Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Am I? It’s that lunch, I expect. Makes me drowsy.”

  I was feeling draggy and slow, though I expected my silence had more to do with Daniela Forlani than anything else; with the way that she had smiled and talked with Alex over lunch, and with my learning that she’d actually arrived at the Villa delle Tempeste last night, and that hers had doubtless been the light I’d noticed from my window, the light that had drawn Alex down from the terrace and into the gardens. And if I’d needed proof of that, the fact he’d left the dogs behind rather clinched things—Daniela had made it quite clear over lunch that she didn’t much care for the greyhounds. Which meant Alex had probably been with her this morning as well, I thought, recalling how he’d told me he had kennelled Max and Nero because he couldn’t take them where he’d gone. In fact, for all I knew he’d spent the night there, at the villa, with Daniela. It could very well have been her window he’d been looking out when he’d seen Den and me pass by on our way to the theatre.

  I hadn’t said anything, at lunch, about having seen her in Venice, or about her male companion with the heart-shaped bald spot. It wasn’t my business, any of it. And besides, if she was with Alex, then however disappointed I might be, I wasn’t going to interfere. I didn’t make plays for other women’s men. I wasn’t Mother.

  Rupert told me, “You should go and have a lie-down. We can manage.”

  “No, I’m fine.” To prove it, I looked round and said, “I’m guessing that this was a ballroom?”

  The answer came, not from Den or from Rupert, but from the doorway behind me. “My grandfather practised his fencing here,” Alex said. “I’m told he was not fond of dancing.”

  I wheeled, and found him watching me.

  He asked, “Does that disappoint you?”

  “Not actually, no.” I had an easier time imagining Galeazzo D’Ascanio fighting his reflection here than waltzing. From what I’d read of him in his biographies, he hadn’t been particularly social, and for all he’d loved throwing wild and decadent parties, I thought it far more likely he’d have stood against the wall and watched, as his grandson was doing right now.

  The dogs were at his side again, their long tails wagging. Max, the bolder one, took a step closer, accepting the invitation of my outstretched hand. As I petted the smooth brindled head Alex said, “He’s not usually so friendly.”

  A few hours earlier I would have responded in kind to the tone of his voice, the rare smile, but now that I knew he was attached, I was careful to do nothing that could be considered flirting. “Yes, well, dogs can always tell the people who like them, can’t they?”

  And then I bit my tongue because that could have been taken as being a shot at Daniela Forlani—too close to Mother’s cattiness for comfort.

  Alex studied me a moment; turned to Rupert. “I have time now, if you’d like to come and choose the furniture, the tables and the chairs, that you would like to have in here for your rehearsals. I can have someone bring the things down later on.”

  I wondered who he would get to do that. He must surely be running out of servants, with the maid and his driver still missing. I didn’t say anything out loud, of course, but Den had no such reservations.

  “I can carry one end of a table, if you’re running short of bodies,” he offered cheerfully. “Still no sign of Giancarlo, I take it? Teresa was saying that sometimes he goes off for weeks at a time, is that right?”

  “It has been known to happen.” Alex tipped his head to one side. “When were you talking to Teresa?”

  “Oh, just before lunch, for a minute. I was dying for a cup of coffee, and she made me one.”

  “You must have impressed her,” said Alex, with the faintest of smiles. “Like Max, she usually isn’t so friendly with strangers.”

  “She’s friendly with me.” Den scratched his head and flashed a boyish smile. “Guess I’m just lucky. Hey, speaking of coffee, Rupert, do you think you could grab me a cup on your way back from picking the furniture?”

  Rupert hadn’t looked too eager to go and do anything, but his professionalism won out over any reluctance he might have had to leave me in the room alone with Den. “Certainly. Celia? Would you like a coffee, too?”

  “No, thanks, I’m fine.”

  “Right, I shouldn’t be long.”

  “Take as long as you like,” Den invited, with a wink. He really couldn’t help himself, I supposed, as I watched him complete his chalk circle. When Rupert and Alex had gone he stood, brushing the dust from his hands. “There, that’s it for the stage. Now I just have to figure out where the gangway goes.”

  I handed him the measurements to study. “So you’ve been chatting up Teresa, have you?”

  “Just getting the gossip. She told me something interesting about the maid who’s done a bunk—it seems the girl was hot and heavy with Pietro. Yeah,” he said, as he saw my expression, “that’s what I thought, too. I can’t imagine any woman wanting to be with the guy, but there you go. There’s someone for everyone, that’s what they say. Anyhow, Teresa said the girl had been upset for a couple of days, so she thinks they’d had some kind of lovers’ quarrel, and that’s why the girl disappeared.”

  Having seen Pietro, I was inclined to think the maid had done the wisest thing. I had a sudden thought. “Next time you’re talking to Teresa, see if you can find out why she doesn’t like me.”

  Den took his end of the measuring tape and began backing up, with his eyes on the numbers. “It’s not you,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s the ghost.”

  “Sorry?”

  “She’s got this idea that Celia Sands—the first one—is still hanging around her old rooms. You know, haunting the place.”

  “Ah.” I remembered the emphatic way Teresa had told me that my rooms were no place for guests. How had she put it, exactly? Things happen. “And what makes her think that?”

  “She told me that she’d had a few . . . experiences. She didn’t go into the details. Why, would you like me to ask her about it?”

  “No, it doesn’t matter, really.” I didn’t believe in ghosts.

  “She’s quite a character, Teresa is. What role did you give her?”

  Again I looked lost and said, “Sorry?”

  “In that game you play, the Shakespeare game.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “Rupert told us. Last night,” he said, “after dinner—you’d gone up to your room, I think, and we all got talking about Shakespeare, I can’t remember why, but Rupert told us how you’re always giving roles to people.”

  “Ah.” There was really no cause to be angry with Rupert, I thought. There was nothing particularly private about my game—all my friends knew I did it, and Rupert would never have purposely done anything to embarrass me. But I did feel embarrassed. I was so much younger than everyone here, and so much less accomplished, and I hadn’t especially wanted them to know all my childish habits. Something stirred my memory. “Was Nicholas there, too, last night?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Oh, no reason.” But that explained why, on the terrace this morning, he’d made that comment about Pietro being a perfect Caliban, and why he’d smiled when he’d said it. He’d been playing a game of his own, I thought. Which meant my first impression had been right: he was a rat. Like Bryan always told me, first impressions were the ones to trust. I smiled at Den. “In answer to your question, I haven’t given any role to Teresa, not yet.”

  “She’s a tough one,” he admitted. “Not like you.”

  “Oh, yes? And how would you cast me?” I waited for him to pick one of the obvious ones—Juliet, or Ophelia, or—

  “Cordelia,” he said, without missing a beat.

  Youngest daughter of King Lear. The loyal one, the one who had the kindest heart. I was flattered. “Wait a minute, though . . . didn’t she get poisoned at the end?”

  “I don’t think you’re in any immediate danger.” He marked out his lines on the floor for the gangway. “There, we just n
eed the furniture, now.” As he knelt to replace the page of stage measurements in the ring binder he’d brought with him, he said, “Oh, hey, I almost forgot. Here you go, you’ll need this for tomorrow.”

  I took the single page he handed me, a labyrinth of lines. “What’s this?”

  “A map of the hallways, from your room to this one.”

  He was nothing, I thought, if not meticulous. “You think I’ll get lost, do you?”

  “Not if you follow that map, you won’t.”

  With a smile at the drawing I folded it over and tucked it away in my pocket.

  xi

  I got lost on my way to rehearsal next morning.

  To be fair, in a house like Il Piacere my only hope of finding my way round would have been to leave a trail of biscuit crumbs or unwind a ball of thread behind me, like Theseus in the maze of the Minotaur. Of course, I could have used Den’s map, but at the moment it was doing service as a bookmark in the little red volume of Galeazzo’s Celia poems sitting on my bedside table. I’d been falling asleep last night reading the poems, and the map, neatly folded, had been right there beside me, and I’d put it in to hold my place, not thinking. And this morning I’d forgotten where it was, and what I’d done with it. I’d only just remembered now.

  The problem was, I thought as I came round another bend in the dim corridor, that now I was lost, and about to be late.

  I quickened my pace, spurred by the same irrational impulse that made me drive faster whenever I took a wrong turn, as though my mind had already dismissed everything around me as unfamiliar and was eager to look round the next corner. I knew I’d gone wrong because I wasn’t in a corridor any longer, I was passing through a chain of formal rooms, eerily quiet and empty and smelling of polish and dusty old draperies. Confused, I stopped and nearly turned to double back . . . but then I heard a small and reassuring sound, as welcome as the beacon of a lighthouse to a sailor, certain evidence another human being was nearby: the industrious clacking of a computer’s keyboard.

  I tracked it to a closed door on my right. The clacking stopped, but I heard movement, someone walking on a creaking floor and a snuffling sound that wasn’t human. Alex, I thought, and the dogs. I hesitated, not altogether sure that I wanted to let Alex know I was lost, but the pressures of time overrode my reluctance. I was raising my hand to knock when the door opened suddenly, making me jump.

  He was startled as well, but he recovered more quickly than I did. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning. I—”

  “Shouldn’t you be at rehearsal?” He checked his watch. “I thought it was supposed to start at ten.”

  “It was. It is. I mean, that’s the problem, I can’t find the room . . .”

  “Ah.” His nod held comprehension. “You came down the main staircase, did you? You should have turned right at the bottom, not left, that’s all.” He raised a hand as though to direct me back again, then appeared to think better of it. Stepping fully through the door he pulled it closed behind him. “I think it might be simpler if I showed you.”

  Following, I tried to keep track of the route we were taking, back into one of the rooms I’d just come through then out by a different door into a short passage that in turn brought us into a cloister-like corridor looking down over an idyllic courtyard . . . but these things only registered in part. I was much more aware of the time and the man at my side, of his breathing and the way he walked and how often the dogs at his knee sought his hands. Bryan always said a dog could tell you more about a man than people could. “You can fool another person,” he’d once told me, “but you’ll never fool a dog. They know the stuff you’re really made of.”

  I found myself wondering whether, in Daniela Forlani’s case, it was a matter of her not liking the greyhounds, or of them not liking her.

  I said, “It’s kind of you to do this, really. I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”

  “I was finished. And anyway, I was only on the computer reading my mail.”

  “Oh, you have e-mail?” I said that too quickly, and with rather too much interest.

  Alex noticed. “Is there someone you would like to send a message to?”

  “No, no, it’s not—”

  “You are most welcome,” he invited me. “It wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Well . . .” I thought for a moment, then finally caved in. “If you’re sure . . . I mean, thank you, I’d love to send something to Bryan. I’m sure he’s dying to know how we’re getting on. We rang him from Venice, of course, and I know Roo was planning to phone at the weekend, but it’s so expensive talking on the telephone and he does have his computer at the flat . . .” My voice trailed off as it occurred to me that Alex might not know who Bryan was; that he might not, in fact, know anything of Rupert’s private life. Even in these more enlightened times in our society, not everyone approved.

  But Alex’s expression hadn’t changed. “No problem,” he said. We’d arrived at the foot of the stairs I’d come down from the first floor. “So now you go this way,” he told me, “and turn, and the passage will bring you right into the Stanza degli Angeli.” He angled his wrist and looked down at his watch. “You still have two minutes. You’ll get there on time.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You do get a break before lunch?” he asked, as I was turning.

  I paused. “Yes, I think so. A short one.”

  “Come then if you like and I’ll help you to e-mail your friend. You’ll remember the way?”

  “Heavens, no. I’ve a horrible sense of direction. But not to worry,” I said. “I’ll just come to this stairway and then try to find my way back to the rehearsal room.”

  I think his smile surprised him, too. He looked at that instant unguarded, approachable. Only I knew that I couldn’t approach him in the way I would have liked to. The moment passed.

  Still, watching him walk off, the two dogs trotting at his side, I felt the stirring of a feeling that I recognized—a faint but certain tightness in my chest that almost tingled. Damn, I thought. I didn’t want to be attracted to the man. No good could come of it. But the feeling persisted, ignoring my attempts to fight it.

  “Damn,” I said aloud and, turning, ran for the rehearsal room.

  xii

  FIRST rehearsals always made me nervous. It didn’t matter that I had already met the other actors, or that Rupert was directing, or that all we had to do this first time out was sit around a table reading through the play out loud. I still felt beastly nervous.

  For one thing, there were strangers present. Everybody came to first rehearsal—the people who would be in charge of make-up and our costumes and the set design, they all turned up this first time out, although we mightn’t see many of them until the final days before performance. They were all friendly, all fairly young, all Italian, though none of them came from the town and the one who lived furthest away had had to come from Verona this morning, which must have been a fair drive for him. Rupert introduced us round, but though I shook their hands and smiled I didn’t retain any faces or names. My mind just wouldn’t concentrate.

  The room didn’t help. In this echoing space with the mirrors all round me I couldn’t help feeling small and insignificant, a child in grown-up clothing, fooling no one. And it didn’t help, either, that Madeleine was sitting directly across from me, graceful, composed, every inch the professional.

  For assistance I looked heavenward, my eyes seeking the angels in the ceiling paintings—more cherubs than angels, with soft wings and sweet childish faces that offered encouragement.

  Rupert was talking. Having already shown us the overall design for the production, he’d moved on to the finer points. “. . . And that, I think, covers the rules and procedures. Is everyone clear on those? Good. If you do have a problem, just let Dennis know. Are there any objections to Nicholas smoking?” he asked without breaking stride, as Nicholas, rocking back in his chair at the opposite end of the table, touched the flame of his lighter to a cigaret
te.

  The pause that followed held surprise. From the look on Nicholas’s face I could tell it had never occurred to him to ask permission; he was used to doing as he pleased.

  “Right,” said Rupert, when no one objected. “Then I think we’ll get on with the read-through. I’m going to let you just feel your way through this first time, let you make the first contact with your character, and we’ll see how that goes, all right? Dennis, would you call the cues, please?”

  Rupert settled back as Den picked up his stopwatch and started us off with a brilliant imitation of a chiming clock, the sound that first opened the play. Some stage managers, when calling cues, would simply read ‘A clock chimes four’ and be done with it, but Den’s way was better. It helped set the mood.

  I set my script flat on the table to hide the fact my hands were shaking, took a deep breath and read out the first line. My voice came out flat, rather tense, not at all what I’d wanted; the harder I tried to correct it, the worse it became. And it went on like that, with me stumbling over the words and Madeleine coming back smoothly while everyone else simply followed along. I could feel them all watching me, wondering why in God’s name I’d been given the part—or at least, that’s what I would have wondered, in their place. I couldn’t even bear to raise my eyes to look at Rupert; didn’t want to face his pity or, worse still, his disappointment.

  Head down and desperate I soldiered on, reading too quickly in my effort to get to the end of the first act, to the séance scene in which Nicholas’s character would at last come in, beginning as a disembodied offstage voice, then making a dramatic appearance in the flesh at the next-to-last line, relieving the long unbroken dialogue between myself and Madeleine.