Little Fortress

by Laisha Rosnau

  The war was over, and I knew we should all be relieved. It wasn’t right that I pined for the first years of war, when my role within a household had become as indispensable as sleep. But I’d been wrong about that. I was sent away before peace was declared and now, here I was with another family, touring a tiny town in Western Canada.

  As if in answer to Ofelia’s Italian, the man said, “The camp is officially closed. It’s been standing vacant for two years. We do need to dismantle it – it’s getting taken over by vagrants and Indians. They go and set up their own tents in there, build fires. It’s a public danger, I keep telling council.”

  Leone turned to the estate agent, then away, clearing his throat. “The Indians, I’m given to understand, don’t live in teepees here.”

  The man laughed. “No, not teepees, exactly! Canvas tents or, mostly, shacks. There aren’t many in town, though. They aren’t really supposed to leave the reserve out on Okanagan Lake, need a pass to do so – though some always find a way. Occasionally, their fires get out of control on the hillside by Long Lake, but don’t worry, they won’t bother you. You’ll be living in town.”

  “The lakes!” Leone clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “I’ve heard so much about these lakes!” He looked over the seat toward us, raised his eyebrows.

  Ofelia and I sat in silence as the men talked. I pictured roaming Indians, the abandoned imprisonment camp, fires out of control. I couldn’t imagine who would choose to live in such a place.

  * * *

  The house the duke and Ofelia chose was a three-storey wooden home on Pleasant Valley Road. “Quite spacious. Stately,” the estate agent said when we first saw it.

  I nearly sputtered a laugh.

  “You all right then, Miss Jüül?” Leone winked at me.

  I looked toward Ofelia, who was using her cane to walk that day. She held her small frame completely straight, as though she didn’t need assistance, but I saw how her thin hand was clenched around the cane, tendons tight against her skin.

  Sveva ran circles in the parlour, leaping around the edge of the room through dust motes lit in lines of diluted sunlight. “Second owner was a dance instructor,” the agent said. “He built the addition so that this room could be used for dancing.”

  Later, Ofelia said to me, “Imagine, holding a dance in that tiny parlour! This is what they believe is a grand home, Miss Jüül.”

  It was much bigger than the one in which I’d grown up on the farm, and that one had been considered a big home in our district. “Think of it as your country retreat.” I repeated what I’d heard the duke say.

  “I don’t want a country retreat.” Neither did I, really.

  Two

  Four years earlier, when I’d first been in the Caetani’s employ in Rome, I’d rarely left the walls and courtyards of Villa Miraggio. The duke was having it built for Ofelia and it wasn’t yet finished when I arrived, weeks before baby Sveva’s birth. Laddered in scaffolding, partially draped in canvas, the villa rose like a large, tiered cake from the highest hill in the city. “Windows on every level, every side. When it’s complete, no view of Rome will be obscured,” the duke had told me. This was their first home as a couple, away from the official palace residence where the duke’s parents, his siblings and their spouses all occupied different wings. The staff in Villa Miraggio, of which I was one, seemed modest to them in comparison, plentiful to me.

  Ofelia wasn’t well after Sveva’s birth, but when she was healthy enough to join the duke’s family at Palazzo Caetani, she invited me along. “Oh, I’ll stay here,” I told her. “I’m used to dining on my own.” Not that I would be. I’d likely be joined by any number of the senior staff at the villa.

  “Well, stop being used to it! I won’t always be an invalid, and if you are to be my companion, you are to be treated like one, not like one of the house girls. Come on then, let’s get dressed for dinner.” She took my hands and opened my arms, as though we might start waltzing. “Though Duchess Ada is as likely to turn up at the table in her pajamas as she is to get dressed for dinner, we should dress in semi-formal wear. Do you have something, Miss Jüül? If not, I can –”

  “Oh yes, certainly, I do.” I must have seemed so provincial standing in Ofelia’s drawing room, wearing one of the plain, dark dresses I wore daily. There had been a time, not that long before, when I’d chosen my clothes for dinner carefully each evening, dressed with only my body and pleasure in mind. Time could shift in a moment, become a scent both smoky and sweet, a jump in my rib cage, a turn in my stomach, then be gone again.

  * * *

  We entered the walls of the palazzo, which didn’t open into courtyards or gardens but dark passageways climbing with as much scaffolding as did the villa. The duke led us down halls lined with stacks of paint cans, hammers and tools leaning against stone walls. I whispered to Ofelia, “Is the palazzo under construction, as well?”

  The duke heard. “When isn’t the palazzo under construction?” He turned and winked. “It’s perpetual, has been since I was a child – one wing is finished and then another begins to crumble, but none has ever actually been completed to my knowledge!” He laughed at this. “Designed by one of Michelangelo’s pupils. It’s too bad we didn’t have the master himself, as it will always be a work in progress, never a masterpiece.” The duke seemed genuinely amused rather than bothered by this. I’d assumed that the villa would be completed soon, but now I wasn’t as sure.

  Ofelia had told me that there was no set hour for dinner and that we would be expected to remain at the table until the last of the family had eaten. We were among the first to arrive, though a brother sat at one end of the long table, a newspaper open and obscuring his face like a screen. “­Miche, show some manners,” the duke said. “Say a proper hello to the ladies.”

  The man folded one side of the paper and peered over it. “A proper hello to you both.” He snapped the newspaper up around him again. As he did, an enormous man appeared in a coat decorated with medals of some sort.

  I nearly stood in respect, but Ofelia held onto my arm and leaned to me, whispered, “The old footman.” I noticed then that his arm was cocked, a cloth draped over it, a bottle of wine in one hand. The man said something, but even though it must have been in Italian, I didn’t understand him. Ofelia simply smiled at him in response.

  The duke said, “Yes, please, Pagolo,” and the man poured us wine.

  When the man left the room, the brother put down his paper. “Poor Pag’s got such a speech impediment that only a Caetani can understand him, and then only half the time, yes, Leone?”

  “Half at best, I’d say.”

  The brother stood up and rounded the table. “Excuse my rudeness, ladies. Caught up in war propaganda, I’m afraid.” We both stood as he made his way toward us. He bowed to Ofelia, kissed her hand and then turned to me. “Another young thing you’re keeping in the villa, Leo?” More than ten years older than Ofelia, I was hardly young.

  “Please excuse his utter deficiency of civility, Miss Jüül. This is my brother, Michelangelo, the youngest as I’m afraid you can tell.” Indeed, he looked younger than me. “Michelangelo, this is Miss Jüül, Ofelia’s companion.”

  His brother flicked his eyes up and down my body, then turned and began circling the table, hands slapping against the tops of each chair as he went by. “This war, it’s interminable.”

  “Most seem as though they are.” The duke leaned against the high-backed chair, took a sip of wine. “Let’s not get into this with the ladies here.”

  Michelangelo was pacing, making rounds of the table. “I suppose you still think we would have been best to abstain, remain neutral, as though such a thing were possible, Leo?” He clutched the top of a chair opposite us.

  Leone put down his wineglass and adjusted his collar. “I’ll remind you that I fought on the front last year.”

  His brother pulled
out a chair, slumped into it. “I thought we weren’t getting into this with the ladies here.” He raised an eyebrow.

  “We’re not.”

  Two more family members came into the room – a brother, Roffredo, and his wife, Marguerite – nodding through brief introductions as they sat down. Around each family member’s setting were varying arrays of small pots of pickles and spices, as well as vials and jars of what appeared to be medication around some. When his wine came, Roffredo opened a narrow jar and threw a pill into his mouth before taking a drink.

  Marguerite leaned forward. “Miss Jüül, is it?” She spoke to me in English.

  I was surprised to be spoken to directly, felt my neck and chest spark with the quick heat of nerves. “Yes.”

  “Not Italian.” This was neither a question nor quite a statement. Her voice had the round lilt of an American.

  “No.” Few would mistake me for being Italian. My hair was a dull brown, and though I’d seen several fair-skinned and light-eyed Italians since I’d been in the country, my skin was what betrayed me, never burnishing, going from white to pink to red under a dusting of freckles that might spread if exposed to direct sunlight too long. “I’m Danish.”

  “Oh yes.” She turned to the duke. “Is this –”

  He interrupted her, switching to English as well. “Miss Jüül’s joined us from a household in Cairo.” He looked pointedly at his sister-in-law.

  “Yes, of course.” Marguerite nodded.

  The patriarch, Duke Onorato, came to dinner an hour or more after we’d arrived. He was bent over a cane, but even then, I could tell that at one point he would have been taller than the duke, himself well over six feet tall. Everyone stood and said, “Father,” then resumed what they’d been doing. Ofelia had told me that the senior duke had once challenged Buffalo Bill to a horse-wrangling contest when the American cowboy had a show in Rome – and that he had won. I looked at the old, stooped man. With his height, his long, white beard and his cane, he looked like a prophet.

  Leone’s mother, Duchess Ada, arrived a few minutes after her husband. Her hair was set with a wave and held up with jewelled pins, and she had emerald drop earrings, but she was dressed in a violet dressing gown. “Oh, look at you all!” She came first to Leone, who stood and then bent so his mother could put her hands on his face to kiss his cheeks. She then held Ofelia’s hand in both of hers. “You look so well, dear – you’re better?” When Ofelia said she was, the duchess asked, “And Sveva? How is that little beauty? Where is my darling little granddaughter?”

  “We hope she’s sleeping,” the duke said and raised a wineglass at this thought. “If not, God bless those who are tasked with caring for her – the girl has quite the lungs. We can hear her clear across the villa from the nursemaid’s quarters.”

  “Oh, you should have brought her! None of us mind a little noise, and you know how I adore babies.” She turned, looked directly at me. “And who’s this?”

  “Mother, this is Ofelia’s companion, Miss Jüül.”

  The duchess took my hand as she had Ofelia’s. “Lovely to meet you. I do hope that you enjoy your time with my family.” The duchess spoke in English the entire time, her accent the king’s own, Received Pronunciation. I knew already that she was English aristocracy, her marriage one of both political union and what anyone who spoke of it agreed was genuine love between her and Duke Onorato. He didn’t speak at all that evening and, at one point, appeared to be asleep. The duchess and her sons joked and sparred, moving between English, Italian and, at times, French. The meal, if one could call it that, was random dishes set down now and again by the incomprehensible giant footman, and the food, too, seemed to alternate between English, Italian and French.

  “You know Gelasio has plans to blow up a mountain on the northern front, don’t you, Leone?” their mother asked at one point, as though this were the stuff of chit-chat.

  “He mentioned something about that when we spoke, yes. If anyone has the bombast, it’s him, isn’t that right, Roff?”

  Instead of answering his brother, Roffredo asked the duke, “Are you finding you have any time for your research these days?”

  “Oh, it’s coming along. The war has slowed things down, certainly.”

  Ofelia turned to me. “Leone is compiling a multi-volume account of Islamic history and culture.”

  I looked at her for a moment in response, blinked. I wasn’t always sure I’d understood what she’d said – both my English and French were stronger than my Italian then. “He is?”

  Marguerite laughed. “That was exactly my response! It does make perfect sense, really, but what these Caetani men will take on – while Roff composes his symphonies, Leone compiles a history of one of the world’s great religions.”

  “Great?” Michelangelo said from the other end of the table. “Some would beg to differ. Regardless, the entire Western world is at war and my big brother is writing about the Middle East, which, after this war, will no longer exist.”

  “Oh, it won’t, will it?” Leone took a drink, then seemed to study the liquid in his glass before putting it down.

  As though to change the subject, Margeurite turned to me, “Are you familiar with the work of Marie Bregendahl? If you’ve not yet read A Night of Death, you must.”

  “A Night of Death? Why that sounds cheery.” Her husband was spooning various condiments onto his plate, dragging shapes through them with his spoon as though he were a child.

  “Roff!” She batted at him. Her husband recoiled in mock alarm, shrugged dramatically toward Ofelia and me.

  “I do adore literature.” My voice sounded stiff and put-on, like a precocious child, even to me. “But I’ve not lived in Denmark for some time, so I’m a bit out of step with the current authors.”

  “This came out – when? – maybe 1912, 1913? I’d say probably no more than four or five years ago.”

  Roffredo said, “I’m surprised you don’t know the exact publication date.” He looked toward me. “Marguerite has a mind for not only books but publishing – hopes to go into it herself one day.”

  I smiled and nodded at some comments to seem both amiable and intelligent. The Caetanis were generous to me, treating me as though I belonged at the table with them. In my time away from Denmark, my language skills had improved – French, English and then Italian. By the time we left Italy, I felt as though I could move fluidly between both languages and worlds alike, but I wondered how much slipped between gaps as my mind shifted between them. I couldn’t know how much of my experience would be locked in memory to be shaken loose years later.

  Three

  When the first correspondence arrived in the box on Pleasant Valley Road, it wasn’t from any of the duke’s family. Rather, it was from Ofelia’s sister, Emerika, addressed to me. She had come to stay with Ofelia in the months after Sveva was born and had quickly assumed a friendship and familiarity with me. She wrote that she wanted to scold me for having forgotten so soon about her – a distant flirt, she called either herself or me, I wasn’t sure. She imagined my Canadian attire was a short pleated dress with high boots like the girls of the Wild West. “Please say it’s so!” I could practically hear the delight in her voice, see her swinging her full skirts, winking, doing all those very animated things she had done at Ofelia and the duke’s residence in Rome.

  Emerika asked after Sveva and implored me to distract her niece and make her happy. Even if that had been my role in this family, it wasn’t something that I was sure I could do. It was Ofelia whom I was trying to distract and keep happy, not an easy task. She refused to speak English, and I knew the chances were slim of finding anyone who spoke Italian in this small Western Canadian town. Instead, I was able to find two French-speaking ladies in the area. Though we hosted them for tea, and were invited into their homes in turn, I can’t say much friendship resulted.

  “I have so little in common with
those women.” Ofelia leaned against a hall table when we arrived home from one of the teas. She hadn’t used her cane that day and was likely tired from the strain of socializing with strangers. It was true, of course; she was quite different from the Canadian women we’d met. The duke felt she should try harder, but I thought this unfair. She was exhausted by the toll of travel, and there was little of comfort to Ofelia in Canada. The country was as unfamiliar to me as it was her, but I’d convinced myself I was adaptable. Being a buffer between Ofelia and our new world became a distraction for me, a way to keep my mind away from the edges that dropped into memory. I was stronger than that.

  * * *

  When we first arrived, the days seemed modulated – warm sunshine during the day, cool breeze through the trees in the evening, nights smattered with stars. Then it began to rain and it continued, alternating between pounding downpour and dull cloud, for more than a month. When the rain cleared, the sun bore down day after day, baking the ground. Even in the early mornings when the cook, George, and I went out – he to collect the milk and egg deliveries, I to collect the mail – I could feel the heat loosened from the gravel drive with each of my steps. By afternoon, the pine trees would drop their needles and I could smell the bark of ponderosas like vanilla through any open window.

  In the distilled light of early morning or evening, white-tailed deer would walk through the property, hooves high and ears twitching. They moved at such a languid pace that even when they were spooked and jumped in response, they would turn toward us and stare, their eyes large and dark, regarding us with incomprehension, a kind of blinking curiosity as to why we were there, looking at them. Their confusion at our presence seemed right, natural. I wasn’t sure what we were doing there, either.

  The first fall we were in Canada, Sveva called from the top balcony, “Come, come, come! Look!” We followed to where she pointed and saw a sow bear on a thick tree branch, her back arched and fur standing on end like a frightened cat. The sow made a huffing noise as the four of us backed off the balcony, Ofelia holding Sveva by the shoulders.