“As though I’d gone into mourning?” I ask, arriving now at the tone I’d meant to assume in the first place.
Bruno smiles—a small, reserved smile. “Well, you did return upon the death of your aunt, I remember, and your mother died sometime after, no?”
“Yes,” I say, disarmed by the sympathy in his voice. “And I heard your mother died. I’m sorry. It’s hard to imagine anyone replacing her here…”
I falter, remembering who has replaced her. It hasn’t taken us long to get to the heart of the matter. Bruno winces as though he’s been trapped, and I remember another detail from the tapestry in the rotunda. The man who kneels to unsnare the bird from the net is watched by a lady carrying a falcon on her arm. In the language of love practiced in medieval art, the tethered falcon is a reminder that even the hunter can be trapped. It’s some relief to see that he’s not totally in control of the situation, that he’s been unnerved by my presence as much as I have been by his. My heart is racing. But then, I tell myself, maybe that’s because it’s just occurred to me that he might be involved in Robin’s death.
“No one imagines that Claudia is a replacement for my mother,” Bruno says, “least of all Claudia. But it suited her purposes to come back here when my mother died.”
“You mean because of the lawsuit?”
“Ah.” Bruno tugs at the skin under his right eye, skin that has become darker since the last time I saw him affect this fundamentally European gesture (its meaning, I learned over time, ranging from “You can’t fool me” to “You’ve caught me”). “I see you’ve been keeping up with La Civetta’s abundant store of gossip.”
“Actually, I only heard about it a few weeks ago. I was surprised that you and Claudia would be here and that Cyril would allow it when you’re suing him.”
“Cyril and Claudia are both believers in the maxim ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Technically, I’m not suing anybody. The Brunelli family trust is suing the estate of La Civetta. It’s all civil enough, and in the meantime, where else would I go?” He holds up his hands and, although I know he means to include all of La Civetta in the gesture, I imagine he means the rose garden, the fountain, this very moment. Perhaps it is what he means, because as he lowers his arms, he says, “I see it’s drawn you back as well.”
“I was offered a job on the film,” I say primly, “as a research consultant.”
“Ah, I see. And you’ve come to the rose garden to do research?”
I look down at the fountain, at the torn-up shrubbery; the center is still covered by thick vines. I’ll have to come back to look in the basin for the poems, but for now I have to invent another reason for being here.
“Yes, I remembered the lines of poetry that are inscribed on the fountain. You were the one who showed them to me.” I say it as if it’s his fault I’m here—not just in the rose garden, but in Italy. I suddenly feel immensely tired and a little dizzy—the jet lag catching up with me. Surely that is what keeps making me feel flimsy—as if I’d left part of myself somewhere over the Atlantic and it hasn’t had time to catch up with me yet. “The boy who wrote the screenplay used them in one of his poems. Perhaps you showed them to him?”
“Ah, Robin. Povero raggazo. Orlando told me what happened. It’s upset him tremendously.”
“You know, the police wanted to speak with him after Robin died, but he disappeared,” I say. “And we’ve all wondered what he was doing in New York.”
Bruno shrugs his shoulders. “Teenagers—who can make any sense of what they do and why? I tried to tell him it was foolish to go to New York, and look at what happened. And then he was afraid of the American police. He watches too much of your American television shows, CSI, Law and Order…He was afraid they’d find some speck of Robin’s hair on his lapel and send him to prison. I’ve taken Orlando to the American ambassador and he answered his questions. He wants now to act in this movie the Americans are doing. You know, he was working with Robin on the script.”
“Yes, Leo Balthasar told me there was some disagreement over the writing credit for the screenplay. Perhaps he wrote the poem that’s in the script,” I say. “If so, he’s inherited your poetic talent. It’s very good.”
At the mention of the poem, a change comes over Bruno’s face, a stillness that freezes his usually mobile features as if he were posing for a picture, and I wonder whether it’s because he thinks I know where the poems are.
“You mean you don’t believe the poem is by William Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, Ginevra de Laura?” he asks.
“Well, I’ve only read one of the poems…but perhaps you’ve read others.”
Bruno hesitates. “I’ve heard one of the poems described, but no, I’m afraid I’m at an even greater disadvantage. I haven’t read any of these poems.”
“But you’ve heard the stories about Ginevra de Laura. You were the one who told me about her—” I blush, remembering the circumstances under which he imparted that particular lesson. “Finding those poems and proving that they were by Shakespeare’s Dark Lady would be a real scholarly coup for you, wouldn’t it?”
“And for you as well,” Bruno says. “Is that why you’re really here, Rose? To make your academic reputation?”
It’s exactly what I’ve just accused him of, so I shouldn’t be surprised—or as hurt as I feel by the sudden coolness in his voice. This is what I wanted, I remind myself, to establish right away that there was nothing between us. He’s also provided me with a chance to explain my presence here—and my search for the poems—that doesn’t involve Orlando and my suspicions about Robin’s death.
“Yes,” I reply, “I’d like to find those poems—if they exist. Not because I think they’re by the Dark Lady, but because I’m writing a book on Renaissance women poets. The discovery of a previously unknown poet would be a valuable addition to the book. I remember that you told me that Ginevra was Lorenzo Barbagianni’s mistress. Isn’t it more likely that if she wrote a series of poems they were addressed to him rather than to William Shakespeare?”
“Not if you knew anything about Lorenzo. He was a bit of a brute. No, according to references in contemporary diaries, she wrote to an unnamed lover. Someone she met as a young girl—an Englishman, it was thought, since the poems were written in English—before she became Barbagianni’s mistress and came to live here at La Civetta. After Barbagianni’s death she went to live in the Convent of Santa Catalina. It was believed that she destroyed the poems, but I came across a letter recently from the mother superior of the convent in the early seventeenth century referring to the ‘creative outpouring’ of one of her nuns, and it occurred to me that she might have been speaking about Ginevra de Laura and that Ginevra could have taken the poems with her to the convent. And if that were so, it’s possible they were brought here after the 1966 flood when Lucy Graham ‘saved’ the water-damaged books by bringing them to La Civetta and appropriating the ones she thought might be valuable.”
“If they’ve been in Lucy Graham’s archives since then, why haven’t I heard of it? Why hasn’t anyone—you, for instance—published it?”
“Because they’re not in the archives. I’ve looked, of course. It’s possible, though, that Lucy hid the poems when she realized how valuable they were. I’ve been looking for them for years. It’s one of the reasons I came back.”
I look away, up toward the villa, not wanting to ask what his other reasons might have been. All I can see of the building from here is a glimpse of golden ochre shimmering through the holm oaks and yew hedges. “It would make a great story, wouldn’t it? An undiscovered sixteenth-century Renaissance woman poet who wrote sonnets in English. And you’ve never found a single poem? You said you heard one described…”
“Just an old family story,” Bruno says. “My mother said Sir Lionel gave her a poem once, but she wasn’t really sure who it was by, and when I tried to ask her about it she refused to say more. No, the only lines of Ginevra’s I’ve read are these two lines…Do you remem
ber them?”
While I’ve been looking up at the villa, Bruno has been excavating the fountain, pulling out handfuls of twisted rose vines, not gently as he removed the vine from my hair before, but roughly, so that all the roses on the vine have shed their crimson petals over the marble fountain and his hands are scratched from the thorns. There’s a hunger in his eyes that I recognize from the first time we met here and he asked me whether I thought one had to experience passion in order to write poetry. It occurs to me now that I’d never answered the question.
He holds back a last tangle with one hand and with the other circles my waist to draw me closer. Through the thin fabric of my dress I can feel the warmth of his arm penetrate my skin, setting off a vibration that radiates across my back like a net woven of electricity. In pulling the vines from the rim of the fountain, Bruno has also cleared the basin, which is empty. I barely have time to register my disappointment that the poems are not here before Bruno reads the two lines out loud.
“Our bed awaits thee, strewn with wisps of rose,” Bruno recites, “my longing more than any the wind knows.” I feel an answering throb in the wind as it picks up the scattered rose petals and blows them toward the villa. One petal catches in Bruno’s hair and my hand moves toward it as if it, too, had been lifted by the wind, but before I reach it, the wind blows back from the house, carrying with it the sound of voices coming toward us.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
BRUNO’S ARM TENSES BEHIND ME, BUT HE DOESN’T PULL IT AWAY IMMEDIATELY. He takes a moment to lift his hand to my hair and smooth back a lock that the wind has blown across my face. Then he turns toward the approaching voices and leans against the rim of the fountain with his arms folded across his chest, his head tilted down as if he were studying the tips of his soft leather loafers. I turn, too, and try to adopt as casual a pose as he has assumed so effortlessly. Is it just his innate elegance, I wonder, or practice at dissembling, that gives him such an air of nonchalance, whereas I feel as if I’ve been caught pillaging the garden?
I make out a girl’s voice as it comes closer to us on the path. “But isn’t your father, like, working on the movie? Can’t he get us something better than extra work?”
“My father won’t do a thing,” a boy’s voice, young and petulant, answers, “because my mother doesn’t want me to be an actor.”
I recognize the voices as the same two I’d overheard playing Romeo and Juliet in the teatrino—only now instead of advancing through a web of metaphor toward their first kiss, they are, apparently, bickering over the politics of family and influence. As they come in to the clearing, I recognize the boy as Ned Silverman, Mara and Gene’s son. He’s got his father’s height but his mother’s pale skin, dark hair, and delicate bone structure. The girl I recognize by her raspberry-colored hair as Zoe Demarchis. She startles when she sees Bruno and me and drops something on the path that she screws into the ground with the sole of her rubber flip-flop. The smell of pot and burning rubber joins the hundred varieties of roses, and I wonder what the Dominican friars of Santa Maria Novella would make of that addition to their line of perfumes.
“Professor Asher.” Ned turns as bright pink as the rose petals that litter the ground. “Wow. I didn’t know you’d arrived. Are my mom and dad here, too?” Ned’s eyes dart back and forth as if he expected Gene and Mara Silverman to jump out from behind the fountain and yell, “Surprise!”
“I’m sure they’re up at the villa resting. Which is what I should be doing, only I was so excited to be back at La Civetta after twenty years that I had to come out and look at the garden and I ran into Professor Brunelli.”
Zoe widens her already dilated eyes—I think, for a moment, at my explanation of how Bruno and I happen to be here together in the most secluded part of the garden, but that isn’t what she finds incredible. “Twenty years! Man, that must be so weird coming back after all that time.”
She’s made it sound like centuries, but I’m forced to agree with her. “Yes, it is strange, but what’s strangest is how it feels like it could have been yesterday—” I realize I’m stroking the rim of the marble fountain. Bruno is looking at me, remembering, I feel sure, that this was where we first kissed.
“Do you all know each other?” I ask, my voice a little high and brittle sounding to my ears. “Professor Brunelli, Ned Silverman and—” Before I can say her name, Zoe steps forward and does it for me.
“Zoe Demarchis,” she says, extending her hand to Bruno. “You teach that poetry class, right? I was going to take it because I write poetry all the time, but then I got the part of Juliet and realized that I wouldn’t have time”—she gives Bruno a flirtatious smile—“but maybe you could give me a private tutorial?” Zoe catches my eye and her smile fades as if I’d scowled at her, although I hadn’t been aware of doing so. She quickly adds, “I really liked that sonnet you recited, Dr. Asher…you know, at the thing for Robin in Washington Square? I remember that it had something in the last lines about black ink and love lasting.”
“‘O, none, unless this miracle have might,’” Bruno recites, “ ‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright.’”
“Yeah, that’s it. I thought it was cool because Robin was always talking about being remembered for what he wrote. You must have really liked him, huh? Was he, like, your favorite student?” She slides her eyes toward Ned and then, looking back at me, widens them in an attempt to look sincere. It’s always amazed me how young people—especially stoned young people—think adults don’t notice when they’re being laughed at. Ned, though, looks pained at the insinuation in her voice. Poor Ned. Mara was unfortunately right about the effect of roughing it on his physique and complexion. He looks too thin and his skin is mottled and rashy—what I’d taken for a blush at first being a permanent strawberry blotch on his cheeks.
“I’d be saddened by the death of any of my students,” I say in my best prim schoolmistress voice.
Zoe and Ned nod seriously and I think I’ve gotten away with my evasion, but then Bruno says, “Yes, but you haven’t answered Ms. Demarchis’s question. Was Robin your…prediletto?”
He chooses the Italian word that means “dearest” or “pet,” giving it an inflection that makes it sound vaguely dirty, maybe because of that letto at the end, which means bed. Zoe giggles and Ned turns so pale that the rash on his cheek stands out like the angry mark from a slap. I turn to Bruno and meet his gaze. Does he really think I was having an affair with one of my students? And if I were, who is he to call me to task? He’d had an affair with me when I wasn’t any older than Robin. At least I’m not married.
“I suppose he was,” I say coolly. “Who could help but take an interest in a young person of such talent? I think he would have become a great writer. If he kept to it.”
I’ve meant only to make Bruno a little jealous—to let him see that I haven’t spent the twenty years since I left him in mourning (despite that suitcase full of black clothing back in my room at the villa)—but the look of hurt in his eyes goes beyond jealousy. It’s the jab about Robin’s potential as a writer that’s gotten to him. But only for a moment. He shrugs and lifts his hands, palms up, to the sky. “But now we’ll never know. What a shame, eh?”
“Maybe it’s better,” Ned says. “Now everyone will remember him as this beautiful guy with all this promise and he’ll never get old or fat and give up his dreams and take some awful job he hates and live in the suburbs. He’ll never have to be a failure.” Ned finishes in a gasp that makes him look like an angry fish.
“Yes,” Bruno says, pushing himself away from the fountain, “there is a beauty in that. Some flowers are more beautiful as buds than full blown. And memories are often best left as memories. I hope you don’t regret coming back to La Civetta, Professor Asher. Reality so rarely measures up to our memories.”
“No,” I say, looking down at the ground strewn with scattered rose petals, “I guess not.” I look up too quickly, and the heat-struck garden seems to blur around
me, dark, petal-shaped blotches superimposed over the thicket of green. I feel myself swaying, and Bruno touches my elbow to steady me.
“You’re not going to faint…?” Bruno asks. I think we both hear the echo of the word “cara” at the end of his sentence and remember it’s what he asked me after the first time we kissed.
“No,” I say, pulling away from his touch. “It’s just jet lag. I’d better go back to my room and rest.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to miss the big party tonight,” Zoe Demarchis says. “It’s to celebrate the summer solstice and officially open the summer term. Mr. Graham’s had a crew of chefs cooking for a week and we’ve been rehearsing day and night to get the entertainment ready. The theme is the Capulets’ masked ball from Romeo and Juliet with a little bit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream thrown in—those are the two plays we’re doing here this summer. I’m playing Juliet and Ned’s Romeo. We’ve been rehearsing day and night for two weeks and we’ve only got three more days before opening night, so we’d better get back to it, right Ned?”
“Oh, right.” Ned shakes himself as if waking from a dream. He is still, I think, imagining poor Robin, frozen for all time in the moment of youth and promise like a figure on Keats’s vase. There’s a strange light in his eyes that makes me uneasy, but then maybe it’s just the pot he’s smoked. “I’m her Romeo…” He starts to laugh and Zoe pulls him away, heading down the path toward the villa, first shushing him and then giggling herself. Bruno and I follow a few steps behind. At first I think Bruno’s slow pace is to give them time to get ahead, but even when they’re out of sight he keeps his eyes on the ground and loiters a half step behind me. I can think of nothing to say to break the silence until we reach the gate that leads out of the rose garden.
“What you said just now about me regretting coming back to La Civetta…” I begin. “Is there any reason why I should?”