The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  I close my eyes and see an image of Robin Weiss standing at the end of the lemon walk, the same image I’d seen in my mind when Mark asked us to observe a moment of silence for Robin, but then I had imagined Robin looking away and despairing that he’d lost a part of himself—the best part of himself—at La Civetta. I’d let myself believe Mark when he told me that Robin killed himself, but now the Robin in my head turns to face me. He’s smiling into the camera, the Tuscan hills behind him, the future in front of him. I open my eyes. When Mark lied, when he told me that Robin killed himself, he’d been protecting himself, but he could have said that it was an accident. There was no reason to claim that Robin had killed himself except that he knew how much it would hurt me and how much I would blame myself. How well he had understood me, I think, beginning to cry for the first time tonight. Even when I started to suspect that Orlando had killed Robin—even when I decided to come here to find out the truth of Robin’s death—a part of me had been afraid that I was only trying to avoid the guilt of letting Robin down. Mark knew that and used it. He counted on my guilt to keep me quiet.

  I hear voices at the door and steel myself to face the police. I look down at the pietre dure pattern on the floor and remind myself that if Ginevra de Laura could face Barbagianni in court and tell her story, so can I.

  By the time I have finished with the police, it’s after four a.m. They had wanted me to show them Mark’s room, where I had found the letter, and then where I’d hidden after I ran from him. The worst moment was when one of the officers had lifted the lid of the cassone and noticed the nail marks in the lid.

  “Did you do this?” he asked, and for a moment I couldn’t remember whether or not I had. For a moment I wondered how I could have lain in that box and not gone mad and tried to scratch myself free.

  Before they left me in my room, I asked whether I had to stay in the country. They told me that before Mark could be extradited to America he’d have to face charges for my assault and for the part he played in the death of Mara Silverman. I would no doubt be called as a witness, but there was no legal reason that I couldn’t leave until then. Did I have a contact number where I could be reached? I gave them Chihiro’s address and phone number in England, and then, as soon as they left, I gathered the poems together and put them in an envelope, which I stuck into my laptop case. Then I picked up my suitcase and headed downstairs.

  The truth was, I’d wanted the police to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to leave the country. I’d wanted an excuse to see Bruno before I left, to apologize for ever thinking that Orlando had killed Robin, even though I know there’s no point. I remember Bruno’s last words to me and the way he looked at me. There’s no chance he’ll ever forgive me. There’s no reason for me to stay.

  The lights are off in the rotunda as I make my way down the stairs, but now that the storm has passed, moonlight pours in through the oculus and falls on the marble rose petals that trail down the steps and swirl in a circular pattern on the floor at the bottom. The light does not make them look like blood, though, as in the legend, but rather like scarlet leaves swept by the the last winds of autumn. “That time of year thou mayst in me behold, / When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” That’s what the rotunda feels like to me now—a bare ruined choir. Staring at the pattern as I come down the stairs, I notice for the first time that the marble petals seem to form letters. I put my suitcase down at the bottom of the stairs and turn to look at the floor from another angle.

  “I’ve always thought it looks like a G and a W,” a voice says from behind me, “but part of the floor was destroyed when the rotunda was enclosed in the eighteenth century. Do you think those poems you found will tell us the answer?”

  I turn to see Cyril seated in his armchair, a glass of cloudy liquid in his hand. The green glass shade of the lamp by his side casts a glaucous glaze over his face and the drink.

  I remove a thick envelope from my book bag. “I don’t know,” I say. “I haven’t had a chance to read them. Here”—I hand him the envelope—“would you do me one favor?”

  “Anything for you, Rose.”

  “Would you show them to Bruno and tell him I wanted him to read them first?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to wait until morning and tell him that yourself?”

  I shake my head. “I think it’s better this way. He’ll never forgive me for being willing to sacrifice his son…even if…”

  “Even if Orlando isn’t his son,” Cyril finishes for me.

  “That’s what you meant the other night about sacrificing a young life for the sake of La Civetta, isn’t it? I thought you meant Robin, but you were thinking of what it would do to Orlando when he found out that Bruno wasn’t his father…. How did you find out? Did you perform a covert DNA test on them while they were sleeping?”

  I’m only half kidding, but Cyril chuckles. “Well, not quite, but they both had blood drawn last month for a new insurance policy, and I was able to bribe the doctor. I’d always had my suspicions.”

  “Does Bruno know?”

  “I thought it only fair to tell him, but it turned out he had always known that Orlando couldn’t be his son.”

  “But how?”

  Cyril raises an eyebrow and waits for me to put it together.

  “You mean, he had no reason to think Orlando was his?”

  Cyril nods.

  “But then why…?” I sink down onto the love seat and Cyril pours me a glass of the absinthe, which I wave away. The last thing I need is to make the situation any more cloudy.

  “That’s what I asked him. He told me that the man who’d gotten Claudia pregnant was married to someone else and he wasn’t interested in having anything to do with the child. Claudia was still his wife and so he felt he couldn’t abandon her—or the child. He begged me not to tell Orlando the truth. He said he’d always regarded him as his son.”

  “And did you ask him why he let me think Orlando was his child?”

  “I didn’t have to. Isn’t it obvious? He thought it would be easier for you if you hated him. That you’d get over him more quickly. A noble idea, I suppose, but he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

  I nod my head, unable to speak.

  “As wrong as it is for you to leave now, Rose.”

  I look up at Cyril’s face and see that it’s suddenly illuminated, as if the truth of what he’s saying was lighting up his face, but then I realize it’s just the headlights of the cab I’ve called coming up the viale. I stand up and bend down and kiss Cyril’s cheek, which is surprisingly soft and, even more surprisingly, damp.

  “Ah,” Cyril murmurs, “ ‘I crave the grace thy kisses can bestow / Upon my fallen self’s scarred flesh and bone.’”

  “That’s the poem I found the first night…. You left it for me…but how?”

  “Robin sent it to me last year with that ominous little note—as if I didn’t know what stains this house bears! He wanted me to know he’d found the poems so that I’d back the movie, but the little imp wouldn’t tell me where he’d found them. I spent the winter looking for them and then I thought I’d let you have a go. And see? I was right; you found them. You’re meant to stay here, Rose; you’re meant to be with Bruno. I’m sure of it.”

  “You’ve inherited your father’s romanticism, Cyril.” I straighten up and the headlights from the cab strafe the room and catch a glitter on his cheek; then as they swerve—the cab coming around the circular drive—and leave his face in shadow, the tear vanishes. “But you’re wrong about me and Bruno. Don’t you see? He was willing to give me up for Orlando before Orlando was even born. Why would he place me first now?”

  I turn away then and hurry into the rotunda. As I bend down to retrieve my bag I hear Cyril answer my question, “Maybe because he’s acquired a modicum of sense in the last twenty years.” But I walk out through the ingresso without letting him know I heard him.


  “Andiamo?” the cab driver asks when I get into the back of the taxi.

  “Sì,” I say. “Andiamo.”

  As soon as I settle into my seat on the train I fall asleep. I only awaken when the Swiss customs officials board the train to check passports. For a moment I think that the Florentine police have changed their minds and decided that I’m not allowed to leave the country after all, but after a cursory look at my passport they let me go.

  The sun is coming up as the train starts up again. I notice a sudden ordering of white stones along the roadsides and the absence of laundry hanging from clotheslines as we pass over the Swiss border and feel a pang for the mess and drama of Italy. I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep again, so I take out my laptop and begin to read Ginevra’s sonnets. By the time I’ve reached Paris I’ve read all the poems—sixty-six of them—at least twice. Some I’ve read three or four times, a few so many times that their words have begun to swirl in my head and the rhythm of the train has acquired the meter of a sonnet. In Paris I switch trains in a fog and fall asleep again as soon as I’m settled in my seat, lulled by the beat of Ginevra’s poems as I cross the English Channel.

  In London I have to switch stations—from Waterloo to Euston—to catch a train to Lancaster. Crossing the Thames in a taxi I glimpse the enormous Ferris wheel, the London Eye, that strange new addition to the London cityscape. I haven’t been in London in a decade—not since I attended a conference on Elizabethan poetics—and it occurs to me now that I might have planned this trip a little better to take advantage of passing through. But then I’m not in the mood for sightseeing, nor do I have the money to pay for a London hotel room now that I don’t have that consulting check from Lemon House Films to look forward to. I’m not even sure that I’ll want to continue teaching at Hudson in the fall. As the taxi makes its way through the London streets, I ponder my economic straits and find myself curiously unrattled by them. I’ve lived modestly over the years and, thanks to Aunt Roz’s rent-controlled apartment, managed to put away a fair amount of savings. The cabin in Woodstock is paid off. I could sell it if I needed to—or I could sublet the MacDougal Street apartment and live in Woodstock until I got another job. I could take time to finish my book on the sonnet—or I could take the year to write a book about Ginevra de Laura. The story that is emerging in her poems has seized me in a way that I would have thought impossible when I left La Civetta this morning. Perhaps it’s because her own ruined love affair is even sadder than mine. It may be meager comfort, but by the time I’ve reached Euston Station I no longer feel like the only person in the world whose heart has been broken. Still, I don’t want to spend an hour sitting in the station watching young lovers saying tearful good-byes or springing into each other’s arms in gleeful reunion. I decide to roll my suitcase over to the British Library instead.

  The new library was built since my last trip to England, but I know that the things I’m looking for, which were at the British Museum the last time I was in London, are in the John Ritblat Gallery now. I look at the Blackfriars mortgage deed with Shakespeare’s signature, at the Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, which many scholars think is written in Shakespeare’s handwriting, and at the portrait of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout on the title page of the First Folio. I find myself looking at the portrait as if sizing him up as Ginevra’s English lover, but then shake myself. There’s been nothing in the poems that proves Ginevra’s English lover was William Shakespeare. I check my watch and see that I should start walking back to the station, but before I go my attention is drawn to the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It’s opened to sonnet number 116.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken:

  It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

  Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error, and upon me proved,

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  Turning away from the display case and making my way through the crowded lobby of the library, I find, to my embarrassment, that I’m crying. I cry all the way back to Euston Station, through the rain that has begun to fall—a sudden, violent shower that recalls the tempests that aren’t supposed to shake true lovers. It’s ridiculous, I tell myself when I’ve boarded the train to Lancaster. No lover ever lived up to the ideal that Shakespeare proposes. Of course love changes when the object of that love changes. I can’t expect Bruno to still love me after he realized that I’d turned his own son in to the police. Just as he didn’t expect me to keep loving him when I believed that he’d been sleeping with Claudia. If I had clung the longest to love even after I believed myself betrayed, that didn’t mean I’d been the truer lover. It just meant that nothing had come along to replace that first love.

  Ginevra had no better luck. I reread the poems again and at last I see her story clearly. She’d written the limonaia poems—and all the others urging her lover to come to Italy—not only to gain her lover back but also to make herself believe that their love was so strong that it could weather betrayal and the lapse of time. But she had been wrong. There’d been no reconciliation, no last-minute reprieve. In the end she’d gone alone to the Convent of Santa Catalina to live out the rest of her life.

  By the time I arrive in Lancaster I feel like I’ve not only traveled halfway across and off the Continent but also across four centuries. And yet, as I catch sight of Chihiro on the platform—attired in a sort of neo-hiking–cum–Mary Poppins get-up of neoprene climbing tights tucked into green thigh-high Wellies under a Harris tweed capelet—I feel that while I’ve come to the end of the story of my love affair, I haven’t come to the end of the story of Ginevra de Laura and her English lover. I suspect, actually, that I’ve come to where their story began.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  IT RAINS EACH MORNING MY FIRST WEEK IN THE LAKE DISTRICT, WHICH SUITS my mood just fine. I leave my light Italian silks packed in my suitcase and purchase waterproof hiking boots and a waxed Barbour rain jacket. I consider buying a cheaper jacket but then hear, as clearly as if she were standing next to me, Mara telling me that the classic Barbour is really an investment. Each morning I print out a few of Ginevra’s poems and toss them into my book bag along with water, a chunk of cheddar cheese, and a package of McVitie’s Hob Nobs. (Chihiro’s pantry, which in New York held little else but ramen noodles, is here stacked with such British delicacies as PG Tips tea, McVitie’s digestive biscuits, Cadbury chocolate, and Marmite.)

  I spend each morning and afternoon hiking through a light but drenching drizzle, climbing toward mist-enshrouded views. I don’t really care how far I can see when I get to the top of another peak, though; I care only that the walk has some goal—a crest or lake view, a ruined tower, a literary marker where Wordsworth stopped and wrote a poem—because otherwise I wouldn’t know when to stop. When I reach my goal, I eat my spare lunch and read a few poems. Sometimes I read them aloud, a practice that would be considered eccentric any other place on the planet but here in the Lake District, where declaiming metered verse is fairly common behavior. The only thing that distinguishes me from my fellow Barbour-clad tourists is that I’m not reciting Wordsworth or Coleridge; I’m reading the lines of an unknown Italian poetess who lived four hundred years ago.

  In the evenings Chihiro comes back from her research at the library at Dove Cottage and we share a dinner of shepherd’s pie and Guinness drafts at the local pub. It takes five or six nights just to catch her up on the events of my short stay at La Civetta and
then another night to read and dissect a long e-mail from Daisy Wallace.

  “She says that when Saul Weiss heard that Mark is being charged with Robin’s murder he decided to come to Italy to attend Mark’s trial in Florence.”

  “Really? Why not just wait until he’s extradited to America?”

  “Daisy says he ‘wants to keep an eye on President Abrams and remind the Italian court that he’s awaiting more serious charges in the States…” I imagine he needs to feel like he’s doing something. Cyril’s given him a room at the villa for the summer and Daisy says that Frieda Mainbocher has taken him under her wing.”

  Chihiro nearly spills her Guiness. “God help the poor man—he could be smothered!”

  I laugh, but then I shake my head. “You know, actually, I can see them getting along. Apparently they’re going through the villa’s accounting books together—”

  “Asher, are you ‘shipping’ Frieda and Saul?”

  I take a sip of my ale to hide my smile. “Well…they both do have an interest in double-entry bookkeeping…”

  Chihiro squints her eyes as if examining an image of the accountant and the social historian together and then nods her head up and down. “Okay…yeah…maybe…. Now what about Claudia? Has she been brought up on charges yet?”

  “Daisy says that Claudia is being charged with the Italian equivalent of manslaughter for Mara’s death,” I tell Chihiro. “She claims that Mara thought Orlando was trying to seduce Ned and when Claudia laughed at her she became hysterical and attacked her. She said she slipped down the stairs in the struggle.”

  “Hm,” Chihiro says, blowing at the foam on her Guinness, “do we believe that? Mara was high strung…”

  “It could have happened that way,” I admit. “Daisy says that either way Claudia’s bound to end up in jail for years. When Mark’s extradited she’ll face charges as an accessory after the fact for Robin’s murder because she didn’t come forward with what Orlando told her. Gene Silverman and Leo Balthasar will also be charged as accessories.”