She Walks in Darkness (11 page)

“He meant to steal the treasure!” Floriano’s voice rose even higher. “He deceived you; he searched for it. Perhaps Mattia helped him! He found it; he was writing about that in his diary when I came in behind him. I had thought he would be asleep, I had drugged his drink, but he was not! He looked up—”

“And you killed him. Out of fear.” Prince Mino’s eyes were grim indeed now. “Gold was not what he sought, but that you could never understand. He should have stayed in his room, as I bade him, but in a young man so closely imprisoned, folly was inevitable. He too came of inferior stock.”

“He was looking for gold! Any man with a brain looks for gold!”

“Any man with your kind of brain.” Again Prince Mino’s voice cut like a whip. “You murdered your father’s guest, and then, when the Allied officers came with their questions, you panicked and planted evidence against me, your father. Is that not so?”

Sweat stood on Floriano’s face, his throat worked.

“Answer me. Is that not so?”

“I was afraid that Mattia would tell you. He had seen me coming up out of the cellars.” Floriano groaned.

“So? Then Mattia was fortunate to live as long as he did. But he suspected you only of spying, not murder.”

“He loved me better than you ever did!”

“Longer, at least.... You changed your name for fear of me, an imprisoned old man. But I had my watchers. I knew when you joined the communists—those mad, murderous vermin who are yet too good for such as you, since they do not set gold above all else.”

“They kill princes. They do not hold bastardy against a man! They are the hope of the world.” All Floriano’s old fanaticism flamed up, though his eyes, fixed upon his father’s, still made me think of a bird’s transfixed by a snake.

“A great hope, truly. They taught you to roast poor old Giovanni Quilico alive in his own furnace. And a weakling government only sent you to the Mastio.”

I jumped. This must have been the outrage that Dr. Pulcinelli had spoken of, and I, like a fool, had thought Floriano too fine, too fastidious, to have had any part in it.

“Yet the most doting father could not have rejoiced more than I when I heard of your escape, my son. Or have sorrowed more sincerely when he heard of your recapture.” Prince Mino’s voice was colder, more biting that the bitterest wind. “For had you had to serve your full sentence before you returned—as I knew well that you would return, faithful to your vulgar dreams of buried gold!—I might have been too old and too feeble to give you the welcome due you, my son.”

Floriano swallowed, but made no sound. He still stared at his father, bird facing snake. And Prince Mino suddenly seemed to tire of the game. He rose. “You have rested long enough. It is time to go. Be so good as to pick up the lantern, signora.”

I had expected that. I had known it must be coming, but when I picked up the lantern, my hand shook so that the prince reached out and steadied it. He looked at it appraisingly. “This does not belong here. But it is well made.”

I said shakily, glad of anything to gain a moment’s time, “I bought it in Volterra yesterday. Taddeo Credi made it.”

Then I shivered, remembering my feeling when I had left Taddeo’s workshop, the unseen eyes watching me, the footsteps following me. I had been right. Death had followed me back to the Palazzo Verocchio, death masquerading as youth and beauty. Floriano, escaping a second time. His first escape must have lasted long enough to rid him of his prison pallor, give him the tan that had fooled me....

Prince Mino’s voice called me back. “I am glad to see that the old fellow has not lost his touch.” He was still looking at the lantern.

“He should have cut your heart out with his chisel long ago!” Floriano’s voice was savage; something had suddenly brought back his courage. “Many a peasant has killed his daughter’s seducer. But he did not. He hoped that you would make him rich. He licked your boots.”

“Your grandfather is a sensible man. I set him up in his own shop in Volterra. He knew that he did not have it in him to rise higher.” Prince Mino’s voice was calm, unruffled. It was I who started. Then Rossana Credi— the beautiful Rossana—

“And my mother? How high did you raise her?” Floriano’s eyes were burning.

“I gave Rossana what to her was luxury. If she had not been too foolish to behave herself, she might still be enjoying it.” Prince Mino’s voice was still unruffled.

“Yes, she was foolish!”

Floriano’s voice stabbed like a knife. “A woman needs more than luxury, more than old withered flesh, even if it is princely flesh. A prince—bah! She was young and beautiful. She saw a young man, and he saw her. She gave herself, she who had been sold before. How you made him run away, I do not know, but what you did to her I know!”

“What exactly do you know?” Prince Mino’s face had suddenly become very still.

“You terrified her first; you made her feel cheap, ashamed. A faithless harlot, you called her—you who had taken her for your pleasure. If ever she was a harlot, you made her one.” Floriano’s voice shook.

“Even then you were an eavesdropper, my son?” Prince Mino’s face still had that inhuman stillness.

“They who have a master learn such tricks early.” Floriano’s voice stabbed at him again. “I was little, but I remember. I heard your voice; I can still hear her weeping.” He paused; the room itself seemed suddenly very still. Nothing in it moved, nothing but the shadows that flickered beyond the lantern light.

“We thought you sent her away to serve in the house of friends of yours in Florence, people who would watch her well and see if she mended her ways. We hoped that in time you would let her come back, my grandparents and I. My grandmother burned many candles before the Virgin.” Floriano’s voice shook. “And then you told us that she was dead.”

“Only you believed that. I told your grandfather that she had gone away with a new lover.” Prince Mino’s voice was as expressionless as his face.

“I see. So you made sure that they would never seek her grave. Even a rabbit like Taddeo Credi must have killed you had he known the truth!”

“Which you found out?” Still that serene, deadly voice.

“I heard the address you gave your chauffeur when you sent her away. The street number I forgot, but the name of the street I always remembered.” Floriano’s voice shook. “Later, in my teens, I found among your papers an address on that street. And next time you took me into Florence—and left me to amuse myself while you went off with your fine friends that I was not good enough to meet!—I went to look at that house to which you had sent my mother. It was not the kind of street I expected, not the kind of house I expected. Yet still I did not understand until I knocked on the door and they let me in!

“That was folly.” Into the taut hush Prince Mino’s tones fell, cool, undisturbed. “Older men than you have picked up evil sicknesses in that place.”

“I was not green, my noble father. I drank with the girl they gave me, but I did not touch her. I paid her for the name of an old woman who worked there. No inmate—inmates of a place like that do not live to be old. But that old hag who scrubbed floors remembered a very pretty girl called Rossana, one who must have come there at about the right date. One who died soon. That was all I could be glad of—that she died soon!” He shuddered, then turned blazing eyes upon his father. “How much did they pay you for my mother, most noble father? Or were you too proud to take money from such as they? Did you give her to them as a free gift—the mother of your son?”

The silence that fell then cannot have lasted very long, but it was very deep.

“It was not well done.” Prince Mino spoke as if to himself. “I have since regretted such outraging of beauty.... Treachery came to you with her blood, but there was no malice in her, only weakness. She did not earn her fate, as you have earned yours.”

He shrugged again, as if shaking off some slight, clinging encumbrance. “We must go now. You first, signora. For now I will carry the lantern.”

Courteously he stood aside for me to precede him through the door. Like automatons Floriano and I moved at his bidding. It was as if we were machines, and he had pressed the buttons that controlled us. Floriano’s defiance was over, spent with the fury that he had hurled at the icy, impregnable fortress of his father’s pride. He was in pain, but that did not matter, even to him, except because his disablement kept him from fighting for his life.

It had been meant to do just that. Prince Mino easily could have planted that bullet in his son’s heart, but he had not. Why?

Not because of pity. Not because of scruples....

I remembered Burckhardt’s great work on Renaissance Italy, his description of the
bella vendetta,
that “beautiful vengeance” that must be a work of art, something worth years of waiting and planning. An agony that tore soul as well as body, and the cooler, the more dispassionate its infliction, the more the avenger had been admired. My skin crawled.

Floriano stumbled against the wall and groaned. Pain has a terrible anonymity; it wipes out personality. I put out my hand to help him, as I would have anybody else; then met Prince Mino’s eyes and knew that I had made another mistake. He knew very little about pity; if he had had any doubt that I was his son’s lover, he was satisfied now.

“Let him be, signora. Go on.” The implacable, polished voice did not rise, but I went on.

We came into the kitchen; our captor herded us toward the cellar door.

We were going down into the vaults!

Realizing that, I woke up, lost the queer feeling of moving will-less through a dream. I stopped and faced my enemy. “Please, Prince Mino—whatever you think of me, my husband has never harmed you. He’s here in your house, hurt—”

“You wish to go back to care for him? Most touching wifely solicitude, signora, but you will soon forget it again. As you forgot it before, in my son’s arms.” Again his dry smile cut like a whip.

But this time a kind of queer, cold courage came to me. I said, “You want to believe that. To play the righteous judge, miles above Floriano and me. But you can’t stay up those glorious heights if you let my husband die. Then you’ll be a common criminal, just as Floriano is. Just another murderer.”

He was silent a moment; then he said, “I have always meant to see that help came to your husband, signora. It will; that much I promise you.”

I said, “Thank you,” and I meant it. But Floriano burst into wild laughter. “You fool! Can’t you see that he means to kill you too?”

I said, “I know that.”

I suppose I had known it all along, but saying it gave me a strange, freezing feeling of finality; and both men looked at me in surprise. There was even a touch of respect in the prince’s voice as he said, “I am sorry, signora; I regret the necessity. But I must have a little more time; my work must be finished. And that work is too important to be risked for the sake of an adulteress.”

I didn’t try to answer him; it didn’t seem to be worthwhile. And when the cellar door swung open, the light itself seemed to shiver and recoil from the darkness below.

t is a strange thing to look down into darkness—utter, abyss-like darkness—and to know that you are going to go down into it, and will never come up again. Prince Mino’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Be pleased to descend, signora.”

And I did exactly that. Dumb, docile as sheep, Floriano and I moved before him. It is terrible, the human instinct to obey; the secret that Madame Montessori and Mussolini—those two very different Italians—both knew. Perhaps it gives hypnotists their power too.

My heels rang upon those stones on which I had seen old Mattia Rossi lying in his blood. Those stones from which he had been dragged to his unknown grave.

Soon now Floriano and I would find our graves....

Well, for Floriano that was fair enough; he had smashed that bloodstained gray head. But what had I done? Anger flooded me, stiffened me. What right had Prince Mino to judge me? Why had I let him cow me? I shouldn’t have wasted those few minutes on the stairs; I could have jumped past Floriano, have knocked—at least have tried to knock—my lantern from the prince’s hand.

As if in answer, his voice came: “Please take the lantern now, signora. Also remember that from now on my flashlight will be in my left hand, as my pistol is in my right. Any trickery will only compel me to act at once.”

He set the lantern down; I picked it up.

We went on. We came to another staircase. The stale smell of the depths came up to us, closed round us. I thought dreamily, unbelievingly, “I shall never breathe fresh air again.”

That didn’t seem real. Nothing did.

Passage followed passage; chamber after chamber opened off them. We were below the cellars now, among the tombs. The painted walls swarmed with a myriad forms; sometimes demons glared at us, sometimes dancers rioted along beside us, men red as American Indians clasping milk-white women. One could almost see their delight in their bodies, in their leaping, spinning, amorous strength, although those bodies were only paint on stone. Crazily I wished that I could jump onto the wall too, and dance away with them, happy and safe. Then, looking a little closer at some of those fiercely joyous red faces, I knew that I couldn’t have said “No” to those men as long as I had said it to Floriano. They would simply have grabbed me.

Floriano. From time to time I saw his face, drawn with pain, slack with despair. Fear was older in him than rebellion; he was conquered. But I had not obeyed Prince Mino from childhood; deep down under the dream, something at the core of me waited, angry and watchful.

We went on and on, down, down.

The lantern was getting very heavy. For a long time the air had been bad, and it was getting worse. My lungs sucked at its lifeless weight. We must be in the very bowels of the Earth now; only this wasn’t Earth. These walls that pressed in upon us had been hewn out of the rock that lies beneath our planet’s life-giving pad of soil; they were further down than life should go. We were indeed in the Underworld, in the very Kingdom of the Dead....

“Only a little farther now, signora.” That courteous voice of Prince Mino’s! “We are near that sanctuary in which, until I discovered it in 1939, no man had set foot for over two thousand years.”

The place Roger Carstairs had found! For the first time in what seemed hours, I remembered the diary.

Floriano’s face glowed. The beauty that had faded from it flashed back, like the lighting of a lamp. “The treasure chamber! You are taking us to it!”

“I am. It seems fitting, my son, that you should see that for which you have taken two men’s lives. For which soon you will give your own life.”

The light went out of Floriano’s face; his shoulders sagged. But my heart leapt with a wild gladness. Time! This should give us a little more time!

We came to a place where two huge slabs of stone rose starkly, massive double doors guarded by two more of the squat urn-men, with their weirdly lifelike red faces.

“These should not be here.” Prince Mino sounded almost apologetic. “My ancestor took them from their proper places. It was some whim of his to set them to guard what he had placed within.”

Which ancestor—and what had he placed within?
Dear God, don’t let it be what I’m thinking of.
My courage was gone again; I was remembering what I least wanted to remember.

“Open the doors, my son.”

Those stone slabs would have been heavy for a man with two good arms, a man who had lost no blood. Sweat ran down Floriano’s face; his big black eyes looked like a suffering child’s.
He is a child,
I thought suddenly.
Too locked up in himself, in his own desires and grievances, to realize that anyone else has any rights, even the right to live.
I had very little reality for him, my feelings and motives none. Childish spite would keep him from ever speaking the words that might clear me.

But if he had spoken, would Prince Mino have believed him? Could he have afforded to? I had to be expendable.

At last the doors opened. Again I was given precedence. That too is a queer feeling—to go through a door and know that you may never come out again.

Before us stretched another passageway, perhaps twenty feet long. At its end was a vast circular chamber. Burial niches lined its walls, stone beds divided from one another by the rock walls out of which they had been hewn.
They look exactly like railroad berths,
I thought, and nearly started laughing again.

A gigantic central pillar supported the ceiling. It had been cracked across, and fresh mortar-work showed like bandages on a wound. Prince Mino surveyed it, frowning.

“Some years ago an Earth tremor weakened this pillar. Yesterday it began to crumble in places. Had poor Mattia not been down here helping me to repair it, he would have been on hand to greet you and your husband, signora. Much might have gone otherwise.”

I felt sick. On his way up from here, old Mattia must have met Floriano. If he had not—if he had not—my legs trembled; the prince looked at me with concern.

“You are faint, signora? Seat yourself there on that sarcophagus behind you. Stand beside her, my son.”

I sat down—flopped down, rather—on the edge of one of those quaint stone berths. Prince Mino walked towards another, swung the flashlight into its shadows, and reached down. When he straightened I saw something dangle, gleaming, from his hand.

A pair of handcuffs!

I screamed then; at least I tried to. All I heard was the kind of feeble squeak you make in nightmares. I knew, then, what it was that I had been afraid of all along.

To lie in one of these stone beds forever. Until my bones crumbled, like those of that girl for whom the villa had been made beautiful long ago. Only I would lie beside Floriano.

“No! No!” Floriano cowered back, his eyes seeming to start from his head. “No!” He must have feared what I feared.

“No unseemly exhibitions, my son,” the prince reproved him coldly. “These toys will not hurt you. They should fit you well, having once held the famous murderess Orsini, she who poisoned not only her husband, but her child. Her own blood, one as close to her as a father.... Your pardon, signora.”

I felt something cold close round my wrist, heard something snap. I looked down and saw the handcuff gleaming there. Its mate gleamed around Floriano’s wrist. We too were linked together, inescapably. Prince Mino said calmly, “Your grandfather had a taste for such gauds, my son. You may remember his collections. Of late years I brought these down here, in case of uninvited intruders, and now they serve me well.”

He turned his back on us, moved to yet another of those stone berths. For an awful instant I thought he meant it to be our deathbed. I could almost hear him say, “Come here. Lie down.” But then I saw that he was looking at the wall that divided that berth from the one just left of it. The fronts of all those dividers looked like separate panels, set into the living rock of which they actually were parts, so carefully had they been carved to resemble wood. Prince Mino seemed to play with those carvings, fingering them like a child. I thought,
Has he gone completely mad?

Then wondered if I had, for suddenly what had seemed to be solid rock swung outwards. The panel was a door, several inches deep; its carved border had disguised the edges. The black cavity behind it did not look a full eighteen inches wide, but it was there!

Floriano and I both gasped. His father swung to face us, shining-eyed. “This is the entrance to the shrine of Mania, Goddess of the Abyss. Its priests buried themselves and it beneath a planned avalanche, to keep out Sulla’s butchers. So they saved their holy place from such rape as the Temple of Veltha suffered.”

He paused, actually smiling at us. For the first time we had some value to him, not as ourselves, but as an audience. And I could have smiled back; my heart felt as if all the rock around us had just been rolled off it. For now, at least, our handcuffs were only restraints, meant to give him full freedom of action.

Nothing else....

His eyes shone, his face was rapt. “Later, under the empire, the family of Tequna, descendants of those old priestly guardians, had this room dug out and made it their family tomb. Giving their dead bodies to guard their holy place even as that earlier head of their house—the last of the high priests—have given his living body. When I found this door, I swore that the trust they had kept through the ages never should be betrayed through me.”

And it won’t be,
I thought sickeningly,
because what Floriano and I see won’t matter. We’re going to die.

“You are ready, signora? I regret to say that at first you must walk sidewise, and always downward. Also we must leave your lovely lantern behind.” With that maddening courtesy, the straight old figure moved to one side, cool again, a gracious host.

That black slit yawned before us. Floriano and I entered it, groped a little way, then heard the door close and panicked. Stone scraped our shoulders, we writhed against each other like snakes, pocketed in blinding, terrifying blackness. When I heard Prince Mino’s voice behind us, I could have sobbed with relief. “A few more yards, and the way will widen.”

Those few yards seemed terribly long. It was wonderful when Floriano and I finally had room enough to walk side by side. The rock walls pressing in upon us made the ghastly tomb chamber we had just left seem like freedom, like the sunlit outside world. Prince Mino kept well behind us; his flashlight gave us just enough light to watch our footing.

I don’t know how long we walked; I do know that every step led downward. The passage kept twisting, turning, until I thought,
This is what it would feel like if one had been swallowed by a snake.
I even began to imagine that I could hear the creature hissing.

It was getting warmer, too. If I had been hurt, like Floriano, I should have thought that I had fever. And the hissing was getting louder, fiercer, filling my whole head. I could smell some kind of odor.

“Steady.” That was Prince Mino’s voice again, closer behind us now. “Soon we shall be there, signora.”

Where?
I wondered.
In Hell?
We did seem to have gone far enough down to get there.

We made one last turn, and then suddenly I could feel the blackness widening, opening, like an awful flower. There was still that odor, but I could breathe again. Though, oddly, the hissing seemed louder.

“Careful. Here the ramp ends and the stairs begin.” Prince Mino swung the flashlight forward.