MY father stayed with us until the last leaves had fallen from the vines, the last embers of the summer heat had cooled to a quiet umber on the hillside. Before he rode off he promised that he would take us away from the castle and that we should live in a little house of our own in the hill city where he would come often to see us so that we should never be lonely anymore.
My mother no longer wore a plain dress of woolen stuff, but laid her stitches into dresses she would wear herself. Though it was the fashion to wear brilliant colors, she chose satins the soft grey of a wood pigeon or colored like far hills at twilight, moss-green velvet, or proud brocade that matched the dried rose-petals which kept their scent through the long winter. She no longer had to cut up discarded gowns to make my clothes, but let me choose which length should be cut from the great bales and rolls, kept in their pungent wrapping and leaved in rosemary, lavender, and bergamot.
When they were finished she laid them away in a dower chest which my father had given her. It had belonged to my great-grandmother, and at each corner there was a gilded griffin, supporting the lid on their outspread wings. In the center panel there was a painting of the young Virgin kneeling before the archangel who told her she would bear the Holy Child. She wore a white coif, fine as mist, through which you could see the curve of her smooth head. Her hands were long and tapering, like magnolia buds reaching towards heaven, and the grass on which she knelt was tall with lilies.
While my mother sewed, she used to tell me how we should live when we went to Perugia.
“It is a very splendid city, far away across the plain—so far that we could not see it even if the shoulder of the mountains did not hide it from us. I was only a little older than you are, Carola, when I went there. There is a great wall round it, with many towers, and the steep streets climb up between the merchants’ houses and the palaces. There are five churches, and the bells sing together to call their people to God. We are going to have servants, as if I were a great lady, but I think that sometimes I shall pretend that we are poor again so that we can go down to the market and buy our own food. I used to do that when I was there with my mother. The people were very friendly and kind; sometimes when they had finished bargaining they would give me a flower or a bunch of grapes because they were feeling happy.”
I said, “It is two months since he went away. Won’t he be sending for us soon?”
“You mustn’t be impatient. The house may not be ready yet. Perhaps he is having a fresco painted by the young artist he told us of—you remember, Carola, the one who is working in the cathedral, I forget his name. He knows he must give me time to have everything prepared, so that my new servants will see that I am worthy to be the mother of his daughter.”
“I have been telling Mimetta that she will really have to learn to lie on a silk cushion and allow herself to be combed and scented—instead of always running away when I let her off the lead and trying to chase rats or burrow in the kitchen midden.”
“He is going to send a coach for us. I have never ridden in a coach—I wonder if it will have two mules or four?”
“Perhaps it will have six like Donna Isabella’s!”
My mother was so happy she used to sing like a brook or a bird, as if joy were her melody.
Then the messenger came from my father. It wasn’t to tell us to make ready to join him; but to say that he had been sent by his uncle on a perilous journey to Spain.
Though I often told my mother he would soon return, it was as though the chill of the future were already upon her, and I could not make her laugh anymore. I used to ask her why she was so afraid, but she would not tell me. Perhaps she thought that to put the dangers she envisaged into words would give them a stronger reality.
Maria and the other servants never spoke of my father when I was there, but sometimes when I went into the kitchen I heard them talking about him, and although they stopped as soon as they saw me, from broken phrases an image grew in my mind. I knew they thought my great-uncle had sent his nephew to Spain because it was a land of bandits and assassins, where death is a frequent guest at banquets and may be hiding behind the bed-curtains when a man thinks he is sleeping in security; and that the head of our house was jealous of my father, jealous of his brilliant youth and of the wide lands he would inherit from his mother.
That year Donna Isabella did not come to the castle, so there was no bustle of preparation, no shouting of orders or scurrying of servants, to disturb the drowsy summer months. As day after day passed with no sable messenger to warn the castle of Orlanzo’s death, Mother was reassured; she used to play with me again and sometimes I even heard her singing.
The garden and the hills were quiet with the first snow when we heard that my father was bringing a bride out of Spain. I could not understand how he could want a foreign woman when he had us; but Mother told me that though a man can have only one wife, he may love many women, though in the eyes of the Church their children are born not of love but of sin. I had been at the wedding of Celia to the falconer’s son, and I could not understand how the slow Latin phrases could change the quality of their love for each other. If it was right that they should live together in the same house because they loved each other, why did they live apart until they were married? Surely God judges His children Himself, and does not leave it to a priest to decree whether they must flock with His holy lambs or herd with the black goats of Satan. I tried to speak these thoughts, but even Mother would not listen to them, and Maria crossed herself and said I was bewitched.
The Spanish bride was the daughter of a prince and had a great dowry. I always thought of her as being old and wizened like Donna Isabella until I heard that she was only fourteen. I asked Mother what she would be like, and she said that I should never see her, because before she arrived we should have gone to Perugia. I was told that in our time men seldom loved their wives, for it was the custom to marry a woman for the size of her dowry or for some family alliance, and I began to be sorry for the little foreigner. Perhaps far away across the sea she was crying, because she didn’t want to leave her family and go into a strange country where everyone spoke a language she could not understand. I hoped my father would be kind to her so that she wouldn’t be lonely; for I knew that being lonely is so much worse than being cold or hungry, and that although she would have rich apartments and eat off gold and silver dishes, she might envy the hog-keeper’s daughter, who lived in a hut with her parents and her brothers and sisters.
My father must have realized his bride would feel strange in Italy, for with his messenger he had sent plans and foreign workmen so that the rooms she would occupy could be altered to the Spanish fashion, in which she would feel familiar. Plasterers and gilders, wood-carvers and painters, came to rebuild the apartments that overlooked the eastern terrace. The great bare rooms were made smaller, with partitions pierced by archways framed in twisted pillars with foliated capitals. The high stone groins were hidden by false ceilings of elaborate plaster or canopies of painted canvas stretched on wooden battens. Three span of oxen were yoked to each cart that brought the ocher-colored marble from Sienna. Bales of gilded leather from Cordoba came to hang in the new ante-rooms, and the deerskin rugs were stored away; for when the Spaniard came, tapestries were to be spread on the marquetry floors for her to tread on.
The foreign workmen were lodged in the granaries opening off the kitchen courtyard, where, in times of danger when the castle might have to stand another siege, grain and fodder for cattle were stored. The other craftsmen, who had come from Perugia and Sienna, hated the Spaniards, but I thought some of them were very friendly. I used to like watching a carver changing the plain wood into flowers and leaves, as if by the magic of his knife he made the dead tree blossom again. The man I liked best was Carlos the gilder. He used to let me watch him laying on the gold leaf; it was fine as cobweb, yet docile in his large hands, and he showed me how the edge of each little square must be smoothed and burnished until the cherubim and twisting vines seemed carved of pure gold.
It was April before we heard that Orlanzo and his bride were nearing Italy, and every day we thought the coach would come to take us to Perugia.
I was talking to one of the Spanish workmen, who was nailing canvas to a wooden stretcher, when I heard Maria calling for me. She was in great distress, invoking the saints and weeping noisily. She wouldn’t tell me what was the matter, but took me into the kitchen and sat me on a table while she filled a pannier-basket with food. Some of the kitchen girls and the other cooks stood round looking at me pityingly. I couldn’t understand why they were sorry for me; but as they kept on telling me not to be afraid I began to be frightened.
Then my mother came into the kitchen. She wore a traveling cloak of grey cloth and carried over her arm the red cloak, lined with squirrel fur, that my father had given me. Behind her were two men, in Donna Isabella’s livery, carrying between them a small trunk made of cow-hide with a rounded lid. They looked very stern and unfriendly, and I could see that the kitchen servants were hostile towards them.
I shall always remember that scene, as though it were a fresco on the wall of a room in which I had lived for a long time; the glare of the fire below the two kids glowing orange in the heat, and the turn-spit boy standing quite still, gaping in amazement with his greasy black hair falling over his eyes; the brilliant colors of fruit and birds’ feathers on the long table and the sharp light of the meat-chopper in Piero’s hand; the white and orange liveries of Donna Isabella’s servants, who held the little old trunk which showed the leather where the hide had been rubbed bare; and my mother standing there in her long grey cloak with the hood framing her still face.
She looked as though she were on the other side of a dream, as though she could not see the people around her but was walking all alone through the land of the sorrowful mist. I did not know what had happened, but I knew that she was very far away and that somehow I must get through into the country she was in—and stay with her always.
I jumped down from the table and ran to her. She didn’t say anything, but she held my hand very tightly. The others must have thought she was bewitched, for they shrank away from her as she walked very slowly and quietly towards the door to the courtyard.
An ox-cart was standing in the spring sunlight. I thought of the coach that my father had promised to send for us—I had been so sure that it would have six mules. There was a group of workmen by the door of the granary, and Carlos ran forward to help her step from the hub of the wheel into the cart. She smiled at him, very gently, but as if she were acknowledging the courtesy of a stranger.
The taller of Donna Isabella’s servants lifted me up beside my mother and threw the trunk after us. Maria was the only one who had followed us out of the kitchen. She was carrying the basket of food I had seen her making ready, but as she tried to give it to me he held her back, saying:
“It is Her orders that they take nothing but one trunk, and no valuables save three pieces of gold. They are to be three leagues beyond Her lands before tomorrow, or it will be—unfortunate!”
Maria screamed at him, “When Orlanzo comes back he will have you tortured for driving out the daughter of the Griffin and her mother! Tortured in a manner worthy of Donna Isabella’s household!”
The man answered, “Orlanzo himself has sent a messenger to Donna Isabella—commanding her to make every preparation for the happiness of his bride!”
The oxen moved slowly forward. We passed under the archway of the courtyard, down the steep hill to the village, and took the road to the west.
The castle where I had lived all my life grew smaller and smaller in the distance—until we couldn’t see it anymore.
I was asleep when we reached the first village beyond the lands of the Griffin. It was dark, and the narrow cobbled street was deserted. The man who had driven the cart was banging on a door and shouting to the landlord to open to him. The inn-sign, three arrows piercing a red shield, creaked in the rising wind, and it seemed a long time before we heard the bolts being drawn back.
The landlord was very fat; not with the kindly fatness of Maria’s husband, but as if he had a monstrous cruelty like the great black sow that always ate her young. I suppose he thought that we were prosperous travelers, for he told us that he would hasten to prepare his best room; protesting that although his was a small inn we should find none other so clean or well-served in the whole of Umbria or Tuscany. He said that he would show our coachman where to stable the horses. But while he was talking we heard the ox-cart turn and go back down the street.
When the inn-keeper found that we had no coach, no grooms or servants, no traveling boxes of gilded leather, his manner changed and he became surly, as if we had tried to dupe him. He accused us of having wakened him from his bed on a false errand, but when Mother showed him a gold piece he said that we could sleep on the settles by the fire. When she said that we were hungry he grumbled, but went off to the back room, which must have been the kitchen, and brought us some stew in a wooden bowl.
The settle was very hard and I was bruised by the jolting of the ox-cart. I tried to make myself believe that I was excited at this adventure; that I was a knight in a song of the troubadours, riding out to find a beautiful princess who needed saving from a dragon. I told myself this very firmly but I couldn’t help knowing that it wasn’t true. I pulled my cloak over my head, as if I were cold, so that Mother shouldn’t hear me crying.
For many days we traveled: sometimes in ox-carts, sometimes walking behind a mule-train when a friendly drover tied our trunk on one of his pack animals.
I knew that soon we should have no money, for already our last gold piece had been broken into bronze. I tried to persuade Mother to stay in some town where she could earn our lodging by doing embroidery, and I told her that I should go from house to house until I found friendly women who would pay well for her work. But when I tried to make her talk of what we should do in the future, she wouldn’t listen to me.
She used to ask me, over and over again, “Don’t you remember, Carola, how he told us we should never be lonely anymore? Why did he play this jest upon us? Was the Spanish woman an enchantress who poisoned him with love potions and put the waters of forgetfulness into his wine? Perhaps she is very beautiful and has so filled his heart that there is no corner of it that we can claim. She is there now, Carola, sleeping in the great bed of the Griffin in which you were conceived.”
Though I tried to comfort her, I couldn’t call her back into the sun. I never believed that it was my father who drove us away, I felt sure it was Donna Isabella, who had twisted his message.
Sometimes I saw a solitary horseman galloping after us down the long white road, and I thought that it was a messenger sent to summon us back to the castle, or even that it was my father himself who had come to find us. But the horseman never drew rein, and we went on our journey alone.
I think Mother was ill though she had no fever, for quite often she talked about the house in Perugia as if we had really lived there.
“Orlanzo was waiting for us when we reached Perugia. The rooms were sweet with plum blossom and flowering almond because he knew I loved them; and through the windows I could see a smooth lawn sprigged with flowers, such as our great painters spread beneath the feet of their goddesses.
“He had thought of everything for our happiness. In the courtyard there was a white mare, caparisoned in scarlet, and he was going to teach you to ride on her so that he could take you hawking with him in the autumn. He had brought you a husband for Mimetta so that there would be puppies for you to play with, and he said that even if they tore the tapestries he would not be angry—for it was all ours.
“There were scented tapers in high silver sconces to light me to bed. My skin looked very white against the red coverlet—the red he loves, the red that is vivid as sunlight shining through wine. As I lay listening for my ardent lover, I used to hear the fountain, whose living water echoed the nightingales. There was a magnolia tree under my window, and its buds, smooth as closed eyelids, bemused us on summer nights....”
I used to hear her crying in her sleep. Then she would wake and lie staring up at the ceiling, her eyes wide open but with no outward vision. She would describe her own life as if she were telling me a story....
“I thought him more than mortal, Carola. I was fifteen, Olivia the embroidress. I had been late in finishing a doublet, and when his body-servant came to fetch it there was a little square of embroidery on the left sleeve still unfinished. I dared not say that it was not ready for I might have been punished, and I hoped it would pass unnoticed in the candlelight.
“I waited till the household was asleep, and then I crept down to the little room, next to his own, where his clothes were kept. The doublet was not there, so I realized he must have dismissed his servant before going to bed and that it would be in his room. I knew his dogs would be with him and that they guarded him well; but they both knew me, for I had helped the groom to look after them when Herta, the bitch, had been ripped in the shoulder by a boar’s tusk.
“The door opened quietly. The dogs were lying by the fire; Herta woke up and began to growl, but when she recognized me she stretched out and went to sleep again. The flames were licking up from the logs and the room was warm with their light. The doublet was lying on the floor under the center window, and I had to go round the bed to reach it.
“Orlanzo was breathing smoothly as though he were in a deep sleep. I had never seen him so close before; to me he had always been the young Griffin, riding out with his falcons or jousting in the tilt-yard; a legendary figure of power and splendor like the knights that my stitches had made to live on tapestries. He looked very young, though already his beard was trimmed into a point. His skin was pale and had the sheen of polished olive wood. I picked up the doublet, and had nearly reached the door when I felt myself checked. At first I thought my dress had caught on the carving of the bed, and then I knew it was his hand that held me back.”
Then my mother’s voice would change and she would smile. It seemed that she had slipped from the sorrow of the present into a happier past.
“I shall always remember the gentle mockery in his voice as he said, ‘I was dreaming that I sat alone in the banqueting hall. Drowsy with wine I stared up at the ceiling, which was painted in my grandfather’s time, and thought how melancholy was my fate, which decreed I must sit alone under the fond eyes of goddesses and the amorous glances of delectable cherubs. Then I noticed that a little Pan, who piped the melody to which they danced, was beckoning me; and I found myself one with the painted company. The breasts of the goddesses were warm under my hands and I found that under their smiling mouths their teeth were eager.
“‘The most fair among them—I think she was Athene—was about to surrender to me the most secret, and yet the most obvious, of her delights, when you must come into my room and wake me up—make me discover myself to be couched, not in the arms of a goddess but upon a mattress stuffed with goose feathers! A melancholy ending to a muse which was fathered by the mind of a poet and suckled by two flagons of my best Falernian!
“‘Come closer, so that I can see you....Perhaps the goddesses have pitied me—for it seems that for sweet fancies they have sent me sweet flesh!
“‘Such modesty would be overplayed if you were a marchesa! Are you a marchesa? Or the shepherdess that comforted Endymion when the moon-goddess left him desolate? Be tender to me and let me quench my thirst upon your mouth. Take off your shift and let me see the moon unveiled by clouds.
“‘Forget who we are, forget to be afraid, forget that I am lord of this dismal house. Join in my dream and let us forget the dawn. We mortals act our melancholy parts, and strut, and smile, and lust, and fight, and die, thinking ourselves the last reality.
“‘Let me play Adam to your willing Eve and forget the serpent of the commonplace that poisons all our days....
“‘Listen! The songs that men think nightingales are cherubs singing, amorous and glad to watch ourselves as their apt pupils. Your hair is like a veil that shields me from the harsh light of my thoughts, which walk with me through leaden-footed years. Your thighs are lilies and your breasts are doves. I am the wine and you the crystal cup, and so, together, we shall drink to love!’”
Sometimes this memory would warm her heart as if once more she lived in its reality. At last her voice would fall away into silence and she would sleep, folded in peace.
Since I was very little, my dreams had been like the memory of yesterday, but even my mother had not believed me when I told her of them. Now that I knew she was so unhappy, I used to pray, not to Our Lord or His majestic saints, but to some little archangel who would not think my prayers too foolish for his compassion. I used to pretend that I could see him standing at the foot of my bed: he had no wings, for I knew that even mortals could fly when their bodies were asleep; his robe was blue as the morning, and his hair, luminous as the petals of a celandine, was bound to his smooth brow by a silver fillet. I told him that my mother sorrowed even while she slept, for the tears slid from under her dark lashes and no smile curved her mouth. I asked him to help me to take her to the house in Perugia, so that she could hear the fountain of which she had dreamed and walk in the early dew when the scent of herbs is strong in the air.
For many nights I talked to him, and still my mother slept with sorrow for her companion. Then I saw my archangel stretch out his arms to me; and the palms of his hands were kindliness and his fingers were strength. I got up from my bed and I felt his hands on mine, warm and living as though we were of the same flesh. He pointed to the bed on which I had lain down to sleep and I saw a child lying there, and it was my reflection.
I think this was the first time Carola knew that the body of Carola moved only because my spirit had put on this flesh: just as the leaves of a tree are still until the wind beckons them to dance.
He led me to where my mother was sleeping, and I saw that although her body lay there she did not stand beside it free and radiant, as I did, but crouched by the dead ashes of the fire in a grey shroud of grief. My companion called her by name, and at first she would not listen. Then she raised her head, and I saw that her eyes were blind.
The Shining One turned to me and said, “For you to sleep is to be born into the light, and to wake is to return into the darkness. On Earth you may walk in shadow, for there are clouds over the sun, but you will tell men that above the clouds there is warmth and beyond the darkness there is light. It may be that some will listen to you and be comforted; but there are many who will hate you and try to afflict you with their own blindness.
“Long have we known each other, upon Earth and away from Earth, under many names and in manifold disguises in the flesh and in the spirit. As Carola you have a solitary journey. But I shall be with you, until the past and the future are one.”
When I awoke, the sound of his voice was strong in my ears. And I went out into the young morning, for I wished to be alone under the sky with the memory of my vision. I felt far wiser than Carola, with a wider understanding than my child mind could compass, because I knew that sometimes in my dreams I had seen truth, and that what other people thought were fancies were the only realities.
The mist was lying on the water-meadows, shining like clouds under the sun. I stood watching a broken ant-hill, and I thought that the ants were like little priests in black cassocks scurrying about their business without knowledge of the immensity of the wide heavens. I realized why I was so unwilling to go to Mass: it was because while I was there the longing to be spoken to with divine authority was more intense than at any other time. Now I should not sorrow that this longing was not fulfilled on earth, for I could escape from the little prison of Carola’s body into the presence of the Shining One.