Enchanter's Nightshade

by Ann Bridge

  All this fuss was really rather a severe shock to Suzy. To begin with, she felt that it was out of all proportion to the small and simple fact; but it was the attitude to herself which surprised and pained her most. In the whole course of her pleasant and successful life she had never encountered open disapproval, let alone reprobation—now she did, and she did not like it at all. The Marchese Francesco, on his return from Nadia’s funeral, instantly noticed Miss Prestwich’s absence, enquired as to the cause, and asked a tiresome number of painfully precise questions about the reasons for her dismissal; he liked the pretty sensible botanically-minded little governess, and made it perfectly clear, in the upshot, that he thought the reasons inadequate and the dismissal a mistake. He, like Bonne-Mama, was quite besotted about Marietta, and set what seemed to Suzy an absurd and exaggerated importance on the fact of her devotion to the little English girl. Bonne-Mama herself, though she said very little, had made her disapprobation of the whole thing perfectly clear; that tiresome old woman, Aspasia, by championing the girl’s cause and taking her to Castellone for this prolonged stay was making a fool of her, Suzy, before the entire Province—though really it could hardly be regarded as her fault if the silly little creature had no more sense than to go and get herself seduced. Livia had been to call, upset, indignant, and reproving, terrified lest “quello lord”, Miss Prestwich’s grandfather, should suddenly turn on them and demand that Roffredo should marry the girl. (Lord Portledown, so odd an adjunct to a schoolroom, had from the outset loomed portentously in the eyes of the Province of Gardone; Livia had always felt that a governess who was connected with a title must be, apart from those clothes of hers, “a thoroughly unsuitable person”.) And then had come the news, yesterday, that Giulio was now ill, or as good as ill, owing to his infatuation with Miss Prestwich. It really seemed as if the wretched girl had turned everyone’s head! Giulio, Marietta and Roffredo—Suzy’s eyelids flickered in a little spasm of pain and distaste at that last thought—all so ridiculously attached to her; and even with the others, Francesco, Livia, and actually Bonne-Mama herself, it was as if this little foreigner had upset her, Suzy’s relations, had as it were ousted her from her secure and unchallenged place in their affection and esteem. It was almost incredible.

  She was sitting in her boudoir, on the Saturday morning after that disastrous Wednesday of encounters, thinking of all this, when Valentino the butler brought in a note on a salver. She took it with a little tremor of the pulses, a slight change of breath; she knew the writing—it was from Roffredo. When Valentino had gone she opened it, half eagerly, half in fear for what it might contain. Roffredo had played her rather a bad turn, too, by advertising his attachment to Miss Prestwich, in what circumstances had turned almost into a public seduction. But Suzy was too Italianised to take a serious view of this lapse, and too much in love with him not to be ready for a resumption of relations if he showed the smallest inclination for it; she had suffered from his silence, from not knowing what view he took of her part in all these events, and what she feared, as she opened his note, was a curt expression of vexation and reproach on his part.

  But her fears were unfounded. The letter was not like that. “Cara Suzy,” it began. “How annoying all this is! I am afraid that you must have been having all sort of embêtements, and chiefly through my folly. I admit that I lost my head completely the other night, and behaved like an idiot. I am a good deal ashamed of myself, and I beg you to forgive me. Do you? And to prove it, will you lot me see you? Do—I need to so much; and if I saw you, I could explain everything. It would not I think be very wise for me to come to Vill’ Alta just now, nor for you to come here; but will you meet me on Sunday evening in that little ruin by what they call the holy well, in the little wood? You know the place I mean—it is close to where the smugglers’ path crosses the road. The ruin is not far in—the bushes are rather thick, but perhaps that is all the better! About a quarter to nine. Do not keep your carriage—I will have the dog-cart to drive you home in. And I will have a rug and cushions there, so that you need not spoil your pretty clothes!

  “Ah cara, I want to see you so badly!

  “Ti bacio le mani e—!

  Roffredo.

  “P.S. Do not on any account send an answer—it is far more prudent not to. I shall be there, waiting for you, in any case.

  R.”

  The female heart is a strange thing. Suzy di Vill’ Alta, with eighteen years as a reigning beauty behind her, breaker of scores of hearts, known to the whole Province as The Enchantress, read this precious epistle with tremulous happiness and quivering soft hope. So perhaps he found that he did care for her, after all, more than he knew; that he could not do without her. Anyhow this meeting would give her another chance to make all come right, to secure his love and fasten him to her; and she was too accustomed to success to feel very doubtful. “Oh, caro,” she murmured—and because his words, his very writing were so absurdly precious to her, she put the letter to her lips before she hid it away in her escritoire between neat bundles of receipts. Her thirsty curiosity about Roffredo moved her later to ask Valentino who had brought the note. He could not say—there was some slight mystery about its arrival. It had not come to the front door; it had apparently been left by some peasant children who came to collect the daily milk allowed to their mother by the Marchesa. When the servant had gone Suzy smiled again—Roffredo was not a very neat intriguer! She sent no answer.

  On that same day, at lunch at Odredo, there were uccellini. Old Trino had been active, and the small bodies of singing birds, spitted five in a row on silver skewers, appeared as a second course, resting on a yellow bed of polenta; they looked hardly bigger than bumble bees, and each side of the breast afforded a bare mouthful. Count Carlo ate his skewerful with relish, praising Trino; Fräulein Gelsicher took hers with her usual careful attention to the quality of the cooking; Marietta waved the dish away with tears in her eyes, recalling Miss Prestwich’s horrified dislike of consuming larks and goldfinches; Elena, as she ate, suddenly started out of an absorbed silence with a half-checked exclamation and a quick laugh— she finished the meal with a sort of dancing sparkle of some private satisfaction showing about her eyes and mouth.

  When lunch was over she pounced on Fräulein Gelsicher. “Senta, Gela, that poor little Marietta is still very mopish. I think we ought to do something to amuse her.”

  “We cannot do much, while she is in mourning,” Fräulein Gelsicher replied.

  “Not socially—but get her out more. I have thought of something.” “What is that?”

  “Why, you know this flower that Postiche found in the spinney? Zio Francesco has never painted it yet. But I know the place, and I thought we might get him to come over tomorrow, and do it on the spot, and then have a little picnic there. If he comes, you need not bother to; you can be with Giulio. But it would make a little change for her.”

  Fräulein Gelsicher thought this an excellent idea. She commended Elena for her thoughtfulness, and broached the scheme to Marietta. The child was not at all enthusiastic; in fact, so far as her listlessness and courtesy permitted she opposed it. Yes, she would like to see Papa, but need they go there? But Elena, with lively and cheerful persistence, bore her down; Zio Francesco would so enjoy it, and it was a pretty spot. She got her way—the note was despatched, the Marchese Francesco sent a delighted acceptance, and on Sunday, after colazione, he arrived in the brougham with his paint-box, sketch-book, camp stool and all the rest of his plant. The two girls, with the picnic-basket, joined him, and drove off along the Pisignacco road to the spinney; there they unloaded their effects, and sent the carriage back to Odredo to rest the horses.

  It was another of those hot still September days which are so frequent and so lovely, in early autumn, in the Province of Gardone. The little copse of tall young ash and poplar-trees, with a thick undergrowth of hazels and elders below was drowsy with the hum of insects and the warm winy smell of the ripe elderberries, which glistened, where the sunlight pi
erced the green gloom, like glossy black beads set on invisible plates. Elena, poking and hunting with swift efficiency, soon found a plant of the Enchanter’s Nightshade growing in a spot sufficiently open to permit of the use of the camp-stool; there she installed the Marchese Francesco, and in a short time he was completely absorbed, sitting in perfect contentment, now leaning his white head forward to peer through his thicklensed spectacles at the modest little object, now straightening up again to transfer his observations to the sheet of rough whitish paper. Marietta, who had wisely provided herself with a rug and a cushion, settled down a little way away with Pride and Prejudice.

  “Why on earth,” she said to her cousin, “have you brought a mackintosh today, Elena? It is so hot and fine.”

  “I thought it would do to sit on; it is very old,” Elena replied, airily waving the object, which was in fact antique enough. She did not however sit on it—still waving it, she wandered off round the end of the copse, in the direction of the smugglers’ path, and disappeared.

  The hot half-hours passed. The Marchese painted, Marietta read a little, but spent most of her time lying on her stomach, her chin propped on her hands, gazing at the sunlit insects which moved in a mazy spinning pattern among the bushes, or watching the ants, the long thin-legged spiders and the small beetles which ran about between the grass-stems. She was still very unhappy, and on this particular afternoon she was unusually aware of her unhappiness. To be free to idle away the hours on a rug at the edge of an unfamiliar wood was normally, for her, to be filled with an active delight; but today this sweet impersonal pleasure in the shapes of plants and the innocent activities of insects and the fall of light was taken from her. Her mother’s action was a pain which she hated to contemplate; it had outraged her sense of justice, and forced her, for the first time, to make a moral judgement on the Marchesa—and this judgement inevitably roused strong feelings of resentment and indignation on Miss Prestwich’s behalf. The child’s loyal spirit suffered from this. About Miss Prestwich, too, her feelings were all pain and uncertainty. She missed her terribly, and longed to see her, to express her love and sorrow, and comfort her; but a fine instinct, born of her traditions, told her that for the moment this somehow would not do, for either of them; it would cause more pain than it would give relief. But her mind worked distressfully at the subject of Almina’s disaster. Brought up among Italian outspokenness, and for months of the year in the country, she had a perfectly adequate working knowledge of the physical facts of life—among the peasants about her, desire and promiscuity, and the physical results of desire and promiscuity were everyday matters, and hardly more disturbing than the breeding of animals. This was the first time that those things were brought, so to speak, into the ambit of her moral consciousness; on them, too, she was now forced to make a moral judgement. She realised that most of the people about her, while laying the blame for what had happened primarily on her Mother and Roffredo, nevertheless tacitly assumed that by that night at the villa Miss Prestwich had been, in some very outstanding way, depreciated—that both her virtue and her social value were greatly diminished by it. And because this had happened to someone whom she loved and knew well, Marietta began to question the actual grounds of this depreciation—(as devout Church-people in England, when their daughter finds herself married to a lunatic or a confirmed drunkard, begin to question the grounds of the Church’s attitude towards divorce). She could not feel that those grounds were either very logical or very just—her mind recurred again and again to the idea which she had expressed to Giulio on that day when she first heard the story, that the thing was an accident, and therefore without moral importance as far as Miss Prestwich was concerned. Consequences there might be— and it was the possibility of the baby, she supposed, and the resultant disgrace which made them all think like that.

  Giulio’s attitude in particular distressed her. He was still very unwell—overwrought, sleepless and acutely miserable. This in itself would have troubled her, but she felt very definitely that it was caused, and aggravated, by his morbid physical horror at what had taken place. All that business about being dishonoured and deflowered she simply could not see the sense of. It was the spirit that counted, and if the spirit was upright and unconsenting, the body’s misfortunes seemed almost irrelevant. Anyhow they could not have the crude importance which Giulio attached to them. Up till now Giulio and she had always been in agreement about most things. Why in this case would he persist in tormenting himself to death with this perverse and inconsistent attitude? Of course he was jealous, but he could have been jealous, she told herself, without that. She recognised that his feeling was a sort of extension of the depreciation idea; and as so many grown-ups held that, it was understandable that he should hold it too. But it was worse with him, and was doing him actual harm; until he stopped feeling like that, he would go on being ill. And she could not see how to stop him.

  It was a heavy set of problems for a fifteen-year-old to tackle single-handed. But so far her feelings were so much involved that she shrank away from any discussion of them, even with Gela or Elena. She lay on the rug all that afternoon, thinking round and round the whole thing, chewing a grass now and then, waving her legs when a horse-fly settled on her calf, and coming back, always, to the despairing thought that, under whatever obsession, her Mother, her own Mother, had been both wrong and cruel.

  She was interrupted by the Marchese Francesco. Having finished his painting of the Enchanter’s Nightshade, he came over to her; he was thirsty, he said, and what about their picnic? Marietta, glad of any distraction, sprang up, and asked where Elena was? The Marchese had not seen Elena. Marietta called—called again and again—there was no answer. “Where can she have got to?” the child said, in surprise. “Well, never mind, Papa—let us at least eat and drink”; and she unpacked the picnic basket, and set out the padded wicker teapots of coffee and milk, and all the rest of the simple meal. “Let me see your picture, Papa,” she said when they were seated, and examined the painting of the flower. It was as beautiful and careful as all the Marchese Francesco’s flowerpaintings, arid rather more elaborate than usual; the Enchanter’s Nightshade stood, with a frond of dog-mercury for neighbour, and a low-drooped truss of elder-berries in the background. “Good, pretty—it is exactly like,” she said. The Marchese beamed through his thick lenses, and patted her hand—“I am delighted that it pleases you, piccolina,” he said. He peered at her, then, rather wistfully. “You are all right at Odredo, with your cousins? You are happy?” he asked.

  The child sprang up, and threw her arms round his neck. “Oh Papa caro,” she said, hugging him, her face hidden—“oh Papa caro! Yes, yes, I am quite happy. They are good to me—all of them.”

  He held her to him and kissed the top of her head, which was all that she presented to his face. “That is well. And you—well, you must be a good child,” he said, with a rather pathetic mixture of embarrassment and affection. “That is all you have to do, remember, my little one. Presently,” he cleared his throat, “we shall make some nice arrangement for you. But just for the present—well, you generally are a good child,” he said, and kissed the thick black hair again.

  Greatly to the relief of both, at this point Elena appeared; her arrival shattered the tender difficult moment. She looked hot and rather dishevelled; her hands were stained with earth and there were earthy marks round the bottom of her white dress. “Oh, I am thirsty!” she exclaimed, plumping herself down on the rug. “Zio Francesco, am I late?”

  “Very late,” Marietta replied for him. “What on earth have you been doing?”

  “Excavating!” Elena replied promptly. She had, she explained, been making an examination of the little ruin in the wood.

  “I wonder you did not hear me call, then,” Marietta said. “I shrieked and shrieked.”

  Elena supposed, pouring out coffee and drinking it, that she had been too busy to notice. She spoke again of her thirst, and said how hot it was. She was right—although clouds were n
ow coming up and obscuring the sun, under the overcast sky the air was closer and more oppressive than earlier in the day. “It might thunder,” she said.

  The brougham drove up, and they bundled in their effects and took their places. Just as they were starting—“Your mackintosh! You have forgotten your mackintosh!” Marietta exclaimed, looking round.

  Elena looked vaguely about. “It must be somewhere,” she said, and they drove off. But when the two girls were put out at Odredo there was in fact no sign of it. Elena was quite undisturbed. “I must have left it in the wood,” she said. “It doesn’t matter— I can fetch it another day. It was so old and dirty, the rain will do it good.” And she laughed.

  Suzy di Vill’ Alta too had watched the darkening sky with anxious eyes that afternoon. Rain would wreck the rendezvous, to which she attached a passionate importance—mackintoshes and thick shoes were such desperately unromantic and unbecoming things, and one could not sit on cushions in a ruin in any comfort during a thunderstorm. But there was no sign of rain when she set out about a quarter past eight; it was cloudy still, but very warm, and she was able to go, as she had hoped, in the filmy dress of black Spanish lace, very transparent and graceful, with wide floating sleeves, trailing skirts, and loose flowing draperies everywhere; the frail black made her fairness both fragile and wonderful. She threw a flimsy black chiffon wrap over all this, and went, eager as a girl, down the long flight of stairs to the carriage;—she generally used Agostino, the young groom, for night work, and did so on this occasion. Leaning back in the corner, as they bowled smoothly along the white road, pale now in the failing light, she closed her eyes, rehearsing in her mind, for the ninth or tenth time that day, the precise tone and shade which her manner to Roffredo was to bear when they met—the degree of coolness and detachment, the hint of reproach and—guided, naturally, by his reaction—the transitions by which aloofness was to slide into accessibility, and accessibility into that touch of responsive passion which, so far, had never failed to kindle his. Ah but, she sighed to herself, finding small tremors running all over her, she must keep herself well in hand; it was dangerous, it put one terribly at the other’s mercy to be so much involved, so moved, oneself. She lit a cigarette to steady herself, and sat listening to the sharp rhythmic noise of the horses’ feet, her lovely pallor lit at intervals by the tiny red glow, in the shadows of the carriage.