Marazan (20 page)

Before I had time to get out, the driver tumbled down from his box and rang the bell. It went jangling mournfully somewhere inside the place. Almost immediately one half of the door swung open, and I was faced with a grave old gentleman in evening dress. He had white hair cropped very close to his head.

I mustered my wretched Italian to my aid. ‘Il Signore Giovanni de Leglia, è a casa?’ I said.

He said something that I didn’t quite catch, with a rapid dignity; I think he was asking me my business. I got out my note-case and produced a card; he went fumbling in the tail pockets of his coat till he produced a pair of iron-rimmed spectacles with which to scrutinise it. That gave me a minute’s grace, and in that time I concocted a wonderful sentence to the effect that my business was urgent and could not be delayed. I fired that off at him; he waited patiently till I had finished, and then gave utterance to that magic formula that pervades all Italy.

‘Subito, subito,’ he said gravely.

I made my driver understand that he was to wait for me, and passed in through the gates, which closed behind me. I found myself in an open courtyard with a cloister running round the walls; in the centre there was a fountain playing, with goldfish in the bowl below, and the place was bright with flowers. The major-domo rang a bell and presently a boy appeared; I was left in his care while the old retainer crossed the courtyard and disappeared from view, my card in his hand.

I thanked my stars that Leglia was at home. I put great faith in Leglia; though I hadn’t seen him for all those years, I was positive that he would be able to help me. Looking back now, I am a little surprised at that. I’m too old to cherish illusions; I don’t generally trust people so much as that. This time I did, and I wasn’t let down.

After ten minutes or so the old man returned, and motioned to me to follow him. As we passed through the cloister I noticed an invalid chair standing in a corner. It was the sort of thing that can be manipulated up and down stairs; it had cushions in it and seemed to be in frequent use. I wondered idly which of Leglia’s family was forced to adopt this means of locomotion. I thought that in all probability it was his mother. I knew nothing about his family or his private affairs at that time.

The journey through the house seemed endless. It was an immense place, full of the sort of furniture that makes a house look like a museum. We went through corridor after corridor, now and then up a flight of stairs, always mounting a little higher till we were well above the level of the surrounding houses. I could see that much from occasional glimpses of the town as we passed windows. At last we came to a heavy door at the end of a wide stone passage. We were on the top floor then; so much was evident from the rafters that supported the roof, stained and carved like the roof beams of a church. The old man opened this door, stood aside for me to pass into the room, and closed it softly behind me.

It was a high, vaulted room, with a wide polished floor. There was a window at the far end opening on to a balcony; beyond that there was a fine view over the roofs of the city, the river, and the country beyond rising into hills. I looked round for Leglia. For a moment I could see nothing of him, and then I saw that he was lying on a couch just inside the window.

I went striding across the room towards him. As I went it was strange to me to see how old he looked. The years had made more difference to him than I could have dreamed.

He greeted me gaily.

‘Stenning, Captain,’ he cried. ‘This will be magnificent, to meet again.’

‘By Gad, Lillian,’ I said. ‘I’m damn glad to see you.’

And then I saw why he had not got up to meet me, why he had never met me in Paris as we had arranged, why the years had pressed so heavily upon him.

He was a cripple. Both legs had been amputated above the knee.

L
EGLIA
was genuinely pleased to see me. Within three minutes his retainer had been recalled with instructions to collect my bag and to dismiss my carriage; while I remained in Florence there was only one place where I could stay. It was with some difficulty that I avoided a second dinner. He switched off that and spoke rapidly to his man; I couldn’t follow what was said, but in ten minutes’ time a great platter of fruit arrived, with a perfectly corking bottle of Madeira. Then he set me up with a cigar, and I settled down in a chair by his couch to listen while he talked.

It appeared that his accident had happened very soon after he left us in France. It was the usual sort of thing; ninety per cent of the crashes at that time were things that never should have happened. He told me that he was teaching a young Infantry officer to fly on some underpowered, dual-control machine. There came the irritable moment when, staggering off the ground, he had shouted down the speaking-tube to his pupil—‘If you’re going to fly the machine, fly it at a decent speed—if not, for God’s sake leave it alone!’ He told me how he felt the wretched man pull the control stick back, how he gripped it and pushed it forward half a second too late, how he felt the machine slow up and lurch down ominously on to one wing tip, how he shouted: ‘Let go everything. You’ve done it now!’ They hit nose-down on to a little mound. Leglia was in the front seat; as the
fuselage telescoped, the engine came crashing back into the front cockpit upon his legs. The other man got off unhurt.

Very soon after that, he said, his father had been killed by a chance shell on the Austrian front. Leglia had come out of hospital towards the end of the war to find himself head of his family, Duca di Estalebona, Principe d’Acceglio, Marchese di Sarzana, Conte di Vall’ Estesa, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and a Grandee of Spain. He was rather funny about that, in his queer English way; he said that he needed a wheelbarrow for that little lot. He had never married. At first, he said, his relations had been assiduous in presenting eligible damsels for his attention and necessary action; he had had them up one by one to have a look at them, and had sent them away again. He remarked, a little bitterly, that shopping was no fun when you couldn’t go and look for the goods yourself.

He lived with his sister; for the benefit of his sister’s fair name he also gave house-room to an old aunt. There were two other brothers; one was in the Legation at Athens, the other in America. Leglia himself spent much of his time in his castle in the Apennines, the remainder in Florence. He told me that it was a great piece of luck that I had caught him in Florence. At that time of year he was generally in the country, but he had remained in Florence on account of a certain stirring in the local politics. He said that he thought his people needed him.

He said that with such a matter-of-fact air that for a moment I didn’t notice the authority with which he had spoken. In a minute or two I was puzzling over it; I was beginning to see that Leglia must be occupying a far more important position in the town than I had supposed. I remembered how the driver of my carriage had
behaved when I said I was for the Palazzo Leglia. I began to edge the conversation round to Florence and Italian politics, but I found that he needed very little encouragement to talk on what was evidently his favourite subject. It was rapidly getting dark. I sat there in the failing light sipping the Madeira and eating biscuits, and listened while he sketched the course of Italian politics through the years since the Fascist revolution. I was amazed to find how close a study he had made of the affairs of his country. The Leglia that I had known during the war had been a feather-headed young man, not especially remarkable for an interest in his country’s affairs. As he talked, it seemed to me that his knowledge must be something quite out of the ordinary even in a country of born politicians. He never mentioned himself, but there was a personal note all through his story that I found it very hard to account for. For him the politicians were live men, men whose characters he knew, men with whom he had argued. He spoke as if he were reading extracts from a diary.

‘You don’t seem to miss much that goes on in Italy,’ I remarked at last.

He laughed. ‘But I see … not very much of what goes on, is it not so?’ he said. ‘I go out only a little, only a little now and then. But sometimes my friends, they come to see me to talk about our country, so that I tell them what I think. They come to me to stay for a little in the country—from Milano, from Roma.’ He mused a little. ‘In England you have a proverb of the sport that sometimes I laugh about with my sister, because I think I am like that. The onlooker, he sees the most of the game. Non è vero?’

‘It seems to be,’ I said. ‘You can knock spots off anyone else I’ve ever met on Italy.’

He smiled happily. ‘Knock spots …’ he repeated.
‘The English slang, that I have not heard not since we were together. Always I have wished to travel in England, to see again the little town where I learnt the flying, And—Andover. That will be the only visit that ever I have paid to England. Always I have wished to return, to see again your pretty country. But.…’ He glanced down at his legs. ‘And I do not know any people.…’

I put him right about that. Then I leaned back in my chair and thought a bit. It was almost dark.

‘I say, Leglia,’ I said slowly at last. ‘I’ve not come to Italy for fun. I really came out to see if I could touch you for a bit of advice. I came to see if you could help me a bit. It’s about one of your countrymen.’

He raised his hand with a smile. ‘One moment,’ he said. ‘It is with pleasure that I am at your service of my countrymen, old bean. But for my countrywomen, I beg that you will remember that I am Giovanni da Leglia, and my people love me.’

That tickled me no end. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of coming to you about a girl. The man I want to find out something about is Baron Mattani.’

I saw him glance sharply at me. ‘Ah,’ he said quietly. ‘He is half English, by his mother.’

It had become so dark that I could see very little in the room. Leglia lay silent on his couch in the gloom, quietly puffing a cigarette, waiting for me to go on.

‘Does he cut much ice in Italy?’ I asked.

He laughed suddenly. ‘The argot!’ he explained. ‘I had not heard the word till I was with you, and I had forgotten.’ He became serious again. ‘He cuts much ice, very much. He is popular, as the papers say. He has the press.’

‘What do you think of him yourself?’ I asked.

He flicked the ash from his cigarette. ‘For myself,’ he said evenly, ‘the Leglias do not smuggle spirits. But in Italy it is not always that one will speak one’s thoughts.’ He turned to me. ‘Now you shall tell me what you want to know of Baron Mattani. If it is that I cannot answer, yet you shall know to-morrow or the next day.’

‘He murdered a pal of mine a few days ago,’ I said bluntly. ‘I want to see him extradited and hung.’

It was a long time before he spoke again.

‘Murder …’ he said at last. ‘That will be something new.’

I knocked out my pipe and filled it again. ‘It’s about that that I came to Italy,’ I said. ‘I can tell you about it if you like. But it’s a long story.’

He lit a small reading-lamp that stood on the table by his couch; in the soft light I could see that he was very serious.

‘Tell me, Capitano mio,’ he said. ‘Of Baron Mattani the littlest things are important to one who loves Italy. And murder is more still.’

For a moment I was at a loss as to where I should begin the tale. ‘Did you know that Mattani had an English stepbrother?’ I said. ‘It was he who was killed.’

Leglia swore, very softly, in Italian. I glanced at him in surprise; in the soft light of the lamp I could see that he was immensely shocked. In Italy there is a great sense of the family unity, far more so than in England. To us a murder is a murder, whoever it be. In Italy, I think, there are degrees of murder and fratricide is a very bad business.

I could see now that Leglia was intensely interested. He lay listening to me for the most part in silence; now and then he snapped out a question when I had not made myself clear, or when he had missed the meaning
of the English. I told him the story straight ahead from the beginning, and left out nothing.

By the time I had finished it was nearly midnight. For a long time he sat smoking in silence, staring out over the quiet roofs of the city, bright in the moonlight. I knew what he was thinking about; his mind was running on the politics of his country. He was wondering what this would mean for Italy. I left him to it, and we sat like that for a quarter of an hour in silence. At last he threw away his cigarette.

‘You will be tired from your journey,’ he said, ‘and it is late. We will go to bed, and to-morrow we will talk. As you have said, I do not think that Baron Mattani will have forgotten you. But for to-night you will be safe in my house. To-morrow, when you have met my friends, you will be safe in the town. There is nobody in all Florence that will not see to a friend of Giovanni da Leglia.’

On this eloquent note we went to bed. He rang for his servant and I was shown to my room. For a hot-weather bedroom it was a pretty good spot. The floor was of stone with little rugs on it. Both the walls and the ceiling were panelled with dark cedar, with little patterns picked out upon the beams in blue and white paint.

I noticed these next morning as I was sitting up in bed over my breakfast. The valet who had brought the tray was quite a boy, with a rich crop of bright red hair. He referred to the meal proudly as a ‘colazione Inglese’, and it was certainly a noble effort for a household where breakfast was unknown. There was coffee, a sort of stuffed tomato with olives round it, a kidney aristocratically perched upon a bit of haddock, the cold leg of a small roast chicken, rolls, butter, and preserved ginger. I did pretty well by it, gratified at the thought
that had evidently been spent over my comfort. Then I got up.

The red-haired boy came in in the middle and wanted to shave me, but I sent him away with a flea in his ear. He told me that Leglia was already up, and was sitting in the cloister. I had a bath, dressed, wished my suit was a little more respectable, and went downstairs.