A Rather Curious Engagement

by C. A. Belmond

  For starters, François had made a lovely curried mussel soup as an amuse bouche, which was served with a dry rosé champagne, and we all clinked glasses to toast Penelope’s Dream. This was followed by a first course of real Dover sole, baked atop a fresh bay leaf, accompanied by a chilled white wine called Vermentino, which comes from the Mediterranean and its islands. Then François, wanting us to taste some of Corsica’s specialties, sent us a plate of grilled lamb medallions, served with a sauce of tomato and peppers, accompanied by one of Jeremy’s hand-picked burgundies, and a fresh garden salad. I smiled to myself, thinking that when Jeremy imagined sharing his wine cellar with guests, he probably hadn’t envisioned Rollo as his first formal dining companion.

  When François arrived with dessert, we complimented him on his selections of fresh food for our trip, and he was pleased, but he told us mournfully, “I am afraid that the world’s oceans and lakes no longer have the vast variety of fish that they used to. Twenty years ago, when a fisherman cast his net he might find twenty-seven different species; now he only sees about six. The warming of the planet, industrial farming and overcrowded aquafarms that dump horrible things into the water . . .” He frowned ferociously. “It is a sin!”

  I thought of the beautiful sea that we were gliding across, and now I imagined the poor fish trying to survive in unnatural conditions in modern times. And then I remembered one of the charity organizations that had contacted me, back in London, who were working to preserve marine life. I brightened, thinking that perhaps I’d found a good cause I could really get behind.

  “Ah, Paradise,” Rollo said, as François served the dessert of fig tarte made with lemon, almonds, and chestnuts, and drizzled with prized Corsican honey, which, they say, tastes different in each season because the bees are feasting on whatever miraculous herb is growing at that time. This arrived with a small glass of Italian Sambuca that had a coffee bean floating in it, that lent its coffee aroma to the liqueur while you drank it; and, later, you ate the whole bean, which had soaked up a taste of the liqueur.

  Feeling expansive, Rollo launched into a step-by-step plan of what he thought we should do to try to track down the dealer. I was surprised that Rollo had thought this all through so thoroughly. Jeremy started out skeptical, but after awhile he found himself thinking it was worth a try.

  The idea was that, when we were close enough to shore, Rollo would have Brice take him out in the little emergency boat and drop him off at a secluded cove not far from town. This way, he would not be seen arriving with us when we docked at the harbor. Rollo would continue, on foot, to the sailors’ bar in town, and he’d ask around for Mortimer, to see if he could convince him to sell the Lion.

  And once he was able to make a recording of Mortimer admiting that he had the Lion, “Well, the rest is up to you,” Rollo said. “You can buy the Lion, you can tell your French cops to have him arrested—but if you go that route I’m afraid I’ll have to make myself scarce,” Rollo said. “I don’t like to be associated with the police. Personally, if it were up to me I’d make a trade with Mortimer—give me the Lion and I’ll give you the recording.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. Rollo glanced at his big wristwatch. “We’ve got time for an afternoon nap,” he said, perfectly serious. “See you on deck in a few.”

  And he shambled off to one of the guest cabins. Brice had been instructed by Jeremy to keep a sharp eye on Rollo, during this whole trip.

  “Are we going with Rollo’s plan?” I asked Jeremy.

  “I say we let him make his recording and then meet us back at the boat and figure it out from there,” Jeremy replied.

  While we were pondering this, Claude came to me with a message he’d just received. He’d written it down. It was from Diamanta.

  Yes, I will see you if you come. When you arrive in Calvi please telephone me at this number and I will send a relative to meet you and show you the way.

  “That’s it!” I cried triumphantly. “That’s what I was waiting for!”

  We were sitting on the steamer chairs on the aft deck under an awning that Brice had cranked open for us. On top of the mattresses he had laid out extra-long beach towels (so you didn’t have to choose between having it only under either your head or your feet). We didn’t plan to sleep, but eventually, with the splash-splash of the sea and the lovely salty air all around us, we both nodded off, anyway. Perfectly civilized, I thought drowsily.

  And it worked, too, because, when, hours later, we could spot land ahead, I felt refreshed and ready. We all assembled on the fore deck to catch our first glimpse of the mysterious, majestic island.

  Corsica is a whole world unto itself, looking like a great big rock sticking up out of the sea. Even today, Corsicans have a language of their own, called Corsu, which came from the Latin and is said to be similar to old Tuscan, akin to the language of the poet Dante. Although “owned” by the French, Corsica is really more Italian at heart.

  Napoleon Bonaparte was born here, only a couple of months after the Italian city of Genoa sold the island to France. At age nine, Napoleon was sent to military school in France, and by the time he was a teenager, his father had died, so he was supporting his entire family. But, when civil war broke out in Corsica, Napoleon sided with France against the Corsica rebels—and became a condemned man. So, he had to sneak his whole family out of Corsica in the dead of night, back to France . . . and the rest, as they say, is history.

  As Penelope’s Dream floated closer to shore, I thought about Napoleon sneaking out, yet, thanks to Rollo, Jeremy and I were sneaking in. After being out at sea for so long, we were now eager to finally set foot upon our destination. The coastline of Corsica has miles of beautiful but fairly deserted beaches, and it’s dotted with narrow gorges and other craggy watery nooks and crannies sheltered by towering walls of high-rising rock. We spotted a jagged-looking cove not far from the beach that led to town. It was here that Brice took Rollo out in the little emergency boat.

  I couldn’t help being a bit amused, watching Brice and Rollo put-putting toward the cove; and then seeing Rollo, with shoes and socks in hand, and pants rolled up, climbing out and wading to shore.

  “That’s the most energy I’ve ever seen him exert,” Jeremy noted.

  “I asked him why he was helping us,” I replied, “and he said, ‘Family honor, dear girl.’ Apparently he has a reputation to protect, you know, his honor among thieves!”

  “Plus,” Jeremy reminded me, “we promised him a finder’s fee. If we pull this off.”

  I peered over the bow of the boat, looking into the clear turquoise waters. “Look,” I said, “the water’s so transparent, you can see all those smooth rocks underneath.”

  “Good,” Jeremy said darkly. “At least they’ll be able to find our bodies.”

  When Brice returned with the little boat, it was full speed ahead to Calvi.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Calvi is a bustling port town. High above it sits the famed citadel, a fortress that protected the city from pirates and invaders. People who live in the southern Mediterranean sometimes have the reputation for being stubborn or intractable, and this is mostly based on the pure willpower they demonstrate when they build forts, castles and whole cities on the edges of sheer cliffs and perilous rocks. You would think that the villagers are mountain goats themselves, to scale such heights and build dwellings on impossibly narrow ledges.

  The two Italian cities of Genoa and Pisa fought like dogs over Calvi, and the Genoese won. Later, the British navy came meddling, by trying to help the Corsican rebels drive out the French; and it is here that England’s Admiral Nelson was wounded in the eye and had to wear that famous eyepatch ever after. The citadel above Calvi still has one of Nelson’s cannonballs lodged in it. The narrow streets of the main town lead to the port itself, and a coastline rimmed by a curving sandy beach. It’s popular both with high-end celebrity vacationers—and with the French Foreign Legion, which is a pretty tough bunch.

  G
azing at the picturesque shoreline, I reminded myself that the Count had arrived here a dapper, vibrant man . . . but after this adventure, ended up frail, wheelchair-bound and forgetful. This now struck me as fairly ominous.

  We docked at the marina, where the crew would refuel and reload. There was a promenade along the quay, with fashionable cafés and restaurants overlooking the harbor, and gift, souvenir and trinket shops. I used the ship’s telephone to contact Diamanta. She was waiting for our call. I couldn’t make out what she said when she first answered the phone. But when I told her my name, she said in clear, French-accented English, “Yes, I will send my brother to meet you. He will come to your boat.”

  Jeremy and I went below to freshen up. When we came back up on deck, Claude told us that a young man was waiting for us, in a car parked by the quay.

  “Be careful,” Claude cautioned, looking truly concerned. “If you need anything, please call.”

  The dark-haired, dark-eyed young man waiting for us was about eighteen years old, and the car he was driving was an old convertible that had probably once been expensive. He didn’t speak English; in fact, he didn’t speak a single word to us the entire time. We got in the backseat, and he drove through the town and up into the hills. The clustered village houses, some made of washed white granite from the majestic cliffs that towered over the sea, soon gave way to open fields, where the houses were spaced much farther apart, alternating with pockets of thick dense shrubs, and groves of trees that lined the narrow road.

  We passed an old stone church, and then the road became dusty, unpaved, and bumpy with rocks. The air was fragrant with mysterious herbs, making the atmosphere hypnotic and somnolent in the blistering heat of the summer sun, which caused the trees to droop a little. I felt my eyelids fluttering closed. I had heard that many Mediterranean islands—Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica—have very modern cities and towns ringing the rims of the islands; but the moment that you penetrate deeper into the hills, you seem to go back in time, retreating into a quiet, medieval world.

  The sound of a church bell, and the heavy flutter of crow’s wings, made me open my eyes, suddenly alert. I started to feel uneasy. I mean, how did we know who this guy really was and where he was really taking us? He didn’t glance at us or smile once.

  “It better not be much farther,” Jeremy muttered, just as we turned into a pebbled driveway leading to a fairly large farmhouse with an orchard, a planted field, and, to one side, a yard with a goat and a pig kept fenced beyond the house. The animals seemed to pause and look up at us inquiringly as we parked and walked past them.

  The young man led us up the front steps and gestured toward the door. He walked away and turned a corner and disappeared from sight. Jeremy and I just looked at each other. Then we went inside.

  It was cool and dark in the foyer. The adjacent parlor was empty of people; just some pieces of heavy old furniture, a chest of drawers with a small statue of the Virgin Mary atop it, and a little vase of fresh wildflowers set up as an offering to her. There were two armchairs, a sofa, and two small tables with lamps.

  I heard the sharp tap of a woman’s footsteps coming toward us from the dark hallway. A moment later, a tall, slender young woman with long dark hair appeared. She had a pretty face, with a high forehead and sharply chiseled nose and chin, but soft round cheeks that made her dark eyes seem to tilt upward at the ends. She wore a yellow-and-white flowered dress, with a pale yellow cardigan over her shoulders, buttoned only at the top button.

  “Please, have a seat,” she said, gesturing toward the sofa while she sat down on the upholstered chair opposite us. Her voice and speech had a modern tone, but she moved with an old-fashioned dignity, and had very slow and deliberate gestures, very formal manners. She told us that she no longer lived with her family, but spent only the summers here.

  I made introductions and she said matter-of-factly, “Oh yes, I’d heard of you before you contacted me.”

  This surprised me and stopped me in my tracks. “From the press, or from Clive?” I asked.

  “From my grandmother,” Diamanta said. “She said you would come.”

  I glanced at Jeremy, whose face had that now-see-where-your-curiosity-has-landed-us-this-time look. “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  Diamanta smiled. “Grandmother said we would be visited by a red-headed foreign woman,” she said, watching me closely. She was, after all, an educated girl who knew perfectly well that grand-motherly premonitions were not the predominant twenty-first-century mode of communication.

  Great, I thought. In these environs, redheads were usually considered the troublemaking descendants of barbaric invaders, so they were pretty much viewed with suspicion.

  As if reading my mind, Diamanta said, “Grandmother said that the spirits of this house condone your presence, and she believes that you were sent to end the injustices against our family.”

  Now I did gulp. That was a tall order from the spirit world. I doubted I was up to the task. Surely they must be looking for some other redhead.

  Jeremy, ever one to get down to brass tacks, said in his calm way, “Diamanta. We are looking for a Lion aquamanile that we heard was taken from this place. Is this true, and how did you come to possess it?”

  Diamanta said very simply, “It belonged to our family for many, many years, because the head of this house made it with his own hands for the woman he loved.”

  “Ohhhh!” I breathed. I turned to Jeremy. “The boy who made the aquamanile and fell in love with the German girl!” I turned to the girl. “Oh, what was his name?” I said. “Nobody I talked to seems to know.”

  Diamanta stood up. “Come,” she said. “Grandmother wishes to see you.”

  She led us out of the formal parlor, past a few closed doors and into a kitchen at the back where four women were sitting: a very old lady, shelling peas into a basin in her lap; a middle-aged woman, stirring something in a big cast-iron pot on the stove, and two girls in gingham dresses, one slightly older who was braiding the hair of the younger one. The adult women wore black. From the way they looked at Diamanta, I could see that she was the pride of her family, the city girl who had made good, but came back to visit and help her relatives.

  Diamanta gestured for me to approach the old lady. As I drew closer, I saw that the woman had strange bluish-white eyes that seemed to look permanently upward; and I realized that she was blind, and was performing her task by “feel” rather than by sight. This was the grandmother who had predicted my arrival.

  “Here she is,” Diamanta said softly to the old woman, who turned her head and then put aside the bowl she’d had in her lap. Diamanta gestured to the little girls, and they abandoned the kitchen chairs they were seated on so that Jeremy and I could sit by the grandmother. The old woman waited, her head cocked, alert, as if listening to the breeze that wafted in through the open windows of the kitchen.

  “Talk to her,” Diamanta murmured to me. “Just tell her your name, and why you came.”

  “Will she understand English, or . . . French?” I asked, hesitantly.

  “It doesn’t matter what you say. Just talk to her.”

  So in English, I said my name, and said that I had come to learn about the Lion, and the young people who, many years ago, had fallen in love but were parted.

  “Please, tell us your family’s story about the Lion, and what happened to your ancestor who made it,” I concluded. Diamanta translated this question for her. The grandmother had been listening closely to the sound of my voice, and now she leaned forward, picked up my hand and placed it in her own. It was like being grasped by a gnarled old tree.

  What happened next is somewhat open to interpretation. Jeremy told me later that, technically, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. But I felt something, like a distinct wave of energy, passing through me, as the grandmother uttered several words that I did not understand. The effect on the room was palpable, and even Jeremy admitted this later.

  The grandmother continued to speak in a low
rumbling murmur. Diamanta rapidly translated for us. I listened carefully, not only to Diamanta, but to the lyrical rise and fall of the grandmother’s voice with its poetic inflections that spoke to me on another level.

  “Our family goes back many, many years. The person you want to know about was named Paolo. He left Corsica when he was a very young man, to apprentice in Vienna for a German metal-worker. His boss taught him to read and write. They say Paolo was greatly gifted with his hands, and could sculpt animals out of clay that were, how would you say, ‘real enough to bite you.’ Everyone wanted the things that Paolo made.

  “One day, a fine German man asked Paolo to make a Lion for his daughter’s piano teacher, who was a great musical maestro. Paolo fell in love with the rich man’s daughter, whose name was Greta. Her father would not let her marry a poor boy, and the man was so displeased that he would not pay for the beautiful Lion when it was done, and ordered it to be returned. Paolo was fired from his job. But Paolo and Greta plotted secretly to run away together, until her brothers found out, and locked her in her room so she could not get out of the house! Then, one night, Greta’s brothers went out to ‘teach Paolo a lesson.’ But Greta found a way to warn him, through a servant who was returning the Lion to him. The servant told Paolo to flee for his life, and said that Greta promised that she would find him again and they would be reunited before their son was born.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Their son?” This was more than Mr. Donaldson had known.

  As the old woman continued, Diamanta kept translating. “Once back in Corsica, Paolo tried to get word to Greta, but she had returned to Germany and he could not find her. By this time Paolo had become gravely ill with pneumonia, but he kept hoping that Greta would appear at his bedside and present him with his son. But the girl never came, and he died.”