Abroad, page 17
Of course you’re here.
I blinked and squinted, trying to get a clearer look, but my efforts were futile: the woman had either moved from view or vanished altogether.
Lucretia, 13th century AD
Lucretia wasn’t a nun. She was a servant. Her duties were to clean the church after Sunday Mass. The castello wasn’t a convent, so no nuns ever lived there, but there were services every Sunday, for which a cardinal would ride up on his horse. He would arrive on Saturday, attend dinner in the great hall, then perform the Mass in the morning. The cardinal’s weekly visit was an important mark of status to the Rivaldis; as a token, they had a portrait commissioned of the clergyman holding his favorite horse in his hand.
The cardinal’s name was Ignatio. Lucretia was the daughter of the cobbler. She was a pale creature, meek with pleasant gold hair and papery skin. Her father had many children, some by his dead wife, some by her replacement. Lucretia was quiet. She faded into the din.
One day after the service, while Lucretia was wiping the mud from the pews left by the boots of the horsemen, the cardinal grabbed her by the hair. She didn’t fight. She told herself she was doing it for God. She didn’t fight the next time, or the next time either.
Eventually she started to swell. She told no one, but the cardinal noticed. No one else did. She was nothing in the castle to anyone and she knew it. Even her family had trouble keeping track of her.
The cardinal didn’t say anything on the last day. He took her as he usually did, but would not look at her during it. Afterward, he slapped her and hurried out.
A servant impregnated by a cardinal. There was only one way this could end. She would be cast out. She would die alone in the snow.
The Compagnia was contacted. A nameless noble came in the night with a sharpened dagger. When Lucretia saw the blade at her neck, to her surprise she was flooded with relief.
Her body was carried out in the dark morning. She wasn’t missed in the castle for days.
In the ledger, the death was noted but no one claimed the privilege. The act was simply credited as a service to God.
Lucretia di Bologna, seventeen years old, 13th century AD
16
I took my time getting back. It was cool but sunny—almost mid-October. Winter was approaching; these were the last days of walking without a jumper or a coat. As I made my way back toward the castle on the dirt road, I could hear what sounded like bottled laughter. Staying close to the wall, I went closer and peeked around the garden gate.
A group of men lounged under the awning in cycling gear on the lawn. There were five of them, only one of whom looked especially correct in spandex. Not wanting to meet them alone, I darted into the courtyard and ran up the stairs, where Anna was reading a booklet about the castle, and Luka and Jenny were napping next to empty glasses rimmed on the bottom with the brown sticky remnants of scotch.
“Do you know, this place is eight hundred years old,” she said, not looking up. “I tried to call my cousin to see about the Italian royal registry, but there’s no service up here. Samuel seems to be nobody special; I only know that because no self-respecting Englishman of class would buy a whole castle these days. It’s just a thing Internet people do.”
“Can you imagine being that rich?” I asked.
“Two hundred families lived here in the 1400s. They were attacked all the bloody time. There was a blacksmith, a stable, farming, a clergy staff … up to a thousand people right in these walls, it says. Pretty incredible. We must be in the servants’ quarters, or the soldiers’ barracks.” She glanced around. “They could have given us better rooms.”
“I suppose they wanted to keep us together.”
“Who is the son, I wonder?”
“I saw him, I think. And his friends. They were downstairs on the lawn in cycling clothes.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. They seemed all right.”
“Taz, come on. Were they attractive? Old? Rich?” I shrugged. “Did they look like the sort to show a girl a good time?”
“They seemed a little drunk.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway.”
We were late to cocktails, a move calculated by Jenny and, in the end, all wrong. At six, we entered, shimmering in our long dresses: Luka in gray backless satin, Anna in a somber column of black, Jenny in dark red, and me in my gold-and-black dress. Samuel and Professor Korloff were alone in the main hall with Pascal, who was lingering idly under a painting. The professor was sitting in a large leather chair with a glass of wine, clearly annoyed, and didn’t bother to rise when we came in. Fabrizio stood behind the bar, equally peeved.
“I know it seems strange, ducklings. But when I ask students to a party, I mean for people to show up.”
“I’m so sorry,” Anna said. She truly looked as if she might cry.
“We got so caught up in our preparations,” Jenny said grandly. “It’s Tabitha’s fault, actually. We were doing her hair.”
This was clearly a lie, as my hair was curly and loose, the same as it had been in the morning. In fact, the bathroom had been so thoroughly occupied I hadn’t even taken a shower.
“Which one of you is Tabitha?” Samuel asked.
“Me,” I said. Samuel looked at me for a long time, his eyes traveling up and down my body. I had never felt like a whore before that, even when my college boyfriend had treated me like one. I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Well, you look very nice,” he said finally.
“Yes, very respectable,” Professor Korloff said coolly. “You all look nice. Pascal! Come over here. Now, then. What can Fabrizio get you girls to drink?”
We anxiously accepted glasses of Lillet. After a few painful minutes, the voices I’d heard from the lawn traveled up the stairs, growing louder. The boys burst in, a glad sight to me in their dinner jackets, carrying with them that enviable, boisterous air of having just come from the most amusing party on earth.
“Where have you been?” Samuel asked.
“Down in Gubbio, then we had to dress.” He introduced himself cordially but disinterestedly as Ben, Samuel’s son. He was twenty-four and at university in Rome. He had three friends: Jean, Marc, and Raffie. There was also Roberto, who was older and portly, with a tan, likable face.
As soon as we spoke to these specimens of the opposite sex, it was instantly understood among Anna, Luka, Jenny, and me that Ben and his friends were gay. That Samuel seemed oblivious to this fact—the rest of the evening, he made references to our pairing off—could be nothing other than stubborn denial. The men other than Roberto talked of going on holiday together, of going to clubs, of their boyfriends. Ben was the most aloof, and, it must be said, he never himself admitted to having a gay lover. But it was more than understood, which is why, with much of the pressure off, we females began drinking with abandon—even Anna—and having rather a good time.
The night was unseasonably warm, so at Ben’s insistence we ate on the lawn, as the dining hall was “an absolute crypt.” The table had been dressed with a starched cloth and set with silver, an assortment of crystal, and several bouquets of herbs. The trellis had been strung with white lights, and tall candles flickered on silver candelabras. Someone had even taken the trouble to put out place cards, ensuring that the company was properly mixed. Anna was next to the professor. Jenny and Luka were placed in the center of the men. I was near the end, next to Samuel, who headed the table with solemn duty.
The servers came out immediately, silent and quick, averting their eyes from ours. Our wineglasses were filled to the brim with a sharp white. Samuel gave a grim toast to the legacy of academia and the common man. And then, before we could even put down our glasses, the food started to come.
There was an antipasti course of four different types of shaved ham, surrounded by carved melon so sweet its curves pooled with juice; bufala mozzarella made that morning; pecorino, slightly oily, with cold fresh fig compote. Fried zucchini flowers, still hot and spilling over with fresh ricotta. Goose pâté laced with pine nuts. After that: large trays of fresh fettuccini in oil topped with shaved truffles and cream. A fillet of beef so rare it bled, served with a trio of pink, white, and black salts. A salad of arugula tossed with virgin olive oil, toasted hazelnuts, and vinegar. Another platter of cheeses, shot through with blue mold and truffles, served with fresh figs, pears, and plums. And finally, a panna cotta, cold and quivering, topped with sap-colored honey from the castle’s hive. Each course was served with its own wine, so that by the third course, the lot of us were not only full, but pleasantly drunk.
Anna was holding back, terrified as she was of Professor Korloff, but Luka was quite cozy with her new friends from Rome, who were thrilled by her intimate knowledge—real or not—of the private life of Rupert Everett, a “close personal friend of her father’s.” Next to them, Jenny was letting old Roberto lean in cozily, affording a generous view of her ample bosom.
As I watched them, I had the acute feeling that I didn’t fit in. I did know some of the celebrity gossip from Luka, but I didn’t want to sound distasteful, so I tried to switch the topic to the politics I’d been studying in the paper.
“And what about Berlusconi? When he runs again, will he have a chance?”
“Tabitha is one of my brightest,” Professor Korloff said. “Though she doesn’t know that politics aren’t always fodder for parties.”
“Not at mine,” Samuel said. I would later learn that Samuel was a personal friend of the prime minister. Still, the gentle reprimand reinforced the feeling that I was a fly caught on the wrong side of a pane of glass.
I was seated next to Samuel, who did not bother to talk, but glanced up from time to time at the table with a sad, rather hopeless expression, then turned his attentions back to his dinner. It was an awkward place, sandwiched in between Jenny and Roberto’s obvious oncoming affair and the sullen proprietor. Finally, when the limoncello bottle was empty and all that was left of the panna cotta were sticky plates, I broke the silence.
“Do you miss your wife?”
“No.”
I nodded, and looked desperately down the table.
“Poor lamb, that was not what you were counting on.”
“Oh, no. I—”
“There was a time when I would have said yes. I bought this place for her, you know. She is an ace of a woman. Legendary, really.”
“I saw pictures. When I was looking around.”
“And there’s Ben, of course. But she and I are so sick of each other now, I’m afraid. It’s a hazard of long marriages. We’d divorce, but it’s so tiresome.”
“My parents are the same way. Apart but not divorced.”
“Are they? How interesting.” He said this as if it were the least interesting thing he’d ever heard. “We’ll get around to it, I suppose. Eventually. Luckily my life affords us much time apart.”
“I see.”
“No you don’t. You’re all of … what? Eighteen?”
In the candlelight, his face was gray and waxy. I couldn’t begin to guess how old he was. Younger than the professor, but not by much.
“Twenty-one. I’m nearly graduated.”
“Congratulations.” He turned away, dismissing me. “Ben, what now? Are you children going to town?”
“I suppose so.”
“I’ll get our things,” Anna said quickly, and disappeared, I suspected for a cigarette out of sight of the professor.
“Ben promised us a ghost,” Raffie said. “You can hear her walk in the dark.”
“How wonderful,” Professor Korloff said.
“Oh, you don’t want to take these girls poking about the dank rooms. It’s morbid.”
“No, we’ll love it,” Jenny said, who was now practically sitting in Roberto’s lap. “Really.”
“It would be fun,” Pascal said.
“Don’t you want to take them into Gubbio, Ben? Fabrizio can drive you.”
“I don’t think the girls want to go where we tend to go, Father.” Ben poured himself a drink from the grappa bottle, which had mysteriously appeared while I wasn’t looking.
“Here, let’s let this one decide,” Raffie said, nodding to Anna, who had returned with our purses. “Mediocre club in Gubbio, or a private ghost tour in a haunted castle?”
“Is there even a question?” Anna asked.
“Excellent!” Professor Korloff bellowed, beaming at his protégée. Samuel pulled out a cigar and waved us on. The rest of us trotted after Ben, leaving the remnants of our dinner—smears of cream, pools of bloodred balsamic on white plates, the pits and stems of sucked brandied cherries.
Anna, Luka, Professor Korloff, and Pascal were at the front, engaged in lively conversation about trapped spirits. They were followed by Jenny and Roberto, who were now holding hands. Fraught with unreasonable melancholy, I trailed behind, looking idly into the different chambers. After a while the others disappeared around a corner, but I could still hear them, so I stepped into the music room to look at the portraits there.
There were eight of them, oils at least ten feet tall, of what appeared to be the family in the eighteenth century. There was a small boy in a powdered wig, posing proudly by his mother, a romantic background of trees and sky behind them. There was a woman in her thirties, sumptuously dressed in red-and-silver brocade, her shoulders white and sloped, her face limited by an incongruous nose and close-set eyes, even under the kind brush of the commissioned artist. There was a severe-looking cardinal, dressed in black, bald with a long gray rather sharp-looking beard, inexplicably holding a tiny horse in his hand. And there was a pretty little girl, again in a powdered wig, in an intensely uncomfortable-looking, elegant dress of blue silk. At her feet was a little dog, jumping up on her hem.
So they had dogs, I thought. Were they pets? Or were—
And then, everything went dark.
I gasped and stumbled toward the door. The lights, as far as I could tell, had been turned out throughout the castle. There was no moon, though some sort of dim light was coming from the hallway. An emergency light. I made my way to it, clutching the wall. My hand brushed a ceramic vase and it crashed to the ground, shattering. I could hear my friends’ laughter, but it was very far away now, and I was too frightened to try to find the stairs to get out. I thought about those portraits, those dead faces on the wall, and slid down to the floor, put my head on my knees, and waited.
“Ben!” Samuel’s voice, angry, burst up the stairs. Thinking of the vase, I pushed myself away from it. “Ben, that’s enough of this foolishness! Turn on the breaker!” He was on the landing now, marching forward. His foot crunched the shards of pottery.
“Damnit! Ben—is someone there?”
He turned on his torch and shined it into my face.
“Ah. The Indian princess.” He laughed a bit scornfully. “Well. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, embarrassed. I got up, brushing off my skirt. “I just got a little scared, is all.”
“Ah.” He softened a bit. “You’re all right. Why aren’t you with Ben?”
“I just stopped to look at the portraits.”
“Hmmm.” Samuel sighed. “They aren’t very good, but they’re interesting. Well. My charming son and his friends appear to have switched off the fuse for effect.” He swung his light toward the center of the castle, but the weak light made only a feeble attempt to fend off the darkness. “Are you having fun?”
“I’m not Indian,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“My mother is Israeli.”
“You’re nice-looking, whatever you are. That’s what’s important.”
“It is?”
“In your current situation, yes.”
I was drunker than I thought. “That’s—I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that you, and your compatriots, are here to offer charm and beauty to the party. Arthur brought Elena and me some young things to make us feel relevant. She donates an exorbitant amount of money to his research, so it’s certainly fair. You are part of that decoration committee, my dear. As it happens, you are the most interesting of the four.”
“I don’t think so.”
“There’s no question, actually. Not a classic beauty, but interesting. There are channels in there to be tapped.”
We stood there in the dark, that fading man and I, breathing together in the bowels of his house. We could hear the others giggling in the rooms above. Jenny’s shriek ricocheted down a stairwell.
“Let’s go somewhere with lights,” he said. “I’m too old for this. Come to my study, it’s on a different breaker. We’ll wait out their idiocy and get my ass of a son to turn the lights back on.”
I paused. It wasn’t appealing, following this man to his private rooms. But neither was waiting in the dark.
“This way,” he said, stepping ahead.
* * *
Samuel led me to a living room behind a closed door, more sumptuous than the rest, with velvet wallpaper and deep sofas. He walked to a sideboard, took two crystal glasses, and poured us both some brandy. I took it tentatively and stood by the window, afraid to sit down.
“They should be down soon,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
“You are, and it’s fine.”
He took a book from the shelf and began to read, not seeming to mind that I was standing there, doing nothing. After a few minutes of pretending to stare out the window, I sat on the sofa and took a large swallow.
“She sits,” Samuel said, looking up. “Progress.”
“Sure.”
“So tell me a little about yourself. Tabitha.”
Tell me about yourself. So few people ever said that to me, or cared. There was Fiona, so loud and vibrant. My athletic cousins, rugby champions both. At home I was drowned out by their voices. Are you fine? my mother would ask. Yes, Ma, I’m fine.
“I’m a student. At Nottingham. Third year.”
“Nottingham … no wonder you wanted to get out.”
“It’s a good school.”
“It’s a factory,” he said. He took another sip of scotch. “And what are you studying?”
