A Rather Curious Engagement

by C. A. Belmond

  I said firmly, “Thanks very much, but we have already hired someone else.”

  “Oh, you can always tell ‘whoever’ that you’ve had a change of heart. Think it over,” Lydia said, to Jeremy, not me.

  I shot a warning look at Jeremy, as if to say, There is no way in high heaven that I will let this broad get her mitts on my Great-Aunt’s villa, you can take that to the bank.

  And Jeremy gave me an imploring look, as if to say, Whatever we do, please let’s not have a scene, I know these people are jackasses but they’re old friends and well-connected so if we ever show our faces in London again we may need them someday.

  And my face said, Then that makes this your party, Bub. Get them out of here.

  Mercifully, Bertie’s slightly fogged-out brain cleared a little as he remembered something, looked at his watch and said, “Hang on. We’re going to miss our plane if we don’t skedattle.”

  “How long have you been down here?” Jeremy asked.

  “Took a long weekend,” Bertie said. From the look on his face, and Jeremy’s, I could tell that we all simultaneously realized that Lydia had deliberately dragged him all around the coast looking for Jeremy. Thankfully we’d been at Lake Como.

  Lydia turned to Jeremy now and said, “Darling, Bertie is having a great big party in London next week to celebrate, and you know how much he adores you, and now that we’re all dear friends again, and everyone’s finally happy ever after, you must come! Bertie will call and give you all the details!”

  “Right,” Bertie said, unexpectedly serious with Jeremy. “You’ve got to come. No more excuses. I’ll telephone you straight away, once I have all the particulars.” And they all hugged one another, and then Lydia went tripping off with Bertie into their Rover, which roared away, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.

  I just stared at Jeremy.

  “What? What?” he said defensively. “I didn’t promise them anything. And I never gave her our address down here, nor the harbor where we were, nothing. I don’t know how she tracked us down. Unless, I suppose, she got Bertie to do it. I mean, Rupert knows him, so . . . But, look on the bright side,” he said cheerfully. “At least I’m off the hook! She’s finally found a husband who wants to watch over her. He really does. And Bertie’s always wanted to meet you, so you ought to see him when he’s less—er—celebratory.”

  Jeremy looked unmistakably fond of his school chum when he said, “Bertie was a good friend, he really was. We lost touch socially, because, well, his wife didn’t really care for Lydia.”

  That I could believe. But I said nothing. I supposed that Lydia could have read, online, about the christening of our yacht in that boaters’ gazette.

  “Bertie and I got each other through university, and he’s one person I’ve always known I could really count on, even though we used to compete over girls in our school days,” Jeremy explained.

  “Oh, bingo!” I said wearily. “Well, I have to hand it to Lydia, she knew just which cards to play, and which buttons to push.”

  Jeremy, intelligent man that he is, actually looked genuinely bewildered. “What are you on about?” he asked. “Did it ever occur to you that you can sometimes be wrong? For instance, you thought Lydia was after me! See how mistaken you were?”

  “Piffle,” I said. “Did it ever occur to you,” I went on to explain with infinite patience, “that Lydia is trying to make you jealous by evoking your old rivalry with Bertie over girls?”

  Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “In any case, you owe me a nickel,” I said. At his blank look, I said, “The Sincerity Test I told you about when we left London. Remember our bet? I said that if Lydia was really trying to start anew, she’d stay put in her nice new apartment, soberly assess her life, and get on with it. But if she was after you, then she wouldn’t be able to stand being in London when you weren’t there. She even found an excuse to come chasing after you in the Riviera and check out your boat. And she snooped around our villa! Damn it, Jeremy! She might have been trying to assess your inheritance to figure out what you’re worth.”

  “She’s had that one all figured out, ages ago,” Jeremy protested, “and Bertie is a fine catch, believe me. He stands to inherit a great deal, and he’s already made millions.”

  “Nevertheless,” I continued, undaunted, “I do NOT want that woman dogging our path down here for months on end with her brilliant ideas to make the villa look like some horrible magazine spread. And, I might add, the last thing we need right now is publicity. Showing the whole world—all those crazy people who want to sell us things or want us to pay for their kids’ college tuition— exactly where we live and what we’ve got. Including whoever it was who vandalized the boat—I mean, suppose there were really drugs hidden in that Lion and smuggled onto the yacht? Happens all the time. If they couldn’t find it, they might think we’ve got it stashed at the villa. And Lydia will give them a road map straight to us.”

  “Hold it right there,” Jeremy said, sounding annoyed now. “Before you go off the deep end with drug smugglers and axe-murderers.”

  “All I’m saying is, we need our privacy, and we can decorate our own home, ourselves, thank-you-very-much,” I said hotly.

  “Really, Penny, I thought you were bigger than all this silly female competitive stuff,” Jeremy said, annoyed.

  Now, no woman in love wants to hear even the tiniest bit of disillusionment in her man’s voice, particularly when he’s just had his ex-wife hanging about with her arms around his neck. But I was feeling a tad let down, too.

  “Well, I thought I’d found the one man on earth who was above being duped by manipulative women like Lydia,” I retorted. "And P.S., I am not competing with her. She is competing with me! There’s a world of difference . . .”

  “Penny,” Jeremy said slowly, “I don’t care a hoot about having Lydia decorate the villa. I frankly think she’ll forget all about it when she gets back to London, because she’s got a rather short attention span.”

  “Hah!” I said darkly. “She won’t forget.”

  “If she persists,” Jeremy said, “you can tell her again that you don’t want it. I leave it to you. Only, please, do it with dignity. Above all, I don’t want to quarrel with her—or you—anymore. It’s not about an ex-wife. It’s about Bertie. One has to be careful with friends, especially when you don’t like their choice of spouse. Once the women get catty with each other, things can get very ugly very fast. Everybody starts trading insults, and the resentments can fester for years and years. And I don’t want to be put in the position where I can never talk to Bertie again. I like Bertie. I’ve missed him. And life is too damned short to forget about your friends. I know he’s an ass sometimes, but so is everybody. Including me.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said in a small, distressed voice, then amended it with, “except when you let your ex-wife touch you as if you still belong to her.”

  I frankly felt, at this point, that Jeremy should have woken up and realized that all I needed was a little reassurance on his part. But he was too upset to notice. He was saying, “You have my permission to tell Lydia to bug off about the decorating, but just don’t do it with ill will. Can we even do it with some grace? Is that possible? ”

  I thought I detected a teeny tiny bit of the old class prejudice, as if somehow I’d been raised without his snotty attitude which passed for good breeding.

  “Oh, gosh, gee, let me see, I guess I can figure out a way to be gracious,” I said, “even though of course it goes against all my principles. Just who do you think raised me, anyway?”

  “Good God,” Jeremy said, amused now, “how did this turn into a quarrel about upbringing?” He sighed heavily. “Penny, we don’t have to go to Bertie’s party. This is our summer break, and we’ve got plenty of excuses to beg off. There will be other parties, anyway. But do let’s be careful with people, all right?”

  I suddenly got a terrible, awful, rotten vision of what my future could h
old. I thought of having to chum around with Bertie and Lydia for the rest of our lives. The curse of a working imagination is that suddenly you can conjure up the most vivid pictures even before you’ve given your mind permission to do so. I saw Lydia in ski-bunny costume, forcing us to go on winter vacations with her. I saw her in a teeny bikini, jumping into my pool at the villa. I saw shooting parties in country houses where I’d get stuck with the females while the men went out and hunted poor little foxes and pheasants. And everything, no matter what we’d do, would become a competitive sport: who’s got the bigger car, the better apartment, the trendiest kitchen, the nicer clothes, the prettier figure, the smartest babies, the most sought-after nanny, the richest husband, the sexiest wife.

  But I realized that there was a lot I didn’t know about Jeremy’s circle of friends, and, therefore, a few things I didn’t know about him. I loved him enough to want to find out what they were, and to consider that, if he cared about Bertie and his crowd, then there were probably good things I’d overlooked or hadn’t yet discovered about them. I certainly didn’t want to add to his stress, nor make him feel he had to choose.

  We drove back to the villa quietly, very quietly, more quietly than ever before. Then Jeremy reached out and squeezed my hand.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Once Penelope’s Dream is up and running, and we’re no longer a captive audience sitting there in the harbor, then nobody will be able to find us and we’ll always have a ready-made excuse—as Mum said, we’ll be a moving target. Meanwhile, you and I have gotten ourselves a little assignment. What do you say we get cracking on it?”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The best thing about the next couple of days was that I discovered how much more delightful it was to have a partner in my eccentric career. Until now I’d always done my research alone, working for days, even weeks without talking to a solitary soul, except for the occasional curator or librarian. I don’t know if I started out in life with the personality of a hermit, or if I developed it of necessity, because of my job. Sometimes you think you’re a certain type of personality just because your life circumstances didn’t offer you much choice.

  But now, I had Jeremy to commiserate with. We camped out in the living room of the villa, because it was the one room that the workmen were done with. We dragged the furniture off the patio and set ourselves up there. At least we were now wired for highspeed Internet, so we set up our computers and sat, head-to-head, digging up whatever we could that was pertinent to the case. We were so engrossed that we scarcely noticed when it began to rain, until it started coming down in sheets, and the workmen told us they’d have to knock off till it stopped.

  Well, to slightly alter a well-used expression, when it rains on the Riviera, it pours. Cats and dogs. And those charming, breathtaking corniche roads that make hairpin turns around the stunning cliffs, suddenly turn into a scary roller coaster. You don’t want to go for a drive anymore. You just want to stock the house with food and coffee and wine, and snuggle under a blanket until the sun comes out again.

  And that’s exactly what we did, for several days, sitting there clicking away on our computers. Every now and then one of us would shout out some new information, and print it and put it in a file marked “Lion” or the one marked “Boat.” And, Jeremy kept making jokes. Bad ones, at times. And I kept laughing at them, even though I knew I shouldn’t encourage him. But he was working seriously, too, and at lunchtime we’d take a break and compare notes.

  “What have you got?” he’d say briskly, looking up.

  I said, “Remember the Count said that some beggar woman had put on a curse on him—as if she’d even caused that storm that made him ill?”

  “Of course,” Jeremy said.

  “Well,” I said excitedly, “he may not have been totally bonkers. In Corsica they have these local shamans called mazzeri. That’s the plural. It’s ‘mazzer-u’ for a guy and ‘mazzer-a’ for a woman. Anyway, they conduct their magic at night, in their dreams. During the daytime, they are fairly ordinary citizens, but are known for their strange, hypnotic stare.”

  “Like vampires or zombies?” Jeremy asked, fascinated.

  “No, not at all. Being one of the mazzeri is considered a higher calling. Mazzeri could be anybody—the butcher, the baker, the farmer’s wife, the mayor. Ordinary by day; but in the parallel world of dreams, they are ‘spirit-hunters.’ ”

  “And how exactly does that work?” Jeremy inquired.

  “Well, since the mazzeri operate in the dream world, they know that, at night, the souls of living people take the form of animals, and roam the woods,” I replied. “So the mazzeri must attack the first animal they come upon, even if it’s the soul of someone they know or love. They hunt with sticks and stones. If they wound that soul in their dreams, then, in real life, that person will fall ill. If they kill the animal, then the person will die—but not immediately—so, back in the real, daytime world, the mazzeri are able to foretell death or tragedy, see how it works? It’s because they know what happens to people’s souls at night when we’re all asleep, and they know which animal represents the soul of which neighbor.”

  “Pretty spooky,” Jeremy commented. “I imagine nobody wants to get on the bad side of one of these shamans, day or night.”

  “Yeah, and it’s supposed to be a very stressful job,” I explained. “The mazzeri often try to warn people and save them from their fate. This stuff dates back to Paleolithic times. You know, all those beautiful cave paintings of human figures with animal heads, like bison and boar?” I took a deep breath. “And that’s not all. The spirits of the dead come back periodically to visit, or have battles with each other. You don’t want to get caught in the middle of one of those ghost battles, they say.”

  “So,” Jeremy said thoughtfully, “you think some local woman was trying to warn the Count that disaster awaited him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And it spooked him.”

  “But,” Jeremy said slowly, “why should it spook him?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Jeremy said, “The Count is a man of science and art. Why should he care what a superstitious local woman said, unless he’d done something to feel guilty about?”

  “Like?”

  "Like dealing in stolen artifacts,” Jeremy said. “Like grave robbers. ”

  “Wait a minute,” I said suspiciously. “What have you got?”

  Jeremy said loftily, “It just so happens that I think I may have turned up the photograph that got the Count, and all those other crazy collectors, thinking that the Lion still existed somewhere. Look.”

  He turned his computer screen so I could see it. The photo was very blurry, and it looked as if it had been part of a newspaper feature. “It’s from Corsica.”

  “What is it?” I asked, squinting. “It looks like some sort of festival. ”

  “You might say,” Jeremy said. “It’s a ritual for the second day of November.”

  “All Souls’ Day,” I said, enthralled.

  "Right-O. Every year, the Corsicans light torches and have processions, and they visit the family tombs and light candles and put out food and milk, to try to appease their dead relatives, who come back to inspect their graves and make sure you’re doing good upkeep,” Jeremy said. “Anyway, the next morning, the family checks the fireplace hearth to see if they spot any footprints of the dead.”

  I shivered. The rain was still pelting against the windows and making sighing sounds as it whooshed around the villa. “But why did the photographer—?”

  “Oh, he was just a travel photojournalist who was taking pictures of the procession because he liked the local costumes and color,” Jeremy said. “He had no real idea what he was dealing with. But look in the far left corner of the picture. See that metallic thing glowing in the candlelight?”

  I peered closer. “Hey,” I said. “That could be a lion.”

  Jeremy said, “Apparently, when this article was published, it set off a little
firestorm among collectors. A museum director spotted the photo, and hurried down to Corsica to check it out—but by the time he got there, it was gone.”

  “Gone!” I said. “As in stolen?”

  “As in pilfered, pounced-on, pocketed,” Jeremy said emphatically. “Nobody knows who, in that stampede of collectors, took it.”

  “Wow,” I said, impressed. “Do you think it was the Count?”

  “Or that dealer. Jones.”

  “But if this thing was in Corsica,” I said, “what’s it got to do with Beethoven?”

  “Ah,” Jeremy said. “Beethoven. I’ve been checking him out, as well.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “What have you got?”

  “Nothing about the Lion whatsoever,” he said. He flipped over a page of his notepad and read off the things he’d jotted down. “Beethoven was a short fellow—under five foot four. He had a pretty wretched childhood—a terribly abusive teacher who beat him, and an alcoholic father who used to throw him in the cellar without food for punishment, and then wake him in the dead of night and make him practice the piano till dawn.”

  “He was born in Germany but he lived most of his life in Vienna, didn’t he?” I asked, looking at my own notes.

  “Yes, he had to live there—it was part of the deal he made with his Viennese patrons. Some of them paid up, but some didn’t,” Jeremy said. “So he had money problems.”

  “Did he ever marry?” I asked, enthralled.