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8

‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun’

VIOLETTA

‘From the sea she came, and the sea will claim her.’

Marijita was a soothsayer. That is the trouble with prophecies. Once they are made, you wait for them to come true. I could not get it out of my mind. I found myself watching my mother, listening to her conversation for any hint that she might be going on a ship, or taking a voyage, but it didn’t happen like that at all.

Two years passed. It was the summer when I was twelve. We were at the summer palace when my mother disappeared. Her clothes and sandals were found on the beach, left in a neat pile as if she had gone for her early morning swim. She was never seen again. Servants and soldiers searched the coast for miles in both directions. Lookouts stared out to sea until their eyes were red and aching with tiredness, but they saw nothing but the restless waves.

My father ordered boats both large and small to take up the search, ranging far out to sea, along the coast and out to the offshore islands, in case she had been swept out by tide and current. The fishermen coming into port were questioned as to whether they had seen anything and sent straight back out again. Day after day the search went on, but there was no sign of her, living or dead.

At last my father called off the searching. He declared a period of mourning and made arrangements for an elaborate funeral. The empty coffin was draped with her purple colours and paraded through the town on a splendid bier drawn by six matching black horses. It was buried in the family vault with full funerary rights and all due ceremony, but people were struck by the strangeness and muttered that no good would come of it. Such things fed their superstitions. The spectre of the empty coffin was to haunt the city for a long time to come.

MARIA

My lady went into the deepest mourning, deeper by far than for her father or brother. She went triple-veiled and dressed in cypress black. She gave the running of her household over to Sebastian, which is what he had always wanted, and withdrew from the world. She took to the upper rooms of the palazzo, cutting herself off. She allowed no one to see her, not even me, not even Feste. She lived like an anchoress, taking food through a small shuttered window. The only person allowed to see her was Marijita, who arrived at the dead of night and left in the early morning, speaking to no one, as if she’d taken a vow of secrecy.

Feste took it badly. He had been in my lady’s household from a small child. They had played together and he had taught her all sorts of tricks: how to walk on stilts and whistle like a bird. He had been her father’s Fool, then hers. He won’t thank me for telling you, but he pined like a dog, sitting outside her door for weeks, for months. He climbed up to her balcony and sang and played so sweetly that the birds stopped their voices and the bees their buzzing, just to listen. All to no purpose. She would not let him see her, or even acknowledge that he was there. He worried himself to a shadow and was like to die of grief, until I told him to look to Violetta. She was motherless, her father otherwise occupied, Lady Olivia too immersed in her own sorrow to take notice of anybody else. Who would care for her now? I thought they might comfort each other. At last he took himself off to the palace. In truth, I wanted him out of the way. Lord Sebastian had never liked him, and the hatred was returned in brimming measure. Feste has a sharp mocking tongue and does not try to guard it. He was safe while my lady was there to laugh at his wit, but without her protection he was vulnerable. One word out of turn and Lord Sebastian would snuff him as quickly as he would pinch out a moth.

Once Sebastian realised that Lady Olivia’s withdrawal was permanent, he was not long in destroying her household. He went abroad, and in his absence the young men who made up his retinue took over bringing everything into dissolute disarray. My lady’s loyal servants and followers left one by one. They’d had enough of the insults, the violence, the drunken, vile behaviour. Months went by. My lady did nothing to intervene. Toby and I saw the year out, but when Lord Sebastian came back after the Winter Festival he seemed surprised to see us there. It was as if the disrespect and disorder had been a deliberate campaign. He had us banished. It broke my heart to leave. I would have stayed with my lady, braved any amount of humiliation and cruelty – such things mean nothing to me – but I was given no choice. I packed with a knife at my back. Armed men took Toby and me to a waiting ship and stood guard on the dock until we sailed. I cried bitterly all the way here.

VIOLETTA

I mourned her in my own way.

It was as if the sun had gone from our lives, leaving everything in shades of grey. It is possible to gradually forget its brightness and grow used to living in cold and darkness. Even in the depths of winter one is conscious of the year turning, but I knew that the light would not come back again.

That year it seemed as if Nature herself shared in our sorrow, as if Demeter mourned anew for her lost daughter, Persephone. The ground froze iron hard. Birds dropped from the trees as the wind howled from the north, scattering the ships before it and bringing freezing rain that broke the trees and shrouded everything in glass. Then the snow came, blanketing a world from which all brightness had been removed. This year there was to be no Winter Festival, no holiday, no feasting, no celebration of Our Lord’s birth and the year’s turning. It was as if there could be no spring.

The only ritual my father kept was the Feast of the Epiphany, the most important date in the city’s calendar. Every year, in the Procession of the Magi, our most holy relic was paraded through the town and shown to the people. The canopied reliquary was carried by four cowled monks, with priests swinging silver thuribles, sending up white clouds to fill the frosty air with the sweet, musky smell of frankincense. Behind them came a great pageant led by my father on Pegaz, his grey stallion, caparisoned in scarlet and azure, with his guard following, their armour shining, then all the leading families, dressed in their finest.

It was always a great occasion, vivid with colour and the flash of gold and silver, but that year it was more like a funeral procession. The people watched in pinched silence as the sombre parade wound past them. There was no colour anywhere, the thuribles were stilled and even the burnished gold of the reliquary seemed as dull as tarnished brass.

The golden reliquary, studded with gems and cunningly wrought by the goldsmiths of Byzantium, holds one of the most sacred relics in Christendom: the gift of myrrh offered to the Infant Jesus by the magus Caspar. The precious substance is contained in a small silver-lidded cup of great antiquity, set with precious stones and still containing the myrrh used to anoint the body of Our Lord. It came to our country from Constantinople. It was being taken by ship to Venice when a great storm blew up. The ship was lost with all hands, but the relic floated to shore by miraculous means and was found by a fisherman. He took it to a holy man who built a church to contain the precious object and the town grew up around it.

The cup came home, for the people believe that Caspar, a learned prince, set out from somewhere along our coast and travelled east to Persia to become a magus. The relic was regarded with great awe by Illyrians, doubly identified with the founding of our country. The reliquary was processed round the city, taken to each canton, to be reverenced by the people living there, then returned to the cathedral to be opened at the appointed time when the gift was judged to have been given.

I was in the cathedral, sitting next to Stephano. We only ever saw each other in church now. The Lady Olivia did not attend. And neither did Sebastian. She took the sacraments in her room. He was either away or did not feel the need to go to church. His absences were noted. Some said he had sold his soul to the Devil. At my father’s invitation Stephano had joined us in our pew. We sat next to each other on that day, our shoulders and elbows so close that I could feel the warmth of his body through the cloth. I set my breathing to match his. We had been kept separate, but we were growing up. Our thirteenth birthdays had just passed. In Italy, girls can be married when they are fourteen. Who knew what next year would bring? I twisted the ring on my finger and looked sideways at him. A little of the gloom of the last months lifted as he smiled and touched his hand to mine. The ring almost fitted now.

That glimmer of joy did not last. I had been thinking about us, dreaming of our future, when I heard a gasp. The reliquary stood open on the altar, but the holy vessel was no longer inside. Men hid their faces. Women cried, tore at their hair and ululated as they do when someone dies. Cries of dismay and distress spread like a wave through the congregation, spilling out into the streets.

Not knowing what else to do, the priest closed the reliquary, uttering prayers and invocations. When he opened the doors, the cup was back. It was in its usual place. Wails of horror turned to sighs of relief and fervent prayers of thanks. Some swore that the cup had been there all along, but enough people were willing to take an oath that, when the doors were first opened, the reliquary was empty. Stephano and I among them. Some saw the restoration as a miracle, but I don’t see it like that. The disappearance was a warning. If it was not heeded, then the relic would be lost to us forever and Illyria with it.

If only my father had taken notice of that warning, but he did not.

A bad winter was followed by a worse spring, full of storms, drenching rain and contrary winds. Argosies went out and did not return. Freebooters and pirates prowled the seas; corsairs came from the north, from the east, from as far away as Africa. But my father did not sail out with his fleet to defeat the enemy. The families of his sailors begged in the streets while he retreated to his tower.

The Lady Olivia was never seen in public either. It was as though she and Orsin were wedded at last in their despair. Marijita visited them both, a midwife to their grief.

They were both consumed by the memory of my mother. Some might say possessed. My father was more obsessed with her in death than he had ever been in life. He was hollowed out by doubts about what had happened to her. Had she taken her own life? Had it been an accident? Was she alive somewhere? Had she contrived her own death, perhaps to turn up on some other shore, as she had done here? Was she alone in this, or did somebody help her? The questions ate into his mind like maggots burrow into flesh, allowing him no peace, no rest.

At first he was certain that she must have survived to begin a new life as someone else. He sent agents to search up and down the coast, on the islands, across the sea to Italy, as far north as Venice, as far south as Greece, looking for any word, any sign, just in case she had survived. When no news came back, he turned to other means to find out what had happened to her.

He scoured the libraries and bookshops of Europe, the bazaars and souks of the East, for obscure volumes in Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. He called in mullahs and rabbis, wise men to help him with translation, but he had picked up many languages over the years and he began to work more and more alone. He was never seen in public now.

One day I was summoned to see him in his private library high up in the Tower of the Winds. He needed a sharper pair of eyes to help him with the work. I was shocked by the change in him. His black hair had developed a white streak and was receding at the temples, leaving a pronounced peak. He’d let his beard grow, trimming and twisting it to a point, and he was dressed in black, wearing a long velvet robe over his spare frame like a doctor or a scholar. Or a wizard.

He took me into his Internabibliotheca, his secret study. The air was close. The room smelt of ink and dust, candle wax and old books. He hardly seemed to notice me. I was to be as much of an instrument as the eyeglasses balanced on his nose or the pen in his hand. He set books before me and put me to work, copying words, signs and symbols into squares and triangles drawn on to parchment. Some of the signs and symbols were mathematical, others alchemical or astrological, set against words in Latin, Greek or Hebrew. When I had finished, he took the sheet from me and pored over them. He worked with a fierce intensity, as if he could compel the page to give up its meaning, his brows drawn together in a ferocious frown. He then took my workings to a separate table, adding figures to sheets already so densely covered that they were almost black.

‘It is not madness that drives me,’ he said. ‘Whatever people say. There is a code in the words and symbols. A clavis. A key. I can use it to uncover the knowledge hidden within these texts, just as a key may unlock a casket.’

‘What is inside it – the casket?’ I asked.

‘It is not a real casket.’

I thought about that for a while and then I asked, ‘What if it contains just another key?’

‘That would at least be something.’ He gave me one of his rare smiles, his teeth white and even, and I could see a ghost of the handsomeness that had so captivated my mother when they first met. ‘There are patterns in everything, in the whole of Nature, from the way the stars turn in the heavens to the whorl of a shell or the petals of a flower and the way leaves arrange themselves about a twig. There are forces, hidden forces. If I can discover what they are, how they operate, I will have my hands upon the levers of creation and can work them myself.’

‘Creation is God’s work,’ I said quietly. ‘Man can have no part in it.’

He followed the obsessive thread of his thought as if I had not spoken. He was searching for a way to summon my mother, to call her back from the realm of the dead, and he would use any means. I worked, my hand trembling enough to bring down his wrath. What he was doing reeked of sorcery, of necromancy. I feared for him. I feared for all of us. This was forbidden. Even a duke is not above the attentions of the Inquisition. I pictured the great doom painting that covered the walls above the altar in the cathedral; vile monsters and hideous creatures busy torturing the souls who had been consigned to Hell. What if he loosed such a legion upon the world?

I tried to reason with him, but he would not listen. I was replaced by a Dr Grimaldi from Padova in Italy. He came with a trunk of books and a square leather box which contained his magical instruments. He would work with my father now.

Many thought that my father truly had lost his senses. Guards were set at the base of the tower. Urgent envoys were ignored. Letters and messages from far and near gathered dust, their seals unbroken. My father neglected everything in order to concentrate on his secret studies. Rumour began to seep and spread through the city like a foul, low-lying miasma. The sharp stench of sulphur clung to the area around the tower, along with something putrid, like seaweed left by the tide to rot in the sun. There was talk of spirits walking. Parts of the battlements went unguarded. The Tower of the Winds became known as the Wizard’s Tower, and citizens passing under its shadow crossed themselves thrice.

‘Dead is dead,’ Feste said, his thin face twisting in distaste. ‘Best to let her rest. The dead are not supposed to come back; there is probably a reason for that.’

My father was not the only one searching. One evening I was told that Marijita was waiting for me in the Evening Gallery: a long, light room painted with arcadian frescoes and panels decorated with plants and flowers, so detailed and lifelike they might be growing. It was one of my mother’s favourite rooms. The gallery faces west and gives on to the Garden of the Box Trees. The garden was still well kept, the paths raked and free of weeds, but the plants were wilting for lack of water, their leaves dusty and drooping. I found Marijita staring through the central glass doors, sealed now against the scent from the orange and lemon trees, the bushes of lavender, rosemary and sweet-smelling myrtle.

‘No one walks there any more,’ she said. ‘Ah, well . . .’

Her sigh was full of regret for times past and fear for times to come. Things begun must be finished. My presence was needed. That was all she would say.

She threw a scarf over her head as we left the palace and we hurried through the dark streets. A full moon was rising, casting the town in a cold bluish light. We crossed the Stradun and skirted an old church. We were going towards Lady Olivia’s palazzo. We took a long flight of wide steps, each one worn in the centre, the stone gleaming, polished to marble by the passage of many feet.

The palazzo stood on its own, the grandest house in a street of fine mansions. Wide balconies jutted out in the Venetian manner, each one carved with the family coat of arms. The lower windows were barred and shuttered, the huge front door closed for the night. We rang the bell and the doors were opened by Lady Francesca, one of Lady Olivia’s attendants. I knew her. She had once served my mother. She was originally from Italy and wore her fair hair pulled back from a high forehead in the fashion of her native court.

I could hear laughter, the rumble of male voices coming from the main part of the house. It was now Lord Sebastian’s domain. Lady Francesca took us away from there, up a side staircase that led to Lady Olivia’s private apartments. I had not been there since my mother’s disappearance. The rooms were dimly lit, furnished with white lilies, the mirrors covered as if for a funeral. The only spot of colour was a small, jewel-bright portrait of my mother, her eyes like dark sapphires, her pale pink cheek as translucent as alabaster. She was looking over her shoulder, her rosy lips slightly parted, caught between smiling and laughing as she swaggered in her scarlet-and-blue page’s apparel, a feathered cap upon her head.

The painting stood on a table, flanked by candles. It was cased in a small folding frame, like a portable Madonna, and I stopped to gaze, as if at a shrine.

‘That is how I first saw her. I had the portrait painted from other likenesses and from my memory of that time.’

I started as the voice came from the shadows. The Lady Olivia must have been there all the while.

‘I’m sorry.’ I curtsied. ‘I did not see you there.’

She waved a gloved hand as if it were no matter. She was dressed all in black, her face obscured by the triple layering of veils.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

As she turned, I caught the shine of her large, lustrous eyes and the livid sheen of her pale skin. We followed the rustling silk of her skirts up another flight of stairs and then another, up to the roof. Lady Olivia’s house was tall. From the top, it was possible to see over the city walls to the sea. We walked on to a wide terrace, planted with trees and flowers, bleached of colour in the moonlight, their fragrance strong.

‘Come, child,’ she said, beckoning me on. ‘Don’t be afraid. There is something I want you to see.’

The terrace was set out with a silver bowl on a tripod. Lady Francesca melted into the background as Marijita stepped forward. She took a stone from a soft leather pouch that she wore at her waist. This was the shewstone, the seeing stone that I had found on the sill in her room in the walls. She held up her arms, holding the stone up to the moon’s brightness.

Lady Olivia had been engaging in the same rites as my father but with more success. I felt my mother there. I sensed her nearness, like a cold breath. I would have turned and bolted, but the Lady Olivia had hold of my arm, her gloved hand tightening like a vice.

‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘It seems that your presence is needed.’

I was propelled forward towards the place where the silver bowl stood. It was filled with water. The moon floated like a bone counter on the black surface. Stars showed around it like a scatter of diamond dust.

‘She will come to you,’ she whispered.

Marijita lowered the stone into the water, rippling the stillness, and went to the very edge of the terrace. She raised her arms and began the Summoning: ‘Hear us, Great Hecate, Triple-faced Goddess, Mighty One, Queen of the Night, Goddess of the Pathways, Lady of the Crossroads. Hear our prayer and answer . . .’

‘Look! Look closer!’

Lady Olivia’s hissing command came to my ear as Marijita’s voice rose and fell. I clutched on to the sides of the bowl and gazed into the water past the reflected moon and caught the blue-white glimmer of the moonstone in the silver depths. As I looked and looked, moon and stone joined together and I saw something lighter than a moth’s wing moving across the surface. As I stared on, the form seemed to free itself and come floating up towards me. The water became agitated. Ripples moved in circles out to the edge of the bowl and back again until the whole surface began to bubble and roil, as if the water was coming to the boil, although the silver under my hand remained cool.

I started back, fearing that the thing would spring up into my face. Beside me, the Lady Olivia stood transfixed, her veils moving in and out with the rapidity of her breath. I looked up. The shape of a woman was coming towards us. She moved between earth and heaven, between air and water, following the broad silver path made by the moonlight across the glittering black surface of the sea. Swathed in a shining mist, her outline as yet indistinct, with each step she gained solidity. I remembered what Feste had said. Dead is dead. My mother would never walk in life again. I would never hear her voice soften in affection, or be held in her embrace, or feel her kiss, soft as a butterfly’s wing on my cheek. This was not her. This was a spirit, maybe sent by the Evil One to beguile us.

I shrank away, but Lady Olivia did not share my doubts.

‘Viola!’ she called, and started forward as if to meet her. Marijita held her from the brink and spoke in warning.

‘You may speak to her, but she may not answer. Do not on any account touch her, or she will take you with her to the realm of the dead.’

‘But that’s what I want! Don’t you see?’

She tore the veils from her face. It was if she was dead already. Her beauty had gone, eaten away by grief. The skull showed clear beneath skin as pale and dry as parchment. Only her eyes were alive, blazing out from their bony orbits, full of hunger and longing.

She gazed at the approaching figure as one long starved might look at a feast. She stepped past me. Divining what she was about to do, I put out my hand to stop her.

Suddenly Marijita was by my side.

‘Let her go,’ she whispered. ‘The dead are hungry for the living. She will take you too.’

Her hand held on to me as, between one blink and another, Lady Olivia stepped out, arms stretched towards the spectre. For a moment she seemed to walk on the air and the couple floated together, arms around each other; then one of them disappeared, as insubstantial as a bubble, while the other plummeted to earth, being made of more corporeal stuff.

There was no cry; she made no sound as she fell. I found myself listening for the muffled thud of impact, but there was nothing. Then came shouts of alarm and the sound of running feet.

In front of me, the tripod started to shake, the sides of the bowl began to quiver, the surface of the water shiver and quake. There was a deep rumbling roar which seemed to come from the depths of Hades. The whole building was moving. The shouts from below turned to screams. I struggled to keep my footing. The house shook like a toy in a giant’s hand. All around us tiles were falling, chimneys toppling. Bells began tolling, wild and spasmodic, shaken to life in the church towers.

The shaking stopped as suddenly as it had started, and there was a moment of still silence, before the air was filled with a distant, different kind of roar. I looked out to see land where all had been water. Boats lay stranded, rocks and weed gleamed in the moonlight. The sea had been sucked away, and now it was coming back to shore. We threw ourselves down as the great wave broke against the walls, drenching us with water, tossing boats up on to roofs, flinging weed to hang from balconies and fish to lie on terraces, flopping and gasping.

It was put out that the Lady Olivia had fallen, frightened by the earthquake, or had been pitched from her balcony by the force of it. But many refused to believe it. Those first on the scene insisted that she fell before the earth began to shake. Many suspected that she had taken her own life, and that her sin had made the earth to quake. Others suspected darker forces and pointed to my father’s tower, second and third finger curled tight to the palm, forefinger and little finger extended like horns in the sign to ward off the evil eye.

Lady Olivia was to be buried alongside her ancestors in the family vault beneath the cathedral, but many kept to their houses; those who dared turned their backs as the funeral procession passed them. Lord Sebastian was there, dressed in deepest sable, with every show of sorrow, although he stood to gain everything. He led the mourners, although he would not allow Stephano to attend, punishing him for something that he had done. Sebastian was growing in his cruelty. He was chief among the pall-bearers, helping to carry his wife’s coffin down into the vaults. The stone steps were still strewn with flowers from my mother’s funeral. The pall-bearers crushed the dried and withered blossoms under their boots. As they emerged, even the attending priests were white-faced and shaking. The vaults’ heavy sealing stone was quickly lowered, thudding back with such speed that it all but trapped the robe of the last to leave. The priests stood in a cluster, praying with great fervour, swinging incense and sprinkling holy water. After the ceremony, the great processional cross was moved from its normal place close to the altar and positioned above the entrance to the vault. It might have been a settling of the earth following the recent quake, but some of those who had gone under the ground swore that they had heard a great sigh, as if two lovers had been reunited, at the moment Lady Olivia’s coffin slid on to its stone resting place.

Lord Sebastian left on a sea voyage soon after the funeral. When he came back, he did not come alone.