[Barbara Samuel] Night of Fire(Book4You) (27 page)

Blinking, the girl looked around, and said, softly, "Oh!"

"Poet! Sir Poet!" The cry came from a matron, squeezed tightly into her gown, an abundance of powdered bosom spilling out above. "You must read for us!"

Cassandra automatically translated, and Analise gave a laugh. "I do not think it is exactly his poetry she is longing for, do you?"

Surprised, Cassandra laughed with her. It felt good, the shaking loose of laughter. It had been too long.

She knew she should stand, take her leave, escape while it was still possible, but something held her there. A strange protectiveness engendered by the girl's small hand in her own, perhaps. The bevy of women descending on Basilio could be a cruel lot, and Cassandra could not abandon Analise to them.

Or perhaps it was only the need, however wrong it was, that Cassandra felt to simply look at him. It amazed her, sitting there in the late warm sun, what an enormous tide of emotion he could rouse in her. It never waned, not even a little. Every detail of him seemed dear. The lobes of ears and the cut of his mouth, and his thickly fringed and beautiful eyes that fixed on her, clear and direct.
You see?
his eyes said to her.

And Cassandra nodded, as if they spoke without words.

The bevy of women surrounded him but Basilio kept walking toward Cassandra and Analise, listening, laughing, donning a charmer's guise. He knew these were the women who would increase his fame, and did not take it lightly. One pressed a copy of the book into his hands.

"Have you read it, his book?" Analise asked.

"No. I have not yet had the opportunity. Have you?"

"I have heard him read, but he composes in English."

Basilio reached the bench, the ladies in their bright gowns crying out for him to read, leaning on his arm, fawning around him.

Cassandra repressed a smile, and he caught it. "What say you, madam?" he said to her. "Shall I read?"

And it was, suddenly, impossible that she could pretend that what had passed between them had never been. She smiled, very slightly. "As you wish."

"Will you translate for my wife?" he asked in Italian.

Caught by the entreaty in his eyes, she nodded. Fear made her hands clammy. In a voice that was more breathless than she would have liked, she told Analise, "I cannot promise to make the Italian as beautiful as his English."

"At least I will understand the spirit."

Basilio opened the book, seemingly at random. The whispers and rustles settled until there was only the sound of the birds in the background, twittering and calling, and the distant sound of the musicians playing Handel.

The world narrowed for Cassandra—narrowed to his hands, loosely clasping the book, to his throat, to the place above his upper lip where he'd shaved so cleanly, to the fan of his lashes over his cheekbones.

At last he began to read, his voice lilting. Cassandra listened, unsure she could capture the rhyme scheme he used, and decided suddenly that it was not necessary.

Quietly, earnestly, she began to translate:

"How to capture the magic of moments? How to capture the perfection when the sunlight falls,
just so, across the gray branch of an olive?"

He raised his eyes, speaking to Cassandra alone. Captured by his eyes, by the burning in them, she dropped her voice even lower.

"
I am driven to it
," she said quietly in Italian, "
again and again, like the painters who try to capture
the light here, driven to the attempt to capture God in some small way. The soft brown swell of
the sea swirling over bare white feet, the way a woman bends her head and shows the soft, clean
place on the back of her neck…"

Cassandra translated faithfully, her heart shattering a little more with each word, each image, all of it

drenched with Tuscan sunlight and the taste of Basilio's kisses. He spoke of olives and plums and the smell of a woman's mouth.

Around him, the women's eyes filled with tears of appreciation, their mouths going soft in wonder and yearning. It was his passion they responded to, the reflection of a side of man they wished they could taste for more than a moment of playacting during seduction. Cassandra ached with the recognition that he was truly rare in this, that his passion was not illusion.

Cassandra closed her eyes, whispering to Analise in Italian, letting the pictures he roused float through her mind, so bittersweet and beautiful that she could do naught but let them fill her.

" 'And always,' " he finished softly, " 'I labor imperfectly. Always imperfectly.'"

Cassandra translated the last words in a whisper, feeling the tight clutch of Analise's fingers around her own. She opened her eyes and Basilio stood there, his mouth sober, his eyes fixed purely on Cassandra.

"Thank you," he said, bowing, and turned away. "No more today, ladies. I have suddenly got a headache."

Without waiting for Analise or for release from the bevy of ladies, he swiftly moved away, nearly running by the time he made the doors.

The women drifted away, fans fluttering, their voices circling in sighs.

Analise and Cassandra sat without speaking for a long time. At last, Analise said, "Do you hear that music of love in his voice? I thought it was the love of a woman, but perhaps he simply loves the world and everything in it."

Cassandra's throat was tight with guilt and love and unshed tears. "Perhaps," she said quietly.

"I have never thought of the world in that way before—that it is the hand of God on everything.

It makes it far less wicked." She stood, a faint frown on her brow. "It is all God's creation."

"As you are," Cassandra said, reminding herself.

"Perhaps I should go to him now." She rose. "Many thanks, Lady Cassandra. It was a pleasure to meet you. Perhaps you will visit me."

"I would like that." She rose and kissed both cheeks in the Italian way, then stepped back. "Go to him now."

Basilio burned. A good rain at suppertime had washed the air clean, leaving behind a taste of summer in the mild wind. It reminded him unbearably of Cassandra and August and plums, and he feared he might go mad within the walls of the townhouse.

So he had seen Analise home, and murmured an excuse and left again immediately. He had been walking for hours in the London streets, walking past pubs and dress shops and homes and churches, through squares and along parkways. Walking and walking and walking, to give himself what little peace there was to be found in movement.

It had been a terrible mistake to come to London, even for the benefit of his work. He had not thought what he would do when he arrived here, only let the force of his passion carry him here like a stormy sea.

And now he gasped on the beach like a dying fish, unable to breathe or think or act in his own behalf.

His sin had ever been too much emotion; even his indulgent mother had worried over it. Too much love for the look and taste and feeling of things, too much sorrow for the sadness in the world, too much passion for the pleasure of food and women and drink. Excessiveness would lead to ruin, she admonished him, many times.

And what could this feeling in him be called if it not excessive? It was beyond excessive. It was the excess of excessiveness.

He had not felt like himself in weeks, his mind unbalanced by his yearning for one kiss from Cassandra's mouth, one moment in her arms. Day and night his mind was filled with a wilderness of images—her hair and her eyes and her laughter. When he slept, he dreamed of their limbs entwined; he awakened to the taste of ashes that it was not real. In the dark of night, he entertained a host of fantasies—all of them impossible. His duty, her duty, Analise, even their writing, stood between them.

Everything stood between them.

And nothing.

It did not seem to matter what stood between them; the passion remained. A pain went through him as he thought again of her eyes this afternoon, so sober and steady, sheened with tears as she listened to him read, translating the words back to Analise.

Only their eyes met, and they spoke in the secret language that was contained in his poetry—symbols none but she would know. He had not missed the hurried rise of her breasts as she gazed at him steadily, and he thought it was the first time she had ever heard the poem.

His feet inevitably carried him to her tall house on Piccadilly Street. It was full dark, finally—he could not believe how late the light lingered here—and growing quiet. A dog barked distantly and Basilio heard the clopping of horses followed by the rocking of a carriage not far away. It did not turn his direction, and he looked back to Cassandra's house. He saw no lights in the front.

He stood there, wondering if he ought to simply go to the door and rouse her servant and insist that he be allowed in to speak with her. But no well-trained servant would let him in. And what could he say even if he were allowed in?

In sudden, mad inspiration, he walked to the garden gate and looked at the tree with branches leading to her balcony. He thought of Boccaccio, the story of a man who climbed a tree to his lover's room in the darkness, the first thing Cassandra had read to him that night in his villa.

He tried the gate and found it shamelessly unlocked. Then he was in the dark and cool of her private garden, smelling wallflowers and roses on the night. There was no light from her room, and he imagined himself creeping into the dark to her bed, like Anichino, the lover from Boccaccio—but he would frighten her.

Yet he was here, and his heart was pounding in recklessness and a freedom he had not known since that day she'd left him. Shedding his coat, then shucking his shoes and stockings so he could climb more easily, he leapt into the crotch of the tree and scrambled along the thick branch.

But this was beyond reckless, beyond passion—his love had driven him purely insane. What sort of man allowed his emotions to carry him to such a blatantly dishonorable act? How could he make love to her when he was wed to another? No, that was the act of a man he would loathe.

Feeling heat in his cheeks, he scrambled back down and sat at the base of the tree on the cold damp ground, despair washing through him in vast waves. He would leave London now, return to Italy, attempt to make a life of some beauty with Analise. He did not think desire would ever be part of their union, but perhaps they should both overcome their distaste for sex and indulge enough to have some children. She would be a good mother, devoted and kind.

He saw his life stretching ahead of him, calm and ordinary. He would tend his estates and raise his children to follow after him. He would grow fat like his father, and spend too much time drinking wine on summer nights, remembering a season of great beauty, remembering the poetry that had come from him in that time, spilling out as abundantly as water from a spring.

Perhaps then, this was all. It was not so bad. He had known great love; he had written beautiful poetry.

And he would not be going back to poverty or to a shrewish wife who made his life a misery. He was rich and his wife was sweet, and there were many, many men who had never known those blessings. He had been quite blessed.