Season of Storms (39 page)

I was still trying to absorb the fact that they hadn’t set the fire because of me. I’d been carrying the guilt of that around with me all day, reasoning that if it hadn’t been for me there wouldn’t have been a fire, and if there hadn’t been a fire then Rupert wouldn’t have died. “I heard them say that they were going to change the plan . . .”

“Well, yes, they’d meant to set the fire tonight. This buyer of theirs had booked tickets, Pietro said, for tonight’s performance and intended to come here by one of the holiday coaches, along with the rest of the audience, to collect his purchase.”

Which explained why the stolen items had been packed in a suitcase. In all the confusion of the fire, no one would have noticed one more member of the audience returning with a suitcase to his tourist coach.

“At least, that was the plan,” said Alex. “Only as Pietro said, things didn’t quite work out the way they’d expected.”

“Because of me.”

“Because of you.”

I didn’t need that part explained—I knew that my showing up in the crypt had put Daniela and her husband and Pietro in a no-win situation. The three of them could hardly have let me go on my way unmolested, not after what I’d seen, because I would have blown the whistle on their thieving. But keeping me silent meant giving up their meeting with their buyer, because without me there could be no first-night performance, no chartered coaches, no audience.

No wonder they’d wanted to kill me, I thought. In one move I’d ruined what must have taken them weeks to organize. Now, instead of a neat handover of the stolen artifacts, they were forced to improvise a getaway.

And so the villa had been set on fire a day ahead of schedule. The replicas at any rate still had to be destroyed, and since no one would ever have had cause to suspect that the genuine items had been removed from the villa, any works of art ‘lost’ in the fire would have been paid for by the insurance. And as an added bonus, I’d have been conveniently eliminated.

I frowned. “I don’t understand, though, if they thought I’d be killed in the fire, why did Daniela run away? I mean, Pietro was under suspicion of stealing—all right, I can see that. And her husband presumably went to connect with their buyer. But Daniela could have stayed. With me dead there wouldn’t be anyone here to accuse her of anything.”

His eyebrows lifted. “What makes you think that I wouldn’t have suspected her?”

It was, I thought, a difficult thing to explain to a man, how certain women always seemed to get away with murder. It had everything to do with beauty and sexuality, and how it was used. I’d have been willing to bet, for example, that Alex’s friend with the summer home in Sardinia, no matter how intelligent a man he was ordinarily, had not believed that Daniela could be capable of pulling off a swindle. Even when he’d been confronted with the fake paintings, he’d almost certainly have made excuses for her, saying that she must have been a minor player in the game, that she couldn’t possibly have known the full extent of what was going on . . . “Most men wouldn’t,” I said.

“I’m not most men.” He left a little pause, as though he wanted that to register. “And anyway, she
did
stay, to begin with. She was standing outside the villa when we got down there, wrapped in a dressing-gown, doing her damsel in distress. Had they brought out your body I’m sure she would have been ready with a story to tell us about what you’d been doing there.” His voice had gone harder than normal, and stealing a look at his face I decided—not without a certain flush of pleasure—that he really and truly hadn’t been taken in by Daniela, and that he would have held her to account if anything had happened to me. “Only you came out alive,” he said, “and sometime shortly after that,
because
of that, Daniela disappeared. No one noticed her leaving.”

“She can’t hide forever.”

“Don’t kid yourself. She and her husband will have met up with their buyer by now, and if he paid them even half what the Fourth Crusade objects are worth they’ll be able to hide in style for quite some time.”

“Oh, Alex, I am sorry.”

“What, about my losing the collection? I don’t mind,” he brushed it off. “My own claim to ownership was questionable at best. My grandfather stole them from a house built by a man who had stolen them eight centuries before, and how they came to Constantinople in the first place is anyone’s guess. No one owns things like that,” he informed me. “They’re passing through time, and we’re only custodians, really.”

“But you’d like to have them back, surely.”

“If you’re asking would I like to see Daniela and her husband caught, then yes, I would, but because I want justice for Giancarlo, and for Rupert, not because I want my things back. Losing you,” he told me, “would have been the greater loss.”

He was leaning in to kiss me when a knock at my dressing-room door interrupted.

I smiled. “That’ll be Den, come to call the half-hour. He’s developing fatherly timing already.”

But it wasn’t Den. It was Poppy. She responded to my invitation to come in a little timidly, her gaze moving instantly to Alex.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t . . . I mean, I thought you were alone. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” I said, but my attempt to ease her nervousness was clearly unsuccessful.

Shifting from one foot to the other, she said, “Den sent me to tell you it’s half an hour to curtain up.”

I could hear Den himself, down the hall, knocking at Nicholas’s door—we didn’t have a public address system backstage, like most theatres had, so Den had to do things the old-fashioned way, playing callboy.

I didn’t know whether Poppy was helping him to pass the word to anyone but me, but having delivered her message she certainly didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere. She hovered in the doorway, looking faintly unhappy, and I remembered what Madeleine had told me this morning about how awful Poppy felt about leaving me down in the crypt, and how badly she’d wanted to come and apologize. Even though the half-hour before curtain up was usually a time I liked to spend alone, preparing to go on, I simply couldn’t leave her standing there like that, not when I knew from experience how rotten it felt to feel guilty. And I didn’t want Poppy to carry her guilt for as long as I’d carried my own.

“Come and sit down,” I invited her.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t, I . . .”

Alex rose, pushing his chair back. “Here, she can have my chair. I have to go and get ready, myself, to make the announcement before you go on.” He gave me the kiss, though, in spite of our audience. “I’ll see you after.”

When he’d gone, I looked towards the door again. “Poppy, it’s all right, really. Do come in. I’m not upset with you or anything.” I showed her my most reassuring smile. “Please.”

Anyone watching us would have thought I’d called her on the carpet. Her feet dragged as she moved to take her seat, the very picture of reluctance. I took heart from the fact that she was wearing the necklace I’d bought her in Sirmione, the tiny shells clicking together as they brushed the red wool of her jumper.

“You ought to be,” she said, in a miserable tone. “Upset with me, I mean. It’s my fault you almost got killed.”

“Oh, Poppy.”

“If I’d gone and found somebody straight away, like you’d asked me, then—”

“Then you’d all have been walking right in on a very dangerous situation,” I told her. “And you might have made things worse. A lot more people might have been hurt. No, your timing was perfect.”

“It was?”

“And I’m told it was you who convinced the others to follow Max.”

She glanced away, embarrassed. “Well, he was acting like dogs do in films, you know, running away and then coming back again, and barking, like he wanted us to come with him.”

“So there you are. You actually helped
save
my life then, didn’t you?”

Her small face brightened for a moment, then clouded again. “But Rupert had to help as well, and now he’s dead, and—”

“Oh, darling,” I cut her off, wanting to wipe the sad look from her eyes. “What happened to Rupert, that was an accident. Sometimes things . . . well, they just happen. They’re not anybody’s fault.”

That only seemed to make things worse. Her eyes brimmed with moisture. “You’re being so . . .” Breaking off, she blinked the tears away and went on steadily, “And I’ve been so horrible to you. Mummy told me so, and she was right. I’ve been childish, and I’m sorry.”

Brave words for a girl of twelve. I held back my smile with care. “Well, you’re not being childish now. It takes maturity,” I told her, “to apologize in person. Lots of people twice your age—three times your age—can’t do it.”

She flushed with pleasure, and a glimpse of the old Poppy showed through her self-conscious features. “I was going to ask you . . .” she started, then paused, circling round for the right approach. “That is, I was wondering if you’d like to have lunch with me tomorrow, at the Grand Hotel in Mira. I’d pay, of course—I have money.”

She was so painfully earnest that I was once again reminded of my own youthful crush on my headmistress; how I’d striven to impress her; how I’d longed to share her company. The thought occurred to me quite suddenly that if Den and Madeleine
did
get together then Poppy and I would be sisters of a sort, and it struck me that I’d like that. “Yes, I’d like that very much,” I said.

“You would?”

“Very much,” I repeated. “Now come on, help me get into my costume. I could use an extra pair of hands.”

She left me when Den came round to give the fifteen-minute call and collect any valuables that might need locking away in his desk. “I hope you don’t expect me to take
this,
” he said. “What the devil is it, anyway?”

Putting the finishing touches to my wig, I glanced over to see what he was talking about. “Oh. It’s a prayer-book.”

Bryan had left it in my room this morning, and knowing how fond Rupert had been of it I’d carried it down here for luck. It was my way, I suppose, of having a little bit of Rupert with me still, to see me through tonight’s performance.

Leafing through the pages of the prayer-book, Den admired the illustrations. “Is it very old?”

“At least eight hundred years, I think.” Quite possibly the only item from the Fourth Crusade collection to have survived the theft, I thought. I passed him my wristwatch and handbag for safekeeping. “Here you are.”

“Thanks.”

Left alone, I took the one valuable I hadn’t given him—my little diamond angel pendant—and hung it with care on the edge of my mirror, where it could watch over me. I wasn’t ordinarily superstitious about my performances, but the full weight of what I was about to do had begun to press in on me, the fact that in under ten minutes I’d be facing an audience in my first leading role, in a play that nobody, till now, had been able to bring to the stage. In under ten minutes I’d have to go out there and wait in the dark for the lights to come up, and in front of a full house I’d have to live up to my name, and hold my own with Nicholas and Madeleine, and give the sort of performance that would have made Rupert proud, and . . .

“Five minutes,” Den called, from the passage.

In desperation I looked at the prayer-book, wishing that I could read Greek so I would have been able to call on some higher power for assistance. But I couldn’t read Greek. I did, however, recognize the painted illustration on the page that Den had left the book turned open to—a radiant sunburst against a cloudy sky, as though the heavens had opened to admit a wandering spirit that had just been laid to rest. I remembered how Rupert had phrased the translation: ‘A Prayer for the Laying of Ghosts.’

The eyes in the myriad pictures of Celia the First on my dressing-room wall seemed to watch me, as though she were waiting for something. I found myself searching the eyes of the images, seeking a connection across the long years that divided our lives. Of course I knew I hadn’t really seen her in the burning room, or heard her in the night, and there were no such things as ghosts, but still . . .

“He knows,” I told her, feeling only slightly foolish for talking to a photograph. “He knows you love him, and he knows you didn’t run away.” It occurred to me, gazing up at that famously beautiful face, that I was finishing what she’d begun—she’d never had the chance to play the role that Galeazzo had so lovingly crafted for her, never had the chance to speak the lines before an audience. Perhaps she’d cursed the play herself, I thought fancifully, not wanting anybody else to take her place.

She was smiling at me now, though, looking down with warm approval as if somehow she considered me a kindred spirit.

And suddenly my fears about the play and my performance disappeared, and were replaced with something calmer and more confident. The feeling held, through the moment when Den came to lead me out to take my place on the still-darkened stage, through the moment I spent standing there on my own, with the hum of the yet-unseen audience surrounding me . . . and then in one quick burst the lights came on, spearing the darkness with dazzling rays like the sunburst illustration in the prayer-book, and in that instant I knew everything was going to be all right.

I turned my face towards the light, and spoke the opening line.

He had forgotten how to pray. He turned the pages of the prayer-book slowly, hopefully, but no help came. These words were sterile, penned by monks—they could not speak the passions of his heart.

He felt that he was being watched, and turned to see his son within the doorway, standing solemn and unspeaking. The boy, he thought, was all that he had left now. All the family he could claim. “Come in,” he said. “Come in, don’t be afraid.”

The boy came cautiously, his eyes upon the prayer-book. “What is that?”

“A palimpsest. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“A twice-used book. There was a time when parchment was a rarity, and those who wished to make new books were forced to reuse old ones. This book was a play, a Greek play, when its life began, larger than this, but the monks who found it cut its pages into two and scraped the parchment clean so they could write their prayers and incantations. Only they could not remove the underlying words completely. Here,” he said, “and here, you see them for yourself.”

The boy stepped closer, looked, and frowned. “A pal . . . a palim . . .”

“Palimpsest.” He liked the frown, the earnestness, the drive to understand. “It is a very special book, this. No one else has ever seen it, only you.”

He saw that pleased the boy, and reaching out a hand he touched the shoulder of his son. “Perhaps one day you will learn all the secrets of this house,” he said, and smiled a little wistfully. “Perhaps, one day.”