Flirting in Italian (16 page)

“Or anyone like me,” Kelly joins in, not to be outdone. “No redheaded Irish maids with freckles either.”

“I think your freckles are
sooo
cute,” Paige gushes. “I used to draw ones on my nose with one of my mom’s eye pencils and pretend I was Pippi Longstocking when I was little. Ooh! I should get a red wig and go as her for Halloween this year! What do you think? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

Their voices fade; they’re following Catia, the principessa, and Elisa into a salon beyond the gallery, and I hear Catia’s voice raised, describing the rococo furniture and marble fireplace. Hopefully they won’t miss me for a while. Tears have been pricking at my eyelids ever since the principessa showed that photograph of her sister-in-law, Monica. It’s suddenly overwhelming, this confirmation of my suspicions that I may truly have some tie to the di Vesperis. That’s why I’m not doing a great job of finding my image in these portraits; I’m wondering whether, in all truth, I really want to.

Maybe you should just forget this whole thing
, I tell myself.
You’ve got a mum who loves you with all her heart, and a dad who’s—well, he’s a good dad and he loves you too, even if he did move halfway across the world so you never see him anymore. But you’re still so much luckier than lots of the girls at school, with their parents they never see, or being pulled back and forth with horrible custody messes in all the divorces
.

So what if you look like the di Vesperis? One of them could be connected to someone in your family, from ages and ages ago. You could be a throwback from them
. I think of what happened with
one of Milly’s dog’s puppies. He was all black and gray when the rest of them were all white, and apparently it was the genetics remembering when the breed was black and gray as well as white, at least a hundred years ago. The breeder said it happened sometimes, and that’s what she called it: a throwback.

You’re a throwback. A genetic atavism, if I remember what Milly’s mum called it. It doesn’t mean anything, really. You should just let the whole thing go
.

These words are such a comfort to me, are so sensible, that I feel myself sag with relief as I say them to myself. I turn to leave the gallery having firmly decided to put all of this behind me, the portraits, the history, the past. By this time I can’t see anyone in the salon; they’ve covered the rococo furniture and marble fireplace and moved on. I hear voices echoing from farther down the corridor, which is surprisingly poorly lit, and follow them slowly, in no hurry to catch up. I have made the right choice. The Castello di Vesperi doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I’ve made an official decision. I absolutely do not care anymore about how I might, conceivably, be linked to them.

Lots of kids have fantasies about being adopted, I know. There are loads of novels about it. You have a fight with your parents and you storm out and you find out that really you’re Harry Potter the wizard, or the heroine of
The Princess Diaries
, and your life’s really different from how you thought it was. Honestly, I never had those fantasies: I love my mum and my dad. The only thing I wanted, secretly, was just a little bit more space from my mum, and now I have it. Guilt
washes over me when I think of Mum.
Forget the painting that started all of this
, I tell myself firmly.
I’m forgetting the whole thing. I’m going to concentrate on an educational Italian summer. And when we get back to Villa Barbiano the first thing I’m going to do is upload some pictures to my laptop and sit down and write Mum a really long email about everything that I’ve been doing
.

Well
—I think of Luca
—almost everything.…

I’m strolling down the corridor, the voices fainter and fainter in the distance, and lower now, as if they’ve gone down a flight of stairs. Sure enough, at the end of the corridor is a large wooden door, wide open, and I realize why the corridor seemed dark: they’ve left the door ajar to show me which way they went. A stone staircase with uneven flags leads downstairs, a lamp above it turned on, like a hotel light with a green shade, much more modern than the ancient staircase.

For a moment I pause, because the treads look so bare, the walls equally so, raw stone instead of the carpeting over wooden boards in the corridor. Then I remember what Catia said half an hour ago:
the old dungeons, which we will also explore
.

My spirits lift. Nothing like Gothic, gloomy, possibly haunted locations to make you feel better about your own bad mood. With luck, the dungeons will have barred windows, ancient cobwebs, rusted chains, gruesome tales of prisoners down there for years whose hair had gone completely white when they were finally released.…

I trot down the steps without a moment’s hesitation, calling:

“Hey! Wait for me!”

I’m about six steps down when everything goes horribly wrong. The light above me goes out, leaving me in the pitch-darkness. The door slams. I gasp in shock.

A gust of wind blew the door shut
, I tell myself firmly.
But why did the light go out?
Trying not to panic, afraid to go forward in the dark, I dash up the stairs again and push at the door.

It doesn’t yield. Just as I put my weight on it, I hear the unmistakable click of a metal lock sliding shut. It’s not a key turning, it’s a latch lowering into its hook. And then I hear someone’s footsteps walking away.

I beat on the door with both my hands, and yell: “Come back! Let me out! Let me
out
!”

But nothing happens. And then I realize: whoever’s locked me in was hiding behind the door all along, waiting for me to go down these stairs so they could shut me in. It was a trap, and I fell right into it.

I yell my head off. I yell, and I rattle the door as best I can, though that isn’t very much, as it’s almost flush with the wall and fitted exactly to the doorframe. God knows how much of my yelling is making it through the heavy wood and the two-feet-thick stone walls. When this realization dawns on me, my shouting trickles away. I stand there in the dark, the only illumination the faintly outlined rectangle of light around the door. Breathing heavily, I begin considering my options.

I can’t get out this way. And I don’t want to go down those stairs by myself in the dark.

I know it wasn’t wind that blew the light out; that only happens in nineteenth-century ghost stories, where
a character’s exploring a ruined abbey and her candle suddenly goes out and she feels a cold hand on the back of her neck … 
Gah! Stop it! The last thing you need is to scare yourself!
I slap my hands up and down the side of the wall where the door opens, looking for a light switch. I go right up to the light fitting, standing on tiptoe, and feel all the way around it in case there’s a little button or switch to turn it on. But though I feel the bulb, still warm from recent use, and the shade, and the metal plate they’re fastened to, I can swear that there’s no switch. I suppose it’s unlikely there would be one in this little staircase; it’s probably in the corridor outside. But I don’t stop until I’m absolutely, one hundred percent convinced that there’s no way of turning on the light above my head. Pride alone drives me on; what an idiot I would look to be found here in the dark, when I could have just turned on the damn light.

I sit down on the cold stone and try to calm my racing nerves.

They’ll find you eventually
, I tell myself, doing my best to ignore all those scary old legends about people getting walled up and starving to death, like the bride in the castle who hid in a chest in a game of hide-and-seek on her wedding night and then couldn’t get the lid up again, and the wood was so thick that no one heard her screaming and pounding at the sides, and anyway it was airtight so she passed out really quickly and they searched the whole castle but didn’t think to look in the chest and she was only found years later, her skeleton curled up in the mass of her wedding dress, white lace and white bone, the dark, empty sockets of her eyes staring sightlessly up at the poor person who found her.…

Stop it, Violet! Not helping! Not helping at all!

I draw a deep breath.
They’ll definitely find me. They’ll work out where they saw me last, and come back for me, and I’ll hear them and make enough noise so they’ll know where I am
.

There’s plenty of air in here; I’m not going to suffocate like the bride in the chest. Not for ages, anyway. It’s awful, but I find myself wishing I smoked, just because it would mean I’d have a lighter on me, or matches, something that would allow me to see in the dark. I reach out, and my fingertips touch the walls. The passage is narrow enough that I can pick my way down the stairs without falling, if I keep touching the walls; there’s no drop I could tumble down. And though the black void beyond is frightening, I also don’t want to sit here waiting pathetically to be rescued.

The thought of action, any kind of action, instantly makes me feel better. I might as well see how far the staircase goes. What if it leads outside and I could escape instead of sitting here like a lemon? I picture a door opening onto green grass, sunlight, the blue summer sky, and the image works like a charm. Shuffling along each stone tread, making sure I know where the next step is so I don’t fall, I slowly work my way down.

My ears are still pricked for any sounds from above, in the corridor. If they’ve noticed they’ve lost me, they won’t be searching in silence; they’ll be calling my name, and that I’m sure I’ll hear. And going up fast is much easier than going down. I can shoot back up the stairs if I hear a search party on my trail.

I’m not counting the steps, but I must have gone down twenty or so when my right foot, sliding forward in what by
now is a practiced movement, hits not the expected edge of the step, slippery and curved from years and years of use, but something that rattles and gives, just slightly, as the toe of my sandal comes into contact with it.

A wooden door
.

I practically throw myself at it, patting it frantically with my open palms, searching desperately for a handle, a latch, a big iron key sticking out of a keyhole, ready for me to turn. I run my hands up and down, up and down, making sure I’m not missing a square inch of wood, covering it all, every bit of it, right up to the hinges on the other side.

To no avail. There’s nothing here. No lock, no latch, no big wooden bar that I can lift out of its bracket.

Despair slams into me like a tidal wave. I’ve done so well, made it down the stairs, been brave enough to go searching in the dark for an escape route. And all for nothing. My shoulders sag; tears prick once more at my eyes. I feel overwhelmed by exhaustion and misery. No matter how much I keep telling myself that I’ll be found, that I’m not going to rot away in this stupid passage, it’s very hard to keep my spirits up—because down here there really isn’t any light at all, not a sliver. And it smells really damp. Like a dungeon.

My legs go weak. I slide down the wall and plop onto a step, slumping forward, drawing in long breaths that are meant to calm me down but instead are coming out dangerously like sobs.

I
mustn’t
cry
, I tell myself furiously.
I’m going to be rescued, and when I am, I am
not
stumbling out of this bloody passage with my eyes all red and swollen from sobbing, looking completely pathetic. I am
not
going to let whoever locked me in here see how much it’s
affected me
. And because what I really want to do is curl up in a ball, hug my knees, and have a cry, I do the opposite: I sit up straight, biting my tongue to stop the tears, and lean my head against the wall behind me, tilting it up in another effort to make sure I don’t cry, a trick my mum taught me. She says it’s impossible to cry when you tilt your head back and look up at the ceiling.

Click
. Something knocks against the stone behind my head. For a split second I think it’s someone signaling to me, tapping from the other side of the wall, some other prisoner—
Yeah, or a skeleton knocking with its bony knuckles, I suppose!
I tell myself, mocking my overactive imagination.

Because of course it’s not some signal, from this or the other side of the grave. It’s my silver hair clip at the back of my head, which has just tapped against the stone.

And as soon as I realize that, I jump to my feet and head back up the stairs, not even bothering to feel the wall on either side of me. I was right: going upstairs in the dark is an awful lot easier than going down. Anyway, my hands are fully occupied, fumbling in my curls to undo the silver clip, feeling the shape of it, turning it over to work out how best to use it.

Of course, it’s not real silver, but that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that it’s strong, very hard to bend, and that its shape is long and narrow and pointed. It’s hinged at one side, and each piece has small teeth down it to catch and hold the hair, but I don’t think they’re going to be a problem; they’re really very small. Bracing myself, I pull the sides of the clip away from each other, exactly the opposite of how you’re supposed to use it, forcing the ends to rub against the spring lever that holds them together, trying to
break them apart. The teeth, the metal edges, dig into the soft flesh of my fingers; the more I pull, the more painful it becomes. I’m wincing, telling myself not to give up, but I’m beginning to get scared that I’m going to cut myself, and the two pieces are utterly refusing to break apart. I can’t see in this dark why that might be. Maybe the spring’s just too strong for me. But this isn’t going to work. I’m not going to be able to separate them.

Okay. Plan B. I’ll just have to use the whole thing. Even if it is a bit bigger than I wanted
.

Taking the wide part of the clip in my hand, I work the narrowest part, the other end, into the chink of light that I can see between the stone wall and the wooden door. The thin end of the wedge. It doesn’t want to go—as I thought, it’s a bit too big. Furious now, determined not to be defeated, I pull up my skirt, raise my foot, put my sandal sole onto the end of the clip, and kick it as hard as I can, one hand braced against the wall so I don’t stagger back with the impact and fall down the staircase.

Whack!
Something gives—whether it’s my sandal or the clip or the door I don’t know, until I straighten up again and see, triumphantly, that I’ve forced the door to yield a fraction. The clip is definitely deeper into the crack between the door and the wall. I feel around, making absolutely sure I have it in the right place: yes, I do. The door has actually splintered around the clip. I can feel the chips of wood coming loose, and smile as I lift my foot again and repeat the maneuver, slamming kicks into the clip once, twice, till it’s halfway in. Far enough for what I want to achieve, probably as far as it’ll go.

Then I bend over, take hold of the clip with both hands, and wobble it up and down, up and down, feeling for the metal latch on the other side. I’ve driven the clip in just below it; if I manage to get enough traction, then I’ll be able to lift the latch with it, please God—lift it out of its socket and up, enough so I can push open this bloody door.

The clip stops in its upward movement. I’ve found the latch. My heart soars. Carefully now, going slowly to get the right angle, I keep going, putting what feels like all my weight on the clip now, forcing it down against the wood of the door and the extra heft of the latch that’s resting on it, levering the latch higher and higher, hopefully high enough for it to clear the socket and fall free—

And then everything seems to happen at once. The latch lifts off the end of the clip; I hope with everything I have that it hasn’t fallen back into its socket but is hanging free. I’m about to push the door when it flies open, light streaming in, blinding me; I stagger, losing my balance, because most of my body weight has been shifted forward. I tumble forward into the corridor, the clip dropping from my hands.

What just happened?
I think frantically. The next second, I crash straight into something. Some
one
. Hands grab my upper arms as I collide with a lean body. I’m steadied, and I blink frantically, my eyes trying to accustom themselves to daylight after being in the dark for so long.

I don’t know who I expected to see, but it wasn’t him.

It’s Luca. Hair falling over his face, his blue eyes staring down at me, his handsome features expressing complete disbelief.