The Secret Meadow

CLARE WOKE IN THE dark, rain pounding on the roof, the rush of it down brilliant copper gutters. The sound confirmed the essential understanding she’d pulled from the night of dreams where her past invaded. She could not stay here. The gift, as she’d always really known, was tainted. She’d been handed it as a test. She imagined him picturing exactly how with her greedy nature she would accept, succumb again, never get free of the twisted Möbius strip of guilt and forgiveness. She would confound him, then. When she did manage to see the lawyer, she would sell. She would give the money to her aunt. Split it with her. Resolved, she slid into deep, almost druggy, sleep.

BUT WHEN SHE THREW open the shutters to the wet morning jittering with raindrops and sparks of fire, her interior landscape started to glitter too. The tree by the window had become a jewelled tree, every leaf and twig trembling with diamond points of light, magic, like the thought of Gianni, how she had agreed to see him again.

YESTERDAY SHE’D ARRIVED HOME from Cortona to discover evidence of Marta Dottorelli’s organization everywhere. Notebooks neatly stacked on the trestle table, though Clare had left them strewn. Pencils with chew marks segregated from the others. The book about Etruscan witchcraft she had brought from Vancouver now bundled up inside a linen cloth, wrapped the way a friend in Vancouver kept her tarot cards to prevent the leakage of arcane power. Her suitcase had been delivered, and Marta had unpacked it and organized the contents in the cupboard and dresser drawers, even her awful underwear.

Marta seemed to have discovered the newspaper clippings which Luke Tindhall must indeed have left somewhere in the arbour. Clare found the manila envelope propped against her notebooks, the flap suspiciously wrinkled. Steamed and resealed?

The truth was that Clare had been too narrowly balanced on a high wire of excitement to deal with any of this yesterday. Instead, she’d searched out the giant bar of Tobler chocolate from Duty Free, settled down with the copy of Anna Karenina she’d picked up in London, and happily lost herself in the whirl of unhappy families with multiple names, diminutives, patronyms.

AFTER SHE’D SHOWERED YESTERDAY’S foolishness away, she unwrapped the book of Etruscan magic. She folded the linen cloth around the envelope holding her uncle’s newspaper articles instead, and tucked the bundle out of sight.

The book of magic came from an antiquarian shop in Vancouver, a goodbye gift from a friend. Clare had barely glanced into it, though it had inspired the direction her new book might take. Now, as she looked through it, she shook her head, wondering how much was hocus pocus. It had been written in the eighteen-hundreds by an American folklorist who claimed to have mined deep caverns of Tuscan peasant wisdom. The illustrations purported to be reproduced from Etruscan artefacts, but they held heavy overtones of Victorian faux-serious naughtiness, and the text, telling of the folklorist’s meetings with a mysterious strega in Florence, gave details of spells, for good or ill, said to have lingered from the time of the Etruscans. Extremely creepy some were, involving the skinning of cats, the killing of spiders, the blinding of lizards; ways for women to rid themselves of love rivals by making comfits of disguised menstrual blood for their rivals to eat. No wonder Marta had covered it up.

When she heard Marta enter through the kitchen door, Clare stifled the urge to hide the book. Marta came and peered over her shoulder. Clare heard that disgusted lip-popping noise.

“Boh! These are not things to meddle with, Signora! This book — who is it written by? An American? What does an American know of these things?”

“And what do you know about them, Marta?”

Marta’s hand tightened on Clare’s shoulder. But then, in another of those unsettling about-faces into kindness, “Come, Signora Chiara,” she said. “Let me look at you.” Instead, Clare found herself burying her face in her hands, hardly knowing what was wrong — maybe shreds of the night’s murky dreams still clinging, but the interior sparkling of the morning was going on, too. “Come,” Marta said again, “Come, come, come!” Clare found herself rising, a great lump in her throat, as Marta put a hand on each of her cheeks, then pulled Clare to her thin chest. “The Signora is at the moment somewhat perplessa, yes? A little lost? To come here to this strange country, to start on this big work of a new book? And missing your good uncle, too.”

She released Clare and with one of her worn hands touched first Clare’s forehead, then her chest, then either shoulder, in a blessing. “What you should do is to go down into the valley and visit the great princely tombs,” she said. “These will be useful for your research, more than books like this.”

“But —”

“Now Signora Chiara. You must listen, please.” Marta shot a stern glance at the chimney mantel where Clare had propped the painting of the poppy from the other day. “Yes, this is a fine poppy that you have painted. And perhaps you have found it growing by the roadside. Good. But you must listen when I tell you of dangerous things. It is not good to read such books as this …” she broke off and crossed herself, “And it is not good just now for a beautiful woman to wander in our hills. If you need to study the wild plants, you will please go to the museum and study the work of our hermit. The paintings are a national treasure, available to study. They have all been copied onto plastic film, the microfiche.”

Clare took a breath to protest that she had her own way of working. But Marta turned the subject back to the tombs in the valley. This was where the princes had been buried, many generations and their families, in tombs that were themselves as big as hills. They were the only surviving tombs in the area. Very remarkable. Very rare.

“What happened to all the other people then? The ordinary ones, not princes?”

“Beh!” Marta said. “What happens to us all? We live. Then we are dust.”

When Marta had gone downstairs to clean out the bathroom drains, Clare assembled her painting gear and crept out the kitchen door.

THE NIGHT’S RAIN HAD turned the stream into a torrent; even the path along the level was next to impassable. No one casually wandering by would get the idea of trying to follow such a violent flow up into the woods. It was hard and slippery going. Clare had to beat her way through the thicket along the side, clinging to bushes and alder branches for support. But, when she finally emerged from the trees, the meadow was a bowl of steaming light, brilliant with the glitter of millions of little flowers holding drops of water at their centres. Millefiori, she thought, remembering that chandelier.

But I am not thinking of you now, Gianni DiGiustini, she thought as she made her way over the spongy grass. I’m not thinking of the expression on your face when you looked in my car window. Probably it’s what makes your type so irresistible, that you actually feel such joy with each new woman, that you can pass along that gorgeous malady, fatal to others but never to you. If you cross my mind today I will simply wave you away, as one is supposed to in meditation when thoughts of any sort come up.

She caught sight of a patch of Cistus growing on a nearby rocky slope, picked her way across the soggy meadow, scrambled up. The tissue-delicate flowers were like little rosy gifts that had just come unwrapped; their yolk-yellow centres glowed. She settled on a flattish rock. She breathed in the smell of grass and stones and bushes warmed by the sun. She set to work.

FOR THE NEXT DAYS, Clare was careful to dodge Marta’s watchful eye as she made her escape to the upland meadow. She knew it was ridiculous to sneak around, and also to lock away the new paintings in the sideboard, pocketing the key. But Marta’s presence was so very present. It seemed impossible to reach a clear understanding about a set routine. Yes, yes, yes, Marta told her, she had come to Signor Geoffrey every second day. Yet these days varied. Clare never knew when Marta would turn up, to begin all over again the sweeping, cleaning, scrubbing that she had done the time before. Niccolo, too, was always somewhere about, working in the olive groves or dropping by the kitchen door with offerings of eggs from his chickens, cheese from his goats, early lettuce from his orto. It seemed churlish to chafe under all this hard work and largesse.

One morning, after several days of such hide-and-seek, as Clare again started up to her secret meadow — that was how she thought of it now, her secret, hers — she had not gone a hundred yards when she encountered Niccolo.

Where was the Signora going?

The Signora lied that she was trying to bushwhack her way over to the town; hadn’t a trail led around the end of the little valley from here once, connecting this slope to the town? Only for the cinghiali he growled. Only for wild boars and porcupines and foxes.

But then his knotted sentences took on a kinder tone. He said he had been on his way to find her, to share some of his concerns: the need for a new cultivator, the problem of finding help with the harvest when no one in Italy wanted to work anymore except the Albanians and Poles. He guided her back through the gate and up into the terraces of olives, while he explained where rock walls needed repair and new planting needed to be done. The roof of the tool shed needed replacing.

Clare was alarmed, but ashamed too, that she’d been living in a bubble of her own dreaming creativity and had thought of none of this. She admitted that she had no idea what her finances were. She would have to wait until she could see the lawyer.

Ah, but the Signora was not to worry too greatly, he said, his tone switching into one of consolation; he and Marta had given their entire lives to the care of the property so that Signora Chiara could inherit the good fruits of the land that they, Niccolo and Marta, with their four hands — he held out his gnarled ones — had long assumed the responsibility of attending. He continued to steer her uphill, telling her many things. She gave up trying to understand, just walked with him in the sun and let the deep rumble of his voice wash over her. When they reached the tool shed he gestured to a stone bench, invited her to sit, brought out a large green bottle, two mugs, a round of bread, which he cut with a machete, holding the bread against his chest. Then he turned the implement on a wedge of pecorino cheese, and shared his morning snack with her.

DURING THOSE LONG DAYS (while in the offing the wedding pageant glittered, and Clare’s veins still buzzed with sparks), if she was not painting, she wandered among the hillocks at the base of the horseshoe cliff, examining the mounds that became more and more tomblike under her attention. She poked here and there among the bushes for possible ancient entrances. Sometimes she stretched out in a grassy spot on top of one particular hillock with her ear to the ground, imagining a chamber underneath containing carved funeral beds, the soft whisper of the grass persuading her that she was overhearing ancient dreams rustling among treasures that some long-ago woman had selected to accompany her to the afterlife: a bronze mirror so she could keep her looks, its reverse side engraved with a mildly salacious scene from myth to amuse her on her travels, and at her bedside one of those linen books which Luisa di Varinieri hoped to come upon, the prized possessions of a woman convinced she could take it with her. And who, in fact, for several thousand years, had managed to do just that!

The meadow’s botanical abundance was another enigma. Clare came upon plants with variations she could not identify, even in her Italian wildflower book. She began to dream that this upland meadow might be a refugium of sorts, sheltering plants once nurtured by an ancient civilization and then gone wild. Around the tomblike mounds asphodel grew, famous in myth as food for the dead; but these buds presaged uncommon blood-red blooms. Star of Bethlehem clustered around the base of those hillocks too, but with variegated petals, a firmament of little gold-and-white stars shooting from bulbs that might be plump with ancient secrets.

Her painting became unorthodox — sometimes as if she were taking wing, seeing the meadow the way a bird might, or a butterfly, a mosaic of shapes and colours, of grass and diminutive flowers, yet always with the botanical details correct, other times settling very close, making compositions that were more like patterns, massed starry blooms rising out of a mesh of leaves, or white spikes angling in lank disorder, or the fragile tissue-paper glory of pink rock roses linked and overlapping one another, and then the dark tunnels that opened through the tangle of stems, and a crosscut depiction of the layers of soil beneath, through mulch and subsoil and stony ground, where the roots and bulbs lived, and the hair-like filaments that probed and sustained underground life that was electric with the further story she imagined.

Her imagination dwelt on the further story.

When she paused and looked up through the screen of trees towards the town, she no longer acknowledged the ruined Medici fortress at the top. Instead she saw sun flaring on a temple with a gilded roof, towering with ancient gods. She saw a funeral cortège winding down from the city and along a narrow road, then up the route that had long since become a stream. She heard the blast of curved trumpets, then the sweeter music of the flute players as they led the way. Pretty girls strewed the path with flowers. A covered wagon pulled by white oxen carried the dead one. Young men followed in chariots, ready for the funeral games.

IT WAS NEARLY SUNSET when she returned home after another day of such buoyant work and dreams. Marta had left her a pot of soup simmering; amazingly heartening, the iron taste of roadside weeds. No one had ever cared for Clare this way.

Still, as had become habit, Clare locked away the sheaf of her newest drawings. Not that there would be any chance of Marta being deluded as to what she’d been up to. But the work represented something at once so promising and fragile. She felt it could not bear the scrutiny of others.

Clare stood for a long time, looking around the beautiful room, pondering the other enigma: that nothing had lodged here of torment or guilt, which surely her uncle must have felt, guilt and twisted anger, or he would not have framed the bequest that way. The walls sheltered her. The little winds rustled in the chimney of the fireplace and whispered of how the hearth would warm her in the winter. The shutters promised to restrain the summer sun, promised that as the days went by she would feel more and more easy in this house, the excitement of the painting she’d been doing helping her to accept that it was right for her to be here. The house held no vibrations whatsoever of what might have gone on here when he came up from Rome.

Marta didn’t know what he’d done in Rome, something for that big American paper, yes, and it must have been important because he had an apartment on the Piazza Navona too.

Did he drive here? Clare had asked yesterday, hoping to lead to the question of the Lamborghini. Marta had shrugged as if to say, What did Clare imagine? That he flew? Several times Clare had tried to ask about the car. Marta always looked blank. She and Niccolo did not have time to think of Signor Kane’s cars; he rented them, perhaps. If they were blue, green, yellow, it was all the same to her. But yes, he did come here often. It was noisy in Rome. He liked to come here, where he could think. He liked to tramp the countryside, getting himself far too tired, “… looking for our little treasures. Though naturalmente those treasures have been all gone long ago.”

YESTERDAY, MARTA TOLD CLARE a story, while she was taking down all the dishes from the kitchen shelves and washing them with baking soda and putting them back, plates and bowls and mugs made by a local pottery she said, with a design of a castle on a hill.

“In the old days,” Marta said, throwing her rag into the sink, “before your archaeologists tramped over everything, we who lived on the land did sometimes find things in our fields. My Nonna’s fiancé uncovered, once, a beautiful jewel, a scarab, with his plough. He gave it to my Nonna when they became betrothed. And just before Nonna died she promised it to me.”

Marta found a tube of glue and began mending a broken cup she’d discovered at the far back of the top shelf, giving Clare a look suggesting that she might have been the one who’d broken it.

“But then the priest came,” Marta said. “He saw the scarab lying on the table by the bed, and he made my Nonna give it to him, saying it was important for the archaeologists to study. He would have to give it to the museum. He told poor Nonna this was for the safety of her soul.”

Marta set the cup on the windowsill with a warning look that it should be left there.

“So you see what all your archaeologists have done,” she said. “Digging everywhere with their little spoons, making us thieves for what we find even on our own land!”

She turned her attention to the sink itself, pouring in baking soda, then vinegar, setting off an eruption.

“Your uncle would not listen. He would tramp the fields in every weather, Madonna! If not for that perhaps he would be with us still. From the first I told him after all those years of archaeologists swarming, our poor fields were left with no treasure.”

THE ENVELOPE OF NEWSPAPER clippings that Luke Tindhall had brought still rested in a drawer of the sideboard, safely wrapped in the linen cloth. Harold Plank had been the one to tell Clare that under that pen name of Fufluns, Geoffrey Kane had set himself the project of tracing the footsteps of George Dennis, the nineteenth-century author of Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria.

Fufluns, she thought, as she stared at the black shape of the Medici fortress against the sunset. As always when she returned from the meadow, her head buzzed with questions about what might lie beneath the maddening hummocks in the field. There was no one she could safely ask.

Fufluns.

Why had he chosen that for a pen name? The Etruscan Dionysus, god of plenty and of too much plenty. The god of madness, drunken revels. The god of possession, whose stare was said both to bind and to release.

A few lights down in the valley winked through the dark, as she returned to the sideboard for the manila envelope. She slit it open.

SPREADING THE CLIPPINGS on the table, she hardly dared read them. Might his writing give back his voice to her? Might he have written all of this with her in mind over the years, words erasing the memory of girl as specimen on a slab, ugly and inevitable, a thing literally spoiled? Might he have resolved something in her favour when he chose to become that complex god?

But this stuff was dry. The articles were a gloss on George Dennis’s work — and not very well done, she decided.

He had woven in his own observations, yes, and brought the reader up to date on new discoveries at the burial sites and changes in the cities, quoting George Dennis often, at the same time tailoring his prose to a sort of stiff approximation of Dennis’s style. But where was the heart of the man who had dreamed all his young life of making just such an exploration?

Tindhall had organized the clippings with the most recent on top. Clare fetched the one that Anders Piersen had pressed into her hand, and saw it was the same as the one Tindhall had marked with a star.

“Happy the man who with mind open to the influences of Nature journeys on a bright day from Cortona to Perugia!” my guide George Dennis informed me, as I continued in his footsteps one recent day. “He passes through some of the most beautiful scenery in all-beautiful Italy, by the most lovely of lakes, and over ground hallowed by events among the most memorable in the history of the ancient world. For on the shores of ‘the reedy Thrasymene,’ the fierce Carthaginian set his foot on the proud neck of Rome …”

Odd, but when he quoted directly from his source, her uncle’s own presence came back to Clare with a queer stab of revulsion and joy. The smell of pipe smoke on his Fair Isle sweater, the feel of that sweater on her cheek and those rainbow colours as she half-closed her eyes and let the big words fly over her and breathed in uncle smells of safety and exclusiveness. But Dennis’s familiar prose was followed by Fufluns’s stilted faux-Victorian style:

Setting my own foot on a route almost in view of that broad expanse of water, I came upon a stretch of paving, all but overgrown.

Now it is not uncommon to come upon patches of Roman road; however, examples of Etruscan roads are a great deal rarer. Hence my interest on discovering — on this now-untravelled slope — a short stretch of paving unmistakably Etrurian in nature, judging both from the size of the stones and the widespaced grooves, characteristic of those marks left by centuries of funereal traffic through the necropolis at Cerveteri …

Clever though. Clare had to shake her head. The “stretch of paving” must certainly be the stones Luke Tindhall had taken her to see. Her uncle would have known of it for years. It was right on his place after all. Yet he’d saved writing of it until the very end. To stir up exactly the likes of Luke, snooping on behalf of the likes of the Plank Foundation?

I look forward to describing more fully, in a longer publication, evidence that this discovery indicates a major polis in these same hills. If so, one can be certain of burial places nearby. For without exception Etruscan burial places are to be found within sight of the nearby settlements, at a lower level, allowing a strong sense of connection between the cities of the living and the dead.

Yes, but how ironically misleading. For the “major polis” was of course not some undiscovered city, but Cortona itself. She imagined the dry pleasure he might have taken in feeding this clue to all those academics who had been condescending about his work, hoping to send them tramping eastward searching the hills directly above “reedy Thrasymene.”

Or had it all been intended mainly for her?

Seek and ye shall find.

Maybe he’d imagined her to be far more cosmopolitan than she was, that she actually read the International Herald Tribune or The New York Times. Was this the way he’d finally hoped to speak to her? A breeze stirred the wisteria vine outside. Who had he been then, the man who wrote these dry pieces, which all the same had got the academics buzzing?