Belladonna Read online

  “Look, Matteo,” Bryony says, running down to it, her curls flying. “This is our star. You have to stand in the middle, there. Stand on it and make a wish.” She dances near the leaping waters, then calls to me to be the timekeeper in her race with Matteo around the pond. He always lets her win. Smart guy. He’s certainly learned how to manage a female.

  “It’s the wishing star,” Bryony says, running into her mother’s arms.

  Later that night, we are sitting on the roof terrace of our hotel, hoping for a breeze. Everyone else in the city is sleeping but Leandro and Belladonna and me, it seems. He wants to talk to her; I feel it.

  “Bryony is obsessed with her wishing star,” Belladonna says, eventually breaking the silence. She, too, feels that Leandro wants to say something, and she isn’t quite sure what it is.

  “I have a wish,” he says, and pulls out a small ruby velvet box. “I wish to marry you.”

  Belladonna looks at him in amazement. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am very serious.”

  Her face changes, and she pales. A fear I haven’t seen for ages is creeping into her eyes. No no no, my darling, I want to say, save yourself. Do as he asks. You can trust him.

  “Why do you ask this?” she asks. “You can’t love me. I don’t want you to love me"not that way.”

  “You are quite wrong,” he says, perfectly calm and collected. “I do love you. I have grown to love the sight of you every morning, every day. I love how your face looks when I speak to you, no matter what I say. I love the colors in your hair, the shape of your fingers, the way you hold your child, the hunch of your shoulders when you are troubled. I do not expect you to love me, but my love is simple. I have not asked for it; it exists. That is all. Despite what you say, I believe in you.”

  “Believe in me? How can you?” she asks, her eyes blazing. “Look at me"I am nothing. Certainly not a woman. I’ve done nothing for anybody, been nothing, since you met me. I no longer know how to exist in the world. I feel nothing but hate.”

  “That is also quite wrong,” he replies. “You are very much a woman, and you feel many things. I will not hear you deny the love you feel for your child and your friends, or your caring and compassion for the people around you.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “Of course it is. You can burn with hatred and rage for one creature and yet still love another.”

  “But why?” she cries. “Why change things? Why ask this of me now?”

  My darling Belladonna, please, look at this man. He is dying before your eyes and you refuse to see it.

  “I am tired,” he says, “although my heart is not yet weary.”

  He said something like that once before, in Merano. Except then it was the other way around.

  “But I can’t touch you,” she says. “I won’t ever let any man touch me. You know that. I could never be a wife to you. So why bother?”

  Honestly, sometimes she is so obtuse I want to shake her.

  “My dear, that is of no consequence. I doubt the possibility should arise, even if you so desired it.”

  Oh ho, impotence. Fidelity’s dearest friend.

  “There should be no reservation in your mind that my intentions are honorable,” he adds.

  Her face is troubled. “Then what do you want? I’ve never known a man to say that.”

  “Your experience of men has not been the usual.”

  She throws me a sharp look. “What else has Tomasino told you?”

  “Nothing more than you have already told me yourself. Which is why I want to protect you. I have no direct heirs, and it is my wish that Bryony have a name and a father. No one will ever know of whence you came, unless you choose to tell them. To me, you will always be la bella donna, but to the world, you will be la Contessa della Robbia.”

  They will come to you if they don’t know who you are.

  “Should you choose to become my wife,” he adds, “there will be fewer problems with my will when I die.”

  “Stop it, please. Just stop it. You’re not going to die,” she says.

  “Just before my great-uncle died, he complained that there was not enough room for his feet in the sarcophagus. Allungare! He said it must be made longer. He refused to die until the stonemason cut him a new one.”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “I have no plans to die at this precise moment,” Leandro says with the slightest smile as he rises to go in to bed. “However, it is an inevitable condition of life.”

  “Leandro,” she says. “Please.”

  He ignores her. He knows her better than she knows herself.

  “If you so wish, I shall draw up papers, if that would make you feel safer,” he tells her. “There will be no changes once we return home. Should you prefer, the ceremony itself will be conducted with the utmost discretion. It is strictly a formality. No one need know until after I am gone.” He places the velvet box on the table. “There is a ring inside, similar to the one I gave to Alessandra. That one I wear round my neck so a piece of her is close to my heart.” He bows, then disappears inside.

  “I hope you’re going to do the right thing,” I say after a long silence.

  “This is your idea, isn’t it?” she says.

  “Al contrario, dearest. I’m as dumbfounded as you are.”

  “Don’t play coy with me.”

  “It’s hardly coy to tell you to marry him, you fool. If only for your daughter’s sake. Then she will have a father she can be proud of.”

  “Instead of His Lordship, you mean. Instead of a monster.”

  I shudder involuntarily at the sound of those two words. I’ve not heard them in many, many months. They don’t belong here, not tonight, hanging like a curse in the limpid night air.

  “It’s not Bryony’s fault,” I say.

  “It’s not mine, either.”

  “Or June’s. This isn’t about June Nickerson, or whose fault it is. This is about Leandro. Your friend. My friend. Our friend. He’s not indestructible. He’s asked for so little from you, and his generosity should not be repaid with fear and unkindness.” I’m really on a roll now, but Leandro means too much to me. “I swear,” I go on, “sometimes I think it is his will alone to see you healed and back in the world that is keeping him alive. He needs you. You are just too selfish to see it. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? Show it to him.”

  “Show him what?”

  “What you wrote and I copied, once upon a terrible time. That book. The diary.”

  That book. Every last grotesque detail is in it, and I know she’s got it stashed somewhere. I’ve searched all over, but she’s hidden it without a trace. Clever girl. She knows what a snoop I am.

  “I can’t,” she says after a long pause.

  “Why not?”

  “You know perfectly well why not.”

  “What’s he going to do? Tell you to leave? You don’t think he suspects something like what he’ll read anyway?”

  “I don’t want him to know the worst of it.” She wraps her arms around herself and shivers, even though it is still sweltering.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Who do you think he is, having taken care of us for so long? He saved us. He knows he saved us from something awful. But, most of all, he saved us from ourselves.”

  “What if he’s one of them?”

  “Oh come on.” I must be harsh. “You know he’s not. This will be your final proof. And it will help us. Perhaps something in the diary will jar his memory.”

  She laughs bitterly. “You drive me crazy sometimes.”

  “Good. Then do something about it.”

  Happily, she swallowed her fears and did do something about it. She married him in Firenze a few days later. A friend of his, a retired judge, performed the ceremony. No one was invited. Not Matteo, or Orlando, or Bryony, who would have loved to have been the flower girl. No one knows but me. When we return home, nothing changes. She hands Leandro the diary, but he adamantly refuses to read
it, and she returns it to its hiding place before I have a chance to find it. The only difference is the ring she wears on a slim gold chain around her neck, set with a sapphire very nearly the same color as a Tuscan sky. And, thankfully, a willingness on Belladonna’s part to spend nearly all her days with Leandro, walking with him in the gardens, sitting with him for lovely tranquil hours on the curved stone steps of the theater, watching the butterflies dance in the sunshine.

  As the grapes ripen and swell later that year, Leandro takes a chill and withdraws to bed. We visit him every afternoon, trying to hide the fear in our eyes. He is only seventy-two, and too young, too energetic still, at least in my mind’s eye, to die. I won’t let him. And to tell you the truth, I think he almost enjoys being sick, since it brings Belladonna closer to him. She is actually fussing over him, tucking in his blankets, shouting at Caterina for a hot herbal infusion. She reads to him, or they sit and talk about nothing and everything.

  Late one evening, after Bryony has kissed him good night and gone to bed, Belladonna shoos me away. Naturally, I sit outside, hidden off the terrace, and listen to everything.

  I hear her reading the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and then the thunk of the book on the table. “

  “ ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends,’ “ Leandro says to her. “Ah, that is better. Your hands are so cold.”

  “I am cold,” she says, even though the night air is still and close. She is speaking so softly that I have to sidle up closer to the door to hear her properly. “I want to give you more, Leandro, I really do. You’ve done so much for me, everything you’ve taught me, letting us live here, safe from the world, and taking care of Bryony. I want to"I just"I can’t. You might not think that I do, but I think about it every day, what’s wrong with me. But I can’t. I don’t think I can, ever.”

  “Shhh,” he says. “Lie down here beside me. Lie down and be still.”

  “I don’t want to do without you,” she says after a long silence. “I never thought I’d say that about a man, but it’s true. I don’t want to be like this, but I don’t know any other way. It’s too deep in me to undo.”

  I’ve never heard her so tender, and my eyes fill with tears, sentimental softy that I am. Under the hardness of her facade a woman’s heart is still beating.

  “It doesn’t matter, my darling,” he says. “Truly. You are here with me now, and that is all I need.”

  “But"”

  “Shhh,” he says again. “Sleep. We need to sleep.”

  After that she reads to him every night and then she lies down beside him, and he puts his arms around her, and they sleep. It is comfort, pure and simple, as if he were a father embracing his child.

  That kind of security is not anything she has ever known, and, of course, given the nature of my story, not anything that could last.

  One stifling late-August morning, I put their breakfast tray on the terrace table and open the door. Belladonna is sitting up in bed, her arms clasped around her knees, rocking back and forth. No no no. Her face is deathly pale, staring out at nothing, and my blood freezes. Leandro looks peaceful and handsome as ever, as if the years had suddenly been erased from his face by a glimpse of heaven. For a fleeting second, I wonder if he saw Alessandra and Beatrice before his eyes closed for the last time.

  I turn and run for the kitchen. Caterina takes one look at me, drops her spoon to the floor with a crack that sounds louder than a cannon blast, and starts to wail. She knows. Not any of her potions would work now. Roberto comes running, and suddenly the house is in an uproar. “Get Matteo, quick,” I say to him, “and Orlando.” I run back to Leandro’s room, and nothing has changed. Belladonna still rocks back and forth, unseeing.

  When Matteo hurries in, he puts his arms around her and lifts her up as if she weighed no more than Bryony. She doesn’t blink. I almost wish she would start screaming, or thrashing around in grief like Caterina and the rest of the maids, whose howls can be heard from the other end of the house. Shock has stilled her senses, and hardened her heart once more.

  Belladonna refuses to leave her room, even for the funeral. Few of Leandro’s business associates are invited; only the staff and their families, and most of the townspeople, weeping as they brush his coffin with branches of laurel before it is taken into the sarcophagus in the family vault.

  I walk to the outdoor theater afterward and stare up at the owl hidden in the tree, remembering the night he’d shown it to us. My longing for his calm gaze and cryptic comments fills me with such pain that I throw myself down on the stone steps and sob for a good long while, until Matteo comes to fetch me back. He sits beside me until my shoulders stop heaving, then hands me a linen handkerchief.

  I take it and blow my nose before realizing it’s one of Leandro’s. I start to weep all over again.

  “You look awful,” he says. “Come. We need you.”

  Such a request always gets me where it works, appealing to my munificent nature. Besides, my eyes are all puffy and my shirt is wrinkled and damp.

  Belladonna is still nearly catatonic several days later when the will is read. I shall spare you the scene of utter astonishment when the will reveals that she and Leandro had married. I fancy I see a small twitch at the corner of Caterina’s lips, but naturally I can’t be sure.

  As I’d expected, Belladonna is to inherit the vast bulk of his estate, with a sizable trust established for Bryony, and an equally gigantic sum provided for Laura and her children. All the staff are given extremely handsome payments, and it is Leandro’s express wish that they and their families stay on for life, if they so wish, to run Ca’ d’Oro as it has been run for years.

  He wills me his collection of canes with the lions’ heads and the hidden blades, and any of the books from his library that I so desire. And his cat’s-eye, though I don’t wish to wear it. It’s too much a part of him, but the gesture fills my eyes with tears. The lawyer than hands me a note sealed with crimson wax, addressed in Leandro’s bold handwriting in a blue-black ink I’d found for him in Firenze. “Thank you, Tomasino,” is all it says on the card inside. “Perduto é tutto temp che in amor non si spende.”

  All time not spent in loving is lost.

  He also provides for me and my brother, and when Matteo and I hear the figure, we look at each other in amazement.

  Too bad all that money can’t buy us what we need most.

  And so the Contessa della Robbia is stupendously rich beyond even my own wild imaginings. Not that she cares, staring out from her terrace in silence. She barely eats, barely nods to her daughter. I notice that she is now wearing Leandro’s sapphire ring on her right hand, and she twists it around and around till her skin is raw and Caterina whispers at her to stop.

  Leandro’s money is not real to her. All that is real is what we found in a numbered account after we escaped from Belgium, but I haven’t told you about that yet. Don’t think I’ve forgotten. You’re just going to have to wait.

  Please, have some respect for the dead.

  Nearly a month later, Belladonna comes up to the terrace outside Leandro’s room and sits down next to me. She is holding one of the leather writing pads I’d bought in Florence, and when she opens it I see a stack of papers covered in her tiny slanted script.

  “Here,” she says, pulling out a sealed envelope and handing it to me. I recognize Leandro’s handwriting in the blue-black ink. I can’t imagine how she could have endured a month without reading it. I’d have gone mental with curiosity.

  “He meant it for you,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “Just read it.”

  “Very well.” I slit it carefully, clear my throat, and read:

  My darling Belladonna"

  “You have been chosen to break the bonds set by the world, and I have faith that you will not falter in your quest. Once before I said to you: If you think you can’t fail, you won’t. This I know you have learned. Stay true to your path, for the vengeance will conquer you if you do not conquer it.

>   They will come to you if they don’t know who you are.

  Yes, and you shall find them.

  I did not think the stoniness round my heart could ever be crushed and obliterated, but you, my angel, have done this for me. Remember this when the nights are black and the dark thoughts are gnawing. Do not, my beloved, ever forget how much your Bryony loves you and needs you. As do your faithful Tomasino and Matteo. Sorrow must not be allowed to become woe. Do not, I beg you, let the loneliness freeze your soul.

  I bless you, my most cherished Belladonna, for the love you have given me.

  Your Leandro”

  Belladonna’s cheeks are wet with tears, but her eyes are sharp, piercing emeralds. I look at her closely and I see that her face has shaped itself once more into that impenetrable mask. I get one of my bad feelings behind my kneecap. That mask is set in inviolable stone.

  “There is nothing else to lose,” she says. Her voice is harsh.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you understand? He was my last chance.”

  I don’t want to be like this, she’d said to him, but I don’t know any other way.

  Chance for love, she means, chance for a life not shaped and shifted by the worms digging their shadowy holes of revenge.

  “Well, there’s me, and Matteo, and Bryony,” I offer, trying to keep my voice conversational. “And everyone else here who loves you.”

  “Don’t ever talk to me of love. Love has nothing to do with me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You love your own child.”

  “That doesn’t count.”

  “That is not what Leandro would have wanted.”

  “Say whatever you want to say, Tomasino. You will anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

  A sense of futility makes the words die in my throat.

  “I am ready to leave this place,” she goes on. “It is Leandro’s home, and without him I no longer belong.”

  No no no, I think I am awfully spoiled by the lush life here. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I want to go where I can find the members of the Club,” she says fiercely. “I want to find them all, and I want them to suffer and rot, and I want to watch them begging me to ease their pain before I’m through with them.”