An Appetite for Violets (40 page)

‘So tell me,’ he added, his voice steely. ‘When was this man your lover?’

I closed my eyes and allowed myself a silent hurrah of gratitude. Thanks to God I could tell the truth. Looking deep into Renzo’s hurt gaze I said, ‘He never was my lover. Think of it. You know that.’

With a grunt of agreement, he nodded. Then looking much like our little son Giacomo, Renzo scowled at the disobliging nature of the world.

‘There are hospitals. If you send him there you will have done your Christian duty.’

It was true. Yet to think of poor Kitt dying alone in a foreign hospital – I could not bear it.

‘No. He must come here. We have rooms. And God forgive me, but he will not be our guest for long.’

‘Why, in the devil’s name are you doing this?’

I scarcely understood it myself. It was a cold passion that drove me, refusing to be crossed.

‘Guilt,’ I said, suddenly looking away.

‘In Florence we say “Guilt is a gorgeous girl but nobody wants her.” Or in your case, perhaps a handsome man. Forget him. You will not be the first woman to shun her past.’

‘I may never have another chance,’ I said, and my voice cracked. ‘He is blind. He is dying. We led him to Italy and it has cursed him. While for me it has been a blessing, for I have all this bounty, our children, and mostly you, Renzo.’ I let my face fall on his shoulder. ‘Let me pay a little back,’ I whispered.

We sat entwined, each in our own thoughts for a long time, growing cold as dawn approached. As I pressed my eyes against my husband’s solid shoulder I saw Carinna dead before me, laid on that white bed, her pale eyes as lifeless as glass. All my chasing of bustle and happiness seemed only flimsy shrouds laid over the horror of her wretched corpse. At last Renzo patted my hair.

‘Come to bed. Yet I still do not see why we should have him,’ he said. The fight had left his body.

‘Because he is Evelina’s uncle,’ I said, and Renzo sighed, and I came to bed.

*   *   *

No one must believe that by taking in Kitt I felt any less for my husband. Renzo is my true love, the father of my beloved children. And thanks to him I run a great trade, and cook as I never could have done, back in England. Kitt is a different draught altogether. I know well enough now, that Kitt would have filled my life with despair. Yet the hours we shared in Paris do burn with a secret glamour in the calendar of my days.

Next day Kitt was moved into one of the hotel’s rooms, and by dinner time he slept in a bed of fresh linen, the gauze drapes guarding his wretched eyes from the winter sun. I hired a gentle nurse, Francesca, and she sat sewing at his side. That evening I fed him myself, setting his pillows behind his back and dabbing his lips with a snow-white cloth. Alone, I studied his ravaged face.

‘You need a barber,’ I said. I held my fingers above the dark shadow of his cheek, but did not permit myself to touch him.

‘Lady,’ he said quietly, his eyes seeming to search for me but not find me, ‘I need for nothing. Thank you.’ His fingers suddenly grasped the bunched silk of my skirt. ‘Am I in heaven?’

‘No,’ I laughed. ‘You are in the Queen of England Hotel, Florence. With friends.’ I patted his hand and loosened his pincer grip. ‘Now sleep,’ I murmured, standing to go.

Again he reached for my skirts but I had stepped away. ‘I am afraid to sleep,’ he groaned, looking about himself, but seeing nothing. ‘For where will I wake?’

‘You will wake here. The nurse will sleep beside you on a couch. You are quite safe.’

As I left he cried out as Renzo’s dog came running to greet me at the door.

‘Lady! I beg you, shut the door. Listen! Don’t let it come inside.’

‘It is only my husband’s hound.’

Ugo scratched and whimpered at the door and poor Kitt recoiled.

‘Great god has it followed me here?’ he wailed.

I spoke to the nurse of his fear of the dog, and we agreed that his blindness must have given him an odd terror, for perhaps some wild dog had once found him alone. It was only a long while later that I remembered Bengo and got to wondering what Kitt had found at the villa.

*   *   *

He was with us only a week before he unmasked me. It was almost Christmas, and Renzo was preparing all the delicacies Florentines must eat at the festival: roast eels, goose, fancy cakes with marzipan frills, and a kind of minced pie they call
Torta di Lasagna,
stuffed with meats and raisins and nuts. As his nurse Francesca had leave to attend mass, it was I who was bathing Kitt’s face one day with a cloth dipped in rosewater. By then I could look at his face without being overcome by miserable tenderness. His eyes were closed and his face was as sallow as parchment. I sighed more loudly than I should have, and pushed back a lock of his long black hair.

‘That perfume. Is it you?’ he asked. ‘Not the nurse?’

Warily, I replied, ‘It is Signora Cellini. The lady who found you.’

A wry smile tightened his lips. ‘Is that the same lady who cried out last night when the loaves were burned that there “were nowt left to serve the guests”?’

My heart thumped as I listened to the movements in the house: the banging from the kitchen, the children chanting from the schoolroom.

‘It is you. Isn’t it, Biddy?’

His thin hand grasped mine, the veins like knotted blue string on a stretched fan of bone. For some while we continued in silence, clasping hands like innocent children. Then, in a low tone, I told him how I was sorry not to have found him sooner. ‘It was good fortune you came here to Florence where I live.’

‘For once in my life I was lucky.’ His face grew clouded. ‘For you did not wait for me at the villa, did you?’ His grip was still tight around my palm. ‘It was you who left me the jewel?’

‘It was your sister’s wish,’ I whispered.

‘Now tell me the truth,’ he said, ‘what happened to Carinna?’

I had little time left before Francesca returned, so I rapidly told him all I dared. How to hide her great belly Carinna had ordered me to act her character.

‘Carinna was with child?’ He looked suddenly bereft. ‘Poor sis. And you Biddy, I thought you had changed much. Yet you always were sharp, I can see why Carinna used you. But what happened? I heard once that my uncle sent a man over to the villa, but there was no sign of her, or any of you. Is it true she left with a secret lover?’

‘She died in childbed,’ I said. ‘Kitt, it was a terrible lying in. As for the child’s father, he never came to claim her or the child. And to be so far from home—’ But for pity’s sake I did not tell the entire truth. That Mr Pars had fallen out with her as plotting thieves will, and she had died a poor suffering girl, with only us lackeys about her, and one of those her murderer. For the sake of her memory, I was too ashamed to tell him.

‘Where is she buried?’ Poor Kitt looked grey with pain.

‘In the graveyard at Ombrosa. Oh Kitt, I am sorry to say the headstone bears my name.’ I bit my lip as I saw his blind eyes move in agitation. ‘To those who knew us, I was Lady Carinna. I am sorry.’

He turned his head away. ‘And then you went on and prospered. Yet what does it matter?’ His fingers loosed in mine. ‘The dead child. Was it a girl or boy?’

At last I could cheer him. ‘No, no. The child lives. It is a girl. I could not part from her. She is my daughter, Evelina.’

He turned his face back towards mine. ‘What d’you say? Carinna’s child is here?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered, for I feared his raising his voice. ‘Only be quiet. My husband Renzo does not want you here. As for Evelina, she does not know you are her uncle.’

‘I don’t care who she thinks I am. Only bring her to me. Just once.’ He clawed towards my sleeve. ‘Biddy, you will do it?’

It seemed a small gift to give.

‘I will bring her tomorrow.’

XXXIX

The Queen of England, Florence

Being Christmastide, 1777
Signora Bibiana Cellini, her journal

Minc’d Pies My Best Way

Mince two pounds of neat’s tongues parboiled with four pounds good beef suet, a dozen fine chopped pippins and two pounds of sugar. Add spice as you will, not sparing a good pinch of salt to mingle savoury and sweetness. Stir with it four pounds of currants, dates stoned and sliced, a pint of sack, orange flower water and lemon juice and half a pound of orange and lemon candied and shred small. Mix these together well and fill your pies of diverse pretty shapes and bake until enough.

Bibiana Cellini, a receipt much favoured, Christmas 1778

To see them together was a strange thing. I told Evelina that Signor Tyrone was her uncle from England who wished her to visit him. Her nurse said it was proper to bring flowers to the sick, so together they bought a nosegay from a seller in the square. Violets, of all flowers. It seemed an unfortunate choice. I led her to his chamber and stood at the window, staring at a rare fall of snow that had settled in the night. Sunlight danced on the pink and brown
palazzi,
glittering on their crystal roofs. I pulled the gauze shut for fear of hurting Kitt’s eyes, and watched from the window like a character in the wings of a stage.

Evelina was nearing five years old and losing the roundness of babyhood. In her striped muslin she looked to me the picture of a little lady, with a blue satin sash around her waist. It was only as I saw them face to face that I recognised the eggshell pallor of her skin and satin weight of her hair. Yet there was more than that: seeing her with her uncle I noticed she possessed a careless charm quite different from my two rapscallion boys. She looked at Kitt with bold curiosity and answered his questions as well as she might. He wanted to know how she spent her days, whether she was happy. In a faltering concoction of Italian and English she chattered of her brothers and her dolls and the snow she had touched for the very first time. I think I never saw a man’s face burn more fiercely with feeling.

‘Evelina,’ he asked finally, ‘would you indulge me?’

She giggled and looked over her shoulder at me.

‘May I feel your face? For then I can tell how you look, even with my eyes not rightly working.’

Again, the little girl looked over her shoulder, and I signalled my agreement. She sat very still, her spine as straight as a rod from her new stays just arrived from Paris. Kitt’s fingertips traced the brushed silk of her hair, her narrow brow, short nose and blinking long-lashed eyes. As he touched her mouth she giggled again, and he traced the smile that lifted two rosy cheeks. His fingers halted at the ruffle of blue ribbon tied about her neck. Strong feelings worked across his face, though whether pain or joy, it was hard to say.

‘Come along, Evelina,’ I said, reaching for her hand. I feared the meeting had overpowered him.

‘Signora Cellini.’ Kitt’s voice was thick. ‘Would you do me the courtesy of returning alone?’

*   *   *

I delivered Evelina to her tutor and dropped a kiss on the scented softness of her head. Then I returned with a choking heart to that gauzy white room. The little nosegay had tumbled on the sheet and he scrabbled for it. He could not settle till he held it tight.

‘You should sleep now,’ I murmured. Discomforting passions roiled within me: terrible pity, anguish, tenderness. ‘I must get to the kitchen. Your nurse will be back soon.’

‘A moment,’ he croaked, pain creasing his brow. ‘I want you to know. I am ready now to join Carinna.’

For a moment I could think of no reply. My conscience told me to comfort him, but what are hollow words in the face of death itself?

‘You will meet again in God’s presence,’ I said.

Tears welled and overbrimmed his lids, running down his sunken cheek. ‘No, we will not meet in heaven, Biddy dear.’ His mouth twisted and he struggled to speak steady. ‘This house was my only taste of heaven. I will be reunited with Carinna in a far worse place.’

‘You have not been such a bad man.’ I pitied him for believing himself beyond redemption. ‘Christ will forgive those foolish sins.’

‘Sometimes I think it is you who are blind,’ he said with a grim attempt at laughter. He lifted the little posy to his nostrils and I too smelled cloying violets for just one moment. They were crushed in his hand, their lilac faces wilting around each yellow eye. The smell of them made bile rise in my throat.

‘The girl, Evelina,’ he said, as if he stared into his own open grave. ‘When I leave this world, there is a pawnbroker’s ticket in my saddlebag. Redeem it. It is for her.’

‘That is kind of you. To think of your niece.’ The violets cast their scent very strong then, and all at once I was back again, in the blue chamber at Mawton watching Carinna’s tear-stained face as she chewed on violet pastilles. There had been a letter on the bed. From London, from Sir Geoffrey, we had all imagined. Yet looking backwards over all that time, remembering her tears, it must have been from her lover. She had tried to reply to that letter, she had hunted for words to confess their love – ‘fire’s heat’, ‘reckless taint’, ‘life’s blight’ – and then scratched at and blotted them, so that no other soul might ever read that unspeakable confession.

‘Not my niece.’ Grimacing with pain, Kitt turned away from me towards the wall. I heard him say it, though I wished I never had. ‘My daughter.’

*   *   *

Christmas is different here. The Catholic way is to have a crib and characters all carved in wood lit up by ranks of candles. My husband embellishes it with sweetmeats, spun sugar and bonbons. It may be very pretty, but this year I miss the dancing and carousing I knew in England, the sweet oblivion of kissing and forfeits and all those harum scarum revels. Here on Christmas Eve we gather for prayers, and my husband serves plates of dainty fish, and gingerbread
panforte.
It is all very tasty, but it is not and cannot be Christmas.

So on Christmas morning I was up at five o’clock, making the fire as bright as a furnace, baking minc’d pies and boiling plum puddings the size of Medici cannonballs, and setting three sides of roast beef to turn on the spits. Soon I breathed again that steam that tells the soul it is Christmas, and all the year’s work done, and time for feasting; the smell of oranges, sugarplums and cloves, all mingled with roasting meats. So eager were the English in Florence to eat their usual Christmas fare we might have filled another twenty tables. I even found mistletoe, and with Evelina made a kissing bough.