Season of Storms (27 page)

xvii

WHEN
we came into the house I would have said goodnight and headed to my room, but Alex stopped me. He’d been quiet on the drive up, so preoccupied that I’d assumed he’d want to be alone with his thoughts and the brown paper parcel that he’d carried so carefully up from the garage, but now here he was with his hand on my arm, saying, “Don’t go just yet. Please. I could do with the company. Someone to talk to.”

It surprised me at first that he’d asked, that he’d consider a virtual stranger like me ‘someone to talk to,’ until I reminded myself that Alex wasn’t a man who had friends falling out of the rafters, and Daniela didn’t seem the type to have a sympathetic ear.

He was Hamlet indeed, I thought, musing alone in this big empty house where the ghosts of his father and grandfather walked, in a figurative sense. But while Hamlet had at least had his Horatio, Alex had no one. Alex’s Horatio, I suspected, had died Sunday night at the side of the road. Which left him with only the greyhounds as confidantes, and at the moment he didn’t even have
them
 . . . they were still up with Poppy.

So of course I said yes, I’d be happy to sit up a little while longer and talk.

The Veranda della Diana was empty when we got there—Rupert had long since departed, going back to his own room, no doubt, with the prayer-book, to study its pages in private.

Alex switched on a floor lamp that spilled a warm pool of light over the arm of a cracked leather chair and onto the wine-red Oriental carpet. The striped draperies, closed round the room on three sides, lent the study a certain cosiness, a comfortably intimate feel that was helped by the low coffered ceiling and smell of old books. Behind the desk the bronze statue of Diana with her hunting dog and arrows gazed serenely past Alex’s shoulder as he turned a second light on.

He set the shoebox-sized parcel with care on the desk, and stared at it so long that I was half-convinced he’d forgotten about me. I took a seat anyway, choosing a cushioned cane armchair across from the leather one, and waited. At length Alex raised his head, surfacing; turned. “I don’t suppose you drink Scotch?” was the first thing he asked. “No? You don’t mind if I do?” Assured that I didn’t, he opened a drawer in his desk and removed a tall bottle and glass, bringing both with him as he crossed to the big leather armchair.

He sat. The light from the lamp at his side angled over his shoulder and caught the clear pale amber of his drink as he poured it. His face, though, was not in the light. He was frowning.

It was obvious that something had disturbed him, something connected, most likely, to the talk he’d just had with Teresa’s brother, and the parcel sitting now on his desk. But I didn’t like to ask, and since he was the one who had wanted my company, wanted to talk, I let him take the lead in conversation.

“I’m sorry I left you alone like that, down at Teresa’s. I didn’t know what Mauro wanted to speak with me about, you see, and so . . .” He frowned again. “I hope you didn’t mind.”

“Not at all. I was well taken care of. Teresa and her mother gave me wine and fed me and—”

“Mauro was friends with Giancarlo,” he said, interrupting me not from rudeness so much as from the fact his mind appeared to be following a single track. “What he told me tonight . . .” He broke off for a moment and took a long drink, then looked over at me for the first time. “You already know half the story of what Giancarlo was up to—you might as well know the rest.”

It crossed my mind to protest that he didn’t have to tell me; that this was after all a private matter, and not really any of my business . . . but Alex was already leaning back, settling in for a lengthy discussion.

“Mauro didn’t hear about Giancarlo’s death until tonight. He drives a lorry, Mauro—he’s been on the road since yesterday afternoon, and in all the confusion, I gather the family didn’t bother trying to contact him. They knew he’d be back today, sometime. Anyhow, according to Teresa, when he found out what had happened he went mad, and kept saying he needed to talk to me. That’s why Teresa phoned; why I went down.” He paused, took a quick sip of Scotch, and went on, “It turns out you were right—Giancarlo was in Sirmione yesterday. He stopped in to see Mauro on his way back. He didn’t have the car with him, Mauro said . . . he just turned up on the doorstep, walking. Said he’d caught the hydrofoil, which wasn’t quite his style. Giancarlo never liked the water.” I saw a brief shadow of memory and loss cross his face, but he steeled his expression against it. “Mauro was on his way out, with the lorry, but he thought it could wait a few minutes, while he had a drink with Giancarlo. He wanted to hear what was happening with Giancarlo’s little investigation; whether he’d found any proof that Pietro was stealing. Mauro doesn’t like Pietro, either,” Alex said, as an aside. He drank again, and swirled the Scotch around his glass. “Giancarlo said yes, he had proof. He told Mauro he’d made friends with an assistant at the jeweller’s shop, the shop he’d seen Pietro going into with the bag. Giancarlo said that this assistant—after several days and, one assumes, a fair amount of wine—had agreed to give him proof, and it was this Giancarlo wanted me to see, in Sirmione.”

It was my turn now to frown. “So why didn’t he keep his meeting with you?”

“Apparently he tried. He told Mauro that this friend of his, the jeweller’s assistant, was sure they were both being watched. The assistant refused to hand over the evidence as they had planned; he insisted on finding another location, somewhere safe. In the end he chose the hydrofoil. Very cloak and dagger,” Alex said. “Giancarlo told Mauro they had to jump on at the last minute, to be sure that this person—whoever he was—who had spooked the assistant, wouldn’t be able to follow.”

“But Giancarlo was able to get what he was after?”

“Yes. That box, there.” Alex nodded at the desk. “Giancarlo asked Mauro to keep it safe there, at the house—said he didn’t fancy carrying it around any more than he had to, he didn’t want it breaking. He said I could come down and see it there as easily as anywhere. And then he left. Mauro offered him a ride up in the lorry, but Giancarlo said he’d rather walk. The first sunny day, he said, after so much rain—it was good to be walking.” Again the shadow swiftly crossed his face. He raised his glass.

I said. “I am so very sorry. You were close to him, weren’t you?”

“Like brothers.” The words brought an ironic twist to his lips. “They say that every family has its curse. The curse of mine is infidelity. My grandfather’s affairs are public knowledge, and my father . . . well, he was his father’s son. Giancarlo’s mother was a very lovely woman.”

It took a moment for me to absorb what he was telling me, and then I simply said, “Oh,” because I couldn’t think of anything else
to
say.

“I don’t have any proof of it. My father never acknowledged any children but myself, but I had my suspicions. Giancarlo did too, I’d imagine. He was more a D’Ascanio than I was, in some ways—he had the curse as well.” Again his mouth curved, fleetingly. “But underneath it all he was a good man, and a good friend. Yes, we were close.” He looked away at that, and his gaze found the box on the desk. “I did him an injustice, though. I thought that he was wrong about this business with Pietro.”

“So Pietro
did
steal something, then?”

For an answer, Alex rose and fetched the box itself, returning to place it with care on the small round table by my chair. He and Mauro had already had the brown paper off once—when Alex broke the single piece of tape that held it on, the paper fell away in stiff folds, and the box lid lifted off. From its nest of polystyrene beads, Alex gently extracted the ‘proof’ that Giancarlo had managed to get from the jeweller’s assistant: a chalice, a Byzantine chalice of alabaster and gold, the same one that Edwina had shown me in the curio cabinet of the Villa delle Tempeste.

Alex set it on the table, where it caught the light and glittered like a treasure from Aladdin’s cave. He looked at it, then looked at me. “So now I have a problem.”

xviii

DANIELA
came to my room the next morning.

I was finishing up with my voice exercises when I heard the door to my sitting-room open and close. I turned in surprise at the sound, because everyone knocked, and I’d just begun thinking it must be the new cook and housemaid, Teresa’s replacement, who might be excused for not knowing the unwritten rules, when Daniela appeared in the door leading through from my bathroom.

She looked rather different than she had at breakfast, an hour earlier. At breakfast she’d had the eyes of an ingénue. “And I, of course, had no idea,” she’d told Nicholas across the table. “When Alessandro came to me last night”—the slightest pause, a glance at me to make sure I had taken in that point—“I was very upset, that Pietro should do this. I feel a fool that he could steal these things from the villa without my noticing, but I am not always looking in the cabinet, you understand, to see what is there and what is not. Fortunately, it appears he only took the chalice and a small bowl, and the chalice is recovered, thanks to God.”

Unimpressed, I’d gone on spreading jam on my croissant, watching Daniela the same way I might have watched Mother perform on the stage. There’d been four of us there—Den, myself, and Daniela and Nicholas. Madeleine and Poppy had been down for breakfast earlier; their plates hadn’t yet been cleared away . . . Rupert had still been on his walk, and Alex had been . . . well, somewhere.

Deprived of a full audience, Daniela had nonetheless given it her all. One would have thought Pietro had tried to murder her in her sleep, instead of simply stealing. “Never has such a thing happened at one of our properties. He is a beast, Pietro.”

“But he’s gone?” Den had asked.

“This morning, yes, before we could confront him. Alessandro thinks perhaps this jeweller in Sirmione, he has noticed the chalice not there at his shop any longer, and has telephoned to Pietro, to warn him. And the jeweller is gone, too. The shop, it is closed.”

I’d found myself wondering what had become of the assistant, the one who had passed the chalice on to Giancarlo. I had hoped he wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere, himself . . . but I’d kept my thoughts silent, not knowing how much of the story Daniela had known. She hadn’t once mentioned Giancarlo, after all, and Alex might only have told her the barest details of the theft. I hadn’t wanted to repeat what he’d told me in confidence.

Den had remarked that it shouldn’t take the police long to find a man as ugly as Pietro, and then Nicholas had said, “I’ll bet he’s hiding out in Milan with his girlfriend, that maid who did a runner. She’s likely in league with him.”

I’d joined the conversation for the first time. “I shouldn’t think it likely. Alex says she’s a very religious girl.”

Nicholas had shrugged. “Most people put their principles aside,” he’d said, “for money.” And then, because I’d mentioned Alex’s name and Nicholas loved stirring things up, he’d added, “You seem to be spending a lot of time with our Mr. D’Ascanio, Celia. You weren’t the reason he got back so late last night, now, were you? Poppy had the blasted dogs till nearly midnight.”

Den had come unexpectedly—and rather gallantly, I’d thought—to my rescue, commandeering the conversation with a tale about Poppy and the greyhounds, giving me time to finish my coffee and excuse myself to go and do my warm-ups.

But apparently he’d only bought me a temporary reprieve, for here was Daniela now, walking right into my rooms without knocking.

Momentarily knocked sideways by her arrogant invasion of my privacy, I could only stand and stare as she took up her position in the doorway, hands on hips, as belligerently posed as if
I
were the one intruding.

“You were with Alessandro last night,” she accused me.

My first instinct was to make a rude reply and throw her out, but even as my blood pressure rose, I tried to hold my temper. Wiping my face clear of any emotion, I said in my coolest voice, “I don’t recall hearing you knock, or inviting you in.”

“You were with him.”

“Did he say I was?” Turning my back to her, I gathered my rehearsal clothes with careful hands, keeping my movements deliberately slow, unconcerned.

She didn’t like that. “If you play a game with me, you will be sorry. I am asking you a question, and—”

“And I suggest that you ask Alex.” I faced her squarely, holding my rehearsal clothes against my chest. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get ready.”

For a long moment I didn’t think she would give way, but at last she shrugged and moved aside. I went with her to the door and held it open, to make certain that she left. She turned on the threshold and paused. “Does he make love to you,” she asked, “my Alessandro?”

Certain questions, Bryan always told me, oughtn’t to be dignified with answers, so I gave it none.

Daniela smiled a viper’s smile. “No,” she said, “I do not think he does. For that he needs a woman, not a little girl.” Her tone grew arch. “Be careful when you try to fight with someone who is stronger. You will find that it is dangerous.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said.

“You are a fool, then.” And with that she turned and glided off, her footsteps on the stairs a grim reminder that again, as on the terrace, she had scored the final point.

Damn, I thought. Why was it I could never think of what to say when it most mattered? I’d find the perfect comeback line eventually, I knew—tonight in bed, perhaps, or in the bath, having replayed the whole conversation a hundred times over, perfecting my lines till the last stabbing comment was mine, not Daniela’s. But that would be too late.

I sighed. And then, aware suddenly of a feeling of being watched, I looked up and over the landing.

Madeleine smiled. She was hugging her half-open door as though trying to keep out of sight, not from nosiness, I thought, but for discretion’s sake. “I heard Daniela’s voice,” she said. “I thought you might need rescuing.”

“I’m fine, thanks.” My words did not convince her. I suspect I neither looked nor sounded fine, because her eyes grew rather thoughtful.

“Have you finished with your warm-up? Yes? Then why don’t you come in and keep me company while I get ready?”

Holding up my folded rehearsal clothes, I said, “I need to change.”

“You can do that in here,” she invited me, pushing the door wider. “Plenty of room.”

I could hardly say no.