Phantom (21 page)

And so it went on throughout Luciana's turbulent childhood—the rows, the scenes, the interminable conflict between Isabella and myself. Where once we lived in perfect harmony there was now only constant discord, and all of it shamelessly propagated by the exquisitely pretty child whose willful winsomeness was the delight of my late middle age. Surrounded as I was by a colorless crop of females, Luciana seemed like a mischievous ray of sunshine peeping between dignified clouds; I was always powerless to resist the enchanting pout and the overly ready tears.

Ten years on, I was finally obliged to admit that what had been so utterly irresistible at three was not half so beguiling at thirteen. A widower by then, a full decade older and less able to cope with the spectacular manifestations of Luciana's unstable personality, I was beginning to understand that Isabella's fears had not been without ground. The child began to run wild when her mother died. She lived for a brief time with Angela and wreaked such havoc in her sister's household that I was forced to admit the need to send her away to a place where she ' might learn the harsh lessons of self-restraint.

The convent school I chose was near Milan, far enough from home to discourage any thoughts of running away, yet close enough to the aunt who undertook to take charge of her in the brief Christmas and Easter vacations. Always beguiled by the prospect of novelty, Luciana departed cheerfully enough for Milan; but within a fortnight I had received the first of a series of tragic little letters.

Dearest Papa,

I am so very unhappy here. The nuns are very unkind and none of the girls like me… Please, please change your mind and say I may come home to you at Christmas after all.

That letter kept me awake all night. I got up before there was a glimmer of light in the sky and wandered distractedly down to the nearest site… and it was there that I saw Erik that first time and gained the strength to resist the artful pleas of my wicked little daughter.

I determined to keep to my original intention for once. Luciana would not be allowed to come home until summer.

But now summer was upon me and still I had not told him.

Why?

over Rome the bells were ringing and calling the faithful to early-morning Mass. As I came out into the courtyard, adjusting the set of my hat, I tried to pretend I had not noticed Erik quietly pruning the Chinese wisteria that crept up the trellis work. He never came with me to Mass and I firmly resisted the temptation to ask him to do so. The boy's devotion to me had grown to the point where I strongly suspected he would cut off a finger should I once suggest that I had need of it. If he ever returned to the faith I wished it to be for love of God and not for love of me…

It was Sunday, a good day to make a resolution and stick to it, and I determined that as soon as I returned from Mass I would tell him about Luciana. But just as I was pulling on my gloves there was the sound of carriage wheels in the street outside and I frowned. I wasn't expecting visitors…

She flew into the courtyard to my unready embrace like a little bird let out of its cage, her heavy hair flying out behind her like a cloak of black silk and her piquant face flushed with excitement.

"Papa, Papa, I'm home! I thought I'd never get here, it's been such a horrid journey, so hot and tiresome! Oh, Papa… what's the matter, aren't you pleased to see me?"

"Luciana…" I held her eager little figure slightly away from me, as one might seek to fend off the attentions of a lovable but overexuberant puppy. "My darling girl, what are you doing here? I didn't expect you for another week!"

"Oh, I know, isn't it wonderful? Sister Agnes and Sister Elizabeth have the fever and we've all been sent home early because of it."

"Surely there should have been some notification, Luciana—a letter at the very least."

She pouted prettily. "Oh, we were all told to write home, and, Papa, I really did mean to do it, but somehow I just never seemed to have a moment. And I knew it wouldn't matter, I knew you'd be here… Oh, Papa, please don't be cross with me, not on my first day home."

I kissed her hot cheek helplessly and turned to look at the tall figure who had silently taken refuge behind the riot of trailing foliage. The moment I had been instinctively avoiding could be avoided no longer.

"Erik," I said quietly, yet with an unmistakable note of command in my voice, "I would like you to come and meet my youngest daughter, Luciana."

For a long moment he did not move and then slowly, reluctantly, he unfurled himself from the shadows to glide across the courtyard beneath the shelter of the cloak in which he had hastily shrouded himself. He glanced at me briefly, with pained surprise, and I had the uncomfortable suspicion that his face might well have turned as white as the mask that hid it.

Luciana was staring at him—but not as I had expected her to stare, with vulgar, tactless curiosity. Her eyes were resting on the mask with a sort of glazed fascination and she seemed to be holding her breath as she held out her hand to him.

Erik bowed gracefully, but his hand stopped just short of her gloved fingers and I noticed that he took great care not to touch her.

"Mademoiselle," he said softly, "I must ask you to pardon my intrusion upon a private moment of reunion. Sir"

—he turned to make exactly the same little bow of courtesy to me—"I should be glad if you would excuse me… ?"

There was nothing I could do in the face of his icy formality except make the signal of assent that freed him to return to the house without a backward glance at either of us.

When he had gone Luciana clutched my arm with urgent and barely concealed excitement.

"Oh, Papa," she breathed, with that ominously familiar note of subdued hysteria in her voice, "who
is
he?"

The peaceful idyll of pupil and master came to an end with Luciana's return, just as I had secretly feared it must. She appeared in our quiet, ordered firmament like a spectacular shooting star, and in her wake the bond that had been growing steadily between Erik and myself suffered inevitable strain. He no longer came to dine at my table, preferring to eat alone in the cellar. Nor did he come to sit anymore of an evening beside my hearth, and permit me to delve at my leisure into the bottomless wonders of a unique imagination.

His response confirmed the deep-rooted unease which had held me silent all these months. It was inevitable that a boy who so worshiped beauty in every form would be dumbstruck by Luciana's heartrending loveliness, and I was not surprised that his immediate reaction should be to bury himself behind a wall of silence and retreat to the cellar like a wounded animal going to ground. I had expected him to back away in pained horror from a situation that threatened to strip away all his natural defenses.

What I had not anticipated was Luciana's response to his guarded aloofness, the inner misery and outrageous bad behavior that his determined reserve and cold correctness provoked in her. They scarcely met—he made very sure of that—but those occasions when they did were charged with the intolerable tension generated by Luciana's hurt pride. The boy ignored her because he was afraid to betray himself to further pain, but Luciana could not bear his apparent indifference. And she began to demand his attention with rudeness, sarcasm, and ridicule—the very things life had taught him to expect.

For a month I was forced to stand by helplessly, watching my headstrong daughter fall in love not with a living, breathing boy, but with a dream, a fantasy inspired by the primeval mystery of the mask. Once I chose to look with Luciana's eyes, it was very easy to see and understand the primitive allure of that almost regal dignity, the curious, hypnotic quality of that unique voice. Beneath my roof I was sheltering a young prince of darkness. The sensuality of power radiated from his every gesture, but he remained entirely unaware of his extraordinary ability to attract. There were women here in Rome—women all over the world—who would have gladly sunk themselves in his shadow, had he only known it, had he dared to look beyond the cage in which he had determined to imprison himself. But he was blind to the most essential element of his own magnetism. Someone had taught him to expect only rejection and revulsion in this world and now, in the natural shyness of youth, he was merely repeating to himself whatever painful lessons he had been forced to learn by rote in childhood.

Day after day I watched him suffer the cruel agony of first love. He did not speak of his feelings to me—how could he?—but in every swing of his mallet, every thrust of his chisel, I felt his pain, and my helplessness grieved me. I watched him driving his young body to the breaking point on the site in an effort to escape from the intolerable reality of loving a shallow, frivolous child who was entirely unworthy of him. And I could say nothing and do nothing because the bitter truth was that that shallow, unworthy child was my daughter and I loved her dearly in spite of her selfish triviality.

All I could do was pray that the end of summer would release them both from this powder keg of unexploded emotion. When Luciana returned to the convent there would be another year of grace, a whole year for them to grow up and away from feelings that they were both—for vastly differing reasons—emotionally incapable of expressing in an acceptable manner.

During that terrible month of subdued hostility and repressed yearning, it was the one peg upon which I hung all my hope of peace.

I was a fool.

I should have known my daughter well enough by then…

She wasn't pretending when she told me she was too ill to go back to Milan. Luciana never needed to pretend. From earliest infancy she had always possessed the ability to make herself thoroughly ill whenever it suited her purposes, and now the eyes that looked beseechingly into mine were unquestionably fever bright, and her pulse throbbing beneath my fingers like a butterfly's wing.

I went downstairs grimly to dismiss the waiting carriage and ask Erik to prepare an infusion. I had no confidence in the remedies of apothecaries, but I did have the greatest respect for the boy's herbal knowledge.

"She is ill?" One hand went to his throat in an instinctive gesture that betrayed his anguished alarm.

"It's nothing serious, just a low fever, but she will not be able to travel for a while. I thought perhaps you might know of something—"

"Yes," he said hastily, "there is something… she wouldn't take anything bitter, though, would she? Perhaps I can sweeten it with honey."

And he turned away with an air of distraction that only heightened my growing concern.

"I don't want it!" said Luciana mutinously when I presented the potion an hour later. "You know I hate medicines, Papa."

"Very well," I said coolly, "I shall tell Erik that you refused to take it like the baby that you are."

She sat up suddenly, pushing back the heavy hair from her flushed face.

"Erik?" she echoed wonderingly. "
Erik
made this for me?"

Reaching out her hand she took the little wooden goblet from me and swallowed its contents without another murmur of protest.

And that was the moment when I finally acknowledged defeat. I was too old, too sick, and too generally weak minded where she was concerned to make a stand on any issue that Luciana had determined to fight.

She didn't go back to Milan.

The tragedy had already begun.

I never went down to the cellar. From the very first I had respected the boy's right to privacy, his deep-seated need to have one place that he might call his own. So, although I was annoyed to learn that Luciana had been prowling about there during his absence, I could not resist a small, unworthy flicker of curiosity.

"It's so strange down there, Papa," she said with awe. "The floor is covered with drawings and sheets of music, and all the shelves where Mama used to keep preserves are full of…
things. "

"What sort of things?" I demanded uneasily.

"I don't know, Papa, they're not like anything I've ever seen before. There are lots of coils and wires, and when I touched one it shot sparks."

"You have no business to be interfering with things that do not concern you," I said mechanically. "Keep out of that cellar in future, do you understand me?"

"Yes, Papa." She sighed.

I was alarmed. Concern overcame my dislike of prying, and when I was alone once more I picked up a candle and lit my way down to the cool chamber that ran beneath my house.

I realized as I gazed around in astonishment that I had entered the laboratory of an extraordinary inventor. My knowledge of science was somewhat perfunctory, but I thought I recognized apparatus that appertained to the study of electrical impulses. And there was more, much more that I did not even begin to understand, row upon row of working models—at least I
assumed
they worked— whose very mystery seemed oddly threatening. The boy labored fourteen hours a day on my sites and yet still retained the energy to sit up most of the night tinkering, drawing, composing. I remembered noticing now that even on the sites his interest was turning increasingly to engineering problems, to solutions that lay beyond the compass of a master mason. Once or twice he had made such astonishingly crack-brained suggestions that 1 had been tempted to laugh out loud at him.

But perhaps after all they were not simply the ludicrous notions of an absurdly fevered imagination…

I went back upstairs, determining that I would say nothing about what I had seen. I trusted his common sense sufficiently to be reasonably certain that he was not about to blow my home off the face of the earth in the course of some crazy experiment.

But I was disturbed by this fresh evidence of his inability to rest with my daughter in the house. I wondered what ran through his tortured mind during those hours of darkness when ordinary mortals lay snoring peacefully in their beds.

And my primitive, wordless unease continued to grow.

*

At the end of spring Luciana's shamelessly scheming mind prompted her to hit upon a new means of luring Erik from the cellar. She wanted to transform the old rooftop garden into a beautiful arbor, and part of her scheme was a new travertine bench which she required the boy to carve.