The Tolling of Mercedes Bell: A Novel (29 page)

The church bells grew louder and louder. A large pile of corpses was being burned in the fallow field outside the town wall. This, no doubt, was the destination of the heavy-laden cart she followed. She wept as she walked, unsure how much longer she could continue. She covered her ears with her grimy hands to muffle the sound of the deafening bells.

“B
ELLA, WAKE UP,”
a faraway voice said. She slowly became aware of someone embracing her. With a start she awoke. Church bells were announcing morning mass. It was June in Florence, and with profound relief she remembered that she and Jack were on their honeymoon.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. She burrowed into him, and he rocked her in his arms. The horrific smells and sights she had just left were still vivid. She inhaled Jack’s sweet scent while the ghastly visions played at the edges of her consciousness.

“That must have been a doozy, the way you were thrashing around,” he said, stroking her back and running his hands down the curves he loved so well.

“It was the same dream again, only much more graphic this time. Ugh!” She shuddered.

Jack brushed her tangled hair away from her face.

“My lady, let me help you forget that terrible dream.”

A soft, warm breeze fluttered the curtains and wafted over them. Fine bed linens covered their intertwined legs. The bells had stopped, and Mercedes pushed herself deeper into her husband’s tender embrace, feeling his hardness and his softness both, and his magnificent size. How comforting he was. How lucky and clean she felt after the misery and bleakness of the dream. He rocked her in his arms for a few more moments before spreading her legs with a gentle nudge and rolling her onto her back. The dream evaporated as they became engulfed, his fingers threading through hers.

T
HAT AFTERNOON AFTER A GALLERY TOUR
, they explored one of the city’s historic quarters. The past was around them and beneath them, on every wall, bridge, and abutment. The work of ancient hands and their designs were woven into every architectural form they saw, in the statuary and sumptuous stone urns and tiered gardens overflowing with flowers. Italian cypress and myrtle hedges lined roadways, edged properties, outlined the hills and provided the backdrop for their wandering, as in so many Renaissance paintings. Quietly they walked the cobbled streets between darkened stucco walls. It was like being in a living painting.

They turned up a little lane, following two small boys, who were kicking a ball. Mercedes watched their little sandaled feet as they nimbly passed the ball back and forth. The lane narrowed and curved. Multistoried buildings on either side impeded the daylight. She looked up at the apartment houses with shuttered windows and
strings of laundry stretching across overhead. Jack pulled out his camera to capture the scene, but found it impossible to frame artfully in such a narrow space. He snapped pictures of Mercedes instead.

She pointed. “Around there is a church and up on the left will be a two-story apartment house with an arched beam over the doorway. This place here,” she said gesturing toward the building on the left, “was where the woman came out carrying her daughter. This is the place I dreamed!” She felt her hair standing on end.

Church bells began to toll, and Jack jumped with a start.

“Bella, you didn’t tell me you were psychic.”

“I’m not. It was just all in the dream.”

As they approached the house with the curved lintel, she pointed at it and said, “That’s where two men stood, one with his arm around the other. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Jack, this is eerie.”

“The ghosts are talking to you.” He scratched his head and observed the scene. The lane was too narrow for cars to pass through. It had been constructed in an era when nothing moved faster than a horse, when cities were like nations. Yet children continued to play in the very places where piles of corpses had lain—where death had snatched away so many.

“Everything is exactly as I dreamed it,” she said. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. Does it have to mean something?”

She frowned and said, “Look. I’ve had that dream twice now, and by chance we find ourselves in the exact spot where it takes place. Could you ignore that if it happened to you?”

“Only if I were hungry,” he said, “which I am.” He held out his hand. “Mrs. Soutane,
you
are an adventure.”

She took his hand and pulled him in the direction of the bells. “Let’s go see the church,” she said. The boys with their ball ran into a
doorway just ahead of them, and the lane soon led to a plaza adjacent to an old, but well-maintained, church. An elderly priest stood next to its open doors, welcoming parishioners to evening mass. His black cassock touched the tops of his shoes. He looked across the plaza past a large fountain at the two people in the distance. Water spouted out of the mouth of the lion that seemed to roar mightily at the pinnacle of the fountain.

Shops and a small market surrounded the plaza. A few tables sat outside a café with a striped awning. People greeted the priest and entered the church.

“Inside the doors to the church, on the right, there’s a stairway to the belfry. There is a thick rope that one of the priests pulls to ring the bells. That was in the dream, too. All this area was bare ground— no plaza, no paving stones, no fountain, no businesses. There was a stable, I think. The dead were burned outside a wall that was over there,” she said, gesturing. “This used to be one of the exterior walls of Florence.”

Jack listened intently, looking unsettled. She walked around the plaza slowly, as if communing with the spirit of the place. The twilight seemed to blur the boundaries between present and past, dream and reality. When he saw that she was finally ready to go, he hailed a cab. The sun sank into the west, bloody fingers of light streaking through the billowy gray clouds that had gathered on the horizon. Mercedes withdrew into herself. She looked out at the gathering darkness, strangely possessed by foreboding and sadness. She could not guess what it all meant, but she had an uneasy feeling.

A
T DINNER A BOISTEROUS FAMILY
sat at a round table nearby. Among them, in a tomato-red pinafore, was a lively girl with beautiful dark eyes, perched on her knees in her chair. Mercedes peeked
at the girl while she also tried to decipher the menu. She missed Germaine keenly. She thought of her daughter’s bright eyes and of how she would have enjoyed seeing Michelangelo’s
David
earlier in the day. She imagined her here at the table, next to her Italian counterpart.

Jack noticed the girl and asked, “Is she making you homesick?”

“Yes. What do you think Germaine’s doing right now?”

“Probably giving Eleanor a run for her money.”

“I’m not sure anyone ever gives Eleanor a run for her money,” Mercedes said.

“You underestimate Germaine. She’ll probably have another new wardrobe when we get back, and she’ll have won the swimming competition at the pool.”

Mercedes knew she didn’t underestimate her daughter one bit.

Jack’s attention went to a table of men across the room. They were young and sharply dressed—out for a night on the town.

“Bachelors,” Mercedes said.

“Perhaps. You never know.”

She looked more closely. Beneath the table two sat leg to leg, their feet touching. They reminded her of Damon and one of the other groomsmen.

A
FTER DINNER THEY WAITED FOR
a cab. The family had left shortly before, the young girl skipping behind her father, avoiding the seams in the paving stones. Her pigtails bounced with each hop, and her wrists were daintily angled upward. Mercedes noticed one of the men nod ever so slightly toward Jack. A look passed between them. Jack took her hand and led her outside to stand in the soft evening air in front of the restaurant window. A cab rounded the corner.

“Now, my love, let’s go do what honeymooners do best.” He
grasped her rib cage with both hands and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “You’re pretty sleek for someone who has just eaten a mountain of spaghetti carbonara.”

He looked over her head into the restaurant window and met the gaze of the interested stranger.

They returned to their room, where maids had turned down the bed, left chocolates on the pillows, and opened windows to the evening breeze. Jack walked out onto the balcony over the quaint street below. He stood with his hands in his pockets, turning something over in his mind.

Mercedes happily peeled off the day’s clothes and walked into the shower. When he heard the water running he drew the shades. It was time to get down to more serious matters. He had played nice long enough. There was much his new wife had to learn. He had his needs, and it was high time she began to gratify them. Every smooth stone was once a jagged one whose surfaces have been worn down by time and the elements. Since he couldn’t have what he wanted, he would do the best he could with what he had.

He stripped off his clothes and headed for the bathroom, caught Mercedes from behind, grabbed her hair in his right hand, and forced her against the shower wall. It was the beginning of a night in which boudoir niceties were superseded by a more gritty aspect of male lust: not pleasant, not tender, and not at all personal.