Yellow Dress

CLARE GAVE THOUGHT THAT night about how to get her pen back. Nikki must have slipped it into her satchel — accidentally, of course — when she put the book in there. But Clare still felt guilty about Nikki. The better person who now and then attempted to get out decided that before she called about the pen, she should try to do something in response to Nikki’s plea for help regarding the Plank Foundation. Having let the fiction of a special relationship with Sir Harold Plank grow even wilder, the paradox was that she really couldn’t call him now.

Still, she could at least call dreadful Luke Tindhall and persuade him to go along with her on the expedition to the dig. After all, he’d said she should give him a buzz. She decided she would do that, as soon as she got back from the museum.

UP IN CORTONA THERE were posters for the wedding pageant everywhere, and workmen in medieval dress were stringing lights and erecting bleachers in the piazza where the museum palace loomed. It was three days until she would see the famously philandering Italian again. If, in the meantime, some other woman had not caught his attention by throwing away a hat, a shoe, a thong … She tried to put the event out of her mind as she climbed the four flights of stairs to the museum archives.

Dr. Ruccoli had instructed her to come promptly at ten. But when she got there, “Sfortunatamente,” she was told by a man with crumbs on his magnificent moustache, “Dr. Ruccoli will not be able to be in today.” This other man had no idea that Clare had been expected — and no knowledge about the hermit’s work. He flipped through a card file, but found no listing for this hermit. He disappeared into a back room, and was gone so long that she began to suspect that a caffè corretto had summoned him to the bar across the piazza.

While she waited she studied a family tree that covered one whole wall across the room, a painting of a true leafy tree, with white name-filled little globes attached to every outstretched branch, the generations of some ancient family strung out like Christmas lights, and a helmet and sword and shield at the base of the trunk, emblazoned with the family crest.

Eventually, the man with the moustache did push back through the green baize door. As he set down three large leather-bound volumes, he told her that whoever her informants were, they had been wrong. The paintings in these rare volumes were the work of a wealthy abbot who had lived in the valley below, the Abate Mattia Monetti. Yes, a hermit of the same vicinity had played a part in the endeavour, but had been merely the abbot’s helper, his plant-collector.

The man called in an assistant to keep an eye on her, and then she heard him clattering down many stone steps to the street below.

WHAT A RESOURCE WAS here! Even though the drawings were not exceptional — a patient record done in ink, washed with colour — still, as she turned the pages it began to feel like taking hold of a kindly and responsible hand, walking with this long-ago presence through the local woods and hills, every significant plant noted, its find spot recorded. I know this man, she thought; he is someone with the same passion the best part of me has, the need to record these smallest, most fragile fleeting living things. She decided that the patient humble work really had been done by the hermit, but that he’d allowed renown to pass from him, with all else. She imagined him fleeing the royal court, leaving behind the politics, the intrigue, maybe heartbreak too. It was peaceful, wandering with him through the pages, slipping back through centuries.

But then the family tree on the far wall began to distract her. She started hearing an aristocratic gnat-like chorus, all those generations going back to valiant noble ancestors humming that she, Clare, was going to attend a historic re-enactment of a wedding in the company of one of their young ilk, and she had nothing remotely smart enough to wear. The yellow dress from the shop window on the main street drifted in, swishing around the room, skimming over the table, flaring in the dim mullion-windowed light, brushing against her then darting away. She glanced at her watch. Soon the shop would be closing for the long midday break.

SHE RAN DOWN THE narrow street towards the main piazza, shocked at herself for dashing away, for arranging to spend a small fortune, too, to have the contents of those volumes photocopied from the microfiche the museum had made, and all because of a dress that would almost surely be sold.

A voice hailed her. She caught that edge of upper-class and rough.

She knew who it was before she turned. “Clare Livingston! Halloooo!”

Luke Tindhall, standing with his arm raised, the ruby eye of the gold snake ring catching the light. He’d seen her stop. There was no use pretending she hadn’t seen him too.

No time now. Too bad.

CLARE LAID HER NEW purchases on the bed.

Imagine spending what amounted to two weeks’ salary at the lab for a linen dress so short there was barely room for it to wrinkle, a pair of spike-heeled sandals, a clutch of creamy silk panties that were little more than wisps, and a strapless bra, a marvel of Italian engineering, accented with tasty little butter-coloured flowers.

All that, and she’d blown the opportunity of helping Nikki Stockton as she’d planned, by snubbing Luke Tindhall. She flinched to think of how she’d left him standing in the middle of the piazza, with that foolish raised arm. What had her time in Italy actually been but a wrong step here, a wrong step there.

Clare Livingston, the great explorer, forever lost and scattering such a trail of bad karma that she never would be found.

AFTER A GOOD NUMBER of rings, the phone in Harold Plank’s Mayfair apartment was picked up to the rumbling of someone who might have been wakened from a siesta. Clare nearly clicked off, but when she identified herself he sounded pleased. She pulled herself together and thanked him warmly for the Brunello. She’d been meaning to write a note, she explained. She hoped he’d understand that during her first days in Italy she’d been so busy.

Good, he cut in. He certainly hoped that his man Tindhall had been helpful. He chuckled, said that as Tindhall had been ex communicado since Clare’s arrival, he’d taken that as a sign that his man had been satisfactorily showing Clare around.

The word Ankara had been on the tip of Clare’s tongue — as in, how helpful it had been for Luke Tindhall to drop off an envelope of her uncle’s newspaper articles before he flew off there. But what if Harold Plank didn’t know about his man’s trip to Ankara?

She went straight to the point instead, about the excavation at Poggio Selvaggio, the important work of Dr. William Sands, how fascinating it sounded, how she’d been invited to go up there.

Oh yes, that settlement site, Sir Harold Plank said, his tone implying, just as the Contessa Luisa di Varinieri had suggested, that this sort of project didn’t much spark his interest. But of course, he said, if Clare thought it was something Tindhall should take in, he would call Tindhall, immediately, and insist he go along.

When she’d hung up, Clare ran her finger along the phone cord, as if a clue might have settled among the coils. So what had Luke’s trip to Ankara been about? She couldn’t help an unfortunate little flip of fellow-feeling for someone who, like her, might have a slippery relationship with the truth.