THEY DROVE UP THE hill to her uncle’s place, her place, then drove slowly on along the path into the woods. In the dark they managed to heft two great duffle bags and an oblong padded case up the stream bed. They hid these as best they could.
They sat for a while on one of the mounds. Fireflies sparked, small silent fireworks. Then a rustling movement on the sidehill made Luke call out, “Who the fuck’s there?” It turned out he’d brought along a revolver. He fired it into the air. The silence that settled held just that single whistle that might have been a bird.
The Contessa Calls
A HOT WIND BLEW in from Africa. Overnight the seasons changed. When Clare stood under the wisteria arbour in the morning, she saw the grass along the drive was brittle, and she felt sere and brittle, too. The phone rang as she stood wondering at the harsh quality of the wind.
It was Luisa di Varinieri on the line, saying how delightful it had been the other day to see Clare “at our old Factor’s house, which now of course belongs to William Sands.”
Luisa was calling to invite Clare to a little gathering later in the week, the Festa della Lumache, the yearly festival of snails, to be held in a small piazza near Cortona’s top gate. “This will be excellent for you to write about,” Luisa said.
Clare said a snail festival sounded intriguing. “I’ve always liked the concept of slow food.”
Luisa laughed. “And I will insist that William comes!” she said. “But you, my dear, will have to do your part and ensure that Luke Tindhall makes up the ground with William, now you have established — if I may say — this warm contact not just with Sir Harold Plank but with Luke Tindhall as well.”
Her tone took on the well-burnished ring of orders tossed for generations down ancestral halls.
“We will see you in the Piazza de Pescadori in three nights’ time.”
WHEN CLARE DROVE DOWN to the Molino, the cats were draped on Luke’s shoulders, limp with feline love. Luke was marching from room to room, muttering, “Total cock-up, total cock-up.”
Harold Plank had got wind of his trip to the Middle East, and read everything wrong. Luke had been summoned back to London. There was no time to lose. They would have to get up to her field now and find out what it had to offer, which better be something to make Plank’s eyes light up or Luke was sodding toast.
They climbed straight up from the Molino along the path by the waterfall. The stream had all but dried up over those few days. Wind raked through the trees. When they located the spot where they’d hidden the equipment, Luke discovered that only the most rudimentary instructions had been included with the instrument in the black padded box, a gradiometer, which he said might be the only one they would need.
It was hard to watch Luke’s struggle to put the instrument together. Haste makes waste, little Chiara, echoed through Clare’s mind. When she was little, her uncle had given her a wooden puzzle, an inlaid box with a hidden lock. While she’d tackled the challenge of it he had held himself back, allowing her to learn almost Zen-like patience in the process of sliding this panel, that one — which then revealed further hidden ones — and remembering the sequence, so that eventually, with persistence and patience, she did indeed manage to turn the tumblers of the lock.
She could have helped Luke now. Gone was the patience that must have sustained him in the museum basement in France. He snapped at her when she made suggestions. He crammed this bit into that bit, cursing. He snapped again when she pointed out which was the diurnal sensor on the long white tube, and which sensor needed to face downwards to read the earth’s magnetic field.
When he finally got the device assembled and tested, now almost two o’clock, he told her to take out metal pegs, a hammer and yellow rope, and lay out grids in the areas between the hillocks so that later, if necessary, he’d be able to bring the resistivity meter into play.
HE CLIMBED THE SLOPE of the nearest hillock. Let out a whoop. An exceptional reading! He clambered from one hill to another, as the heat of the afternoon intensified. Exceptional readings, yes. But they began to look exceptionally level. Even when he moved down and across the field, the data all came up looking much the same. At five o’clock he laid the gradiometer down. He’d already made sure he was wearing nothing metal, even checking that his jeans had no rivets. He felt through his clothing again, pulled a tiny one cent Euro coin out of a pocket seam. The coin had thrown the whole day’s work out of whack.
The following morning was worse. The gradiometer ran out of battery power and they had no charger. They set up an alternate electromagnetic system according to instructions that Luke had managed to get the previous night on the phone, but found nothing that would indicate buried entrances to tombs. Clare began to understand that it would take weeks for them to explore this area properly, even if they did know what they were doing. Finally, despite all he’d said regarding the ruinous methods of the tombaroli, he hiked home for a crowbar and began banging it in now here, now there.
“Luke, for heaven’s sake!”
He turned on her. “Isn’t it about time you handed over the information that you are holding back?”
“What?”
“Don’t think I’m not aware that you’ve got a case full of your uncle’s papers. I found that plastic case you hid away behind those books downstairs, with a metal box inside.”
“What?” She felt sick, picturing his big hands getting in there — maybe fingering the ashes too?
“I was able to pry the plastic thing open far enough to see the locked box where you cleverly hid what everyone is looking for. I looked around when you were in your bath. Like a fool, I thought I’d wait till you trusted me enough to show me.”
“You are absolutely not making sense.”
“What’s in there then? Let’s go down and get it!”
“What’s in there is private.”
“Private? I turn over my entire life to you, but you’re keeping the essentials private?”
He stopped. He looked wild. She thought she could see his thoughts clawing around wildly, too.
“Fuck it. Why are we wasting each other’s time?” he shouted. He turned and started off down the field. “You can forget your damn snail festival, too!” he called over his shoulder. He looked almost gleeful. “I know it’s intended to get me to make up with Sands. Well fine. But you can say buon viaggio to Poggio Selvaggio as far as Tindhall is concerned!”
HE HIKED AWAY. SHE sat in the shade of a pine until the sun fell behind the trees above the stream. She packed up the gear, but stayed on. A new moon dropped slowly. Fireflies blinked on and off.
WHEN LUKE FOUND HER, it was barely dawn. She told him to go away. He said he had something to show her. She said she didn’t care.
“You will. Hold out your hand.”
“So?”
She stared at three terracotta fragments.
He said, “Look! Here! And here! And here!”
She didn’t want him to be back. It had been fine alone under the wheeling stars, the black heat wrapping around her as if she were another bush or stone belonging there, nothing to fear, waking all pearled with dew, solitary, free.
Look here! And here! And here! A language she’d grown out of. She slipped back into it with a sense of loss.
“I found these up there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the fortress above the town. “Clare, they are convincing evidence that there once was an Etruscan temple on that hill, just as you imagined.”
Despite herself, interest flickered as she squinted at the small terracotta fragments. The crevices held hints of crimson and deep blue and small flecks of gold.
“I can have them tested in London,” he said, “Which will prove that they must be remnants of rooftop statues on a temple whose foundations are lost beneath centuries of building and rebuilding! A temple looking down into this meadow. You were right all along!”
HE SAID THAT HE’D been completely disgusted at himself for making such a balls-up of their exploration and th
en saying such unforgivable things to her. When he’d cooled down, he’d hiked up to the Medici tower and spent hours scouring around, just because he was so disgusted at blaming her for his ineptitude. Then, just before dark, he’d found these three tiny fragments.
“When I get back from London, I will set things up for a proper exploration here,” he said. “Meanwhile,” he was buttoning the fragments back into his shirt pocket, “these little devils are the secret weapon I’ll use to pacify old Harry. He’ll be eating out of my hand when I tell him the good news.”
When she was silent, he said, “Clare, listen. I know I’ve been a total bastard. Don’t look away from me. Say something.”
Three tiny bits of clay. The secret weapon. The mad hopefulness. When she still kept silent, he said, “Sod it, what’s the use?” and launched into a riff of self-flagellation. “Clearly the woman will never forgive you! She will always be thinking, God what a donkey Tindhall is. And who can blame her? Tindhall, you will wear that black mark all your life like Cain.”
He almost hoped for that, she figured; he was half waiting for her to affirm a lifelong expectation of the worst. But he was a good man in truth, concerned with large important things, though squished into a less admirable shape by the impossible business of being human. She felt a rush of concern for him, which really might be close to love — a kind of thawing, like the slightly ill degeneration she used to feel when snow melted in the spring.
“Oh, stop it!” she said. She thought it might be harder to be him than to be her. Maybe the secret of being with someone was to share the worst parts of yourself. Of course she couldn’t share the really worst. But she remembered how she’d felt up at the dig when she’d held the blue bead, the compulsion to possess one small talismanic thing that she’d felt might, paradoxically, protect her in the future, even from herself.
“Listen,” she said. “Remember that blue bead up at Poggio Selvaggio?”
He frowned, clearly reluctant to give up such triumphant selfabasement. “Oh Christ. The bead, that bead!”
“Remember when it got lost?”
“Of course. What a sodding kerfuffle!”
“I was the one who did that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dropped it. Then I covered it with my boot, so I could steal it when it was safe to pick it up again.”
She saw his eyes widen — maybe even in admiration? Not quite what she’d intended.
“I couldn’t bring myself to do it, though. But the thing is, when I had the bead in my hand, I had the feeling that I was holding an entire world of information … or that it was a small blue eye of truth that I could keep from the world. A tiny cache of knowledge that could secretly be mine. I planned to wear it on a gold chain, here, where no one else could see.”
“Crikey,” he said.
Bad Dog on a Leash
WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT the snail festival, Clare realized she could have found her way to the little piazza at the top of the town blindfolded. She’d retraced the route so many times in her head, first her failed search for the saint’s basilica, then the looping loony descent through tangled streets after driving down that set of stairs on the far side of the square. The details were transfixed, familiar, despite the lanterns in the trees, the crowded banquet tables. She was right back in that day, and straining like a bad dog on a leash to sniff out the trail again to where it had led that day.
Luke kept a tight hold of her hand. They made their way to a table where a familiar group was assembling. Federica kissed Clare absently. The Contessa swished up, wearing a wide-winged hat over a wig with a fat braid that hung to her ankles and a very low-necked tunic.
Applause from Carl. He stood.
“But Anders and I have decided to enter into the costume contest too.”
He pulled Anders to his feet to show off their Etruscan warrior outfits, chainmail vests made of linked-together key rings, pleated battle skirts, plastic wine bottles strapped to their shins as greaves.
“We are armed to the teeth, and ready to take on a whole battalion of snails!”
“This is very clever my darlings,” Luisa said. Even her husband smiled. He gave no hint that he’d seen Clare in Tarquinia.
When Nikki and William arrived, Clare overheard Luisa whispering that she expected William to behave. Nikki smiled brightly at Luisa, and Luisa smiled back, their two smiles arching over William like ceremonial swords.
Nikki was wearing a sarong made out of a paisley shawl, and what Clare at first glance thought were wrist-length black gloves. “Are we beyond the fringe or what?” Nikki said, fingering the crystals on Clare’s shawl. “Ooops!” They both looked down at the little handful of sparkly beads in Nikki’s hand. “I don’t know how that happened. You’ll have to come over, and I’ll thread them back!”
She tucked the beads into the embroidered pouch that hung around her neck. That was when Clare saw that Nikki’s hands were completely gloved in black ink, with a little scroll added at the wrist.
Nikki laughed, self-consciously. “I’ve been getting into my work. I had a little accident, but decided to turn it to good account.”
When the Contessa came to stand beside Luke, Clare thought he was rising in a gesture of politeness, but he increased his grip on Clare’s hand and propelled her over to a gravelly spot in front of a band, oblivious to the fact that no one was dancing. With a stance very stiff, hair afloat and whipping, he spun her through a sort of tango, then marched her back, resumed his seat.
The lanterns, the starlight, the romantic music, the rustling leaves; it was going to be terrible. But she would do her best. She would.
Carl and Anders were making helmets out of their paper napkins. Anders set his at a fetching angle and turned to see if William Sands was taking note. Nikki’s smile flashed like a scimitar.
Platters of crostini arrived. “But these are made with chicken livers!” Anders cried in mock distress. “I thought every course was snail.”
“Liebling, they are snail livers,” Carl rumbled. “You are merely taken in by the fact that every food that creeps upon the ground has the taste of fowl.”
This led to welcome laughter and a discussion of the eating of reptiles and insects around the world. “In Brazil, I discovered that fried worms can be delicious,” Clare said. “But eating spaghetti among the Yanomami?” She held her fork up, miming a wriggling load. “A bit of a surprise!” When the pasta came, it also lacked snails. Clare caught Anders’s eye and together, almost as if on signal, they turned to Carl and said, “Vass is dass?” But when snails finally did arrive — shells glistening in a red and spicy sauce, along with toothpicks, napkins, bread for sopping — the little creatures hunched on Clare’s plate like the thoughts she was clenching.
She got up, walked among the tables to the far side of the square, towards the phone booth, the playground, a stone bench. She sat down and let the festa flow around her: the talk, the laughter, the cavorting children, the babies held aloft or passed around to be admired. All these good people gathered in this starlit piazza in their little town to celebrate the goodness of a lovely night in June, these people who knew innately how to celebrate. It flowed by on the far side of a thick pane of glass.
“Hello, Clare.”
HOW HE LOOKED. AND everything ripping open in front of her, lights, sounds, smells, all coming at her, not painted on the far side of glass. It swam around him. He looked so good. Ridiculous and patently untrue, but he looked uncomplicated, simple, good.
Dusky perfume drifted from the lime trees rustling overhead, a canopy of heart-shaped leaves, silvery on one side, glossy on the other. The clusters of small white blossoms.
She said, “I was in a tomb that had a ceiling like this. It had a painted canopy all sprigged with little flowers.”
“You were in Tarquinia.”
“Yes.”
“I came by to see you.”
“Oh!”
When? she wondered. What if she’d hadn’t bee
n so stubborn, hadn’t insisted on going to Tarquinia with Luke!
He said, “I hope you have been all right?”
“Have you?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I have been eaten by my own stupidity and pride — and then realizing that when I left you, you were not well.”
She kicked a pebble at her feet. There would be grass in a park like this back home, not gravel. She said, “I felt badly, too. That was kind of a mess-up, that morning.”
He knocked a fist to his forehead, “Shamefully, it was not until several days later that the dogs of my pride let go.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “Are they very fierce, these dogs of your pride?”
“I did not think so. But with you, yes it seems.”
She saw Luke across the piazza glancing around for her with a haughty, desperate look. Luke doesn’t deserve this, she thought. The lanterns made the shadows lengthen, shorten, sway.
She started to get up. “There have been some changes since then.”
He caught her hand. She sat down, and ducked her head, as if Luke’s glance would wing above her.
He said, “Clare Livingston, I have been a fool.”
Oh, me too, she realized.
Another long pause, while she contemplated her folly and kept her head down so she didn’t have to meet Luke’s stare. She imagined reaching up, kissing Gianni just on the cheek to say goodbye, how instead they would rise up together through the trees, up through the powdering of stars, leaving behind the tables strewn with snails and bread and wine, and all the gaping people.
She said, “I am involved with someone else, now.”
“The one you are with tonight is important?”
“I have to say ...”
“You have to.”
“No, damn it. I don’t have to. He is.”
Gianni rose to his feet. “Come. Walk with me. Please.”
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