Part 3 (1/2)

He knew my G.o.dfather was my guardian also, which was more than I did. Unless he spoke in error. Surely no man past twenty-one possessed a guardian, and I was twenty-four? This did not matter, though. What mattered was Ambrose and his illness, Ambrose and his death.

”These two letters,” I said stubbornly, ”are not the letters of a sick man, of a person ill. They are the letters of a man who has enemies, who is surrounded by people he cannot trust.”

Signor Rainaldi watched me steadily.

”They are the letters of a man who was sick in mind, Mr. Ashley,” he answered me. ”Forgive my bluntness, but I saw him those last weeks, and you did not. The experience was not a pleasant one for any of us, least of all for his wife. You see what he says in the first letter there, that she did not leave him. I can vouchsafe for that. She did not leave him night or day. Another woman would have had nuns to tend him. She nursed him alone, she spared herself nothing.”

”Yet it did not help him,” I said. ”Look at the letters, and this last line, 'She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment...' What do you make of that, Signor Rainaldi?”

I suppose I had raised my voice in my excitement. He got up from his chair, and pulled a bell. When his servant appeared he gave an order, and the man returned with a gla.s.s, and some wine and water. He poured some out for me, but I did not want it.

”Well?” I said.

He did not go back to his seat. He went over to the side of the room where books lined the wall and took down a volume.

”Are you any sort of a student of medical history, Mr. Ashley?” he asked.

”No,” I said.

”You will find it here,” he said, ”the sort of information you are seeking, or you can question those doctors, whose address I am only too willing to give you. There is a particular affliction of the brain, present above all when there is a growth, or tumor, when the sufferer becomes troubled by delusions. He fancies, for instance, that he is being watched. That the person nearest to him, such as a wife, has either turned against him, or is unfaithful, or seeks to take his money. No amount of love or persuasion can allay this suspicion, once it takes hold. If you don't believe me, or the doctors here, ask your own countrymen, or read this book.”

How plausible he was, how cold, how confident. I thought of Ambrose lying on that iron bedstead in the villa Sangalletti, tortured, bewildered, with this man observing him, a.n.a.lyzing his symptoms one by one, watching perhaps from over that threefold screen. Whether he was right or wrong I did not know. All I knew was that I hated Rainaldi.

”Why didn't she send for me?” I asked. ”If Ambrose had lost faith in her, why not send for me? I knew him best.”

Rainaldi closed the book with a snap, and replaced it on the shelf.

”You are very young, are you not, Mr. Ashley?” he said.

I stared at him. I did not know what he meant.

”What do you mean by that?” I asked.

”A woman of feeling does not easily give way,” he said. ”You may call it pride, or tenacity, call it what you will. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, their emotions are more primitive than ours. They hold to the thing they want, and never surrender. We have our wars and battles, Mr. Ashley. But women can fight too.”

He looked at me, with his cold deep-set eyes, and I knew I had no more to say to him.

”If I had been here,” I said, ”he would not have died.”

I rose from my chair and went towards the door. Once again Rainaldi pulled the bell, and the servant came to show me out.

”I have written,” he said, ”to your guardian, Mr. Kendall. I have explained to him very fully, in great detail, everything that has happened. Is there anything more I can do for you? Will you be staying long in Florence?”

”No,” I said, ”why should I stay? There is nothing to keep me.”

”If you wish to see the grave,” he said, ”I will give you a note to the guardian, in the Protestant cemetery. The site is quite simple and plain. No stone as yet, of course. That will be erected presently.”

He turned to the table, and scribbled a note which he gave me.

”What will be written on the stone?” I said.

He paused a moment, as though reflecting, while the servant waiting by the open door handed me Ambrose's hat.

”I believe,” he said, ”that my instructions were to put 'In Memory of Ambrose Ashley, beloved husband of Rachel Coryn Ashley,' and then of course the date.”

I knew then that I did not want to go to the cemetery or visit the grave. That I had no wish to see the place where they had buried him. They could put up the stone, and later take flowers there if they wished, but Ambrose would never know, and never care. He would be with me in that west country, under his own soil, in his own land.

”When Mrs. Ashley returns,” I said slowly, ”tell her that I came to Florence. That I went to the villa Sangalletti, and that I saw where Ambrose died. You can tell her too about the letters Ambrose wrote to me.”

He held out his hand to me, cold and hard like himself, and still he watched me with those veiled, deep-set eyes.

”Your cousin Rachel is a woman of impulse,” he said. ”When she left Florence she took all her possessions with her. I very much fear that she will never return.”

I left the house and went out into the dark street. It was almost as if his eyes still followed me from behind his shuttered windows.

I walked back along the cobbled streets and crossed the bridge, and before turning into the hostelry to seek what sleep I could before the morning I went and stood once more beside the Arno.

The city slept. I was the only loiterer. Even the solemn bells were silent, and the only sound was the river, sucking its way under the bridge. It ran more swiftly now, it seemed, than in the day, as though the water had been pent up and idle during the long hours of heat and sun and now, because of night, because of silence, found release.

I stared down at the river, watching it surge and flow and lose itself in the darkness, and by the single flickering lantern light upon the bridge I saw the bubbles forming, frothy brown. Then borne upon the current, stiff and slowly turning, with its four legs in the air, came the body of a dog. It pa.s.sed under the bridge and went its way.

I made a vow there, to myself, beside the Arno.

I swore that, whatever it had cost Ambrose in pain and suffering before he died, I would return it, in full measure, upon the woman who had caused it. Because I did not believe Rainaldi's story. I believed in the truth of those two letters that I held in my right hand. The last Ambrose had ever written to me.

Someday, somehow, I would repay my cousin Rachel.

6.

I arrived home the first week in September. The news had preceded me-the Italian had not lied when he told me he had written to Nick Kendall. My G.o.dfather had broken the news to the servants and to the tenants on the estate. Wellington was waiting for me at Bodmin with the carriage. The horses were decked in crepe, as were Wellington and the groom, their faces long and solemn.

My relief at being back in my own country was so great that for the moment grief was dormant, or possibly that long homeward trek across Europe had dulled all feeling; but I remember my first instinct was to smile at sight of Wellington and the boy, to pat the horses, to inquire if all was well. It was almost as though I were a lad again, returned from school. The old coachman's manner was stiff, however, with a new formality, and the young groom opened the carriage door to me with deference. ”A sad homecoming, Mr. Philip,” said Wellington, and when I asked after Seecombe and the household he shook his head and told me that they and all the tenants were sorely grieved. The whole neighborhood, he said, had talked of nothing else since the news became known. The church had been draped in black all Sunday, likewise the chapel on the estate, but the greatest blow of all, Wellington said, was when Mr. Kendall told them that the master had been buried in Italy and would not be brought home to lie in the vault among his family.

”It doesn't seem right to any of us, Mr. Philip,” he said, ”and we don't think Mr. Ashley would have liked it either.”

There was nothing I could say in answer. I got into the carriage and let them drive me home.

It was strange how the emotion and the fatigue of the past weeks vanished at sight of the house. All sense of strain left me, and in spite of the long hours on the road I felt rested and at peace. It was afternoon, and the sun shone on the windows of the west wing, and on the gray walls, as the carriage pa.s.sed through the second gate up the slope to the house. The dogs were there, waiting to greet me, and poor Seecombe, wearing a crepe band on his arm like the rest of the servants, broke down when I wrung him by the hand.

”It's been so long, Mr. Philip,” he said, ”so very long. And how were we to know that you might not take the fever too, like Mr. Ashley?”

He waited upon me while I dined, solicitous, anxious for my welfare, and I was thankful that he did not press me with questions about my journey or about his master's illness and death, but was full of the effect upon himself and the household; how the bells had tolled for a whole day, how the vicar had spoken, how wreaths had been brought in offering. And all his words were punctuated with a new formality of address. I was ”Mr.” Philip. No longer ”Master” Philip. I had noticed the same with the coachman and the groom. It was unexpected, yet strangely warming to the heart.

When I had dined I went up to my room and looked about me, and then down into the library, and so out into the grounds, and I was filled with a queer feeling of happiness that I had not thought ever to possess with Ambrose dead; for when I left Florence I had reached the lowest ebb of loneliness, and hoped for nothing. Across Italy and France I was possessed with images which I could not drive away. I saw Ambrose sitting in that shaded court of the villa Sangalletti, beside the laburnum tree, watching the dripping fountain. I saw him in that bare monk's cell above, propped on two pillows, struggling for breath. And always within earshot, always within sight, was the shadowy hated figure of that woman I had never seen. She had so many faces, so many guises, and that name contessa, used by the servant Giuseppe and by Rainaldi too, in preference for Mrs. Ashley, gave to her a kind of aura she had never had with me at first, when I had seen her as another Mrs. Pascoe.

Since my journey to the villa she had become a monster, larger than life itself. Her eyes were black as sloes, her features aquiline like Rainaldi's, and she moved about those musty villa rooms sinuous and silent, like a snake. I saw her, when there was no longer breath left in his body, packing his clothes in trunks, reaching for his books, his last possessions, and then creeping away, thin-lipped, to Rome perhaps, to Naples, or even lying concealed in that house beside the Arno, smiling, behind the shutters. These images remained with me until I crossed the sea and came to Dover. And now, now that I had returned home, they vanished as nightmares do at break of day. My bitterness went too. Ambrose was with me once again and he was not tortured, he no longer suffered. He had never been to Florence or to Italy at all. It was as though he had died here, in his own home, and lay buried with his father and his mother and my own parents, and my grief was now something I could overcome; sorrow was with me still, but not tragedy. I too was back where I belonged, and the smell of home was all about me.