Some three hundred and eighty-one years since she had been here. Since she had existed.
I did not quite believe in what I saw. The actual house was a mirage—less, itself, like a reflection in water than a mirror. Or else, some clever effect thrown by sudden light upon a blank void. But sun and shadow flickered, separated. A bird flew out from the trees into the church dome of the sky.
2
He led me to another tavern. I have no memory at all of getting—or of being got—there. In the vine-screened courtyard, he made me drink half a pitcher of water, and then some of the local rough and earthen wine.
I thought I must have taken too much sun—odd in itself, I had credited myself with being fairly used to the climate by now. Or, I wondered a little if he had lightly drugged me. (The lessons of my father: Trust none, love none, use all, had put me, early in life, in shackles. Scorn and hack them off though I had, to break that ever-reiterant hold was often hard.)
But Anceto said to me, “Never fear, Edmondo. You are only under her spell. I have seen it before, now and then. No shame to you. Nor will she hurt you. And I am here.”
“So I see,” I said. My voice was cooler than my head.
Both of us slept after, under the purple awning. When I woke in the sinking afternoon, some pretty insects—dragonflies I thought them, but he gave them another name and pedigree, were dancing to and fro. They seemed to weave a fine and glistening net over the court.
“Be easy,” said my companion. “Nothing needs to be done till sunset comes. Not even then. When the moon stands high.”
“And then what?” I muttered.
“We return to the Palazzo Ranaldi. There you will bribe the old custodian—he’s amenable and not expensive. We’ll take him some wine, too.”
“Wine, money—what makes you think I’m so rich?”
“But you are, Edmondo,” he murmured, gentle as a lover. “If only alas, in the bounty of your elegant mind. You see,” he added, as he poured for us a little more red delight, “she haunts the Palazzo. Or so they say. At this time of every month, when the moon is almost full, almost a perfect round like the mirror of a lovely woman . . . Then.”
“Why?” I said.
He smiled at me. He was my brother, my best and dearest companion. Had I been able, ever, erotically to love a man, I think. I should have yearned for Anceto. But that extra element has never been a part of me. And besides, I did not trust my brother and friend. Of course, he would mislead me, perhaps even with some spurious and vulgar show put on for my benefit by mountebanks in the secret rooms of the Palazzo . . .
I laid my head on my arms and fell once more asleep. He would rob me, if he hadn’t already, while I slept. Naturally.
Instead, it seemed, he himself paid for our late luncheon and woke me kindly at midnight. (Midnight—for I heard certain clocks and bells chiming in Corvenna, all out of pace with each other, so that the whole jangling farrago lasted well into six minutes.) And what anyway is Time? Save some fool’s notion of ongoing existence. As if always we must walk sternly forward, onward—While instead we drift in circles, or flow backward, as does the sea. Or else we stay entirely still as any stone. As they say in France, J’y suis. J’y reste. Here I am, here I remain. But there I did not remain. Anceto guided me once more into the city, and toward the green canal. And the moon, indeed almost full, stood high.
• • •
The way across the canal was over a lumpy little bridge. I did not remember to have seen it there before. Perhaps it had not been.
The night water below, no longer green, blacker than the sky. But the moon lay in it, white mirror reflecting into mirror.
Approaching the Palazzo it seemed now only a huge, gaunt, forlorn old house in darkness. Among the other mansions distantly grouped along the bank, here and there the faintest light was showing. If some of these, I noted as our footsteps rang on the cobbles of the near shore, were timorously put out.
Anceto let us through an arched gateway in a wall, leading into the garden, which had become, as it had already looked, a primeval forest. The talons of trees clawed at us, thigh-high grasses whipped and little things skittered away. Once a pair of glowing eyes—some nocturnal bird or beast—or a demon—beamed icily down on us, turning red before they were gone. However, here was a side-door, lean and shut, but with a lamp burning somewhere behind and within, so every crack and undone seam in the door’s wood gleamed. The moon by then too was beginning to fill up the garden, which seemed to me then suddenly like a drawing, or a woodcut, two-dimensional.
Anceto tapped delicate as a mouse on the thin door. Which after a moment was undone. “Is it you, Anc’o, my dear?” A tiny creature, the caretaker. Perhaps it had even been he, eyes ablaze, up the tall tree in the garden . . .
Anceto spoke softly in the accent of the city. And the way was made wide for us.
I found I did not want to go in.
Despite William Joseph’s threatful warnings, it was not I feared a den of thieves. In fact—I feared nothing specific. Not even the ghosts it seemed I had been promised a sight of.
But it was too late for retreat. Will-less, I had already entered. Coins were changing hands, soft as bread. (Anceto’s again, not mine.) The caretaker picked up the lamp, and led us through into some kind of anteroom. It was his bivouac in the huge wilderness of the house, not uncozy in its cramped and impoverished manner.
I had forgotten all my Italian. I could no longer tell what Anceto and the little weasel-man said to each other. Instead I seemed to hear a sort of murmuring, like far-off music—a mandolin, perhaps, a pipe—through the low-lit wall a flush of other brightness bloomed somewhere. Not cool and pale like the waxing moon; richer, yellow, hot gold. Only for a second. An aberration of the eyes?
“Come, Edmondo.”
Anceto led me out again by another slight door. Stairs, probably a hundred of them. About halfway up the flight, a side window abruptly flaring, a searing line of light.
“Follow her,” he said, or I believed he did. “The moon will lead you. No, I shall not attend you. Not for me, this. I’ve said, I do not dare. But for you, no choice. I envy you, my friend. And fear for you. Go now. Waste no more of your night.”
• • •
Cremisia’s father had been a prince. He ruled the house, as he did his estates about the landscape beyond Corvenna, and was the recipient also of endless wealth from other properties and concerns scattered elsewhere on the globe.
A large man, too, this Raollo Ranaldi, well over six feet in an age when five feet seven was the average height of a fit and well-nourished man. He was besides raven-haired, with small slippery frost-gray eyes that—certain scribes reported—seemed able to cut men who offended him, like knives.
Raollo’s brother (the uncle of Cremisia) was broad-built and almost as tall. He had—reportedly—the dark cunning eyes of a rat. Although rats, of course, are intelligent animals, self-serving only through the laws of survival. Uncle Marcaro was a drunken lack-wit, vicious because he might be, and so greedy that, by the age of twenty, they said, he must needs be carried in a chair by six poor menials, his own bulk by then being already too much for him.
To this pleasant guardianship Fate had given Cremisia.
She had two brothers also, half-siblings to her, borne to Raollo’s previous wife, a poor blonde lady who, according to further gossip, Raollo had murdered one night, out of inebriated peevishness, since she had accidentally spoken well of an enemy of his.
The twin brothers, Giuseppe and Giacobbe, had flaxen hair like their mother, and her large blue eyes. Otherwise they were all from their father’s stable, big and tall, crass, cruel, and crazed. They fought duels and won them by strategies—such as having several of their own men run out and stab an opponent through.
When Cremisia was born, these lads were just seven years of age. But within four or five further years t
hey had already attained much of their undainty reputation. They would pay their small half-sister scant attention until she, at the age of twelve, began herself to flower into adulthood. Then, at some eighteen or nineteen years, the princely youths mused on their ‘quaint sisterling.’ Such talks were neither brotherly nor choice.
The fifth male figure of note, whose shadow so far only hung upon the horizon of Cremisia’s life, was her cousin, also a Ranaldi, Thesaio. And he was unlike all the rest, being in his nature fastidiously priestly and cold, lacking appetite for anything, and very conscious of the sins of Humanity, himself possibly excluded. For the sake of the precious Ranaldi dynasty, it had long been determined that any female child of Raello’s must be wed to Thesaio. When she was three years of age and he nine, Thesaio and Cremisia were therefore duly betrothed, in the chapel of the White-Hooded Virgin at Corvenna.
• • •
Believe this or not, once more I was, and remain, unsure how I reached the next stage of my evening. I recall the stairs, and the moon’s rim at the window, which silver-coated the steps’ dulled marble treads. Then a space of vague shadow. And then there was a picture.
For a minute I thought it hung on a wall before me.
A wide and heavily gilded frame contained a grandiose canvas, in dimension some seven feet (upright) by twelve feet in length. Yet this must be like the night garden, which I had interpreted as a wood-cut. The framed painting was no less than a living, moving scene, the frame itself the surround that was like that of a window. Light and color, sound and motion, these were in the picture. (In recent times, I have watched moving pictures on a screen. When first I saw such things I asked myself if my memory of the framed living painting were the same. But it was not.) There was music too I could hear, the very melody I had caught the essence of before, mandolins and pipes, the chirruping of small drums, and then the clear-water genderless voice of a singer. The words were not Italian, but Latin. I understood them immediately.
Come, bite the apple, my beloved,
Pierce through the crimson skin into the sweet
and firm green heart.
How can it harm you? The Snake recommended it!
It will make us strong and wise, and valiant in love.
The scene, as I began to be able to focus on it, floating there in a thick broth of candlelight, was of a banquet. On the sumptuously caparisoned chairs and couches nobles sat, or part lay, decadently, in the antique classical Roman pose. Their costly garments (beyond the Sumptuary Laws), the coverings of furniture, the swathed drapes, seemed generally of a garnet red, or vermilion, or that red-magenta still often called ‘purple’. The long tables were a clutter of fine wood, gold metal and silver, of gemmed knives for eating, and large peculiar long forks—reminiscent of the killing tridents once used in gladiatorial arenas—here presumably facile in the skewering of meat or pastry. From metal ewers flowed fountains of scarlet wine to tall goblets, all those of a sheer greenish glass. Little boys—pages—scurried to and fro carrying delicacies to this or that lord. Few women, I noted, were present. And the ones that were had a slightly unruly look, however glamorously got up. They wore makeup too, the ladies, a sign in such days, when used so overtly, of the whore. (Please don’t think I speak in criticism of such women. It is one of the four oldest professions on earth, the generous selling of one’s own body for sex. The other three professions being, of course, war, robbery, and murder. Of these four, prostitution is the only one that should be respected, and that fully. Those who preach otherwise are blind arrogant fools or shysters. These women are more than worthy of honor, protection, and wealth. They save minds. Perhaps even souls.)
Nevertheless, one was conscious this particular feast had a spurious air, a dubious component. For at the high place Raollo the Tyrant sprawled, and nearby his gormandizing brother Marcaro, deep in dishes. Elsewhere, glancing about, I failed to find the twin brothers, but they would at this date have been thought too young perhaps to attend. How did I know this? Because exactly then into the aureate soup of hall stole a little slender girl, some seven years of age, clad in a white dress, with her long black hair streaming down her back, much as did the locks of the lady guests, if hers more prettily, not being interrupted by combs and flowers and so on.
You could not help but see the child’s skin was peerlessly pale. It glowed to rival the candles’ gold. Her eyes were dark as darkness, and partly lowered with a modesty that nearly shocked, when seen in that cacophony of loudness and gluttony. Her mouth was soft red as a poppy. On a small gold dish she held carefully and steadily, this child, a single deep-red apple—redder than her lips. Let alone the painted lips of the ladies, the smoldering hangings, cushions and clothes. From the apple a soft steam lifted. I found I could smell its perfume, as—perhaps luckily—I could nothing else there. Cinnamon and ginger, a touch of sugar so brown and intense it too was like a spice. And through this the aroma of the fruit itself, both fresh-cut and baked.
The song came then again. Come, bite the apple, my beloved—
Raollo was sitting upright, pushing off, with typical boorishness, his female companion. He was laughing though, and not unpleased.
I had by now identified the scene. Any who had ever attempted to research the history of Cremisia Ranaldi has probably read of it. A poor book that left it out. She was indeed seven years of age. But, as I once was, it seemed, she had been given over to the care of witch-like nurses. And one of these, it transpired, was not unkind, and also an actual mageia, gifted in the arts of her calling; able also to effect the odd and genuine spell. She loved Cremisia like a mother, a step-mother, maybe, with a good heart. And her magic it was too that made her direct the child to tonight’s act. ‘One day,’ the nurse-witch said, ‘this step will render up a flower. Even if none remember or know why. So such rituals may work.’
Cremisia carried the unfaltering apple up to the dais, and her father. The nurse, soberly clad, a crone old and narrow as a hundred-year sapling, remained modestly below in waiting.
Raollo spoke to his daughter. I could not catch the words even to try to grasp them. But he grinned, and ran his doubtless meat-and-syrup smeared hand over her raven feathers. Then he gripped the platter, and using a silver spoon, berried with red jewels in its hilt, he mercilessly ran the apple through, and ate it in evident enjoyment.
The hall applauded. Politic to do so.
And then he spoke again, and I heard his words and what they meant.
“We thank you, Daughter, for this tender offering. And though you should, at this hour, be abed, no reprimand shall be returned to you. A charming gift. Now. What will you have in return?”
The hall laughed with jolly scorn. If the child were silly enough to ask for something, inevitably it must be infantile and vacuous. More likely she would be lost for words.
Cremisia spoke.
“Nothing now, honored sir. But one day I may ask for something.”
The chairs and couches fairly rocked with mirth at this, Raollo’s high seat too. And after that the musicians struck up another tune, and the witch-nurse, wrapping the child in a fold of her robe, led her swiftly away, out of the burning light, under the shadows beyond the picture’s frame. At which the entire image sank like a dying fire.
• • •
Other paintings, scenes, pictures (mirages) occurred after this. They were up on walls, in doorways that appeared impenetrable, or over the ceilings, the floors.
I seemed to myself to be wandering the Palazzo, but always with inexplicable slight gaps between this step and that. Up stairs—marble, wooden—I went, and down. I found myself in open vacant rooms, with not a stick of furniture—or maybe one tiny stool, upon which the most miniature foot (perhaps of a child?) might be placed. Or they were stacked with chairs and tables and chests, like a restaurant (that had been closed), if rather finer than most. There was the occasional courtyard, very much in the pre-Christian Roman
style. Here troughs shallowly rose, no longer freighted with flowers but overgrown by some form of laurel or ivy; each space was supplemented by a pool or fountain, now dry as the night had become. Hot yet heatless, pale though dark, the stars faintly overcast in rifts of invisible cloud. The moon, which had been so luminous and nearly full, was misty and far over to the west. Had so much time elapsed in my confused excursion?
Once I shouted down to Anceto, from a gallery all slit with smoky lightless windows, calling at least twice through the house. Which building seemed then hollow as a flute that no one played upon. Nor could my English voice do so. I called, and thought I had made some noise—but perhaps I had not. And for sure, not even a solitary echo replied. I felt I was tired. I wished to leave, could I but find the exit. I neither understood nor any longer cared what went on. I wanted to escape, to sleep. But the thing was the pictures every time galvanized me.
I think they didn’t frighten me, but conceivably they did. I never believed them to be due to legerdemain. Or if they were, the sort occasioned by modern photography—then before its hour, or some older device that used a hidden mechanism and so played (apparently) color and animated form upon the mansion’s stones. Finally there was another empty room, and in it a single chair, upright and of some historic value, unless being a cunning copy. I sat down in it, exhausted and affronted. I had, whatever else, been duped. (No doubt when the sun rose Anceto would negotiate my release, on payment of some suitable ‘gift’ which, naturally, I did not possess to be robbed of.) It seemed to me I next heard a clock chime, all alone, the fourth hour of morning. But God knows if I did. Everything was out of synch—moonrise, and set, my own progress, the night itself.
The world of the city was any way completely dark by then, while the golden images had all gone out and nothing new replaced them. What had they shown? Fragments of Cremisia’s childhood, youth, young womanhood. She, about twelve, clad in crimson, rode a white pony in a procession, seated side-saddle. Or in a dull house-dress, perhaps thirteen, in a garden of hedge-sculpture, she was almost cornered by the two blonde half-brothers—a steward coming to call them off. Though she had seemed quite cool. There was, in these scenes, no dialog at all, no sound, no scent. But there were two other vital moments, glimpses—she turned her head at a window, her hair like a sea-wave of ravens—was she sixteen? Seventeen?—or she lay in a doll-like bed, only four or five years of age, sleeping. My eyes, as well as I, grew tired. The result of the constant irregular flux of blackness to candlelight, torchlight, or of a sun so long set it might have ruled another world than ours.