Prospero wasn’t sure whether to dismiss this as sacristy gossip. Besides: his thoughts about his father tended to be laced with irony. This helped dissipate the enfevered murk which was the count’s climate. As a cuttlefish sprays ink, so the old conspirator had always darkened the atmosphere around himself and Prospero’s adolescence seemed to him now to have been a long, frustrated fumble towards the light.
Seeing his stepbrother ankle-deep in the water, he remembered that the ground here shelved and, emerging from behind his tree, introduced himself and said that the thing to do now was to take a rowboat. When they were settled in it, he asked the child’s name.
‘Cesco.’
‘And how do you come to be alone?’ Prospero was poling them towards the middle.
‘Daniele was with me. The soldiers took him.’
Prospero knew Daniele, his father’s gamekeeper.
‘I hid,’ said Cesco. ‘I’m good at hiding. Like you.’
Where was his mother, asked Prospero. At the house, said Cesco.
‘Well, there’s your yacht, free.’
Launched on the syrupy surface, a wake fanned behind it, as neat as a printer’s caret. Prospero swung the boat around, and it was then that they heard pistol shots.
‘Bang!’ cried the child. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’
*
So, in the end, there was no ceremony to Prospero’s meeting with his stepmother. The noise which brought Cesco and himself running to the villa had given their father a seizure and he was stretched on a couch when they edged open the door. Someone had ridden off for the doctor and a woman who must be the new contessa was holding the invalid’s hand. Seeing Prospero, she gravely and just perceptibly tilted her head towards Cesco who was straining to be let run to her. Take him away, said the head-tilt. Prospero, who knew what it was to be confronted by a felled parent, did.
*
‘Is Papa dead? Did the soldiers shoot him?’
‘No, but we mustn’t disturb him.’
‘They didn’t shoot him?’
‘No.’
‘Who did they shoot?’
‘They shot in the air. It’s a thing soldiers sometimes do.’
‘Could they hit God?’
‘No, he hasn’t got a body.’
‘They could shoot birds. Daniele shoots ducks. I help him pull off the feathers.’
‘Well today they were only trying out their guns.’
‘Did the noise make Papa ill like it does Cook?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think I’ll go and see her. She may be ill too.’
‘That’s a good idea. If she’s well, ask her to give you supper.’
‘It’s too early.’
‘Ask for a merenda then. Don’t bother Papa. He needs to rest.’
‘Why do you call him Papa?’
‘He’s my Papa too.’
‘Yours? Your Papa?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
The square, freckled face considered Prospero, who guessed that the thought towards which Cesco was groping was, ‘So I’ve got to share’. He guessed it because he had been thinking it himself.
Cesco put a thumb in his mouth, then said, ‘Is my Mamma yours too?’
‘No. I had a different Mamma.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I’ll tell you another time. Now you’d better see Cook.’
Cesco left.
*
In the courtyard, soldiers were looking hangdog and their white coats were dirty, no doubt from looking up chimneys and through hay lofts. Their officer apologised for what had happened. It had not been one of his men who fired the pistol but a local man who had enticed them here with assurances that the count was hiding Garibaldini. The fellow, said the Austrian, had now been sent packing and would not have been listened to in the first place had there not been previous reports of odd activity in the Stanga grounds. Queer lights and movements had been seen after dark.
‘We had to investigate.’
Prospero said he hoped his father might now be left alone, adding that the count was a friend of the Pope’s. At this, the officer saluted and marched away his men. Friendship with this pope was not, in Austrian eyes, much of a recommendation. As they left, the soldiers made way for a carriage belonging to the doctor, a nimble old man, who jumped out without waiting for the step.
‘Where is he?’
Prospero accompanied him to the drawing room, then waited with his stepmother who admitted that she had perhaps been over-zealous in sending for the doctor – but women were expected to fuss, were they not? ‘Do you hate having a stepmother?’
‘It’s too late for you to do the bad things stepmothers are accused of doing.’
‘Yes. You’re too grown up.’
He reflected that his father had kept her hidden for years on his account and that living in furtive solitude could not have been easy. She talked of his father’s health, guessing now that the seizure had been no more than a little palpitation. Prospero wondered whether his father had reason to be worried by the soldiers’ visit and whether she knew.
She wore a peony-shaped crinoline and her face was frilled with laugh lines. Running his eye down her friendly figure, he saw that she was pregnant. Seeing him see this, she blushed.
‘I’m delighted for you both.’ Looking shyly away, his mind swerved towards Dominique who must be about his stepmother’s age.
Just then the doctor came to report on his patient. Dottor Pasolini had, like the count, been an ardent Carbonaro. ‘He’s all right,’ he told them. ‘He had a fright for sound reasons. Not medical, but something should be done about them.’ Then he asked Prospero to come with him as far as the gate, so the two walked in single file, between the ruts, while the carriage ambled behind.
‘She’s a good thing,’ said the doctor. ‘Jokes about old men’s wedding songs turning to dirges don’t apply. I suppose you knew they’d been together for years?’
‘Well, the boy must be six.’
‘They were together long before the boy. Your mother agreed to it. Oh yes. Your parents’ wasn’t a love match. It was a pooling of resources for political reasons. Don’t look shocked. Your father’s passion was all for our struggle – or so he thought until he met Anna. Your mother had money which he needed for a cause in which they both believed. She, as a woman, couldn’t act on her own account. It was a fair bargain.’
‘Until he betrayed it!’
‘Until history betrayed them both. Conspiracy fell out of fashion. The Centurioni who killed her were chasing shadows. An appalling thing. Your father couldn’t get over it. That’s why he took so long to marry Anna. I thought you might not know.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Well, now you do and had better ensure that Anna too knows what she needs to. She was always kept in the dark about his conspiracies. It was part of the bargain with your mother. That was her province. It’s too late now for secrets, but he can’t see that, so it’s up to you.’ The doctor smiled and, as Prospero felt unable to say anything, they walked silently as far as the gate where they embraced. Then the doctor drove away.
Prospero did not go back the way he had come, but, returning to the pond, took the boat out to the middle and sat staring into its shadowed waters. He didn’t think of what he had just been told, but the liquid darkness soaked soothingly into his mind. After a while, he rowed back, moored the boat and returned to the villa, approaching it through the kitchen garden where the air was heavy with smells of wind-fallen plums and evening-scented stock; a mix which seemed to typify the domestic life which would now go on here without him. Oh, he would visit. He would bring gifts for the new baby and for Cesco who, no doubt, would one day farm the place. Why not? Prospero had never been interested in it. His was the melancholy of the dog in the manger.
The thought made him laugh. After all, this was a good moment; the one when the intrusive dog, with a last yaw
n of regret, bounds forth to freedom – and useful activity. The laugh became a shout. His sense of purpose was honed. Rejecting his father’s way of life, he would be true to his father’s more worthy ideals. The old Carbonari had struggled gallantly for an embattled cause, but the flame animating them had been stolen fire. They, like all heretics, were impatient. They wanted heaven here.
Striding through fireflies, he resolved to attend at once to tidying things up. Anna must be told about the villa’s secrets, whatever they now were. Absorbed in this thought, he almost tripped over something which smelled gamily of mortality: a sack of dead rabbits. Pushing it away, he cleaned his hands in grass then, looking up, saw a man standing on a low wall. It was Storto, the fellow who had forced him to watch the beating of the Centurioni.
The poacher’s pose was one of cartoonish attentiveness, and the only movement about him came from a small bag. Apparently forgotten in his clenched hand, this heaved and jiggled. A ferret?
‘Storto!’ Prospero pulled his coat and the man looked blindly around, then wheeled his gaze back to whatever he was watching. ‘Are those your rabbits?’
‘Signor Prospero! It’s the Madonna.’ His voice was aghast.
Prospero climbed up beside him. Ahead, clearly visible against a background of outbuildings, sailed a luminous figure. Larger than life, it had a white garment with bits of red and blue, black hair, touches of gold at the throat and shoulders and some sort of dark shape above its pale face.
‘Holy Mary …’ gabbled Storto, spiritually turning his coat – for had he not been a free-thinking conspirator? ‘Pray for us sinners,’ he begged, and tightened his clasped fingers so that his stifling ferret went mad inside its sack.
‘It’s not the Madonna,’ judged Prospero. ‘Not in a black hat!’
‘Halo.’
‘Not black.’
‘… hour of our death, Amen. Who then? The devil?’
Prospero screwed up his eyes. The image was too soft-edged for a transparency and anyway there were no windows facing this way. ‘It’s rum,’ he admitted, then: ‘It’s Napoleon.’
‘Napoleon, Signor Prospero?’
‘From a magic lantern,’ Prospero realised. ‘Poor Captain Melzi’s lantern! Someone’s throwing images on the barn wall!’
The captain had died, possibly of a broken heart, but more likely of a ruined liver, for he had taken increasingly to drink when the war, the world and his friend and rival Guidotti disappointed him. One of his hobbies had been making slides of the heroes of his youth and prime.
Storto, however, had never heard of a magic lantern. ‘Viva Napoleone!’ he cried, to conciliate the old invader. ‘Why’s he haunting us then?’
‘Listen, Storto, you keep your mouth shut about this. The Austrians were here earlier and they wouldn’t like it.’
‘He gave them many a licking!’
‘Exactly. Listen now. Remember that Centurione you thrashed?’
‘He’s gone. The whole family is. There’ll be no trouble from them, Signor Prospero.’
‘Maybe not from him, but his friends are back in power. And if you say one word to a living soul about what we’ve just seen, I’ll tell what you did to him. Not to mention the rabbits.’
‘What rabbits?’
Prospero indicated the sack. Storto said he hadn’t seen it until this minute. And the ferret? Where? In the bag in his hand.
Storto gave in. ‘All right.’ He climbed down from the wall.
But Prospero hadn’t finished. Grasping him by his distorted shoulder, he said, ‘What’s more, I want you to tell me everything my father’s been up to in the last year.’ He shook him gently. ‘I’m much more dangerous than that image up there.’
*
The count relished the story of Storto’s seeing the Madonna in poor Melzi’s last remaining slide with which Daniele had been amusing little Cesco. ‘Ha!’ he roared, ‘that restores me!’ And he raised his glass. His veneration for the Pope had turned to vinegar. ‘Our lantern doth magnify Old Boney whom the zealots see as Antichrist I. Antichrist II is Garibaldi! I drink to them both,’ said he, although he had been told by Dottor Pasolini not to drink at all. Wayward and unbiddable, he insisted while his wife remonstrated and she, when he wasn’t looking, emptied his glass into a potted plant.
Storto, said the count, wasn’t all that far out in confusing the Madonna with Napoleon. Both had brought down Republics, if one was to believe Papa Mastai, who was ascribing his restoration to her rather than to his allies. The count stared in puzzlement at his empty glass, then signalled to the footman: more wine. He banged the table so that wax flew from the candelabra.
‘I remember him when he was bishop here. Good-hearted but emotional. You can’t rely on emotion. It’s womanish!’ He slapped his wife’s marauding wrist. She had been after his glass.
She smiled. ‘Women …’ He launched into a disquisition and she let the smile fade, placidly, not minding in the least.
Prospero noticed the wobble in his father’s wrist and the shine of his scalp through the chicken fluff of his hair. Hers, he thought, is an impossible situation: responsibility without power, the very one in which he would like to put the Church!
The count was persuaded to go to bed early and his wife led him off, smiling a promise over her shoulder. She would be back to talk to Prospero who had told her that he had something to discuss. Storto had informed him that his father had been spending time in his old secret hiding place and might have something there. Guns? He wasn’t sure. The count didn’t trust him now.
Left alone, Prospero paged through an old book of fairy tales. Once his, it had been taken over by Cesco and the black and white illustrations had been vividly coloured in.
‘Look at the Orco,’ Cesco had invited earlier, showing a purple ogre with teeth like scythes. ‘It gives me dreams that make me get up and look for Mamma and disturb everyone.’
‘Do they get angry?’
‘Yes, but in my dream I can’t help it. I think it’s real.’
Prospero thought the whole villa might be mired in the same dilemma.
‘I’m not asking you to be disloyal,’ he told his stepmother when she came back. ‘It’s just that he’s getting …’ He stopped, since harping on his father’s age must offend her. ‘He’s always been,’ he corrected this, ‘rash. I used,’ he heard himself blurt, ‘to blame him for my mother’s death!’
He had shocked them both.
‘I’m sorry.’ His mouth felt stale from eating ancient wedding cake. They had saved a dusty piece for him which he had pretended to enjoy.
Into his bruised mind came echoes of the doctor’s words and his revised version of Prospero’s childhood myth. Prospero’s own memories were of his mother as smilingly cool and of his father as besotted with her. How fit this into the new frame? Meanwhile, whatever his stepmother’s emotion, he was drowning in his. Pique? Jealousy? As the magic-lantern image had done at first, it evaded defining. Perhaps it was suspicion? The canon cited by Don Vigilio, which forbade those who took a lover during a spouse’s lifetime to marry them if the spouse died, cast its shadow into the mix. A lawyer’s ruse to prevent uxoricide, it had no relevance here. His father, a gentle, irresolute man, must have married Prospero’s mother on some absurd understanding that theirs was to be a purely political partnership, then fallen in love with her after becoming entangled with Anna who, even now, seemed to know little of his political interests. She must be told of them, decided Prospero, and soon had her so alarmed that he began to feel remorse.
‘You see why I had to speak out?’ He wanted an admission of his own rightness. ‘His laughing at the magic-lantern story,’ he scolded, ‘is worrying.’ And he told how the Austrian officer had mentioned people reporting strange goings-on at the villa.
‘I see.’ Her soft frilly face puckered anxiously.
‘I’m sorry.’ He had an urge to take her protectively in his arms.
‘No. You were right to tell me. Well, if there’s somethi
ng in that secret apartment, we’d better see what it is.’ She stood up.
This startled him. ‘Now?’
‘I couldn’t sleep without knowing.’
So he had to accompany her. The apartment, he explained, as they made their way there, had two entrances – one through the chimney in his father’s bedroom, the other from behind a piece of statuary in the front of the house. Somehow, he had now plunged them into the very sort of situation which he most abhorred: histrionic, furtive and probably unnecessary.
Moonlight was milky on the gravel and, further off, on potted lemon trees. By contrast the old hideaway smelled of enclosure and rancid hopes.
‘Mildew!’ diagnosed Anna with housewifely distaste. ‘Muffa!’
‘There’s a lamp!’ Guiding himself by a shaft of moonlight, he got it alight.
‘This place is horrible.’
He had always thought it silly. Now, however, taking its danger seriously, he tapped walls, searched cupboards and even prised up floorboards to find nothing more sinister than bales of pamphlets tied with string and copies of the now banned portrait of Pio Nono blessing the troops. ‘Viva l’Italia’ ran the legend, with the memorial date, 10 February 1848. Just nineteen months ago. Shiny with varnish, the prints gleamed, as Prospero’s light-bearing hand shifted, and the Pope blessed them both.
‘It’s like keeping old love letters!’ whispered Anna. As though reprimanding her frivolity, a sound came from her husband’s room and the two froze. A draught rippled a curtain, bringing home to them the dangers of what they were doing. There were no guns. What there was was the danger of a confrontation which could engender misunderstandings and sour the marriage for which she had waited so patiently and long.
‘Come on!’ She drew him outside, then ran with him across the front lawn and into the safety of the hall where, relieved and laughing, they hugged so spontaneously that Prospero was afflicted by a sensation which he recognised as pure carnality; cocksure and misplaced, like a bit of monstrous marine life taken by error in a trawl.
The Judas Cloth Page 33
