abdomen of the other man to the wrist, then jerked free, lunging away from him. He caught Violet at the waist, whirling her behind him as he deftly plucked the parasol from her grasp.
The two attackers were lean, with dirt embedded in their skin and the scarred faces common to waterfronts the world over. One was short, the other taller and wider. Cursing, they closed in.
Allain never let go of his portmanteau. A faint smile hovered at the corners of his mouth, while his eyes were silvery with the fierceness of his intent and feline in their watchfulness. He attacked.
The first man gave a gurgling cry as he reeled backward. A stiletto fell from his lax grasp, glinting as it skidded over the paving stones. The second as
sailant swooped to grab for it. The parasol whipped the air with a soft-edged whine as Allain extended his reach. The man grasped his flopping wrist, stumbling backward.
Allain edged forward, the parasol level, steady.
The two broke and ran, stumbling over each other, clutching their wounds.
There was a ragged cheer from one or two in the crowd; the rest melted away with hardly a backward glance. Violet, reaching for Allain, gripped his arm so tightly that he winced.
“You’re hurt!” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
“My own fault; they caught me off guard.” His smile appeared strained around the edges.
“Let me see—” she began.
He shook his head, indicating that they should proceed in the direction of the ferry landing. “It will wait until we reach some kind of lodging. I don’t think it’s much more than a slice.”
“Were they after money,” she asked in low concern as she walked beside him, “or was it — something else?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” he said. “But if they were sent by Gilbert, he must have the devil’s own luck.”
They sought lodgings in an ancient palazzo just off the Grand Canal. It belonged to an elderly widow, the Signora da Allori, Allain said, a building of four stories built of mellow golden stone that was stained gray green at the waterline with the inevitable rise and fall of the water level. The facade facing its side canal featured double loggias on the second and third floors, with Gothic arches ornamented with stone lacework, which gave it an Oriental air.
Allain left Violet sitting, gently rocking in the somber black gondola that had brought them, while he went to speak to the widow’s majordomo. By that time Violet had ceased to wonder how he knew where to go, how to get there, or whom to ask for shelter. Nor did it occur to her that he might be refused.
He was not. By nightfall they were ensconced in a large, square room with long windows that opened onto one of the front loggias. A tin bath had been wrestled up the stairs by a pair of grinning manservants directed by the majordomo, a middle-aged man with a nice smile but a long nose and longer chin. He was harried in turn by the housekeeper, an older woman with a sharp tongue, fine black mustache, and ample shape who turned out to be his wife. Water to fill the bath appeared soon after; it was plentiful, though not particularly warm.
A nightgown, a wisp of batiste edged with exquisite handmade lace, was laid out on the great bed with its dusty silk brocade hangings. With it was a dressing gown only slightly more substantial. The housekeeper had brought them, though when Violet asked her where they had come from the woman only nodded in Allain’s direction, winked, and bustled from the room.
The majordomo, Savio, brought a doctor, a man of grave visage and sage opinions. The doctor looked at the slash in Allain’s side with pursed lips, but did nothing more than wash it with soft soap, dust it with a white powder, and wrap it with clean linen. Bowing over his fee with consummate grace, smiling a little as he stepped, quite unnecessarily, to kiss Violet’s hand, he departed. Allain frowned as he watched him go.
A man of many parts, Savio also provided an evening meal, one brought to them, on Allain’s order, immediately after they had bathed. This repast, consisting of pasta and salad greens followed by pork roast with new potatoes and cabbage, was cooked by Savio’s wife and served, with passable competence, by the two manservants who were their sons.
Later Violet and Allain carried the last of their wine to the loggia. They sat enjoying the evening air and entertaining themselves by watching the water traffic plying up and down, counting the different kinds of boats and the different cries of the boatmen that served as warnings against collisions.
The moon came up. It slanted its silver beams across the water, gilding the rooftops with their baroque chimneys, cutting the square buildings with their rows of columns into odd foreshortened cubes and angles with the look of a drawing in black and white made by a madman. Somewhere, in some ancient courtyard garden, a nightingale trilled. A musical ensemble two houses away was practicing Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet in A, playing that slow, melancholy piece over and over again, so it drifted across the rooftops, coloring the night with its bittersweet refrain. A gondolier out in the Grand Canal sang a snatch of song with the caressing lilt and rhythm of a love ballad. The water lapped at the poles at the landing below the loggia and slapped at the palazzo’s old stone walls.
A gondola, gliding past, carried the yellow gleams of its prow lantern before it as it went. Violet, turning her head to look at Allain in that brief yellow glow, saw his face turned toward her, his eyes like dark, glinting pools of desire as he watched her.
She reached out her hand to him.
14
IT PLEASED JOLETTA TO THINK that the route she and Rone were taking by car to reach Venice was not so different from that taken by Violet and Allain by carriage and train. The placement of roads had changed little in that part of the world, and the train embankment ran beside the autostrata for miles.
The car Rone rented, the only one available at the agency, turned out to be ancient and cranky, a standard-transmission compact that trailed a blue vapor of oil smoke and had no air-conditioning. Joletta knew without being told that few cars came equipped with air in Europe, but couldn’t resist pointing out that the tour bus had been.
Rone listened to her acid comments and watched her trying to keep the wind from tearing the hair from her head for half the morning. When they stopped at a pharmacy for their toiletries, he bought a white silk head scarf and a pair of oversized white-rimmed Italian sunglasses. As he handed them over, Joletta was too surprised, and irritated that she hadn’t thought of them herself, to offer more than a muttered thanks.
Regardless, when she tied the scarf over her hair, put on the glasses, and propped her arm on the open window as they whizzed down the road with the wind in their faces, she felt very European. She did not, of course, mention that to Rone.
Joletta had never learned to manage a standard transmission. Because of it Rone had to do all the driving. Less than ten minutes over the Italian border, she was delighted to have an excuse not to get behind the wheel.
The Italian drivers were demons on the road, charging forward with a disregard for safety that bordered on suicidal, or possibly homicidal. An automobile could at any moment become a weapon of aggression in the war of the motorways. When it happened, they took no prisoners.
The frantic traffic, streaking along at one hundred and forty kilometers per hour and beyond, nearly eighty-five miles per hour, didn’t seem to bother Rone; he merged with it with competence and élan. Hands rock steady on the wheel, senses alert, he held his own and did not flinch or give way to any man or vehicle.
By default it became Joletta’s task to act as navigator. Following the strange road signs and distances in kilometers was not as difficult as she had feared when Rone first tossed the map into her lap. The highway system itself was little different from the interconnected roads and interstates of the United States, and the method of marking the different routes was possibly even better. Her instructions as she guided their progress were short and to the point, and usually in answer to some request from Rone.
He whistled as he drove, snatches of some Italian folk tune, Joletta thought, though she didn’t know the name. Apparently he was happy because he had gotten his way about leaving the tour group. She was also enjoying the change. It was so much nicer to be speeding along at their own pace, slowing when there was a village worth seeing, or even stopping to take a photograph of a patch of wildflowers or a vista. The wind whipping through the open window felt good on her face. Free of the hermetically sealed and air-conditioned bus, she could catch the scents of the countryside, savor the privet scent of the vineyards, the whiff of herbs in newly mown grass, even the faint odor of a herd of goats.
She began to wish that the drive could go on and on. Still, she would not have admitted it to Rone under torture. She was in no mood to be
reasonable. She was mad at him, and she wanted him to know it.
She reached out to switch on the radio.
Rone glanced at her, then abruptly stopped whistling.
She fiddled with the dial, trying to tune in a station. After a few minutes she frowned in irritation. She was sorry that she had put an end to his whistling. The sound of it was preferable to the rock music and soccer games that were all she could find on the radio, and was certainly better than his strained silence. Embarrassed to switch off the radio again so quickly, she left it on a rock station and leaned back in her seat.
It was a shame she wasn’t talking to him, really, she thought as an hour passed and then another. There was history and romance and endless fascination in the very names of the places they were passing through, and Rone was one of the few people she had met who might have been able to appreciate these things. More, there were new green leaves on the trees, and the yellow gorse and red poppies along the roadsides seemed bigger and brighter than in England and France. She turned toward him once or twice to mention such things, but always subsided again without speaking.
She was staring out the window when he spoke in flat tones. “How long are you going to keep this up?”
“What do you mean?” The question was an automatic defense as she faced him.
The corner of his mouth twitched in a faint smile as he said, “The silent treatment.”
She had not considered it in that light. It was an uncomfortable reminder of Gilbert’s silence toward Violet in the journal. She didn’t much like that image of herself, didn’t care for the idea that that particular method of dealing with anger might be a family habit.
She said, “I’m here because you arranged it. I don’t have to like it, or be nice about it.”
“You don’t have to sulk, either. If you don’t like it, tell me about it. I can’t read your mind.”
Wildest Dreams (The Contemporary Collection) Page 21