Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  Brave words for a girl of twelve. I held back my smile with care. “Well, you’re not being childish now. It takes maturity,” I told her, “to apologize in person. Lots of people twice your age—three times your age—can’t do it.”

  She flushed with pleasure, and a glimpse of the old Poppy showed through her self-conscious features. “I was going to ask you . . .” she started, then paused, circling round for the right approach. “That is, I was wondering if you’d like to have lunch with me tomorrow, at the Grand Hotel in Mira. I’d pay, of course—I have money.”

  She was so painfully earnest that I was once again reminded of my own youthful crush on my headmistress; how I’d striven to impress her; how I’d longed to share her company. The thought occurred to me quite suddenly that if Den and Madeleine did get together then Poppy and I would be sisters of a sort, and it struck me that I’d like that. “Yes, I’d like that very much,” I said.

  “You would?”

  “Very much,” I repeated. “Now come on, help me get into my costume. I could use an extra pair of hands.”

  She left me when Den came round to give the fifteen-minute call and collect any valuables that might need locking away in his desk. “I hope you don’t expect me to take this,” he said. “What the devil is it, anyway?”

  Putting the finishing touches to my wig, I glanced over to see what he was talking about. “Oh. It’s a prayer-book.”

  Bryan had left it in my room this morning, and knowing how fond Rupert had been of it I’d carried it down here for luck. It was my way, I suppose, of having a little bit of Rupert with me still, to see me through tonight’s performance.

  Leafing through the pages of the prayer-book, Den admired the illustrations. “Is it very old?”

  “At least eight hundred years, I think.” Quite possibly the only item from the Fourth Crusade collection to have survived the theft, I thought. I passed him my wristwatch and handbag for safekeeping. “Here you are.”

  “Thanks.”

  Left alone, I took the one valuable I hadn’t given him—my little diamond angel pendant—and hung it with care on the edge of my mirror, where it could watch over me. I wasn’t ordinarily superstitious about my performances, but the full weight of what I was about to do had begun to press in on me, the fact that in under ten minutes I’d be facing an audience in my first leading role, in a play that nobody, till now, had been able to bring to the stage. In under ten minutes I’d have to go out there and wait in the dark for the lights to come up, and in front of a full house I’d have to live up to my name, and hold my own with Nicholas and Madeleine, and give the sort of performance that would have made Rupert proud, and . . .

  “Five minutes,” Den called, from the passage.

  In desperation I looked at the prayer-book, wishing that I could read Greek so I would have been able to call on some higher power for assistance. But I couldn’t read Greek. I did, however, recognize the painted illustration on the page that Den had left the book turned open to—a radiant sunburst against a cloudy sky, as though the heavens had opened to admit a wandering spirit that had just been laid to rest. I remembered how Rupert had phrased the translation: ‘A Prayer for the Laying of Ghosts.’

  The eyes in the myriad pictures of Celia the First on my dressing-room wall seemed to watch me, as though she were waiting for something. I found myself searching the eyes of the images, seeking a connection across the long years that divided our lives. Of course I knew I hadn’t really seen her in the burning room, or heard her in the night, and there were no such things as ghosts, but still . . .

  “He knows,” I told her, feeling only slightly foolish for talking to a photograph. “He knows you love him, and he knows you didn’t run away.” It occurred to me, gazing up at that famously beautiful face, that I was finishing what she’d begun—she’d never had the chance to play the role that Galeazzo had so lovingly crafted for her, never had the chance to speak the lines before an audience. Perhaps she’d cursed the play herself, I thought fancifully, not wanting anybody else to take her place.

  She was smiling at me now, though, looking down with warm approval as if somehow she considered me a kindred spirit.

  And suddenly my fears about the play and my performance disappeared, and were replaced with something calmer and more confident. The feeling held, through the moment when Den came to lead me out to take my place on the still-darkened stage, through the moment I spent standing there on my own, with the hum of the yet-unseen audience surrounding me . . . and then in one quick burst the lights came on, spearing the darkness with dazzling rays like the sunburst illustration in the prayer-book, and in that instant I knew everything was going to be all right.

  I turned my face towards the light, and spoke the opening line.

  He had forgotten how to pray. He turned the pages of the prayer-book slowly, hopefully, but no help came. These words were sterile, penned by monks—they could not speak the passions of his heart.

  He felt that he was being watched, and turned to see his son within the doorway, standing solemn and unspeaking. The boy, he thought, was all that he had left now. All the family he could claim. “Come in,” he said. “Come in, don’t be afraid.”

  The boy came cautiously, his eyes upon the prayer-book. “What is that?”

  “A palimpsest. You know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “A twice-used book. There was a time when parchment was a rarity, and those who wished to make new books were forced to reuse old ones. This book was a play, a Greek play, when its life began, larger than this, but the monks who found it cut its pages into two and scraped the parchment clean so they could write their prayers and incantations. Only they could not remove the underlying words completely. Here,” he said, “and here, you see them for yourself.”

  The boy stepped closer, looked, and frowned. “A pal . . . a palim . . .”

  “Palimpsest.” He liked the frown, the earnestness, the drive to understand. “It is a very special book, this. No one else has ever seen it, only you.”

  He saw that pleased the boy, and reaching out a hand he touched the shoulder of his son. “Perhaps one day you will learn all the secrets of this house,” he said, and smiled a little wistfully. “Perhaps, one day.”

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  But my fate ever in a frequent round

  Turns . . . and changes character.

  Sophocles: The Lost Dramas, Fragment 713

  We don’t go very often to Il Piacere, now.

  The Trust has the charge of the house and the gardens, and although they detour the tourists round our private rooms while we’re in residence, it still feels rather strange, as though we’re part of the display. Teresa has several times turned people out of her kitchen, and once I came across a straggler who had stopped to use our bathroom. Still, the house works better as a showpiece than a home, I think, and I have no doubt Galeazzo’s ghost is somewhere looking on delighted at the sight of people queuing for a glimpse inside his legendary bedroom, or the desk in the veranda where he wrote his final poems. As for the spirit of Celia the First, if she still haunts her rooms in the ladies’ wing, she keeps a low profile. None of the Trust’s workers, nor any of the tourists, have reported anything ‘happening,’ as Teresa would put it, in Celia’s suite.

  I myself am inclined to believe that what I saw and heard were mere imaginings, and yet . . . and yet, there is a part of me, I must admit, that wouldn’t be surprised if someday someone chanced to stumble on the resting-place of Galeazzo’s Celia, sheltered in the gardens of Il Piacere. Walking there, I almost feel her presence.

  But so far only one body has been found at the estate, and that a more recent one—not in the gardens, but down on the small stretch of beach by the boathouse. As Alex had suspected, the little maid who’d vanished on the day I’d first arrived hadn’t run off to Milan at all; she hadn’t run to anywhere. I’m told that Lake Garda is known to not give up its dead, but it gave back the maid . . .
gave her back very gently, and set her in plain view to bear a mute witness to murder.

  Pietro, still in prison, claims it wasn’t he who killed her, that Daniela’s husband did it, and forged the letter to her family saying she was fine; but it’s likely we shall never know the truth. The two of them—Daniela and her husband—have eluded the authorities for so long now it seems to me unlikely they will ever be found, let alone brought to justice. We actually had a postcard from Daniela, last Easter . . . at least, Alex did. It came addressed to him, at Il Piacere—a view of Buenos Aires, and on the back her signature, and nothing more. It had occurred to me that she must have truly had some feelings for him, to take such a risk, but when I’d said so to Alex he’d shaken his head and replied that women like that didn’t care about anyone, really; that men, to them, were playthings. I could understand the argument—Daniela, after all, was a good deal like my mother, who had grown so accustomed to being the bright centre of the universe that, like the wicked queen in the fairy tale, she couldn’t conceive of anyone being fairer than her—but I couldn’t help but think that in Alex’s case, Daniela had felt something more. I’d seen her eyes that day on the terrace, when she’d warned me off.

  “And anyway,” Alex had gone on, still holding the postcard, “she’s not taking any risk, sending me this. They’ll have moved on to somewhere else by now, take my word for it.”

  With the money they must have made selling the Fourth Crusade collection, they will doubtless be able to keep moving for quite some time. Where the stolen items went, we still don’t know—they have, as Alex put it, merely continued their illicit journey from hand to hand, as they came down through the ages. The few fakes salvaged from the Villa delle Tempeste after the fire have been put on display by the Trust, and the story of the theft has found its own place in the tour guides’ patter, one more curiosity to entertain the tourists.

  But there is one piece yet surviving—the prayer-book, which Alex allowed me to bring with us when we left Italy. That, and the portrait of Celia the First that had hung in my bedroom, and which is hanging now above me as I write this, are the only things we’ve taken from the house, the only things we didn’t want to leave behind. The rest is for the Trust, and they are welcome to it, Alex says.

  He talks from time to time of putting on another of his grandfather’s plays in the theatre, but I don’t imagine anything will come of it. At any rate, it wouldn’t be the same. We could never match the triumph of Il Prezzo.

  It was Il Prezzo that first brought us to New York, by invitation, when our summer’s run in Italy was over; and the play is running still, to good reviews, although the only original cast member remaining is Madeleine. Nicholas left two months after we’d moved to New York. He now lives in Los Angeles, where I understand he has been seen at several parties with the actress who last year received the Oscar for best work in a supporting role—which was, I thought, appropriate.

  I’d have stayed on longer with Il Prezzo myself if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was offered, unexpectedly, the lead role in a television miniseries, and when I wavered it was Madeleine herself who pushed me into it. I remember she and Den had been throwing one of their famous parties that weekend, at their house in New Jersey, and Madeleine and I had found a corner of peace on the covered back porch, and with our drinks in hand were watching Poppy throw a ball for her new cocker spaniel puppy, and Madeleine, making her case for the miniseries, had quoted from Shakespeare, from Julius Caesar : “ ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune . . .’ ”

  And when she’d said that it had struck me that I’d had my tide already, and had taken it, and had indeed found fortune. Not only in a financial sense, though I’d be the first to admit that I’ve travelled a long way from that draughty fourth-floor flat in Covent Garden, but in those things that make one truly rich—in friends, and in my ever-growing family, and the joy of being able to perform.

  I did the miniseries, though. I’ve learned it’s always wise to take advice from Madeleine.

  I took her advice about Alex, after all. She said I ought to marry him, and so I did, and that has worked out well enough—the evidence is sleeping here beside me in a Moses basket, guarded well by Max and Nero. Bryan and Edwina will be coming in a week’s time for the christening. We had a small dispute about the name—Alex had felt that it ought to be Rupert, only I had argued that Rupert had never much liked his own name, and had several times said that he wouldn’t have wished it on anyone else . . . and choosing between Den and Bryan would have been impossible for me, so in the end we had settled on Christopher.

  “It’s all his own name,” I’d said, watching our son while he slept. “No one else’s.”

  It had pleased me then, as it does now, to know he’ll have no expectations to live up to on that count, and nothing that he’ll have to prove. Mind you, it doesn’t bother me so much these days to carry Celia’s name. With the success of Il Prezzo, and the first episode of my miniseries scheduled to air on Sunday next, I feel more confident in my ability to make my mark.

  According to Madeleine, I already have. Only this morning she came by to tell me how, at dinner last night, she and Den had chatted with an influential critic who’d been praising my performance in Il Prezzo. “And Den got to bragging, you know how he is, and he told the chap that, in his opinion, you had done a better job than the first Celia Sands could have done with the part.” Whereupon the critic, so Madeleine says, looked up in some surprise and asked them, “Was there another Celia Sands?”

  Perhaps they’ll write that as my epitaph. I think that I should like that.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The character of Galeazzo D’Ascanio and the estate of Il Piacere were inspired by the real-life poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and his grand home Il Vittoriale, built on the shores of Lake Garda above the beautiful resort town of Gardone Riviera. In paying homage to a fascinating man I did not, of course, mean to imply that any of the events described in this book actually took place—the story is entirely imagined, and my own.

  For my research into D’Annunzio’s life I am greatly indebted to the wonderfully colourful biography written by his friend and secretary, Tom Antongini, and published in English by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1938.

  To all those others, both in Italy and here, who were kind enough to assist me in my research for this book, I give my heartfelt thanks; most particularly to the woman at Equity in London, whose name I never learned; to Humphrey Price; to Jane Bradish-Ellames of Curtis Brown; and last but by no means least, to the actress Cynthia Dale, who generously prompted from the wings.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ACT I

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  ACT II

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  xi

  xii

  xiii

  xiv

  xv

  xvi

  ACT III

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  xi

  ACT IV

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  xi

  xii

  xiii

  xiv

  xv

  xvi

  xvii

  xviii

  xix

  ACT V

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv
<
br />   v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  xi

  xii

  xiii

  xiv

  xv

  xvi

  xvii

  xviii

  xix

  xx

  xxi

  EPILOGUE

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ACT I

  i

  ii

  iii

  iv

  v

  vi

  vii

  viii

  ix

  x

  ACT II

  xi

  xii

  xiii

  xiv

  xv

  xvi

  ACT III

  ACT IV

  xvii

  xviii

  xix

  ACT V

  xx

  xxi

  EPILOGUE