Little Fortress

by Laisha Rosnau

  “I’m sure it won’t be up to me.”

  Fifty

  The duke’s home, Villa Miraggio, was perched on the highest hill in Rome. Inside the gates of the courtyard, two men appeared and walked off with my trunk as a woman took my arm and began to lead me away. “Mrs. Domitius will get you settled and introduce you to Ofelia.” The duke nodded and left, and it was she who led me through the construction, stepping around tools, materials and men with equal efficiency. We took a staircase without a railing and emerged into a part of the villa that was complete, glass on the windows and rugs on the floor, heavy doors hinged to frames. A few more hallways and arches and there was furniture, art hung on walls.

  Ofelia was in one of the upper bedrooms, on a chaise near the window, her legs folded and covered in a blanket, belly high and round under her breasts. She turned when I came into the room. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Domitius. That will be fine.” The older lady stood beside me near the doorway. Ofelia looked from one of us to the other, her eyes not long on me. “Miss Jüül, is it? Come in, come in!” and, “That will be all, Mrs. Domitius.” I walked toward her with a steady gait, as though approaching a dog I’d been assured would not bite. I had no reason to be afraid. Ofelia was looking out the window when she said, “Please, have a seat,” and gestured vaguely into the room.

  I chose a chair, turned to smile slightly at Mrs. Domitius, who was still standing in the doorway. Once she left and closed the door behind her, Ofelia turned to me. “Silly old hen!” She winked. “She’s upset because she thought she would be the only help I would need, apart from those who will be with the baby, of course.”

  I kept the slight smile on my lips, hands in my lap, perched on the edge of the chair.

  Ofelia smoothed the dress over her belly, tucked what I assumed were stray hairs, though none were visible to me, behind her ears. “Thankfully, Leone agreed I should have someone closer to my age. I don’t need to be looked after by someone as old as – no, older than! – my dear mother, may God bless her soul.” She traced the sign of the cross against her chest and closed her eyes.

  I waited for what might happen next and said nothing, not knowing if I was expected to speak.

  After a moment, Ofelia opened her eyes and turned to me. Her face was beautiful in its symmetry, colour high on her cheekbones, her mouth full, eyes deep-set, lids heavy. She looked languid, as though she could fall asleep at any moment, and I knew the feeling, the weight of sleep at one’s centre that could press outward and pull a body down. “So, you are Miss Jüül.”

  “Yes.” My first word to her, spoken in Italian. I’d learned enough in my time at the cloister to speak quite well, though my accent was thick, hard to identify, I’d been told. “Pleased to meet you, Duchess.”

  At this, she laughed. “Oh, my! They haven’t told you?”

  In the household, I had met only the duke and Mrs. Domitius so far, and neither had told me much of anything.

  She shifted and spoke to me in French. “I’m afraid the Roman Catholic Church has yet to approve the annulment of my husband’s first marriage, so – I know, it’s wretched – but I am not quite a duchess, simply a lady.”

  A mistress, I thought. I answered her in French as well. “Oh, shall I call you that, then: Lady Ofelia?”

  She swatted her hand in front of her face. “Goodness, no! Call me Ofelia.” She leaned toward me, reached out her hand as though to touch my own before dropping it to her blanketed lap. “You and I are going to be friends.” Ofelia leaned back, closed her eyes again and sighed. “The Caetani seniors quite approve, you know.”

  I didn’t know if she was speaking about our new friendship, such as it was, or about anything else, so I listened.

  “Well, approve may be a strong word. We are in Rome, after all, but the duke’s mother and I – we have something. Some kind of understanding,” she told me. “I can’t explain it. A feeling of kinship, I suppose, even though that sounds trite. Did you know, Duchess Ada once climbed a peak in the French Alps on her own?”

  Ofelia had switched back to Italian, and I was doing my best to follow along. The duchess Ada must have been the duke’s mother – a mountain climber, apparently. That was surprising.

  “Not that I am a mountaineer – my health wouldn’t allow it – but I think she appreciates my spirit.” Ofelia held her throat, then traced her fingers along her collarbone. “And his father, I imagine he’s just glad I’m not a Colonna.”

  I remained quiet.

  “Not even God approves of that marriage, I’m sure!” Ofelia crossed herself and lowered her chin. When she looked up again, she said, “You’ve hurt yourself.” She gestured toward my bandaged hand.

  “Yes, but not badly. The dressing will come off soon.”

  “Well, I know that even small injuries can take some time to heal – just try not to get into any trouble here. This household seems a bit accident-prone!” Ofelia was grinning again, flushed.

  I wasn’t sure if the words trouble and accident implied more. I didn’t yet know how much was genuine, how much was a lark to Ofelia.

  * * *

  The house girls passed to me pieces of rumour and lore, in quick and sometimes rough Italian, as they oriented me to the partially completed villa. They showed me the kitchen, though I would have little need to be there, they told me. They pointed out the unfinished stairway to the staff quarters, but my own room would be in a different wing, near Ofelia’s. As I mapped the parts of the villa that were still under construction, the rooms and the roles of the staff, I collected each bit of gossip, put them together in ways that I could make sense of the family. I learned that Vittoria Colonna was the name of the duke’s wife, the daughter of a family as noble as his own whose rivalry with the Caetanis went back as far as each line could be traced – ten or eleven centuries by then. Their marriage had united two of the most powerful families in Rome. “It will never be annulled,” one of the girls told me. “The church won’t allow it – the pope, personally, will not allow it.”

  Another girl whispered to me about Vittoria Colonna and her own dalliances – kings and politicians and artists, I couldn’t keep track. “It’s no wonder, really. I mean we’ve heard that the duke has had his own affairs – they all do – but it’s not so surprising that he’d eventually fall in love with someone else, his own wife more interested in society balls and foreign royalty than in him.” These girls, some no more than sixteen or seventeen, thought that they had these tangled relationships figured out. So rarely can anyone other than two people in love know what goes on between them. I tried to take it all lightly. Eventually, I didn’t hear much from anyone beyond Ofelia. I supposed I’d proven loyal, that my sympathies lay with her. I tried to capture more slips of gossip, but the rumour mills turned without me and I didn’t catch even the bits of chaff they threw off.

  * * *

  In the last weeks of her pregnancy, Ofelia was confined to bedrest, attended to by the Caetani family doctor and a contingent of starchily uniformed nurses who may have been called away from the Italian front to look after her, the duke’s mistress. I tried not to form judgment about this. I wasn’t certain what was wrong with Ofelia. It seemed that no one was. “Weak heart, poor dear,” I heard one of the kitchen women say. “Constant nausea, swollen legs,” a house girl told me. Another told me that the baby was in a poor position, though no position seemed ideal carried by a frame as small as Ofelia’s. I was more petite than she – I was often mocked for my diminutive stature – but she seemed more fragile.

  The baby was born in August, a little over two months after I arrived. Professor Manzonni, the Caetani’s elderly family surgeon, was called. I sat in a small room outside Ofelia’s quarters as house girls came and went with pots of hot water, cloths and linens. The walls were coated in steam, the air rusted with the smell of blood. After a time, the girls began to emerge with sheets and blankets clotted red, and the younger
girls began crying, out of sorrow or fear or melodrama I wasn’t sure. I didn’t ask any questions. I assumed I would be told what to do; told when I could help. I heard, “loss of fluids,” and, “the professor wants the herbalist here.” After hours of tension crackling through the villa, the duke was invited into Ofelia’s quarters. He emerged cloaked in his own exhaustion but with a cigar in his mouth, his full eyebrows raised, eyes bright. “She’s the most beautiful baby girl!” he announced. “Let’s ring some bells!”

  It was Mrs. Domitius who said, “You know we can’t, Your Grace.”

  “Who says we can’t?”

  “You know the people will –” she paused. Bells were only rung to celebrate the arrival of the recognized next of kin of nobility. “They will be expecting –”

  “I don’t care much for expectations or customs, my dear Mrs. Domitius. Now who will show me the way to the bell tower?” It was soon clear that he’d been bluffing; the duke was not going to ring any bells. “I’m going to go tell Mother and Father,” he announced to those of us who were in the room. “They will be so excited!”

  When he was gone, one of the girls said, “Excited? Imagine. For the illegitimate child of his mistress? And a girl at that.” Mrs. Domitius told her to hush and get back to work.

  When I first saw Ofelia after the birth, the baby wasn’t with her. “She’s with the wet nurse. I don’t have much strength.” She lay flat against the sheets, tapped of colour. There was a bassinet across the room, flounced with layers of eyelet and lace, a satin ribbon bowed at its crown. I wondered if the baby had slept there yet. “She’s so beautiful, Miss Jüül.” Ofelia’s voice was thin, a waver to it. “She looks so much like the duke, it’s a bit unnerving, but you’ll see, she’s just so lovely.”

  “I’m certain she is.” The bedclothes over Ofelia’s chest began to darken, and though it had been months by then, my own breasts responded with a hardening and an ache. She was leaking breast milk as another woman fed her baby, yet Ofelia hardly seemed to notice. There was a sheen of moisture across her face and I reached out to touch her skin. Ofelia was so hot that it surprised me. “I will get one of the nurses – perhaps the doctor?” She was already asleep but I kept my hand on her forehead for a moment. I remembered Clara’s hand around mine in the hospital, Sisters Bertha and Anna. How they prayed above me; how when I opened my eyes, they told me I was loved. They were so certain. I regretted my own faltering faith. The love of man and God alike seemed fickle, wan. It could fill me one moment, then drain away like blood down my legs, drying.

  Fifty-One

  Sveva Ersilia Giovenella Maria was a strong, lean baby with a full head of hair and a face so much like her father’s already, it was startling. When she cried, she howled, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was heard for blocks around the villa. Sveva bellowed, balled her little fists, and Ofelia called for her sister, Emerika, to come to the villa. She lived in Florence, where she was married to a Spanish doctor and had her own small son. “They’ll be fine for a couple of weeks, my boys, I’m sure.”

  Emerika slept late each morning, then trailed behind me in nightgowns and robes, her speech a murmured commentary on the machinations of various politicians, theatre actors, artists and Caetani family members. She spoke even of the calibrated worlds of the staff that skittered around all these figures. She seemed to think of me as a confidant. She and the duke adjusted to the other’s presence, though neither seemed fond of the other. Emerika was a larger woman than her sister – taller, her curves more insistent in her dresses, her waistline cinched more tightly. One would have thought that, of the two sisters, she had been a singer in a supper club, but that had been Ofelia. Ofelia, with her sallow skin and dark smudges under her eyes, looking more mysterious than sickly then. The smoky curl of her voice making people lean in close to hear. At the end of her sets, she would turn quickly, the layers of her skirts moving like fog across the dim stage, and leave immediately after performing. She refused anyone’s company for hours.

  It was from Emerika that I learned all this. “It’s slightly scandalous, how they met.” She lowered her voice. “A dinner club.” I wondered if it was a euphemism for something but would not ask. “Not anything untoward about the club or the entertainment, of course,” she clarified, as though reading my mind. “Ofelia and I are extremely well-bred.” We were in the parlour and Emerika studied herself in a mirror above the fireplace. “She’s a better opera singer than chanteuse, to be honest, and that’s what our parents would have preferred for her – all those years of voice training. She made an absolutely lovely soubrette but, when our parents died, it was clear that she wouldn’t make it past that role.” She turned to me. “Our parents would have been mortified, of course.”

  Of course, I said, but only in my mind.

  She smiled, but not with her usual gaiety. “But they’re gone now, and while, my God, my sister did not need the money, I feel as though part of her needed to be something beyond the role of a soubrette – to be more seen, somehow. I mean, she truly was something.” Her admiration seemed genuine. “You wouldn’t know – she was as fragile, as quiet in some ways as she is now, but a slight roll of her wrist, tilt of her chin, and she could have a room enthralled before even singing a note. It’s no wonder, the duke.”

  The wet nurse would bring the baby in to see her, but Ofelia slept for most of each day. While her sister rested, Emerika wanted to visit with me, but I had work to do. I had learned about the schedule of a duke, landowner and parliamentarian, how hours of the day and days of the week were to be slotted up against one another. As with the Brandts, I kept the family’s social calendar, made any appointments that were necessary and ensured that baby Sveva was adequately cared for, if not by her mother. When the duke had duties to attend to out of Rome, which was often, it was I who adjusted Ofelia’s days to keep her occupied and entertained while she was awake. All I had to do was set up the Victrola with some records in the parlour, set Ofelia up with blankets over her on a chaise, and the sisters would punctuate a couple of hours with the titters, groans and lilts of their conversation, though eventually Ofelia would tire.

  “Miss Jüül!” Emerika called to me on one of these evenings. “Honeybee, darling, Jüüly!” Her sister called me by endearments earlier and more often than did Ofelia. “Come, come!” She patted the settee beside her, a signal to sit down, though I remained standing. “Oh, you!” She pulled me down, nearly on her lap.

  “Emerika!” said Ofelia. “You leave poor Miss Jüül alone.”

  “It’s all right.” I shifted but our hips were still pressed against one another. I tried to sit straight, even stiffly. Though Emerika encouraged me, I knew I was not to lounge around the villa with the sisters.

  “So, Moconni.” Emerika’s mouth twisted into a smirk.

  “Mr. Moconni?” I repeated the name of the sisters’ estate agent. He’d been by the villa three times since Emerika had arrived, each time with papers for the sisters to sign after he’d explained each one, a process which lasted hours.

  “You must know.” When I didn’t respond, she squeezed my knee and I jumped a bit. “Oh, you. The poor man is besotted!”

  I continued to sit as still as I could beside her.

  “With you, our Miss Jüül!”

  “Well, Emerika –” started Ofelia.

  “But it’s true!” Emerika shifted on the settee, our hips rubbing against each other, and I battled the impulse to stand, straighten my skirts.

  “True or not, I will not have our estate agent make off with the best staff I have.”

  “And you’d deny her love over being subservient to you, darling sister?”

  “I would deny no one love, would I, Miss Jüül?” Ofelia spoke to me as though we held between us many more confidences than we’d shared then.

  “We know you don’t want to be left to contend with the Caetani family on your own.” Emerika stood
up, and I sank into the space she’d left behind.

  With what was there to contend? Nearly a thousand years of family history. An estranged wife from a rival family, a marriage blessed and now gripped in the fist of the pope. Little did I know then how the currents of dissent in Italian parliament would swell outward, and I hadn’t yet heard of the Caetani family curse. Though I carried the heft of my own grief, little seemed to affect us in Miraggio, moving from room to room, the walls being built around us in the villa on the hill.

  Emerika continued teasing. “It seems like the duchess Vittoria couldn’t cope with being around the Caetanis for any period of time – gallivanting around Europe as she has been for the last twenty years.”

  “Why do you have to bring up that woman again?” Ofelia threw off her blankets and got up to change the record. When she stood, she looked at me. “Rumour and speculation.” Then, to her sister: “­Remember that.” After a moment, Verdi’s Falstaff crackled through the room.

  * * *

  Later, when Ofelia was resting, Emerika said, “My sister makes a good show of propriety, doesn’t she?”

  She did. So much so that I could forget that I was staff to an unconcealed mistress of a duke.

  “She’s the first of the duke’s rumoured mistresses to usurp his wife. I’ve heard often how desperately the duchess Vittoria wanted to live outside the walls of Palazzo Caetani, to get away from his overbearing family. In twenty years of marriage, the duke wouldn’t concede.”