The Marshal Makes His Report

by Magdalen Nabb

  ‘Guarnaccia. Marshal Guarnaccia.’ He listened. It had been William’s voice but muffled, blurred.

  The door opened a crack. William’s face was flushed and sweaty, his hair untidy.

  ‘You were resting. I’m sorry.’

  William took an unsteady step backwards and opened up sufficiently for the Marshal to enter. As he did so he passed close enough to William’s face to understand that it was flushed not with sleep but with wine, and he remembered the story of the firework. That too had been when he’d had too much to drink. However, it was one thing for someone to say they’d been drunk and another to see it. William was always so spruce, so quick on his feet and sharp with his tongue. This seemed like a different person and the Marshal’s only thought was to retreat.

  ‘I won’t disturb you. I’m sure you need to rest when you have to work in the evening.’

  ‘I’m not resting and I’m not working—ha . . . good one, that, for an actor, not resting not working . . . If you want a drink I might as well tell you there’s none left.’

  ‘No, no. I just called to ask if your sister was back but I see she’s not so I’ll leave you.’

  ‘Thursday . . .’ He mumbled so the Marshal wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

  ‘Thursday?’

  ‘Three days to get over it. She didn’t come last night so it’ll be Thursday. Three days to get over it. If anybody asks for me just say I’m asleep, will you?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’ He sat down heavily on the narrow divan, took off one of his shoes very carefully and then lay down. Almost at once he began to snore. The Marshal withdrew.

  ‘I suppose you want to know what I’m going to be when I grow up.’ The diminutive Fiorenza threw herself into the opposite corner of the long sofa from the Marshal and began stretching out one leg and pointing the foot as though she were still at her ballet lesson.

  ‘And why do you suppose that?’ he asked her, sure that, whether he asked or not, he was going to be told. He was right.

  ‘Because it’s what all grown-ups ask. Anyway, I’m going to be a ballet dancer and a veterinary surgeon.’ The right leg went down and the left shot up to point at the air.

  ‘That’s a lot of work,’ the Marshal said.

  ‘I don’t mind. I shall like it. And I’m going to have a lot of children, eight or nine. How many children have you got?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘That’s not so many. Why do you have your hat on your knees?’

  ‘Because it’s not polite to keep it on in someone’s house.’

  ‘You could hang it up,’ she suggested. Then, after a covert glance at the flame above the peak, she lost interest in his headgear. She glanced over the back of the sofa at an enormous gilded clock with figures supporting it which stood on a long oak table.

  ‘Aunt Fiorenza never comes out of her room until five o’clock exactly. She puts her hair up first and she puts nail varnish on her nails only you can hardly see it because it’s not a proper colour. If I were allowed to put nail varnish on I’d choose bright pink or red. That would be much better, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘But nobody lets me. Aunt Fiorenza won’t even let me go in her bedroom and watch. She says “One doesn’t” and that’s that. She always gives me cake, though.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice.’

  ‘First I do my homework and then when she comes out of her room she rings the bell and we have tea and cake.’

  ‘You’re not doing your homework today.’

  ‘That’s because I’m talking to you. I’ve got Italian and maths to do. You can’t do sums, can you?’

  ‘Not very well.’ His efforts on behalf of the boys had usually got them into trouble.

  ‘I can’t either.’ She stretched out both legs now until she was almost lying down. ‘Next year when I’m in the third course we’ll be doing toe dancing. I want to buy the shoes now but I’m not allowed to because I might hurt myself.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s sensible. You wouldn’t want to hurt yourself.’

  ‘I don’t care. I wish I could have them now. You can break your foot or your knee. A girl called Francesca in the intermediate course broke her knee. It popped out.’

  ‘Did it?’ The Marshal frowned at this painful thought.

  ‘Right out. She was doing a pirouette and she didn’t keep her knee straight. You have to keep it straight, and she went over sideways and her knee popped out and she pushed it back herself but she still had to go to hospital. I can do pirouettes. D’you want me to do one for you while you’re waiting?’

  ‘No! I—no.’ A glance at the slippery marble floor and the thought of knees popping out horrified him. ‘I think we should just sit quietly. It’s almost five.’

  Fiorenza seemed to find this reasonable and went back to contemplating her pointed toes. The Marshal contemplated her. She seemed so tiny and delicate— but then, he wasn’t used to little girls. Her fair hair was plaited and wound around the top of her head and a scrap of turquoise ribbon hung from its centre. Her eyes were hazel and there was a faint dusting of freckles across the nose.

  ‘I don’t look like anybody, do I?’ She suddenly interrupted his thoughts as though he’d spoken them aloud.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It’s what everybody says in this house. Really I look like my mummy, but that doesn’t count because she isn’t anybody, not like they mean. Aunt Fiorenza would like it if I looked like Cousin Neri. Ugh!’

  ‘You don’t like your cousin?’

  ‘No. I don’t know him. I was brought to see him once because he was dying, only then he didn’t die. He was in bed all the time and he had no toys or books or anything. I told Uncle Buongianni. I always get a colouring book and a comic when I have to stay in bed. Now Uncle Buongianni’s dead and I saw Cousin Neri at the funeral and his head was all fat and I didn’t like him.’

  She fell silent for a moment and then, sensitive enough to realize she might have offended him, she gave a sidelong glance at his portly figure and the big hands clutching the hat and said, ‘Some people are quite fat but it’s nice.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Like Father Christmas.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He was grateful for the compliment. Coming from such a source, it relieved his feelings of clumsiness for the first time he could remember. ‘Do you know a little girl called Lucilla?’

  ‘She’s only in the first course—oh, I know why! Her daddy’s a carabiniere so you know him.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t. I’d just heard . . .’

  ‘Fiorenza!’

  The child slithered herself upright and the Marshal got to his feet. Great-Aunt Fiorenza, as formidable an old lady as the Marshal had ever set eyes on, was standing in the doorway leaning heavily on a stick. Her legs and feet were so swollen as to seem boneless and the fine shoes she wore must have been specially made to accommodate this affliction.

  ‘You can have tea in the kitchen with Mathilde.’

  The child, released, scampered towards the door. An icy glance from the old woman pulled her up short and she came back to the Marshal and offered him her hand.

  ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’

  ‘A pleasure to meet you too. Enjoy your cake.’ He let go of the tiny hand and, after a tentative glance at her great-aunt, she remembered to walk not run out of the room.

  ‘Please sit down, Marshal.’

  Great-Aunt Fiorenza herself sat opposite him on a huge straight-backed chair. It looked extremely uncomfortable to the Marshal but he knew it was probably the only sort of chair she would be able to rise from with relative ease.

  ‘You must forgive me for sending for you like this. I imagine that people who want to see you normally call at your office, which I understand is in the Pitti Palace.’

  ‘Yes, but please . . .’

  ‘I should have rather liked to do that. I haven’t been in the Palatine gallery for almost
fifteen years. Unfortunately, Marshal, I’m a sick woman and one who has always held to the dignity of independence. I have no intention of leaving this house in a wheelchair.’

  ‘I understand.’ There was no doubt but what she was a sick woman. Her face had been carefully made up but the yellowish bags under the eyes couldn’t be concealed. Nevertheless, she looked a tough character. She might be sick enough to die tomorrow but she had force in her to carry on for years yet, if she cared to do it. She seemed, now, to be taking his measure with an unblinking stare. In his embarrassment he spoke, clearing his throat first. ‘Your great-niece is very pretty.’

  ‘Hm. She has her mother’s looks.’ The disparaging tone confirmed the child’s statement. ‘She is not my great-niece, strictly speaking. I should explain this to you since it has a bearing on what I want to tell you. Fiorenza is the daughter of Buongianni Corsi’s younger brother who, against his family’s advice, married a young woman of American origin. Fiorenza is their only child.

  ‘You see quite a lot of her.’ He would have liked to say ‘despite your obvious disapproval’ but didn’t dare.

  ‘I have good reason to, Marshal. Should anything happen to my great-nephew, Neri, Fiorenza would inherit not only from the Corsi but from the Ulderighi. You can perhaps imagine that her upbringing would not prepare her for the Ulderighi inheritance.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I do my best, but the influence of a mother of that description and the style of her education such as it’s likely to be, are far from easy to combat, as you may easily imagine.’

  The Marshal, who couldn’t imagine even remotely, was silent.

  ‘I understand you have already met my great-nephew?’

  ‘Yes, I have. A priest, Father Benigni—’

  ‘In that case you’ll have realized that he is infirm. I’ll be more precise: his heart is weak, congenitally weak. He’s unlikely to survive beyond thirty.’

  ‘I see. I’m sorry—but surely, these days—’

  ‘He is hardly in a condition to survive a heart transplant.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘It is my niece Bianca’s wish that he marry and produce an heir.’

  ‘And you’re against that?’

  ‘Obviously not.’ She interrupted herself to lean forward and press a bell beneath a small table that stood between them. ‘I should like, on the contrary, to see him in good enough health for that to be possible. He is weak, very weak. Marshal, I’ll come to the point. I understand that you have been conducting some sort of investigation into the death of Buongianni.’

  ‘Well, yes, but it’s routine in cases like—’

  She raised her stick a little from the floor in front of her swollen legs. The knuckles of her hand tightened around it and the Marshal, staring at the fine, age-spotted skin and the colourless varnished nails, thought for a fleeting second that she was going to hit him. If she had, she couldn’t have shocked him more.

  ‘I intend to help you. I want to know what’s happening in this house.’

  Too stunned to answer, the Marshal was saved by the entrance of a woman with a serving trolley.

  ‘Here, over here! Why isn’t there hot water again?— No, no! I’ll do that, and don’t come back. We’ll do without the water. I don’t want to be disturbed. Wretched woman! The stupidity of these people who can’t learn to do anything properly.’

  The woman wasn’t out of the room and heard it all, to the Marshal’s dismay. If the old marchesa knew it she didn’t care.

  ‘Tea.’

  Again! The Marshal almost sighed his dissatisfaction aloud. And if he had, no doubt this woman would have ignored him.

  ‘I had an excellent couple before, but now that my niece has let the top floor apartments we are obliged to rely on these people coming in daily who aren’t even capable of learning how to make tea properly. Cream or lemon?’

  ‘I . . . lemon. Thank you.’ Well, he would accept it but she could hardly force him to drink it. He placed the cup carefully on the small table.

  ‘Do you believe that Buongianni committed suicide, Marshal?’

  He was taken aback. She went too fast for him. What was he supposed to say? He needed to feel his way around before committing himself. What the devil was she after? What had she to gain?

  ‘You don’t answer me. Why? Because you don’t know or because you know but have no proof?’

  Was it the inheritance? He knew nothing about these things. Or a personal vendetta, some old quarrel . . . Did she care for Buongianni Corsi or hate him?

  ‘You’re from the South, I gather?’

  ‘Sicily, yes.’

  ‘Hm. Then you won’t give me a straight answer to a straight question. If only you knew how tiresome and time-wasting that seems to a Florentine.’

  He knew that all right. He’d seen it written on Loren-zini’s face every day for years. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not sure I understand what you want from me.’

  ‘I thought I’d been perfectly clear. I asked you a simple question.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps it’s the answer that isn’t simple.’ Did she want to know whether he knew about Tiny? His one piece of real evidence. Well, he wouldn’t tell her, not unless she gave her motive away first.

  ‘It seems,’ he went on, his face expressionless as she leaned forward over her stick and watched him intently, ‘that Neri Ulderighi saw his father shoot himself at the top of the tower.’

  ‘They found him down in the gun room.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he was moved. By whom?’

  There. It was that she was after!

  ‘According to your niece, by herself.’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘As you say. I said, according to your niece.’

  ‘If you believe her you’re a fool. Buongianni was a big man. Heavy.’

  ‘Yes.’ The Marshal well remembered the weight of him in the dream. ‘You saw and heard nothing that night, then?’ It was his first attempt at turning the tables on her, asking her a question instead of the other way round. She seemed to have no objection.

  ‘Nothing. I take sleeping tablets. And if I had heard something, do you imagine I could have gone running up to the top of the tower? My condition is plain, I think. I never leave this apartment unless it is to go down in the lift to the reception rooms on the floor below.’

  ‘I understand. It’s fortunate that the dwarf, Grillo, who brought me your letter can act as legs for you.’

  She looked at him a moment in silence, adjusting her opinion of him.

  ‘I see you’re more astute than one would think, Marshal. Yes, Grillo knows what goes on all over the house. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? He comes every day to tell me what sort of state Neri is in. As you can imagine, I can’t go up there to see him myself.’

  ‘But he could come down.’

  ‘He used to do that. Now he sees no one except the dwarf, Father Benigni—and now you.’

  ‘And his mother?’

  ‘He hasn’t spoken to her since that night. They say he won’t allow her in the tower. What the dwarf knows or doesn’t know I can’t say because he won’t tell me; what Neri knows is killing him. On that point the doctors have been clear. What I want to hear now is what you know. I’ve watched you walking around down there in the courtyard, day after day. You suspect something. If Neri sent for you, then he knows you suspect something too. The burden of what he knows is killing him. Take it from him.’

  ‘I would have thought the priest . . .’

  ‘You can only confess your own sins, Marshal.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s what he said to me himself . . . So you think—his mother or—’

  ‘Yes, Marshal. You see I’m hiding nothing from you. Neri must survive at all costs. I brought my niece up from the age of twelve and I know her. By the time she was sixteen years old I was afraid of her. I want to save Neri, and if I said I intended to help you, the truth of the matter is that I want you to help me.’

&nbs
p; ‘If I can, of course.’

  ‘A Sicilian answer. Also, you know something or you wouldn’t be pursuing the matter on your own account. Well, there’s no reason why you should tell me. You’re the one investigating. Well?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can—’

  ‘Do what I can! I’m waiting for your questions. You know nothing about this family, I know everything. Well?’

  In silence the Marshal took out his notebook. In silence she looked at it and at him with evident impatience. Nevertheless, he knew that she had straightened her back and was clutching hard at her stick ready for difficult or embarrassing questions, perhaps concerning Hugh Fido. He surprised her.

  ‘Tell me something, if you would, about this house.’

  ‘The house? You mean its history?’

  ‘No, no . . . Funnily enough, I’ve found out a bit about that in my wanderings about the courtyard.’ Observed by the whole family, as it turned out. Well, he’d felt it from the start and now he knew it was true. So be it. ‘No, the fact that there’s scaffolding outside but no work going on, though now they say the builders are back. Then this business of the tenants. The house being split up and let. All happen a bit suddenly, did it? Nobody seems to have been here more than a year.’

  ‘That’s correct. Just over a year. The reason you can work out for yourself.’

  ‘Shortage of money.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But a very sudden shortage?’