Twain's End (16 page)

“Lyon.”

“As in the beast,” said Clara.

“Lyon—a noble name.” The count bowed to her. “I live quite close by. My home is just across the river, between the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinita.” He turned to Mr. Clemens. “I shall be pleased for you, for your entire party, to join me there.”

“We need to get home,” growled Mr. Clemens.

“Perhaps after Christmas?” asked the count.

“We don't celebrate Christmas,” said Jean. “Not since my sister died.”

After the count absorbed this strange information, addresses were exchanged. Mr. Clemens then led the way to the electric tram stop, his daughters reluctantly following. A tram approached, its trolley pole sparking on the overhead power line.

“Why didn't you let us go to the count's home?” Jean asked once they'd entered a tramcar.

“I didn't like the way he looked at you,” said Mr. Clemens.

“Me?” Jean settled on a wooden bench. “He didn't even look at me. Not like he looked at Isabel. But I found him very interesting. Those dark eyes.”

From the tram ride to the north of town, to the hike back up the steep walled road to the villa, the party was quiet save for Jean, planning the purchase of the emaciated white horse. They passed through the iron gates of their rented estate—still open at that hour—and walked down the long private road to the mansion. There Isabel left the group with a quick goodbye and began the hike home.

She strode down the graveled paths, through the overgrown maze, and across the grassy wooded parkland, then pushed on another half mile through untended forest. At a tile-roofed
villino
in a clearing, her mother attended to the rose vines trellised over the porch.

“Aren't they just marvelous, Isabel—roses!” Mrs. Lyon cupped a
bloom as if it were the face of a baby. “In December! I just can't get over it. Don't you think I should bring some inside?”

“What?”

“Clip some sprays.”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Lyon tilted her head to inspect her daughter. “Isabel, what is it?”

“Nothing.” She lowered herself onto the porch steps.

“You're acting peculiar,” Mrs. Lyon declared. But she left her daughter to go get scissors.

There was a crunching of dried grass and snapping of twigs. Mr. Clemens waded through the overgrown brush of the woods, avoiding limbs on the ground and vines that hung from the trees. Isabel stood slowly.

“Where's your damn pen?” he said when he saw her. He ducked under a gnarled branch and kept coming.

Isabel could barely speak. “Inside.”

He stopped in front of her, too close. Close enough to caress him.

He looked down upon her, the skin twitching under his eyes. “I'm writing my goddamn autobiography. You're my secretary—you're going to take it all down. I'm not paying you to look gorgeous. You have to work if you're going to be around me.”

“I'll work,” she whispered.

“I'm going to work you to the bone. You're going to write and write and write until you're sick of hearing me.”

“I won't get sick.”

“I'm going to tell my whole life's story if it kills me, and you're going to write it down. You're going to keep me from using my pen. You're not going to allow me the writer's obsession of revising my words, you're not going to allow me to alter the truth, you're not going to let me do anything but talk until everything comes out. Get your pen, damn it, before I change my mind.”

Isabel rushed into the house.

Mrs. Lyon was rooting through her sewing basket. “Isabel, have you seen the scissors?”

Isabel grabbed a pen, a sheaf of paper. “Don't come out. Stay here.”

“What?” Mrs. Lyon ran after her.

Drawing a breath, Isabel let herself outside.

When he saw her, his face crumpled in relief before he could blacken his expression. He bit off the words harshly. “All right. Let's begin.”

January 1904

Villa di Quarto,
Florence, Italy

M
R. CLEMENS WAS PROWLING
his private reception room when Isabel entered. The floor-to-ceiling French windows had been thrown open though the weather had gone cold just after Christmas. Even as painted wooden Christ Childs had lain in their mangers all over Florence, her mother's beloved roses had turned a deathly coral. Now brisk air swept in past the statues of angels guarding Mr. Clemens's room, stirring his blaze of white-streaked hair, trembling the ends of his undone bow tie.

“Where have you been?” His tone was such that to a stranger, it might seem like he disliked her.

It had been ten days since that first dictation. When he had finished that evening, he'd ordered her to burn everything she had just written,
now,
and then had stalked back through the woods, leaving her standing in the falling light with the inky pages in her hands. Later that night, when she reread what she'd been too overwhelmed by his presence to comprehend, she saw between smudges—she had written in such haste that she'd smeared the ink with the side of her curled hand—that what he'd spun was not autobiographical but was a story about an unnamed boy in a river town, like
Tom Sawyer
and
Huck Finn.
He had not mentioned himself. Because it had come from
him, she could not bear to destroy it, so had tucked it away in the lid of a suitcase.

But a week passed after his visit, and still he did not return to her little
villino.
When Isabel reported to the villa each day to pay bills, prepare checks for deposit, and to manage the family's correspondence—her instructions were to turn down all invitations with the exception of the King of England, should he write—she strained her antennae to detect if he might be thinking of her. She felt nothing.

She saw him only once, on the third day, when he passed her in the entrance hall on his way to breakfast. He nodded and shambled on, his footsteps echoing from the ceiling frescoed with angels. The following day, when she approached the villa from the gardens, she saw Mrs. Clemens, swathed within a tartan blanket, being wheeled in a wicker invalid's chair onto the balcony, her butler carrying an iron tank of oxygen behind her. When Isabel waved, a white-gloved hand arose from the nest of red plaid.

Was a new development in Mrs. Clemens's illness causing her husband's withdrawal from Isabel? Over and over she replayed the evening when he had come to her. She could not see what she had done wrong. She had given up on the prospect of working with him on his autobiography, and was beginning to think she should go back to the States if she so offended him, when he sent for her via Katy, whose contempt did nothing to put her at ease.

And now he was asking Isabel where she had been? Where had
he
been?

“I've been up to the villa,” she said, “but after I did the work there was for me to do, and you didn't call for me, I took time off for Christmas with Mother.”

“Your work was to take my dictation for the autobiography.”

“I didn't know we were still doing that.” Why was he being so gruff? “I feared something had happened to your wife.”

“Livy's fine.”

She did not look fine. Isabel waited for him to continue.

Like every window in the palace, the French window before which he'd stopped was protected on the inside by a fitted wooden door, this one laid back against the ocher plaster wall. He snatched the handle of the lock mechanism on the protective door and began to shoot the heavy bolt up and down, up and down. “I had pegged you for someone with a little more initiative.”

“You gave me no indication of what you wanted.”

Click, clack. Click, clack.
“You're disappointing me, Miss Lyon. Please do not disappoint me.”

“I will do whatever you need. But I cannot read your mind.”

“I hoped you could.”

She could see he actually meant that.

Click, clack. Click, clack.
“This isn't doing much for my flow of thought. Sit down.”

Reluctantly, she slipped into the chair at the desk. He let go of the latch, rubbed his mustache as he regarded her, and began: “ ‘This villa—' ”

Just like that, he was going to resume his dictation? “Wait!” She scribbled with her pen. Dry. She tried another.

“ ‘—is situated three or four miles from Florence.' ”

She caught up. Soon she heard nothing but the steel nib of her pen scratching and his words, his everyday perfect words. Over an hour later, he stopped. For the first time since he had begun, he darted a glance at her, oddly shy. She beheld him, a little shyly in return, and in truth, felt flattered, mindful of her role as witness to a great and baffling man's work.

• • •

And so it was that they were in his reception room several days later, the wintry countryside smell of cold earth and dead grass wafting in through the French windows that Mr. Clemens kept open regardless of the weather. A bell tolled in the distance; there came a far-off bleating of a goat; blackbirds whistled their melancholy tune. Unwelcome distractions, all of them. Nothing must disturb Mr. Clemens,
his dagger brows aimed at his nose as he paced, hands behind his back, smoke escaping from the cigar between his fingers. Within the room, only the buzzing of a lone fly—hatched in the wrong season and doomed to spend the single day of its life battering at the glass transom above the closed door to the hall—and the crush of the wool rug under Mr. Clemens's boots broke the silence. Isabel noiselessly laid down her pen, rubbed her cramping fingers, then picked it up, waiting for the truth of his life to emerge.

So far during their sessions, he had talked only of the Villa di Quarto and of the woman who rented it, Countess Massiglia, for whom his contempt grew daily. The subject had not yet become personal, but this was his way, both he and Isabel assumed, of his working into the meat of things. Truth would come.

Mr. Clemens took a pull on his cigar. “Where were we? I've lost track. Read where I left off yesterday. I can't seem to think today.”

Isabel scanned yesterday's pages as the fly buzzed at the transom glass. “ ‘There are four rugs scattered about like islands, violent rugs whose colors swear at each other and—' ”

“Right. Right.” He puffed his cigar, then opened his mouth to start. Just then, from what seemed to be directly below one of the windows, came the alternating honk and squeal of a braying donkey. Each cry increased in volume and abrasiveness, as if the animal's outrage were feeding upon itself. Isabel jumped up to close the windows.

“No, leave them.”

Clinging to the casement latches, Isabel glanced across the terrace. She could see the long low stucco stable building at a right angle from the villa, with its crooked row of cypresses jabbing up behind and the two-story stucco carriage house attached to the far end. In this carriage house, the countess, the former Mrs. Paxton from Philadelphia, carried on her affair with her steward while her titled second husband served on a diplomatic assignment overseas. The donkey was tied to a ring in the wall toward the middle of the stable building.

The door to the carriage house flew open. A woman with hair a
red that didn't occur in nature fled down the steps and toward the hedges surrounding the garden. Isabel watched as, bottle-red hair and her paisley shawl flying, the countess, still lithe and beautiful in her middle age, strode for a break in the shrubby border, oblivious to the donkey bucking at his tether at the sight of her.

A young man, naked to the waist, even in this chill, slammed out of the house. Isabel held her breath as he pursued the countess. He caught her on one of the graveled paths of the unruly garden, where, his shoulders rippling like the haunches of a beast, he tipped her back and kissed her.

“I wonder if that's the one who bit off the thumb of one of the countess's men.”

Isabel jumped. She had not heard Mr. Clemens come up behind her. Out in the garden, the steward slid his hand up the countess's dress.

“Supposedly,” said Mr. Clemens laconically, “he's vicious.”

She thrust herself away from the window. “Who?”

“That damned donkey. Who else?”

Mr. Clemens left the window. He stopped before her, close enough that she could feel the disruption he made in the air. He stood staring down at her as, across the room, the fly stabbed and stabbed at the glass.

“Did you—did you want to dictate?”

He turned to grind out his cigar in an ashtray on her desk. “Oh, yes, Miss Lyon. I want to dictate.”

She fumbled for a pen.

He caught her wrist.

He was waiting for her when she looked up. “Not that way,” he said.

She clung to the pen as he ran his fingers up her arm, blazing a tingling path across the flesh under her sleeve, then across her chest, perilously close to her breasts. He found the bare skin of her neck, where he lingered, stroking her throat. She felt her mouth part.