Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  Rupert, of course, hadn’t heard me. He wasn’t even listening to me now. Head down, he was happily lost in his prayer-book.

  “Ah,” said Alex. He looked, I thought, almost disappointed.

  Trying to make light of the mistake, I smiled. “I shouldn’t think you’d want me tagging along, anyway.”

  “On the contrary.” Alex slanted a look down at me. “I’d very much like you to come.”

  “You would?”

  He registered the disbelieving tone of my voice with the slightest of smiles. “I don’t say things I don’t mean, Celia.” And with that he held the door for me and waited.

  xvi

  HE didn’t say anything else on the drive down to Mira del Garda. Not that the drive was a long one, it probably took less than five minutes, but his silence and the close confines of the car made that brief time seem like an hour.

  I still didn’t know exactly why I’d come. After all, this wasn’t like our trip to Sirmione—I’d been cornered into that one by Rupert, I hadn’t had much of a choice in the matter. But this time I could have declined, without giving offence. The fact that I hadn’t declined had, I think, something to do with the way Daniela had reacted to our Sirmione trip, with her threats and condescension. After that, I suppose, it was difficult for me to see her as a wronged party, or to worry what she’d think if I spent time with Alex. I knew full well she’d think the worst, no matter what I did.

  And anyway, Alex had asked me to come.

  I didn’t notice which way he turned at the base of the hill, only that the houses where we stopped were small and warmly lit from within, and that the air around them had a kitchen-cooking smell that wrapped around me, welcoming, as I got out and stood.

  “This way,” said Alex, waiting till I’d joined him before walking round to the back door of one of the houses. He knocked. The old woman who came to the door clearly knew who he was. As she ushered us in, she called over her shoulder: “Teresa!”

  So that was who we’d come to see, I thought, relaxing a little. That was the woman who’d phoned him.

  Poor Teresa didn’t look to me as though she had been sleeping. Dressed in widow’s black, she looked paler, slightly older, but her walk still had the same firmness of purpose. Her surprise at seeing me was plainly evident, but Alex said something that took the distrust from her eyes. Speaking low and quickly in Italian, she motioned towards an adjoining room and Alex nodded.

  He turned to me. “Teresa’s brother, Mauro, wants a word with me in private. Will you be all right out here?”

  I looked from Teresa’s dour face to the sharply curious eyes of the old woman, who’d resumed her seat now at the kitchen table and was slicing mushrooms with a small but wicked-looking knife. I showed a brave smile to Alex. “Of course.”

  When he’d gone, though, my confidence wavered a little until the old woman made a gesture with her knife and said something. I didn’t understand the words, but she had a kind voice.

  Teresa said, “My mother asks please will you sit.”

  As I sat at the table, a little more upright than usual beneath the scrutiny of the two women, Teresa’s mother asked another question.

  Teresa said, “Do you like wine, Signorina Sands?” She was moving to the cupboard as she spoke.

  “Yes, but please,” I said, to stop her—she’d just lost her husband, after all, and it wasn’t right that she should have to serve me—“I don’t want to be a bother.”

  “Is no bother.” Returning with glasses and an open bottle, she poured for the three of us, taking a seat by her mother.

  “Grazie,” I told her, and then turned to thank her mother, also. “Grazie.”

  The sharp eyes softened, crinkling at the corners. This time she rose herself, and fetched a plate. There were trays on the worktop, of small breads and savouries that had probably been specially baked for the funeral, but she filled the plate with some of them and brought them back to set between us on the table. “Mangi,” she instructed me, and pointed with her knife.

  Obedient, I ate a pastry. Embarrassed by the hospitality, I looked at Teresa, wanting to express how sorry I was about her husband’s death. The words came out rather more clumsily than I’d intended, but she didn’t take offence.

  “Signor D’Ascanio says you were there, with Giancarlo,” she said, “on the road.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  She studied me a moment, then she told me, “Is a good thing. I am glad he did not die alone.”

  Her mother interjected, and Teresa said, “My mother asks how old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  Teresa’s mother took this information in translation, smiled, and said something back in a tone of amusement. I caught the words ‘Signora Forlani,’ but Teresa didn’t pass the comment on. She merely made a statement in her turn, and whatever she said made her mother look up at me, surprised. “No!”

  Teresa nodded; turned to me. “I tell my mother that you stay in the ladies’ wing, in the rooms of the English actress. She knows many stories of Il Piacere, of those rooms.”

  She was telling me a few of them now, apparently. Her face had grown animated, and the hand with the knife gestured widely for emphasis. When she’d finished, I turned to Teresa, but once again she didn’t bother with translation, only shrugged and said, “Is like I said—things happen in those rooms.”

  Her mother, clearly dissatisfied with the interpretation service, tried to talk to me herself, aiming the point of the knife at my necklace and stabbing the air. “Angelo . . . good, good.” She smiled at me. “Dio protect.”

  She was saying, I gathered, that God and his angels would guard me from harm. I touched the little gold-and-diamond angel that I wore and smiled to show I understood.

  She would have told me something else, I think, but the door to the other room opened again at that moment, and Alex stepped out. He carried a parcel the size of a shoebox, wrapped up in brown paper. Exchanging a few words with Teresa and her mother, he looked at me. “Ready to go?”

  I stood and thanked the women, leaving behind my unfinished wine as I followed Alex to the door. Teresa’s mother, sitting at the table, tossed a remark to Alex and Teresa said in disapproval, “Mamma!”

  But beside me Alex only turned his head and briefly smiled before the kitchen door swung closed behind us.

  xvii

  WHEN we came into the house I would have said goodnight and headed to my room, but Alex stopped me. He’d been quiet on the drive up, so preoccupied that I’d assumed he’d want to be alone with his thoughts and the brown paper parcel that he’d carried so carefully up from the garage, but now here he was with his hand on my arm, saying, “Don’t go just yet. Please. I could do with the company. Someone to talk to.”

  It surprised me at first that he’d asked, that he’d consider a virtual stranger like me ‘someone to talk to,’ until I reminded myself that Alex wasn’t a man who had friends falling out of the rafters, and Daniela didn’t seem the type to have a sympathetic ear.

  He was Hamlet indeed, I thought, musing alone in this big empty house where the ghosts of his father and grandfather walked, in a figurative sense. But while Hamlet had at least had his Horatio, Alex had no one. Alex’s Horatio, I suspected, had died Sunday night at the side of the road. Which left him with only the greyhounds as confidantes, and at the moment he didn’t even have them . . . they were still up with Poppy.

  So of course I said yes, I’d be happy to sit up a little while longer and talk.

  The Veranda della Diana was empty when we got there—Rupert had long since departed, going back to his own room, no doubt, with the prayer-book, to study its pages in private.

  Alex switched on a floor lamp that spilled a warm pool of light over the arm of a cracked leather chair and onto the wine-red Oriental carpet. The striped draperies, closed round the room on three sides, lent the study a certain cosiness, a comfortably intimate feel that was helped by the low coffered ceiling and smell of old books.
Behind the desk the bronze statue of Diana with her hunting dog and arrows gazed serenely past Alex’s shoulder as he turned a second light on.

  He set the shoebox-sized parcel with care on the desk, and stared at it so long that I was half-convinced he’d forgotten about me. I took a seat anyway, choosing a cushioned cane armchair across from the leather one, and waited. At length Alex raised his head, surfacing; turned. “I don’t suppose you drink Scotch?” was the first thing he asked. “No? You don’t mind if I do?” Assured that I didn’t, he opened a drawer in his desk and removed a tall bottle and glass, bringing both with him as he crossed to the big leather armchair.

  He sat. The light from the lamp at his side angled over his shoulder and caught the clear pale amber of his drink as he poured it. His face, though, was not in the light. He was frowning.

  It was obvious that something had disturbed him, something connected, most likely, to the talk he’d just had with Teresa’s brother, and the parcel sitting now on his desk. But I didn’t like to ask, and since he was the one who had wanted my company, wanted to talk, I let him take the lead in conversation.

  “I’m sorry I left you alone like that, down at Teresa’s. I didn’t know what Mauro wanted to speak with me about, you see, and so . . .” He frowned again. “I hope you didn’t mind.”

  “Not at all. I was well taken care of. Teresa and her mother gave me wine and fed me and—”

  “Mauro was friends with Giancarlo,” he said, interrupting me not from rudeness so much as from the fact his mind appeared to be following a single track. “What he told me tonight . . .” He broke off for a moment and took a long drink, then looked over at me for the first time. “You already know half the story of what Giancarlo was up to—you might as well know the rest.”

  It crossed my mind to protest that he didn’t have to tell me; that this was after all a private matter, and not really any of my business . . . but Alex was already leaning back, settling in for a lengthy discussion.

  “Mauro didn’t hear about Giancarlo’s death until tonight. He drives a lorry, Mauro—he’s been on the road since yesterday afternoon, and in all the confusion, I gather the family didn’t bother trying to contact him. They knew he’d be back today, sometime. Anyhow, according to Teresa, when he found out what had happened he went mad, and kept saying he needed to talk to me. That’s why Teresa phoned; why I went down.” He paused, took a quick sip of Scotch, and went on, “It turns out you were right—Giancarlo was in Sirmione yesterday. He stopped in to see Mauro on his way back. He didn’t have the car with him, Mauro said . . . he just turned up on the doorstep, walking. Said he’d caught the hydrofoil, which wasn’t quite his style. Giancarlo never liked the water.” I saw a brief shadow of memory and loss cross his face, but he steeled his expression against it. “Mauro was on his way out, with the lorry, but he thought it could wait a few minutes, while he had a drink with Giancarlo. He wanted to hear what was happening with Giancarlo’s little investigation; whether he’d found any proof that Pietro was stealing. Mauro doesn’t like Pietro, either,” Alex said, as an aside. He drank again, and swirled the Scotch around his glass. “Giancarlo said yes, he had proof. He told Mauro he’d made friends with an assistant at the jeweller’s shop, the shop he’d seen Pietro going into with the bag. Giancarlo said that this assistant—after several days and, one assumes, a fair amount of wine—had agreed to give him proof, and it was this Giancarlo wanted me to see, in Sirmione.”

  It was my turn now to frown. “So why didn’t he keep his meeting with you?”

  “Apparently he tried. He told Mauro that this friend of his, the jeweller’s assistant, was sure they were both being watched. The assistant refused to hand over the evidence as they had planned; he insisted on finding another location, somewhere safe. In the end he chose the hydrofoil. Very cloak and dagger,” Alex said. “Giancarlo told Mauro they had to jump on at the last minute, to be sure that this person—whoever he was—who had spooked the assistant, wouldn’t be able to follow.”

  “But Giancarlo was able to get what he was after?”

  “Yes. That box, there.” Alex nodded at the desk. “Giancarlo asked Mauro to keep it safe there, at the house—said he didn’t fancy carrying it around any more than he had to, he didn’t want it breaking. He said I could come down and see it there as easily as anywhere. And then he left. Mauro offered him a ride up in the lorry, but Giancarlo said he’d rather walk. The first sunny day, he said, after so much rain—it was good to be walking.” Again the shadow swiftly crossed his face. He raised his glass.

  I said. “I am so very sorry. You were close to him, weren’t you?”

  “Like brothers.” The words brought an ironic twist to his lips. “They say that every family has its curse. The curse of mine is infidelity. My grandfather’s affairs are public knowledge, and my father . . . well, he was his father’s son. Giancarlo’s mother was a very lovely woman.”

  It took a moment for me to absorb what he was telling me, and then I simply said, “Oh,” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I don’t have any proof of it. My father never acknowledged any children but myself, but I had my suspicions. Giancarlo did too, I’d imagine. He was more a D’Ascanio than I was, in some ways—he had the curse as well.” Again his mouth curved, fleetingly. “But underneath it all he was a good man, and a good friend. Yes, we were close.” He looked away at that, and his gaze found the box on the desk. “I did him an injustice, though. I thought that he was wrong about this business with Pietro.”

  “So Pietro did steal something, then?”

  For an answer, Alex rose and fetched the box itself, returning to place it with care on the small round table by my chair. He and Mauro had already had the brown paper off once—when Alex broke the single piece of tape that held it on, the paper fell away in stiff folds, and the box lid lifted off. From its nest of polystyrene beads, Alex gently extracted the ‘proof’ that Giancarlo had managed to get from the jeweller’s assistant: a chalice, a Byzantine chalice of alabaster and gold, the same one that Edwina had shown me in the curio cabinet of the Villa delle Tempeste.

  Alex set it on the table, where it caught the light and glittered like a treasure from Aladdin’s cave. He looked at it, then looked at me. “So now I have a problem.”

  xviii

  DANIELA came to my room the next morning.

  I was finishing up with my voice exercises when I heard the door to my sitting-room open and close. I turned in surprise at the sound, because everyone knocked, and I’d just begun thinking it must be the new cook and housemaid, Teresa’s replacement, who might be excused for not knowing the unwritten rules, when Daniela appeared in the door leading through from my bathroom.

  She looked rather different than she had at breakfast, an hour earlier. At breakfast she’d had the eyes of an ingénue. “And I, of course, had no idea,” she’d told Nicholas across the table. “When Alessandro came to me last night”—the slightest pause, a glance at me to make sure I had taken in that point—“I was very upset, that Pietro should do this. I feel a fool that he could steal these things from the villa without my noticing, but I am not always looking in the cabinet, you understand, to see what is there and what is not. Fortunately, it appears he only took the chalice and a small bowl, and the chalice is recovered, thanks to God.”

  Unimpressed, I’d gone on spreading jam on my croissant, watching Daniela the same way I might have watched Mother perform on the stage. There’d been four of us there—Den, myself, and Daniela and Nicholas. Madeleine and Poppy had been down for breakfast earlier; their plates hadn’t yet been cleared away . . . Rupert had still been on his walk, and Alex had been . . . well, somewhere.

  Deprived of a full audience, Daniela had nonetheless given it her all. One would have thought Pietro had tried to murder her in her sleep, instead of simply stealing. “Never has such a thing happened at one of our properties. He is a beast, Pietro.”

  “But he’s gone?” Den had asked.


  “This morning, yes, before we could confront him. Alessandro thinks perhaps this jeweller in Sirmione, he has noticed the chalice not there at his shop any longer, and has telephoned to Pietro, to warn him. And the jeweller is gone, too. The shop, it is closed.”

  I’d found myself wondering what had become of the assistant, the one who had passed the chalice on to Giancarlo. I had hoped he wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere, himself . . . but I’d kept my thoughts silent, not knowing how much of the story Daniela had known. She hadn’t once mentioned Giancarlo, after all, and Alex might only have told her the barest details of the theft. I hadn’t wanted to repeat what he’d told me in confidence.

  Den had remarked that it shouldn’t take the police long to find a man as ugly as Pietro, and then Nicholas had said, “I’ll bet he’s hiding out in Milan with his girlfriend, that maid who did a runner. She’s likely in league with him.”

  I’d joined the conversation for the first time. “I shouldn’t think it likely. Alex says she’s a very religious girl.”

  Nicholas had shrugged. “Most people put their principles aside,” he’d said, “for money.” And then, because I’d mentioned Alex’s name and Nicholas loved stirring things up, he’d added, “You seem to be spending a lot of time with our Mr. D’Ascanio, Celia. You weren’t the reason he got back so late last night, now, were you? Poppy had the blasted dogs till nearly midnight.”

  Den had come unexpectedly—and rather gallantly, I’d thought—to my rescue, commandeering the conversation with a tale about Poppy and the greyhounds, giving me time to finish my coffee and excuse myself to go and do my warm-ups.

  But apparently he’d only bought me a temporary reprieve, for here was Daniela now, walking right into my rooms without knocking.

  Momentarily knocked sideways by her arrogant invasion of my privacy, I could only stand and stare as she took up her position in the doorway, hands on hips, as belligerently posed as if I were the one intruding.