She Walks in Darkness (6 page)

 
tried to keep on arguing, but I couldn’t; there was nothing I could do. He saw that he had won; he said gaily, “Have you food here, signora? You would be the better for a meal, and me, I have cycled far.”

“Of course. I’ll get you something.” I jumped up gladly; the duties of a hostess should give me dignity, set a proper distance between us. But as I moved towards my fantastic kitchen, he moved with me. Lithely, with all a cat’s grace.

We got the meal together. His slim, beautiful hands were amazingly deft and strong. With ease he twisted open a can to which I would have had to take the can opener. Sometimes his hands touched mine, but they never pressed or lingered. He found the bottle of wine Dr. Pulcinelli had given Richard as a parting gift, and though I didn’t drink much of it, I am afraid I laughed as if I had. It was good, so good, not to be alone!

Around mid-afternoon we began our dessert; the shadows were lengthening. I sat facing the window, and I could see them stretching out long black arms over the green depths, turning the walled garden into a true Valley of the Shadow. Only the high white shape of Eos still towered above those dark, up-reaching tentacles.

“She is beautiful, isn’t she?” I said. “It seems queer to think that last night I was afraid of her.”

Floriano smiled indulgently. “If she lived she would be a thing to fear. Wings like that belong only to the great hawks.”

“And to angels.”

His smile broadened. “To those pretty, pious fairies the priests teach you women to believe in, signora.”

That jarred me. More than I could quite understand. I said, “Angels’ wings are symbolic, of course. My husband says that the early Christians probably borrowed them from your Etruscans. As perhaps they did their ideas of Hell.”

His mouth tightened; a chill came over the handsome, vivid face. “So Prince Mino Carenni used to say.”

“I remember. You said your family knew him?”

“As a boy, I myself had that great honor.” His voice was soft, but something in the tone startled me.

“You sound as it you hadn’t liked him very well.”

“I like none of his caste. You Americana are forever praising the Greeks as the founders of democracy. But
ancient Rome too was a republic—until those grasping, bloody-handed schemers, the Caesars, strangled it. The Italian people have always loved freedom. Like all people everywhere.”

“I’m sorry. I know that’s true. But Greek greatness died with Greek democracy; most of Rome’s came after the republic ended. I suppose that’s why we foreigners always think more about the empire.”

“You are wrong, signora.” His eyes blazed. “All Rome’s greatness was the people’s. Out of their blood, their sweat, their vigor, it was hewn. But the rotten scheming aristocrats robbed them of its fruits—they and their helpers, the greedy shopkeepers. Capitalists have always been with us.”

So that was it. Nobody talks more loudly of freedom than those who have never grasped its true meaning; those who send others to death or concentration camps for not believing as they do. “I disagree with every word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” Which great early American said that, or something like that? I am ashamed to say that I can’t remember, though to me his creed represents the very foundation of any world worth living in.

Well, Floriano had as much right to be a communist as I had not to be one. And he had grown up in a war-devastated country, recently ruled by Mussolini. To him Americans might still seem the victorious enemy, at best a pack of smug Santa Clauses. He certainly was the theoretical, idealistic type of communist, not the
active kind that Dr. Pulcinelli had spoken of. He never could have taken part in anything like that atrocity at the ironworks. Not beautiful Floriano. Probably it would be impossible to make him believe that such a thing had ever happened.

I said peaceably, “I’m sorry again. You know your country better than I do; I’m just a tourist. But anybody can see that you’re a race of artists. I’ll never forget the wonderful things I saw in Florence. And that statue down there—the Eos—” I pointed toward the garden.

“She is not even an original work.” His face was suddenly, shockingly hard. “Taddeo Credi copied her from the design on an Etruscan mirror, made her to Prince Mino’s order. Everything Taddeo Credi ever had has always been at Prince Mino’s orders. Even his beautiful daughter, Rossana.”

The bitterness in his voice shocked me. Could this boy have loved a girl the prince had taken from him? No, surely not; he was too young. I said, “That sounds like the old stories of
le droit du seigneur.”

He laughed shortly. “Noblemen never needed
le droit.
Peasant girls have very little. When offered pretty presents, they do not run fast. Or far.” He brooded a moment. “Fear too. You rich Americans, you do not know how fear feels. Even when your George Dennis came here, less than a hundred years ago, to write about things Etruscan, there were still nobles who had power of life and death over the peasants. Yes, the power to kill.”

Startled, I said the first thing that came into my head. “But George Dennis wasn’t American. He was English.”

“What difference? Save that you Americans are even richer.”

Everything I said seemed to stir up a hornet’s nest. I made one more effort to change the subject. “What did become of Prince Mino? Is he dead, or still in the sanitarium?”

Floriano’s fork dropped. “Why do you ask? You have just been with the professor and Signora Harris; they must know.”

“I wasn’t with them long, and I’d barely heard of him then. I never thought of asking.”

“He must be dead by now.” His voice was rough. “He must be! He is sad, a weak old man who has lost everything he ever cared for.”

I said, surprising myself, “Then he couldn’t have hidden in our car yesterday. He wouldn’t have been agile enough.”

It was like a door opening in my mind, a door that I had trying to keep shut. I suddenly knew what I had been afraid of, whom I had been afraid of, all along. I found myself telling Floriano all about the escaped prisoner, about my own fantastic fear that the fugitive might have left Volterra in our car, Richard’s and mine.

“It was silly, of course,” I ended. “Anybody would have been frightfully uncomfortable, curled up in our car trunk. But last night, in the dark, I couldn’t keep from thinking about it.” I laughed, expecting him to laugh too.

But his face was troubled. “He could have been moved to the asylum. The Carenni estate may be gone; the war ruined many—even of the rich. And I heard that tumult in Volterra; it was great enough to have covered the escape of many men. It might have given a man the idea of escaping. And if he were free, he could come here. Nothing—no one—ever could stop
him.”

I felt my skin creep. “Then you think it might have been the prince, after all—?”

His brilliant smile flashed again, enveloping me like the warmth of an embrace. “Not if he had to travel in the trunk of your car. We talk folly, signora. He is an old man, and feeble, if he lives. Broken, as he deserves to be. Whoever is with us in this house tonight, it is not he.”

The last words evoked a faceless image that chilled me. I said, “If somebody is here, it might be better if it were the prince. Somebody...not strong.”

“Have no fear, signora. I am strong. I will protect you.” His hand shot across the table and touched mine; I was still tingling from that brief, somehow intimate touch when he said, sobering swiftly, “But madmen are dangerous at any age. Do not wish for the company of one.”

“You think Prince Mino really was mad?”

“Always. He was also a murderer. No doubt your husband and his friends did not tell you that; these scholars shield one another. But a young Englishman called Carstairs sought refuge here during the war. He entered the villa and was never seen again.”

“I’ve heard about that. But I thought nobody was sure he came.”

“Allied searchers found a gold pen in the cellars, signora. His name was on it. And tonight I found this.”

He drew a small, stained leather notebook from his pocket. “Look at this. It must have been his. The writing is in English. And the dates are right.”

The writing was in English. The first date—April 30, 1945—seemed to leap at me. I heard my own voice demanding, “Where did you get this?”

“I found it upon the flagstones, near the kitchen door. While I searched for my wheel.” His voice was very grave. “Someone must have been in great haste—or in great fear—to have dropped it there. Someone must have been very clever, too, to have found what the Allied searchers could not find when they were going over the villa, inch by inch, for any trace of Roger Carstairs.”

“You mean—somebody knew where to look—?” My lips were stiff.

“Because he himself had hidden it there, signora. Or had seen the killer hide it.”

“Mattia Rossi! Then he was the servant who betrayed Prince Mino.”

Floriano said quietly, “Yes. That much I knew already. And when I found this book, I knew that you had not imagined your dead man. And I hurried back to you.”

Again his words evoked that terrible, lurking presence, that menace that even now might be creeping through the vaults below.

It could even be nearer. Perhaps listening at the door....

I thrust that image away. I said, “But if Mattia had the book, why didn’t he show it? To prove his story?”

“And give up the clue that might lead to a golden treasure?” Floriano’s smile was dry. “Our Tuscan peasants are shrewder than that, signora.”

“But he didn’t use it!”

“He could not read English. Perhaps he waited, hoping to find someone who did. Someone he could trust.”

“And that person killed him? Or else”—I shivered again—“some way Prince Mino did get back—”

“Then he would have taken his revenge, calling it justice. He never doubted his right to punish.” For a moment Floriano’s mouth and eyes were very grim; then he relaxed. “But we have agreed that the prince cannot have come back in the flesh, signora, and surely we are not such superstitious fools as to fear his ghost. No, more likely old Mattia trusted the wrong man, was betrayed in his turn. Let us see what we can make of this diary, for that is what it seems to be. You whose native tongue is English may be able to read much that I cannot.”

It was not easy reading. A great brownish stain had soaked through the book; whatever my hands touched that, I shrank away, as if from unbearable cold. But finally—using some guesswork—we did manage to piece together a fairly continuous narrative.

Roger Carstairs had come to the villa by night, crawling through thickets that normally he or any man would have thought impassable. Scratched and bleeding, he finally had come upon what he had hoped for: a hole covered by bushes, a hole that turned out to be a vertical shaft leading down into unknown depths. Such hidden vaults honeycomb the now barren Tuscan hills.

“I knew I was taking a risk, going down in there with no light, but I figured that that way I could shake off any men who might still be trailing me and find a place to rest.”

Shelter he found, but also fear. This was very different from his pre-war, professional visits to such Etruscan sites. Soon he realized that he was wandering in a labyrinth at least as inexplicable as the famous cuccumella of Camars: a gigantic, uncanny spiderweb of stone passages and chambers.

“I never had been so thankful for a good mechanical memory. Right turn, left turn—fifth right turn, fifteenth left turn—it’s after your counting gets up into the teens that you begin to have some doubts about the jolly old memory, after all.”