The Sin of Cynara (5 page)

  'We had better refer to you as Mrs. Adams for the sake of propriety, for island people can be rather insular in their moral attitudes.' He faced her again and watched with no movement in his eyes the deft way she rearranged her hair, braiding it swiftly and smoothly to the crown of her head.

  'Your composure is truly amazing, Mrs. Adams, in the circumstances.'

  'I - I was warned that you would probably kill me, signore, for daring to come here.'

  'Then you have got off lightly, have you not? You will take a glass of wine?'

  At her nod he went to a cabinet overlaid by tortoiseshell and took from it a cut-glass decanter and a pair of wine cups. Carol, in need of some ease for her shaken nerves, looked around the room and saw its striking beauty in more detail. The dark mahogany panelling that gleamed like polished armour, and the frescoed ceiling with its rich colours, flying clouds and cloaks, curving limbs and flashing eyes.

  'Your wine, Mrs. Adams.' He was standing in front of her, holding towards her the lovely old wine cup encircled by a fresco of tiny imps. As she took it and looked at it with evident pleasure, that faint twist of a smile touched his lips.

  'Never drink good wine out of anything but the best containers. Wine, like love, isn't worth the tasting unless it goes to the head and the heart. Salúte !'

  'Salúte,' she echoed, and found the wine superb and certainly potent. 'You have a beautiful house, signore. I couldn't believe it when the railway porter called it a palazzo.'

  'Are you enquiring if we are very rich?' he asked, and with a gesture he invited her to sit down in a deep armchair of red leather. When she sat down he took the companion chair.

  'You're bound to think me mercenary, signore, but I really mean what I said about working for my keep. I wouldn't want it any other way, and I don't expect

  Teri to have any legal claims on - on your money.'

  'Quite so, he has none ! It would have been awkward for you, would it not, if your son had looked like you instead of resembling my brother so unmistakably. I might well have run you off the island had you come here with a blond boy, his eyes the colour of the moonstone.'

  Carol looked sharply at the baróne when he said that. He was an acutely disturbing man ... everything about him, his voice, his remarks, his flawed looks that must have been those of a Roman charioteer, a man to whom women would have flown like falcons at a snap of his fingers. Now he had a frightening quality, as if he might enjoy being cruel to a woman, especially if she claimed to care for him.

  'You will be kind to Teri?' she asked tensely.

  'Oh yes, madam.' He twirled the wine in his frescoed cup. 'I reserve my cruelty for women, and you know it, don't you?'

  Carol looked at him and thought to herself that he was diàvolo in a way Vincenzo had not been. With his brother it had been a pursuit of pleasure, but with Rudolph it was a kind of sardonic enjoyment in getting into the minds of people and finding out just how vulnerable they might be.

  'Yes, I think you could be cruel,' she said.

  'And you probably understand why.' His gaze slid across her face. 'This situation is certainly intrigànte.'

  'Oh, most intriguing,' she said wryly. 'I have placed myself at your uncertain mercy — it seems to have become a habit with me.'

  'A habit?' He lifted a black eyebrow. 'You fell a victim to my brother's charm, and now his child has drawn you here despite your misgivings, eh? You are a martyr to your own heart, Mrs. Adams.'

  'If you like to put it that way, messère.' That Italian word for master slipped out almost unaware, and yet directly she spoke it Carol was aware that it fitted him. He was a masterful man, and he was most certainly the master of all this - a superb palazzo on an island, who had made her do something she had never done for Vincenzo ... she had let down her hair for Rudolph Falcone in order to stay here with the child who was not hers.

  Her fingers tightened on her wine cup ... he must never learn the real truth, for he wasn't the type to forgive anyone for cheating him in a game of chance.

  'You are sitting there forming an opinion of me,' he said. 'May I know it, for it amuses me to collect the impressions of women regarding the man I am behind this awful face.'

  Carol flinched at his words ... yes, it must be awful for a man who had once been as handsome as one of the gods to look in a woman's eyes and see there her instinctive recoil from his burns. Pity he would dread and scorn, and so Carol resorted to the truth that lay in her mind regarding him. 'Yes, I'll tell you my impression of you, messère. You are like one of those Roman governors of long ago, who sat in the best seats at the Circus Maximus to watch the Christians being fed to the lions.'

  'A charming image, madam.'

  'Is it altogether a distorted image?' she asked.

  'No.' He shook his head. 'The ancestory of the Falcones goes far back into Roman times and my genes are undoubtedly shaded by the pagan past - and what of you, eh? In far-off days were you a Christian slave with only your remarkable hair to cover your white body?'

  His voice and accent, his very way of looking at her created a vivid mental image of a ruthless centurion with his eyes fixed upon a Christian girl offered up to the wicked delight of the Roman crowd, their jeers and laughter echoing around the arena as she suffered just to provide sport for them.

  Had she been invited to stay at the palazzo just to provide sport for this man, who could never have been gentle even before the accident to his face had seared the memory of pain deep into his flesh and bones?

  'Yes,' he murmured, reading her thoughts in her eyes. 'Every man must have his divertiménto, and the modern circus is all nets and teddy bears. It's a small return for what I shall do for your son, born as he was on the wrong side of the blanket.'

  Carol flushed and hated him for that ... only her love for Teri kept her in this room with this man. In order to get for the boy the things to which his birth entitled him she had to put up with the baróne's tormenting remarks ; she had to bite on the bullet and not give way to the urge to tell him to go to the devil. He knew she was fighting with her temper, it was there in his eyes. Very softly he laughed at her, daring her to refuse his patronage for the boy.

  'You don't like me, do you, Mrs. Adams?' he mocked. 'Unlike Vincenzo I can't be charmed by wide grey eyes and a long creamy neck carrying a weight of blonde hair. I'm iron, madam, where he was smouldering blood and nerves for anything in skirts. There is probably more of Vincenzo in the boy than there is of you, and you did right to bring him here, even if it did take you five years. Stay ! It's a settled thing !'

  'Do I kiss your hand for being so generous?' she couldn't resist asking. 'I suppose as master of all this you can't help your arrogance.'

  'I don't doubt that I'd be arrogant if I had only a lemon cart to trundle around the streets,' he said. 'We are human beings, madam, not dolls. We are flawed by our kind of manufacture as a Lenci doll could never be.'

  'It - it does occur to me, signore baróne, that you could provide an income for Teri - the one that Vincenzo had, perhaps? Then we shouldn't have to impose on your hospitality and I could take a flat in Rome and find work there—'

  'Be quiet !' he ordered, and stood up so he towered over the chair in which Carol sat. 'The boy is part of this family and he belongs here, and as he's still quite young he should have his mother with him. You may not like the idea of living under my jurisdiction, but it's what you came for and it's what you have. What did you think? That the child had a white-haired grandfather who would dote on the pair of you?'

  'Perhaps.' She leapt to her feet, but he was still a good deal taller, making her feel that he always had the advantage by reason of his height and the terror of his face. Her heart felt gripped, shaken, when he looked directly down at her and she had to endure the devastation of a face that must have been so striking. 'I suppose in my heart I did hope that Vincenzo had parents who would understand my plight.'

  'Your plight, madam, is that you leapt into Vincenzo's arms without thinking. You must have been a mere girl - eighteen, I would say. The wife he left behind him was about the same age. Our mother was alive then, and it was she who arranged the marriage. I said at the time that it was a mistake to force the girl upon him, but he made such a bad reputation for himself among the kind of girls that our mother couldn't accept into the family that she hoped to subdue him by making a family man of him. It didn't work, eh? He ran off and collected a bigamous bride for himself ... I think it a good thing that my mother is not alive. She wouldn't have understood your plight, Mrs. Adams. She would have had you thrown out of Falconetti, along with the boy. Her pride could not have stood for a grandson born illegitimately.'

  Carol shivered at the word. This was her darling Teri whom they discussed in this cold and cynical way. Oh, how could she hope that he and she would be happy in this palace of a house, ruled over by a man of arrogant hardness?

  She didn't doubt that he had a sensuous love of the beautiful things he had collected around him; his fingers played over them as if they produced a soundless music for him alone. But she had the sure feeling that few people had touched his heart... least of all a strange woman who came here assuming the motherhood of Vincenzo's child ; the dead brother who in his life had deserted a young and legal wife and probably broken his mother's heart by his desertion.

  Vincenzo had worshipped 'love's warm sweet mouth,' but Rudolph had said he was made of iron, and Carol believed him.

  Whatever had happened to his face enclosed him in armour that would have few inlets to his hardened heart, and she was about to place Teri and herself in his hands.

  She looked at him and felt as if her heart were trembling, and never before had she been so aware of the fateful strangeness of life ... as if one stood in the wings of a great theatre and waited for a curtain to rise on scenes that would terrify, perhaps thrill, and cause pain.

  Her heart raced ... this moment was like a casket that opened slowly... slowly.

  'Finish your wine,' he said, and she glanced dazedly at the garnet-red wine in the lovely old cup and lifted it slowly to her lips. It ran warm and enlivening down her throat.

  'Better?' he drawled. 'You looked for a moment as if you might faint. Have you and the boy had any food?'

  'We had breakfast,' she faltered. 'Before we caught the bus to the lake—'

  'That was hours ago,' he said curtly. He leaned to his desk and pressed the bell on it. Then he moved to the windows in his iron-grey suit that was so faultlessly tailored, fitting like a second skin to his lean and supple body. From the back he had the nobilezza air from his black hair to his handmade shoes. Il signor baróne, who gazed from the windows upon his vast property, imperious as a Roman of old.

  'Come see the lake as the sun goes down,' he ordered.

  Carol walked slowly towards him, feeling the tremor in her legs that was caused as much by this encounter with him as by the need for food. She halted beside his tall figure and looked down upon the Lake of Lina that enclosed this island that seemed so many miles from Chalkleigh and the Copper Jug, where the gossip would be rife that Carol had followed her sister Cynara's example and run off to foreign parts ... no doubt at the beckoning of a man.

  A nervous little smile tugged at Carol's lips. Could the Aunts but see her, alone in the flaming gold of an Italian sunset with a man whose hair and sideburns were like the cheek-flanges of a Roman helmet, and whose eyes as they briefly flicked her face were like those of a falcon.

  She stared at the lake that was shot with red and gold in the glow of the falling sun, just as if gems had been spilled on the water. The water reeds stood dark in that drifting light, bristling and bending in the coming breeze. The air drifting through the windows had a coolness to it and the tang of lemons.

  The incandescence of the sunset was a beauty bordering on fear. It was of heaven, the realm of love and death.

  The little pools of shadow seemed to hold menace at the lakeside; everything brooded, the house, the master, and the distant mountains. The golden shadows deepened and crept over the gardens of broken statuary and stone paths leading to hidden places. The sky overhead was a wonderful cloak of a thousand mixed colours, and a great cloud of mauve vines whispered and moved on the wall beneath the windows.

  'No artist could ever reproduce that in all its living beauty, not even the old masters.' That deep voice of the baróne's seemed to play over Carol's nerve-ends. 'We have paintings and tapestries in the galleria that are superb, but each evening I prefer to stand here and watch nature at work with her superior talents. Have you ever seen a sunset like that one, Mrs. Adams?'

  'Never so vivid, messère. It was almost - frightening.'

  'Great beauty is somehow like that,' he agreed. 'We stand in awe of it, fascinated, and yet if we could touch it, we would choose not to.'

  As he spoke Carol looked up at the hard Latin sculpture of his unmarked profile ; there had been a strange and brooding note in his voice, as if he might have known such beauty in a living person ... a beauty not to be touched by a man.

  A silence hung between them, and it was broken as the door of the panelled room was opened to admit the tall, slender figure of a woman. 'You rang, Rudi?' She had a rather charming voice, but what struck Carol was that anyone should dare to address the baróne in such a fashion.

  'Ah, it's you, Gena.' He moved from the shadows and at his desk he turned on a lamp so that Carol had a better impression of the young woman. She had striking features, with eyes of dark topaz which at the moment held a sparkle of curiosity.

  'Bedelia informed me that we had a visitor — she was in a bit of a state, Rudi, and said something about a woman coming here with a boy who is being palmed off on us as a nephew. It's all very intriguing, but is it true?'