Flirting in Italian (26 page)

“Miele di lavanda,”
she says.
“Lo faccio io.”

She can tell by the blank expression on my face that I don’t understand a word. Tutting, she gets up, goes to the far end of the kitchen, and returns with a handful of something she clumps around the table and holds out to me: dry herbs. Her hand is ancient, deeply lined, more like a claw;
cautiously, I sniff what she’s shoving under my nose and then nod in recognition.

“Lavender!” I say.

“Si, si!”
She taps the jar of honey with the other claw.
“Miele. Di lavanda.”

“Miele di lavanda,”
I say as she nods vigorously. Lavender honey. Now I have to take some. I stir it in, watching the sticky, sugary honey dissolve. My brain’s checking everything: the tea, made by Maria in front of me, poured from the same pot; the honey that she’s had too, serving herself from the same jar. Nothing that could remotely hurt me. I pick up my mug.

Maria’s shuffled around the table and sat back down, facing me.

“La principessa è la cosa piu importante per me nella vita,”
she says. The princess is the most important thing for her.
“Lei e Luca. Le uniche cose per me nella vita.”

The principessa and Luca, the most important things for her. I nod seriously, showing that I understand. And part of me, a silly, fantasizing, dreaming part, thinks that maybe she’s aware of the connection between me and Luca, that she’s trying to welcome me, with the lovely fresh mint tea, her own homemade honey. That she’s telling me how important the family is to her because she wants me to respect that, to treat Luca well.

Has he mentioned me to Maria? Confided in her?
The mere idea of Luca talking about me to someone makes me flush with excitement.

The tea’s cooled enough to drink now. I pick up the mug and raise it to my lips.

And then I jump almost out of my skin. The heavy oak kitchen door at the far end of the long room swings open with such force that it slams against the wall. Sunshine floods in, and I realize how dark it was in here, how little natural light this kitchen has. A figure’s silhouetted against the brightness outside, tall and lean, and in the next moment it tears toward us threateningly, footsteps ringing loudly on the stone flags.

It’s Luca. Heading straight for me, towering over me, his expression grimmer and more angry than I’ve ever seen, his blue eyes narrowed with fury, his mouth a long straight line. It’s all I can do not to shrink back. I’m afraid of him, afraid of what he might do; that realization straightens my backbone and I sit up with posture so perfect that my mother would thoroughly approve, and I stare back at him in defiant challenge.

I’ve done nothing wrong! I was asked to come here, brought by Elisa—I haven’t foisted myself on his home like some kind of pathetic stalker. He has no right to be angry, to glare at me like this—

And then his hand rises, and despite myself I flinch. I should have stood up to confront him, but he was so fast, his long legs crossing the room in a split second. In a small, rational part of my brain, I absolutely know that Luca isn’t going to hit me, but that’s exactly what it looks like, and I stare up at him in utter shock and disbelief at seeing his hand come down with lightning speed toward me. What he does is completely unexpected: he grabs the mug in my hand, rips it from my grasp, and sends it flying toward the wall in one swooping swing of his arm.

The mug flies into the display cabinet like a cricket ball
being thrown. It smashes everything it hits, and it shatters into pieces itself. The sound of glass and china splintering is deafening. I scream, and the next thing I know Luca has his arms around me, spinning me away, suffocating me against his chest so my scream is muted, my open mouth squashed into his shirt.

I’m stronger than I look. I wrestle free a moment later, feeling my eyes stretched as wide as they can go with shock and sheer fury.

“What do you think you’re
doing
?” I yell at him. “Have you gone
mad
?”

I didn’t think I could get even angrier, but when he doesn’t answer, just turns and goes running around the table away from me, I do. If I still had the mug in my hand, I think I would have hurled it at his head.

“How
dare
you?” I shout, but he isn’t looking at me; his focus is entirely on Maria. He grabs her, pulling her up from her chair, and shakes her like a rag doll.

“Cos’ hai fatto?”
he’s yelling into her face.
“Ma cos’ hai fatto?”

She’s yelling back at him, so fast I can’t understand a word she’s saying. I can only stare in horror as, eventually, Luca lets her go, and she sinks back down into the chair again, sobbing, her hands over her face. Luca turns back to me, and his face looks terrible, paper-white, skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, his eyes dark with utter sorrow and misery.

“I am so sorry, Violetta,” he says, his voice rough and hoarse. “I am so very sorry that this happens in my home. She has just tried to—”

He clears his throat, and I see with complete shock and disbelief that he’s crying. I don’t think he even realizes it; he doesn’t raise a hand to wipe the tears away. They’re falling slowly down his pale cheeks as he says slowly, painfully:

“Maria has just tried to poison you.”

It’s two hours later. I feel as if I’ve been through a tornado, caught up in the tight spiral of a cyclone and deposited somewhere else, in a totally different landscape, aching right through to the bone. So though I’m sitting out on the terrace beyond the Gold Salon, looking out on the cypress trees from which we watched the bats pour out on our last visit, it’s as if I’m seeing everything with new eyes. I don’t know what to think, how to react.

Which, I suppose, makes me normal. I mean, who
would
know how to react if they were told that someone had tried to poison them?

“It was in the
tazza
,” Luca’s telling me. He’s sitting next to me on the stone bench, being very careful not to touch
me. I reacted so badly when he grabbed me and pressed my face into his chest so I wouldn’t get cut by a flying shard of glass or china, he’s probably nervous about how I might respond if he tried to hold my hand or put his arm around me.

“The what?” I say dully.

“The cup,” he says. “She put it in the cup before she put it out in front of you. And also the wineglass for your
vin santo
, before. Just a few drops. Not enough to …” He swallows, hard. Out of the comer of my eye I see how tense his jaw is, how tightly clenched.

“Not enough to kill me?” I finish.

“No!” He swivels to face me, his eyes intense. “Violetta, she swears, not that. She never meant … that. Just to hurt you, to make you afraid, so you would not come back here, never again. Maybe to make you leave Italy.”

I prop my elbows on my knees, burying my face in my hands.

“But
why
? I’ve been thinking and thinking about this, and I still can’t see why.…”

I’ve had some time to go over this in my head. Not during the awful scene Luca had with Maria, where she cried and pleaded with him, where he threatened to call the police, where he strode over to the liquid that had been in my cup, now dripping down the wall and pooling in some of the cups and saucers that had survived, pointing at it furiously, telling her he would have it analyzed by the police if she didn’t tell him everything. When he rang his mother, who came home ashen-faced, and on sight of whom Maria broke down completely, wailing and sobbing like a banshee.

The principessa told Luca to ring Catia, to come and
take me away, but I wasn’t ready to go. I think I must still have been in shock. I could barely walk, let alone envisage getting into a car, going back to Villa Barbiano, and having to tell everyone there what had happened, when I barely understood it myself.

That was the other factor, apart from the shock: how could I leave without a full explanation? Without understanding what had gone on here, why on earth Maria would want to drug the
vin santo
and mint tea of a girl she’d seen only once—not only that, but to lock me in the passage too? Because she confessed that to Luca as well. She’d sneaked up, seen me lagging behind in the gallery, and opened the door to the passage, hoping I’d take the bait and assume that was the way everyone else had gone. Once I’d gone down the stairs, she locked me in and slipped back to the kitchen in another attempt to scare me away from the castello.

“I know it’s because of the way I look,” I say, summoning up the bravery to sit up straight and take my hands away from my face.
The face
, I think bitterly,
that has caused all these problems
. “From the way your mother and Maria reacted when they first saw me. I mean, it was really odd and weird.”

I don’t feel I can tell him about the portrait in London. Not yet, maybe not ever. I can’t deal with the possibility that he might somehow blame me, think I’m at fault for having deliberately come to the castello knowing that I was a dead ringer for a girl who lived here centuries ago.

He’s nodding.

“Yes,” he says slowly. “It is your face. And your body. Everything.”

He gestures at me, and I feel really self-conscious,
because he’s encompassing everything about me. He’s really looking at me up and down.

“My mother says,” he continues, “that you look like my aunt Monica when she was your age. My father’s sister at seventeen. Moh.” He pulls a face. “I do not know Monica when she is young. When I know her, she is older, she tints her hair blond, she is very thin, too thin. I do not see that you look like her. Not at
all
.”

The emphasis is very reassuring; I bristled when he said that I didn’t look like Monica, who was thin, but the “too thin” immediately afterward was a huge relief.

“But what my mother think, what Maria think, is not good.” He draws a deep breath. “My father,” he says, “is a very bad husband. He always has girlfriends, always. My mother always know but she will not leave. You know, I tell you this. I hate it.”

The stone bench is very cold beneath my thighs, but I register that without doing anything about it. I don’t move. It’s as if I’m carved from stone myself, like one of the statues in the castello gardens.

“They think because of this that you may be the daughter of my father,” he says, all in a rush. “Because you cannot be the daughter of Monica, it is not possible. She has two children, they are your age and my age. Not possible that she has another. But you are so like the di Vesperi family. Even I see that. I look at the pictures, the
ritratti di famiglia
, and I see it. I do not want to see it. But I do.”

From the moment I discovered that Luca was of the di Vesperi family, somewhere deep down, I’ve been afraid that
we might be related. But this is a horrible, profound communication of my worst fear.

“Is that why Maria tried to poison me?” I say, barely able to move my lips now; I feel overwhelmed with misery.

“
Si
. Seeing you, it upsets my mother very much. She know my father have girlfriends, she accept that. But a child, that she does not know about, makes her very sad.”

“We don’t know that it’s true!” I exclaim.

Luca jumps to his feet and, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets, starts to pace up and down the terrace.

“No,” he says bleakly, ducking his head forward so his hair falls over his face. “We do not know.”

I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them.

“I always realized I looked different from my mum and dad,” I say in a small voice. “My mum’s Scandinavian, tall and blond. And my dad’s Scottish, he has red hair and freckles.”

Luca mutters something under his breath that sounds like a curse.

“How did you know?” I ask him, a question that’s been on my mind ever since he stormed into the kitchen. “How did you guess what was going on?”

He heaves a deep sigh and leans against the stone balustrade that wraps around three sides of the terrace. Fishing in his pocket, he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and taps one out.

“Maria comes with my mother when my mother marries my father,” he explains. “Maria is from the village where my mother’s family has their villa. She is always very
fedele
.” He
thinks for a moment. “Faith-ful,” he translates, his accent making it hard for him to pronounce the
th
sound. “She has always made remedies, with the herbs. Once, many years ago, she became angry with my father because he behaved badly. She make him sick. He never knows, he think he have eaten the bad fish. My mother knows. Maria is good at pretending, she pretend she like him and he does not suspect anything.”

“She
is
good at pretending,” I agree, thinking of her pinching my cheeks on my last visit to the castello, telling me I was pretty; of the way she feigned surprise when she opened the door to me this afternoon. I would never have guessed that she knew I was coming, that she had planned to give me tea, to push a cup toward me that already had some drops of yew decoction in it.

Luca nods.

“But the person she cannot pretend with is my mother. Mamma know and she tell Maria never, never again.
Mai
. Never must she do this thing to give him herbs to make him sick.”

He lights his cigarette with a metallic click of the Zippo.

“And I remember. I am young but I remember. I try to look after Mamma, keep her happy when my father is not here. I hear when my mother tells Maria never again. So when you tell me you are sick …” He takes a long pull on the cigarette, staring straight ahead, avoiding my eyes, his expression still bleak. “I guess what happens.
Maybe
, I think,
it is Maria
. But I do not know, not to be sure, and I am wondering about what to do. But also”—he looks directly at me now, his blue eyes blazing with intensity—“I think you are
safe, because you do not come here again. I think I have time because you are safe with the other girls.

“And then I stop into the Casa del Popolo this afternoon, for a coffee, and I see Elisa. She tells me you are here, because Mamma ring on the phone and say she is with Signora Barbiano and they want to see you. At once I think, but why? This is very strange. It does not make sense. So I ask Elisa, but did you speak to my mother, how did she sound? And she say no, she speak to Maria, it is Maria who give the message from my mother. So then—” His eyes narrow. “Then I am very scared for you and I get in my car and drive very very fast to come here to make you safe.”

“Thank you,” I say. It seems inadequate for what he’s done for me. My arms are still wrapped around my calves; it’s like they’re a barrier, giving me security, protecting me. I feel incredibly vulnerable and alone.

“Di niente,”
Luca says bitterly, which I know means “Not at all.” He looks at me and lets his cigarette butt fall to the terrace, stubbing it out with a turn of his boot heel, and walks over to the bench. To my amazement, he drops fluidly to his knees in front of me; he’s so tall that his face is still almost level with mine. I stare at him, feeling really awkward with my knees bunched up like this.

“You look so sad,” he says. “I am so sorry.
Mi dispiace cosi tanto
. It is for you to say what should happen to Maria,” he continues seriously. “My mother says this too. If you want, we will call the
carabinieri
. The police.”

Instinctively, I shake my head. No police. No publicity. No one but us must know about this awful family secret. I slide my legs to the side, along the bench, pulling my skirt
over my knees, and the next thing I know Luca has reached out and taken my hands. I shiver, and his long fingers wrap more tightly around mine, giving me reassurance.

“She cannot stay here,” he says firmly. “It is not possible. She must leave. She is not good for my mother, I tell Mamma that very often. Maria want to
padronare
”—he thinks—“to rule. To rule the castello. She no want help to clean, to cook. My mother offer often to get more women to clean, to help, but Maria say no. She want to rule my mother. Now I tell Mamma, Maria must leave.”

“If you call the police, there’ll be a big scandal,” I say slowly, trying to work out how I feel, what’s the best thing to do. “I don’t want that.”

Luca is agreeing, but he isn’t pushing me; I feel nothing coming from him but concern for me.

“What else could happen, though?” I say hopelessly. “If your mother”—I would normally say “mum,” but it feels completely disrespectful to call a princess “mum”—“sent her to an old people’s home, she might start—I don’t know, putting stuff in the tea of other people she didn’t like. Or the nurses. It wouldn’t be safe.”

Luca’s listening intently, and I’m talking slowly. He nods sharply as I talk, confirming that he’s taking in what I’m saying.

“I know this too,” he says. “She is not safe. When she do this to my father …” His eyes go cold, his face taut. I’m realizing that he always looks like this when he talks about the principe. “He is sick in the stomach, but who cares? He is very bad with my mother, he make her cry, he tell her lies. So maybe, he is sick one time …” He shrugs eloquently,
still holding my hands. “But with you …” His eyes flash in anger. “You are innocent. You have done nothing. It is very wrong and bad to make you sick.”

He lifts one of my hands and raises it to his cheek, a gesture so tender and unexpected that my breath catches in my throat. I feel the blood rising to my cheeks, and I look down at my lap. I can’t meet his eyes.

“Is there somewhere Maria could go?” I ask in a very small voice. “Maybe”—I have a flash of inspiration—“maybe a nunnery?”

Luca’s face goes blank. I have to explain “nunnery” to him, and that involves hand-waving as I describe the black clothes and white headdress, so I have to retrieve my hands, for which, on balance, I’m very grateful. When he finally gets it, he laughs, throwing back his head; he stands up and props his bottom against the edge of the bench, looking down at me with a great amusement in his eyes; Luca never stands when he can lean.

“Povere suore,”
he says, smiling. “Poor nuns. Maria would try to rule them too. No, if you agree not to call the police, my mother thinks she send her back to her village. To her old house. They know her there. Her mother too, she make the drinks with herbs. Good drinks,” he adds seriously. “I promise. It is not all bad, she makes many good remedies. But they know Maria, they live all on the land of my mother’s family. If my mother send her back, they will all be warned.”

Relief sweeps over me. I take a deep breath.
Never to have to see Maria again, not to have her in the castello. No scandal, nothing
.

“It’s perfect,” I say.
“Perfetto.”

“Good. I think so too.
Perfetto
. She must leave tomorrow.” He shakes his head. “I would say she must leave today, but it is late now, too late for the train to the Veneto. But tomorrow, she go, and someone my mother knows will take her so we know she gets there.” He pulls a face. “The only thing that make me cross is that it will make my father happy. He does not like Maria.”

He reaches out his hand to me.

“It is late now,” he says quietly. “Soon I take you back to Villa Barbiano.”

I take his hand and stand up, facing him. And I realize that I have a sudden craving to be away from here. I need to process everything that’s happened this afternoon: my head’s swimming, dazed with too much information, too much drama.