Twain's End (20 page)

He jerked back his head. “You know I can't answer that.”

“The count seemed to know.”

“Damn him!”

“I feel—I feel like you are leading me on.”

“Lioness, you tell me: what choice do I have, when I want you but can't have you?”

She clung to his words even as the impossibility of the situation became clear. She walked away before the pity she felt for him, hunched and alone, made her turn back.

She wandered down narrow streets. She deserved more than this, more than being a friend who wasn't really a friend, a secretary who wasn't really a secretary. At the end of the day, she was nothing.

Turning her thoughts in her mind, she was surprised when she
looked up in the Piazza della Repubblica and saw the Clemenses' maid. “Katy?”

Katy thrust out her chest in defiance but would not meet Isabel's eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same.” Isabel peered into the windows of the Café Gilli at the crowded tables inside. “Is that—Clara?”

“Go away!” Katy demanded.

Through the glass, Isabel watched Clara chat with the gentlemen surrounding her. When a young man leaned in to speak in her ear, she drew up her shoulders with delight.

Mr. Clemens shambled up. “Katy?”

Her guilty expression sent his gaze over her shoulder. The blotches on his cheekbones flamed as he registered the scene within the café. He loped into the restaurant, followed by Isabel.

“Papa!” Clara jumped to her feet.

“Who is home with your mother?”

“Teresa. Mamma was better today! She said I could go.”

“Who are these men?” He gestured at the group of young Italians at her table.

“They are from the music school!”

“Up,” he told her. He threw down some lira on the table. “Keep your filthy hands off my daughter.”

“They know English!”

“Good. Then they know what I mean when I tell them to keep their goddamn peckers in their pants.”

Clara rushed from the restaurant. She ran through the narrow streets, dodging tourists and shoppers, and then ducked into the loggia of the Mercato Nuevo, where she wove between the market stalls, glancing over her shoulder for her father. He caught her by one of the pillars.

Holding her arm, he handed her his handkerchief. “Clean up your mouth.”

“Papa! You're making a scene.”

“Wipe it!”

She wiped off the tint on her lips.

“Button up your coat. I won't have my daughter looking like a whore.”

Tears rolled down her face as she fastened her jacket. “Why do you do this to me? I've done nothing wrong.”

“Give me your hat.”

Clara was unpinning it when Isabel caught up with them. “Sam! Don't!”

He grabbed the hat from Clara's hands, ripped a glass cherry from its brim, and hurled it to the street. “Is this what you want men to do to you?” He ground the ornament into the stone of the street as he plucked off another. “Use you and then crush you?”

“I wasn't doing anything!”

He pulverized another cherry under his heel, then another.

“Don't punish her,” said Isabel, “when you are truly angry at—”

He stopped. Isabel saw that she did not have to finish the sentence for him to understand.

“Angry at whom?” Clara wiped at her eyes.

He shoved the denuded hat into Clara's hands. “Miss Lyon, take her home. Her mother needs her.” He turned on Katy. “You're supposed to take care of her. You disappoint me.”

Clara swept away. With a venomous glance at Isabel, Katy followed.

April 1904

Villa di Quarto,
Florence, Italy

M
AESTRO LUGARNO'S TUFT OF
mustache, the size and texture of a baby vole, teetered on his lip as he crumpled his face in pain. A moan seeped from his vocal cords. Fastidious in his expectations of his students, although not so much in his dress—his dull black suit bore gravy stains from the tripe sandwiches that he favored—he had reached his breaking point at twenty-five minutes into Miss Clara Clemens's lesson that morning. The Monday, Wednesday, and Friday lessons in preparation for a public concert later that month were not enough. Her father the American
celebrità
had said that his daughter had already received some instruction in Vienna, that she needed only a little brushing up and she'd be ready to go. But after two weeks of instruction, the maestro had lamented to his wife about the devil's deal he had made. There was no pay enough. A cow had more talent.

“No! No! NO!” His tight coat lifted above his belly when he waved his arms. “Again!”

The pianist's wife, a stringy woman as concave as her husband was convex, struck the keyboard. Clara tried once more to match the note.

“No, Signorina! Don't you hear it? Again!”

The keyboard clanged. Clara sang.

“No! Signorina! No! You will be my death! Again!”

Clara's face went the red of a
pomodoro.

The maestro mopped the sole black curl in the center of his pate. “Signorina Clemens, how are you to sing like a bird with your head hang down like a donkey?”

Isabel, on the sofa with a portable desk on her lap, whittling her way through the Clemenses' mail, discreetly gazed away. Clara looked ready to plow the maestro with her brow.

“What is that you do with your neck? Are you a vulture? Up! Up!”

Clara raised her chin higher, her eyes round with murder. She had been ready to kill the man since the day he'd first come to the villa, five days after her father had ruined her hat. Of all of the instructors at the observatory, her expression said, this was whom Papa picked? If he meant to make up to her for destroying her hat and her reputation in town, he had sorely missed the mark.

“
Buono!
Now—again!”

The maestro's wife banged the keyboard. Clara attempted to match the note.

“Now hold it! Hold it! Hold it!”

Clara was trembling with sustained effort when Mr. Clemens strolled in. Instantly, the room felt too full to Isabel, as if his energy crowded everything in it. The piano playing stopped.

“Keep on,” said Mr. Clemens. He dropped heavily next to Isabel. “How is she doing?”

Isabel nodded false enthusiasm, shifting her legs under the lap desk. She'd kept her distance from him since the disruption in town.

“For your august papa,” said the maestro, “we start at the beginning of the piece.” His wife flipped through the sheet music then, at her husband's signal, attacked the piano. Clara began to wrestle with Schubert's “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.”

Mr. Clemens sat back and tapped his boot in time. He lifted his thicket of brows at Isabel.

Isabel smiled as if they were on good footing. They were not. There were no more adventures, no excursions. Their interaction was
limited to one strained hour each morning of dictation for his autobiography, conducted with the door of his room wide open and Katy and the rest of the staff coming and going. After that, Isabel retreated to her office at the other end of the floor, where she performed her secretarial duties for the entire family. In the afternoon, she was free to pursue her own interests. She had taken up watching birds, cataloging the flora and fauna on the estate, and learning Italian, activities that she found so much more satisfying when done with her neighbor, the parish priest, Don Raffaello Stiattisi, a young man who seemed as lonely in his little rectory built into the wall of the estate as she was in her
villino.
Her mother discouraged their friendship—he was not marriageable and therefore was a waste of time—but Isabel welcomed it. He had kept her heart from eating itself.

The maestro's wife played through several sheets of music, her mouth pursed like a drawstring bag, while Clara sang. Mr. Clemens leaned toward Isabel and whispered, “I always thought that Schubert's music is better than it sounds.”

Clara stopped. “Papa. I can hear you.”

Mr. Clemens got up. “Don't let me stand in the way of artistic genius,” he said loudly. “Keep going, Clara. You sound beautiful.” He nodded toward the French windows for Isabel to follow him.

As Clara continued her warbling, they stepped outside onto the terrace, under a trellis from which bunches of just-blooming wisteria dangled. When he stood next to her at the balustrade, she did not adjust her distance. Rightly or wrongly, she savored the feel of his energy.

“Smells sweet,” he said. “Sweeter than hydrangea.”

“Don Raffaello calls the wisteria
glicine.
” She let the word roll from her tongue as her friend had taught her:
gly-she-nay.
“They are blooming early this year. Did you know that these flowers”—she gestured to indicate the trellis running the entire length of the terrace—“are probably all from one trunk?” She pointed toward the stables, where a purple clump draped over the door. “That might be part of the same plant, too. An old plant can spread over fifty feet.”

“Never underestimate an old plant.” He laid a finger on the back of her hand.

She moved her hand. “But though beautiful, the plants get destructive with age. Don Raffaello says that the vines eventually crush their supports, or if they grow up trees, they strangle them.”

“You must be spending a lot of time with the young father to learn all these fascinating facts.”

“He's wise. And I fear that he's very lonely.”

“I'd be lonely, too, if I were lodged in that little tower of his like a fairy-tale princess.”

Isabel pictured her friend showing her the parts of a wisteria cluster in his strong, tanned hands. “He's hardly a princess.”

Mr. Clemens watched her, his gray eyes sharp under erect brows. “Shouldn't he be out saving souls instead of talking to pretty unmarried ladies?”

“I think he'd be happier if he had more souls to save. Besides the estate, he has only the families along the Via Santa Maria to attend to.”

“How about the countess and her lover? They should keep him busy.”

She glanced at him. “Are you afraid that they won't get to heaven?”

“Heaven! I wouldn't wish it even on those two. What a queer idea the human creature has for his heaven! He naturally places sexual union far and away above all other joys, yet has left it out of his paradise.”

“Above all other joys?”

“I'd say so. The very thought of sex excites him. The chance of it sets him wild. In this state he will risk life, reputation, heaven itself.” He looked down his nose to Isabel. “Anything to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax.”

This man had forced his footman to marry his maid after he'd “spoiled” her. He had shamed his daughter just because men admired her, had insulted Count de Calry for letting his servants have love affairs, had despised the countess for indulging in relations with her
steward, and yet he spoke cavalierly to Isabel about sex. He truly must think of her as a goat among sheep. She was not complimented.

“You cannot shock me, Mr. Clemens, try as you may.”

He burst into a laugh. “By God, Lioness, I've missed you.”

She gazed off in the distance at the splashing fountain, furious with herself for imagining him taking her in his arms.

He curled his fingers around hers. “What are we going to do about it?”

“You cannot think I'm influenced so easily.” This time, she did not move her hand.

A French window rattled just down the terrace. They stepped apart as Mrs. Clemens crept onto the terrace, her thin gray braid catching against her white robe.

“Livy!”

“I came out to smell the flowers.” The weakness of her voice made Isabel wince.

“Livy, I'm glad to see you up.” Mr. Clemens strode to her side, Isabel following at a respectable distance.

“The flowers are nice here, but there aren't as many as in the Sandwich Islands. Hawaii, the natives call it.” Slowly, she reached up and touched a budding cluster. “I was fascinated by the variety of flowers in the Sandwich Islands, although my husband seemed more fascinated by the women. But it was rather a heaven on earth.” She paused to cough. “What luck for him that in Hawaii,” she continued, more wheezy now, “women saw no shame in taking a man they wanted, no matter if he were married, though maybe that dulled the pleasure of the conquest for the man.” She turned to Mr. Clemens. “Did it?”

“Livy. You're not well.” He put his hand to her shoulder to guide her inside.

She shrugged him off, surprisingly strong for someone so ill. “Do you like wisteria, Miss Lyon?
Glicine,
I think they call them.”

A chill slithered up Isabel's spine. “Yes.”

Mrs. Clemens slowly raised her eyes to a dangling mass. “It's
likely that this is all the same plant. Did you know that the runners can spread for fifty feet or more?” She smiled when she saw she had Isabel's attention. “The vines will eventually crush their supports or, if they grow up trees, strangle them.” She turned to her husband. “Youth, why look glum? It's a beautiful day.”