The Oracle of Cumae

by Melissa Hardy

  “Not even I know what it means,” the Oracle confided. “But I’ve been told by some pretty highly placed deities who shall go unnamed that my Etruscan accent was more than passable…and that was back in the day when there was still some Etruscan being spoken in pockets around Latium and Umbria.”

  With that, I blew out the candle and waited to see what tomorrow might bring.

  The following morning, Cesare Bacigalupo rose from his big mahogany bed and padded across the tile floor in his bare feet to the shuttered window overlooking the enclosed courtyard. Opening the louvers of one shutter, he peered out. What sort of day is it likely to be? he wondered. Shards of white light stabbed at his eyes and, despite the earliness of the hour, a blast of wilting heat assaulted him, as if the outdoors were an immense oven the door of which he had just opened. Retreating to the porcelain wash basin by the armoire, he vigorously scrubbed his hands, arms, neck, and face and patted them dry with a white linen towel. After this he struggled into his corset. Cesare was a vain man and although he would have been mortified to hear that my brothers called him fat, nevertheless, in his secret heart, he would have agreed with them. He donned a crisp white linen shirt, pulled on tight buckskin breeches and a pair of braces to hold them up, and, sitting on the edge of the bed, worked his feet into a handsome pair of fawn-colored top boots cobbled of butter-soft leather.

  All this was very much as per usual for Cesare. He was, after all, something of a dandy, very particular about his clothes and general appearance. As for the day itself, it was, ostensibly, at least, a normal sort of day. He had got up. That was typical. He had dressed. Now he would have his breakfast. Later he would make his way down to Bacigalupo & Son, then back along the Via San Maria Maddalena, through the Largo Paolo Scirri to home where he would first take lunch, then a nap. This was what he did of a Saturday, what he had done, year in, year out for the last five years. He was a creature of habit, always doing the same thing at the same time, predictable and dull as a clock.

  However, thanks to the nocturnal meddling of the Oracle and me, there was something different about the way the Prior felt that particular morning, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Although he felt well enough rested, he had a memory of having woken numerous times during the night…and in something of a state each time—perspiring, his heart chugging away like a train engine pulling up-mountain. It seemed to him that he must have dreamed strange, sensuous dreams, but he could not remember so much as a fragment of one of them. Just an image, a face, and, oddly enough, not the face he had conjured up on each of the nights following his wife’s death—that is to say, my face—but, remarkably, even shockingly, the face of his second cousin, of Antonella Aiello, his housekeeper.

  Slipping on a camel-colored frock coat, he wandered downstairs. Normally his gait would be brisk, his manner officious, but that day Cesare felt distracted, muzzy, and strangely excited all at the same time. He was going to see her! Antonella! She was going to bring him breakfast, the way she did every day. Oh, but he was a lucky man to have breakfast brought to him by such a creature! So tall! So slender! How could he have thought her too tall, too thin? And with what bright eyes! He could hardly wait, and yet…. He paused by the door of the kitchen, suddenly overcome with shyness. “Cousin Antonella!” he called out, his voice quavering slightly. “I’m up!”

  “Congratulations!” came the tart reply from deep within the bowels of the kitchen, her lair. He dared not peek in. She did not like it when he poked his nose into her kitchen. “You have the entire house to call your own,” she would tell him. “May I, at least, call the scullery mine?”

  “I’ll take my breakfast in the garden,” he said timidly. “If you would be so kind,” he added.

  Antonella grunted in response. Well, she was a woman of few words, after all. An admirable quality in a woman. One of many admirable qualities that Antonella possessed. Why had he failed to see them before? How had he not noticed how striking she was? When she was right under his eyes these past…what was it? Going on seven years. That was correct. It had been seven years since Antonella Aiello had been absorbed into the household, entering not through the front door, as might be expected given the fact that she was a relative, but ignominiously, through the back, for Cesare’s mother had from the very beginning treated the orphaned only child of her cousin more like her servant than her ward. That had been a mistake, Cesare realized now, a grievous mistake that he must put right. No, from here on out, Antonella should have full honors. He must see to that.

  He entered the enclosed garden around which the house, Roman style, was constructed and sat down at the little, tile-topped table where he took breakfast on fine mornings. An unkempt tangle of roses and bougainvillea flanked by narrow beds of French lavender and rosemary, the garden was not large, but pretty enough with its little terra-cotta pots of basil and tarragon and its statue of St. Francis and marble birdbath. He waited for Antonella, as a-buzz as a beehive, all tremulous anticipation.

  Back in the kitchen Antonella roused herself to action. She had been sitting slumped at the kitchen’s battered oak table, steeped in blackest melancholy. Now she hauled her lanky, stooped self to her feet, all the while muttering to herself something along the lines of, “Always eating! Night and day! Day and night. ‘Cousin, Antonella! Please and thank you!’” She began slamming pots and pans around, deeply relishing the commotion, before chancing upon the proper pot to make coffee and banging it down on the stovetop.

  Ten minutes later she shuffled through the open French door, carrying a tray on which was set a demitasse cup, a small pitcher of coffee, another of warmed milk, and, under a white damask napkin, a plate of farfalle—airy pastries shaped like butterflies and sprinkled with confectioner sugar. She exuded resentment.

  For his part, Cesare surveyed his second cousin with glowing admiration. “Why, cousin! How radiant you are looking today!”

  Antonella stared at him, deeply shocked. Then, deciding that he must be mocking her, she sniffed. “It is ungentlemanly of you to make fun of so unfortunate a person as myself!”

  “No, I mean it,” Cesare insisted. “I was not making fun of you. I was just…making an observation.” He leaned over and patted the seat of the other chair. “Come, sit with me! Have a farfalle!”

  “No, thank you,” Antonella replied suspiciously. “There’s a day-old hard bun in the kitchen that no one, not even the birds would eat. However, as it is a sin to waste food, I had planned to make it and a little coffee my humble breakfast.”

  “When there are these lovely pastries?”

  “What has come over you today?” Antonella demanded and fled. Once safely back in the kitchen, she grabbed the stale bun she had supposedly earmarked for her breakfast and hurled it into the garbage.

  Was he being kind, and if so, why? There must be a reason. People were never kind without a reason. He must want something from her. What could it be?

  She opened the cupboard and removed from it two farfalle, fresh this morning. She had secreted them there before serving Cesare his breakfast. She set them on a plate, poured some coffee from the pot into a cup, and sat down at the table in front of the pastries, which she proceeded to tear into small pieces suitable for dunking.

  Perhaps he wanted to sack her and put in her place that scruffy little peasant girl. He was certainly fond enough of her. Fond! She snorted. Her lowly bedroom—as plain as a nun’s cell—might be just off the kitchen, but there was nothing in the least wrong with her hearing. Cesare’s midnight visits to my door, his yowling and his scratching, had not gone unheard. In fact, Antonella had on several occasions stolen out of her room, through the kitchen, down the hall that bisected the house, and into the downstairs foyer to listen. To listen and, should it be required, to intervene. The whole situation disgusted her—a grown man hankering after such a young girl, and his recently deceased wife’s sister to boot! But then Antonella saw her second cousin a
s pompous, self-absorbed, and just the least bit off, like a cheese that has crossed over from a perfect ripeness into something suspiciously tangy. She would put nothing past him.

  “That’s right,” she said aloud through clenched teeth. “Dismiss me. On the other hand, you could always just shoot me down in the street like an old beast of burden past its usefulness. Put me out of my misery. People have been known to do that even to horses of which they were very fond. Or dogs. Dismiss me! And put in my place a peasant girl who won’t know how to polish silver or wax furniture or take care of a house that doesn’t have a dirt floor! Who won’t know how to wind a clock or launder fine linens!”

  There came a tentative knock at the kitchen door, then, “Cousin Antonella?”

  Him!

  “What?” she demanded.

  “May I have a word?”

  “What about?”

  “There’s something I want to tell you.”

  “Go away!”

  “But—”

  “Leave me alone!” she cried in a voice that sounded like a cat being strangled.

  What on earth was going on?

  Flummoxed by the obvious distress into which his small attentions had plunged his housekeeper and unsure what to make of it—or of his own wayward and chaotic emotions—Cesare left home for the majolica factory, feeling distinctly beside himself and wobbly as he struck out in an easterly direction across the piazza. Bacigalupo & Son was located just across the Old Bridge and beyond the city wall on the Via San Maria Maddalena.

  The factory foreman oversaw the manufacturing side of the business while a manager handled the export end with the assistance of a clerk. Both men had worked for Cesare’s father and were so efficient and reliable that there was nothing in the least for him to actually do at the factory. Nevertheless, believing that his job was to inspire a sense of awe among his employees and to remind them that he, like God in His Heaven, was observing their every move, Cesare had made a habit of spending several hours of every day, save Sunday, at the factory, getting in everyone’s way and generally making a nuisance of himself.

  This morning, however, Cesare stopped mid-piazza and reconsidered his options. He felt all at sixes and sevens, whatever that meant. He simply could not stop thinking about Antonella—of her sparkling eyes, like obsidian, of her swarthy skin and beak of a nose, of the plain, yet adorable way she wore her hair in a tight knot at the back of her stringy neck! Surely his manager and foreman could do without him for a few hours. He was certainly paying them enough! He needed to talk to somebody and who better to pour out his heart to than his old friend Pellicola?

  Cesare turned around and headed off in the opposite direction, traversing the length of the Via Filippo Ugolini, past the convent of San Francesco and the little Cappella di Cola, across the bridge and through the old city gate to where the doctor’s rambling stone house was located.

  The Famiglia Pellicola came as close as Casteldurante got to old-fashioned landed gentry. Indeed, its original considerable holdings, along with the enviable title of Count, had been presented to the doctor’s direct ancestor in the mid-fifteenth century by none other than the Duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, in payment for some sort of unspecified services rendered. Through the centuries since the Renaissance, much of the original estate had been sold off to pay debts, one parcel or vineyard at a time. The house, however, remained in the family, that is to say it remained in the possession of Dr. Pellicola, the last of his line, as did a large garden devoted to the cultivation of medicinal herbs and several acres of arable land, good for growing wheat and fennel, beets and cauliflower. A certain Farmer Palumbo worked these for Dr. Pellicola. The estate, diminished though it may have been, nevertheless generated sufficient income that Dr. Pellicola was able to live reasonably comfortably, provided he did not stray into undue extravagance.

  Cesare knocked twice on the heavy wooden door, which was eventually opened by Isabella, Dr. Pellicola’s housekeeper. Isabella had one arthritic hip and sciatica. As a consequence, she got nowhere fast. “Good morning, Signor Bacigalupo,” she said, looking wary and disapproving. The doctor and Cesare’s relationship dated back to their childhood, to school days when they had been inseparable. Even then, the housekeeper had believed Cesare to be a bad influence on her young master. He was forever getting the doctor into trouble. To be sure, it was the doctor who always came up with the ideas. He was the clever one. However, Cesare was always there to egg him on, to enable him. More recently, Cesare had financially backed some of the doctor’s more outlandish and dubious schemes. All of these involved dead animals—wolves and badgers, wild dogs and cats—brought to him by Farmer Palumbo or other neighborhood farmers and hunters, to whom Cesare paid a small fee. For Matteo Pellicola was a keen student of necropheia—the art of embalming. And because Cesare shared this interest (if not the doctor’s strong stomach) and was much more affluent, it was the Prior who underwrote Pellicola’s experiments. These consisted of the concoction of either embalming fluids, which were injected into the corpse, or soaking solutions, in which the corpse was suspended, and were made out of exotic and often expensive oils, unguents, and spirits or chemicals and compounds. To date, none of these experiments had proved successful; it would, after all, be another half a century before formaldehyde came into use.

  “Good morning, Isabella,” Cesare greeted the housekeeper. His manner was overly hearty. Isabella always made him feel like a seven-year-old caught doing something disgusting and despicable, and indeed, when he had been a seven-year-old (and an eight-year-old and a nine-year-old) that had often been the case. Taking his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his frock coat, he mopped his forehead. Even now, Isabella made him break out in a sweat.

  The housekeeper glared at him, then crossed herself as though it was Satan himself come to call and said, “I expect you want to see the doctor. He’s in the garden.” Turning abruptly on her heel, she lurched down the corridor; Cesare trotted along behind her.

  The Casa Pellicola predated the expansion of Casteldurante outside its medieval walls and was charmingly rustic in the haphazard way of country homes of the time, with stuccoed walls, low ceilings, wooden beams, and small arched windows equipped with heavy wooden shutters. No two rooms were on the same level so that climbing two or three steps was required every time one wanted to enter or exit a room—a situation that greatly aggravated Isabella’s bad hip and contributed to her general state of misery. She led Cesare across the wide expanse of the main drawing room, down another flight of steps to a corridor that led past the kitchen, up three steps, through an arched door to the outside and out onto a terrace overlooking the doctor’s extensive herb garden. It took up nearly an acre of land backing onto the swollen bend in the river known as the Gorga del Riscatto. It contained such useful herbs as angelica, goat’s rue, orange hawkweed, elecampane, and monkshood—herbs from which could be fabricated medicaments to address all manner of ailments and some poisons besides. From the balcony Cesare could see that his friend was harvesting lavender; the basket he carried over his arm was full of purple spikes.

  Isabella cupped her mouth with her hands and yelled, “Oh, Doctor! Signor Bacigalupo to see you!” Then, to Cesare’s great relief, she abruptly turned on her heel and hobbled painfully back inside the house, letting the door slam behind her.

  Doctor Pellicola shaded his eyes with his hands and peered up at the house. “Ah, Bacigalupo! It’s you! Come down! Join me!”

  Cesare descended the steps leading from the terrace to the garden and walked the short distance to where his friend stood. The two men shook hands. Cesare cast a backward glance at the house. “What am I to do? Your Isabella does not like me.”

  “Isabella has never liked you and never will. Why start worrying about it now?”

  “But what have I ever done to offend her?”

  “She disapproves of you. She thinks you are a bad influence on me
. If I go to Hell, she will hold you personally responsible.”

  “Whereas, if I go to Hell, it will be a source of some rejoicing for my Antonella,” said Cesare glumly. “Why should your housekeeper love you and mine despise me? Am I not as lovable as you?”

  “Evidently not,” the doctor replied. “But consider this. If I die, my cousin from Fermignano is heir to my estate…and, if you think Isabella doesn’t approve of you, words cannot begin to describe how much she loathes poor Pepe. But what brings you to Casa Pellicola so early? I did not expect you until the afternoon. Not ill, I hope.” It was Cesare’s habit of a Saturday to drop by his friend’s house sometime after siesta to smoke a fat cigar and drink a drop of grappa and check on the progress of various scientific experiments.

  Cesare shook his head and sighed. “Not ill. Just in need of counsel.”

  “Well, you have come to the right place,” said his friend, “for I am, as usual, full of good advice! Please, sit down.” He gestured to a stone bench and the two men sat side by side, looking out at the river. “What is on your mind, dear fellow?”

  “I woke up this morning to some startling news,” said Cesare. “Or, rather, I had a revelation.” He shook his head woefully. “The truth is, I scarcely know where to begin.”

  “In the middle,” counselled Pellicola. “Begin in the middle. You can always work your way back.”

  Cesare took a deep breath. “All right. Here goes. I woke up this morning to find that I have fallen in love…”

  Pellicola rolled his eyes. He laid his hand on his friend’s arm. “With Concetta’s little sister. Are you just realizing that now?”

  Cesare stared at him. “No. I mean. Yes, I was in love with her. Or infatuated. I can’t imagine why. She is just a child and a scruffy one at that. I speak…” He hesitated.