Sky Black as Pearl

TONIGHT A MAN WHO believed in unicorns would take Clare Livingston to a wedding that had happened seven hundred years before. Clare repeated that sentence to herself as the small pot of espresso hissed. She would regard the evening with Gianni DiGiustini as just that: unbelievable, a loophole in time. A reprieve from the debacle of the day before, her attempt to do one good deed having backfired, Luke and William surely firm enemies now.

Not to mention the business of the bead.

Tiny artefacts were misplaced all the time on digs, she tried to reassure herself. Surely the theft of such a thing could be judged tiny on the grand scale of personal larceny, or the larceny of nations for that matter: whole continents taken over, pilfered, treasure appropriated by other nations, or melted down. It was ridiculous to keep having flashes of an alternate reality in which she stole it. She had never in her life stolen any inanimate object. Of course she had appropriated a large chunk of a continent, she realized; but still it was ridiculous to keep feeling, right through her gut, the beadness of a bead — to feel how even a tiny act of theft can leave the thief hollowed through the centre the way a bead is. To recall how snugly the bead had nestled between her heartand fate-lines, to feel weakened by such a near-escape.

In the end there was only one way to put all that out of her mind, and calm her jitters about the coming evening.

AS SHE STARTED UP the creek, preoccupied still, she slipped on a mossy stone. Half in water, half on the verge, with her nose almost buried in the ferny streamside growth, she caught a flash of purple and gold. A tiny plant was unfurling there, something like a woodcock orchid, yet nothing she had ever seen in life or in any illustration. In the excitement of once again coming upon something most unusual, everything else went out of her head. She scrambled to clear herself a nest among the ferns. She imagined herself approaching the orchid’s capture with a kind of reverent stealth. As she drew it to her paper in a net of lines, then embarked on a thrilling struggle to achieve the dark purple-brown of the curling petal, the way that it faded into Renaissance gold — to depict the hair’s-breadth stripes at the base of the petal — the sense came over her again that was richer than anything she knew. She thought, When I am doing this, I am true. She made a vow.

WHEN SHE RETURNED TO the house there was hardly time to bathe and change. Storm clouds were bunching in the west. She shivered in the skimpy yellow dress, with no suitable wrap to cover its spaghetti straps. Then she remembered the shawl on the low table behind the fireplace chair, where the ugly lamp wired to the bronze she-wolf lurked. There was no time to ponder whether the cloth would be stained or ripped. She heaved the chair aside, tipped the heavy statue one way and the other, to inch out the cloth from underneath. The table lid angled dangerously when the statue slid to the edge — then slapped back down onto its squat cubed base.

The cloth was undamaged, beautiful. It wrapped around her shoulders in a shimmering silk cocoon of gold and blue and plum. She put everything back in place, hurried to tidy the room, the beautiful room, feeling a flush of pride. He will see how I live, in this beautiful room.

The painting of the orchid rested on the table, still damp, propped on her portable easel.

THE LAND ROVER PURRED so quietly that if Clare had not been hovering by the window she wouldn’t have heard him arrive.

There he was.

He closed the door of the vehicle with barely a click, bounded up her stone stairs with such a light step, shining hair floating and settling. He was wearing dark silk cotton pants and a shirt of the same blue, and a white linen jacket loose over his shoulders. When she came to the door his look of gladness was so intense that she could hardly breathe. She backed away. “Oh hello! I’ll just go and get my wrap.” In the bedroom, in the mirror, she thought her pale un-madeup face did catch the light in a way appropriate for a woman setting out with a man who traced his family history back to some tragic tale of love and suicide in medieval times. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders. The beads on the fringe gave off tiny music and the colours of the antique cloth seemed fitting.

But when she went back into the other room, he was polite, correct, preoccupied.

He took the key from her, closed up the double doors to the arbour, and took her arm so she wouldn’t twist her ankle on the stone steps in her teetering shoes. In the car he turned an unsettling look on her, somehow both amused and sad — as if even before they’d started out she’d failed some silent test. The dress? Would his famous dangling ancestor have disapproved? Could this even be why the girl flung herself from the tower? Not out of foiled love, but in a flash of precognition at how the family reputation for bella figura would eventually be so shamed? I must not be at all how he remembered, she thought. She studied his hands on the wheel as he steered gently around the many turns down the hill — the slim gold wedding band, of course: no other jewellery, just the ring and the watch, and on his right hand a white scar along the middle finger. She recalled Luke Tindhall’s rough-handling the wheel, the ruby ring winking.

“So how are your unicorns doing?” she said after a too-long period of silence. “Were they glad to see you?”

Again his quizzical smile. “Clare Livingston! You are very beautiful tonight, if I may say. And even more to me a mystery.”

A little late for that.

“I take it the unicorns are okay. And you? You’ve had an okay few days, too?”

“I have spent some time both very interesting and also very disturbing,” he said. He smoothed a hand across his forehead, as if the disturbance was still there.

He said he’d wished she could have been with him to meet his Romanian friend Radu Radescu, the ethnobotanist, who had dropped by on his way back from a trek through the Amazon which had revealed how — even since Clare’s extensive travels, it seemed — vast depredations were going on, the forest receding under ever-newer threats.

That was terrible to hear, devastating. Yet she’d so hoped not to get into a discussion about the Amazon tonight. She was silent.

Gianni was saying that Radescu’s trek had taken him up the river Jari and over the Serra Tumachumac, then through to Roraima and into Venezuela, where he had climbed into that lost world that Clare had written about so well.

Yes I did, Clare thought.

This had been largely because she already knew Gianni’s friend Radescu. She had interviewed him at length by phone, using one of her handy aliases, after Radescu had returned from a previous trip. Radescu had written about the use of yage and other hallucinogenic plants among the tribes, of the brilliant whirling spiritual universe the participants of such rituals entered; he’d written as well of the vast unwritten botanical pharmacopeia such threatened tribes had once possessed. When, in turn, she wrote about the loss of botanical knowledge, and the more recent near extinction of the tribes themselves, she’d been disconsolate. It was shaming that here, now, selfishly, she was wasting her sorrow on the way this evening was likely to turn into a perilous game of hide-and-seek.

Gianni gentled the car through the maze of walled lanes at the bottom of her hill, and again she couldn’t help thinking of Luke Tindhall’s rough driving. At least there had been none of this you are even more a beautiful mystery stuff.

And yes, she’d written an entire chapter on the wonders of trekking into the lost world atop Mont Roraima, where she’d come upon her remarkable Circaea Livingston Philippiana in the spray of Angel Falls. She’d taken particular delight in writing of that area because when her husband returned from his trip through those parts, the article he’d published in Botany Today had been full of footnotes and convoluted academic jargon, almost incomprehensible.

GIANNI DROVE THEM STRAIGHT to the Piazza Garibaldi. He pulled into a space that said No Parking. The policewoman put a ticket underneath his windshield wiper and they exchanged a solemn double cheek-kiss, he and this comely agent of the law. He took Clare’s arm and guided her along the street towards the main piazza.

Everybody knew him. This, at least, was the same as before. The man from the grocery store doffed a triangular hat with a long feather. The secretary from the lawyer’s office, now wearing a high and noble turban trimmed with pearls, sedately grabbed him by both ears. Was he asking himself what he’d got into, walking arm in arm with a woman in an outfit not even an Italian could pull off — the dress that was far too short, the sandals she could hardly walk in, the whole ensemble topped off with a table cloth?

He guided her up the narrow passage leading to the next piazza. After a bit of back-slapping with a man in monk’s garb collecting tickets, he led her into the stands, though no ticket came into view. He guided her towards the section where the seats had cushions.

The great medieval stone palazzo loomed across the square, black against a sky that had turned deepest indigo. Beyond a roped-off area, the entire piazza swayed with a crowd so thick that the coloured garments and oval faces had a wavering pointillist effect. Music faded and swelled as bands approached from different directions through the surrounding spaghetti strands of streets. Small white lights flickered on, outlining the name of the Savings Bank of Florence on the crenellated building next to the grand palazzo. Trumpets sounded. The woman from the leather shop, Petronella, walked into the piazza wearing doublet and hose and a long-feathered hat. At her signal, the palazzo doors groaned open. Half a dozen horsemen skittered out on mouthy steeds. Little drummer boys emerged.

GIANNI BEGAN EXPLAINING, IN a careful travelogue sort of way, that seven hundred years ago the occasion would have linked not just two noble families, but two cities — as was the custom in those days, such alliances frequently forged by marriage. Clare was squeezed close to him, now that the seats had all filled. He gave off a crisp woody sort of smell that reminded her of how this morning, at the streamside, she’d slipped and buried her nose in green foliage. She wished she was back there, doing something she understood. She remembered how when she was painting the orchid she had made a vow: how she’d had a flash of the unique self that was her, how everything she looked at, all around, was something only she saw in just that way, and if she could cleave to the quiet business of recording that, she would be true.

She had left the painting on the table imagining that when Gianni came, he might see all those things about her in it. He hadn’t even given it a glance.

He was being so careful, courteous, explaining how the town was divided into five sections, represented by the five groups of musicians that had come together in the square, each with costumes of different sets of colours; but his discomfort loomed out of him like a separate gargoyle presence, shadowing her enjoyment in this spectacle completely. How could another person do that to you, how could you let them, why should it be so hard to shake that shadow off?

More trumpets. At last the bride and groom emerged, the bride’s horse rearing, circling, threatening to trample the long train of her white dress as it trailed across the stones, until the groom — very like a real groom, young and resolute and confused — sprang from his horse and helped the girl down. The two of them walked forward leading a solemn retinue, including small costumed children looking important and proud.

And no matter what, it was beautiful, serious, believable; not just a pageant put on for tourists, Clare thought, but holding some far deeper meaning for the town. She wished she was here on her own and could enjoy it, without this fine-smelling man glowering beside her.

When the marriage vows had been exchanged, celebrations began: a performance which in the old days would have been a night-long romp, as Gianni dutifully explained. Flag bearers sent shadows swooping over the palazzo walls like giant moths, tumblers rollicked, acrobats swung whirling balls of fire. A chorus of lute-shaped girls sang madrigals. Finally, with the lights still low, a flock of very little girls in white dresses came sweetly down the stairs of a palazzo at the side, playing recorders; a flock of intense little angels.

The battlements were glittery through the rainbow of Clare’s lashes when the piazza suddenly flared up with light.

AS THEY MADE THEIR way down from the stands, the claxon of an ambulance sounded across the square. People squeezed between them in the rush to see what was going on. Gianni turned and gestured that he thought he was needed over there.

She went back and sat down. The crowd thinned, the ambulance left, she didn’t see him anywhere.

When she finally did catch sight of him, he was deep in conversation with a woman on the far side of the piazza. His sister, Clare realized as her vision cleared after the first flush of pique. Federica seemed to be giving him a piece of her mind. Her cap of short black hair bobbed and glistened in the flood lights like a furious black beetle, while he stood with his hands spread, palms wobbling up and down, as if weighing what she said. He turned to walk away. She caught his sleeve.

Was Federica upset because she had spied Gianni with a woman not his wife? Surely she was used to that by now.

So was it because she’d seen him with Clare?

Suspicions swooped in then, huge and winged, like the shadows the flag bearers had sent swooping over the palazzo walls, suspicions so dramatic they were almost enjoyable. What if this was about the property dispute? What if Federica was so intent on that because she knew about the hillocks in the meadow? Indeed, what if Federica and Gianni were actually involved in the illicit activities that Inspector Cerotti had talked about? Hadn’t he said that tombaroli could be anyone?

She saw Gianni reach for Federica’s cigarette and drop it and grind it out, saw him lean in and tilt her chin, bend to kiss her, then whisper something in her ear.

“OH HELLO,” CLARE SAID when Gianni finally joined her. “No one died, I hope.”

Silence. Oh God, maybe somebody had died. But he shook his head. He said that an old friend, the local grocer, had suffered an attack, yes, but the medics said he would recover. It had been a reminder, he said, that life was very short. “We must not give it too many complications.”

Clare said she’d drink to that.

He gave her a close look, that sad smile.

He sat down beside her. Then stood again.

“I have been guilty,” he said. He knocked his forehead with his fist. His wedding band caught the gleam from the string of lights advertising the Savings Bank of Florence, and she thought, So now he’s going to confess that he has a wife.

When he sat back down she concentrated on the remarkable shine on his woven leather shoes, though the shoes themselves were not new shoes, in fact they were very well-worn — maybe ancestral shoes, passed down through all the generations since some ancestor had beaten swords into ploughshares in Bologna? One thing she knew: it was not the wife who shined those shoes. The wife would be too busy running the family business, wasn’t that what Federica Inghirami had said that night at Farnham’s? “I have had to call Eleanora to say, ‘Please do not make me have to tell you that just because you run the family business, you do not run all our lives.’” Clare liked that turn of phrase. Don’t make me have to tell you that I don’t give a damn about your wife, she’d say when he confessed.

He cleared his throat. “When I came to collect you, I could not help noticing the watercolour painting on your table. The little orchid.”

“Oh that!”

“The painting is very unusual indeed.”

Unusual. He’d hated it. She’d wanted him to see it. And he’d hated it.

Something wobbled on the edge of this, though. Maybe the mention of her painting was just to distract her, in case she’d seen him plotting? Could there be any doubt that he and his sister had been plotting? Look at his nervousness as he crossed his legs, uncrossed them, rapped his knuckles against that protruding chin.

“I have never in truth seen one like that,” he said. “Not with that particular striped lower petal, the exaggerated twisted tongue, those colours.”

“Yes, I was thrilled to come across it,” she said, recognizing how important it was not to let him know where she’d come across it.

“Do you think you have discovered, perhaps, another new species?”

She laughed. “New species? No. It was discovered centuries ago.” She gestured towards the palazzo across the square. “I found it growing in the museum archives, in the volumes of those wonderful old botanical paintings. The librarian kindly made me photocopies of all three volumes.”

He smiled. He said that he too had spent many hours with the remarkable collection, though strangely had missed that particular example. He said that perhaps soon, together, they might track down the true living specimen, where it still grew.

She looked away, embarrassed for him now, for such a transparent attempt to inveigle his way onto her fenced-off property, onto her upland meadow. Surely that was what this was all about.

“But this is terrible,” he said, springing up again. “For me to invite you here and then to have left you on your own for so long! Come, we must have some refreshment.”

IN THE CENTRAL PIAZZA all the tables were full. But the waiter in front of the Bar Toscano saw them coming, whipped a tray of crockery from a service table just outside the door, pulled out a chair for Clare. Gianni clapped him on the shoulder. After a few words together the waiter went off smiling, saying, “Ah, sì! Sì sì sì si!”

How, in just the short passage from one piazza to another, had Gianni managed to transform back into the man she’d spent a week having fantasies about? He leaned towards her and, with a kind of gleeful intensity that made her feel she was in an unsafe vehicle at top speed, started telling her a convoluted story she only half got, about a botanist he’d studied under, who had been a student of the famous Cappelletti.

He pretended to be astonished that she didn’t know of Cappelletti, the former head of the Botanical Gardens in Padua, the oldest in Europe. He said that he too had worked at those gardens in Padua for a time, when he’d finished his studies. That was before — a pause in the rush of words — before other things drew him away.

Then a look of sadness winged across his face. “Cappelletti’s watchword, you must understand, has been ‘In nature you must never wear blinkers.’ This has been the most important lesson in my life. Though it has been hard.”

The waiter returned to set down tall, cone-shaped glasses brimming with a pale liquid that gave off a medicinal smell. Gianni raised his glass. He said, “Cheenarrrr.”

Clare said, “Cheenarrrr to you.”

He laughed, and wrote the spelling of the drink on a paper napkin, after catching the waiter’s eye and ordering two more. Cynar. A very healthful liqueur, he insisted; brewed by monks, from artichokes.

She took a sip of the pale liquor. It slid down with such monkish reassurance that she took another.

“You must understand,” Gianni said. “Cappelletti was a man of insatiable curiosity! This has led him, for example, to his remarkable discovery regarding the life systems of resin fungi. And then —” Gianni threw up his hands, “By cultivating the species, Cappelletti was able to show that the organism does not utilize the elements of the resin itself to live, but rather its impurities!”

She caught a woman at a nearby table wondering what the handsome Italian could possibly be saying to captivate his companion. Clare wanted to laugh; if she’d had another hat, she’d have thrown it away, too, just to have the incomprehensible dissertation about resin fungi go on and on. The sky against the town hall tower was black as pearl. The piazza was lit up like a stage, groups of people gathering, gesturing, embracing, drifting into new groups or strolling from the scene. An opera. Someone should burst into song. A balcony jutted from the building above, entirely suitable for Juliet. Now the intense young man across from Clare was insisting she must come with him to Perugia. His mentor, the student of Cappelletti, alas, was no longer there; but it was essential that she visit this Orto Medievale, this refuge of medicinal plants in the monastery of San Pietro.

“You will like it there much,” he said. “When I returned, after some years of living a life where I was not at all engaged, when I sat within the walls of that monastery and breathed the exhalations of the healing plants and listened to the sound of bees, I understood I could no longer pretend to live one life and dream another. This was when I decided I must take all my best energies to save what I could of this earth’s things. I know that when you walk through this place, when you follow the intricate philosophical paths that have been laid out, when you breathe the healing air, you also will find yourself in the centre of the truth of your own life.”

The truth of her own life. She felt a prick of warning. But he leaned forward with that wind-rushing intensity. “You see, it is essential to believe that we are not bound up in the chains of the past, that our planet does not have to plough like an ocean liner ahead to its own destruction, that we can take the reins again, stop the chariot. That each one of us holds the golden key to our own lives!”

“My goodness.”

“Do you think I am extreme?”

She laughed. “Heavens, no.”

“Yes of course I am,” he said. “I am a fool tonight, hardly knowing what I am saying, because I have decided I must tell you a thing I have not dared so far.”

She bit her lip. Couldn’t he just go on talking about resin fungi? But his frown was resolute.

“Ever since I have read your book,” he said, “Yes, more than once — for it was sent me by a colleague in the States — I have been fascinated with your paintings which are so proficient, so beautiful. Some much more than that. Some so full of life that it is possible to hear the rush of it bursting through the stems and leaves. I have been intrigued by how work so praiseworthy for its botanical accuracy might also be said to be infused with your dreams.”

So it was going to be a night of hide-and-seek after all.

But not a game. Not for her. If he knew Radescu, he knew everyone. He could kill her book and all she’d foolishly hoped it might accomplish.

“And in particular,” he persisted, “the remarkable nightshade which bears in part your name, which was growing, you tell us, in the spray of the Angel Falls.”

“Right.”

“Allora.” The long scarred finger reached up to touch his eyelids; first one, then the other, so they closed, as if only in the dark he had the courage to say whatever he was intending. She longed to close her eyes, too; to make this stop, or turn it into something else; the way she had closed her eyes when her uncle touched her, when she had managed to pretend he loved her. In the piazza people were jostling, laughing, joking. A labourer went by with a barrow. The man dressed all in red whom she’d seen on her first morning here was now trying to shove a bundle of hangers into a bucket far too small.

Gianni looked up.

“Ever since then, I have longed to meet the woman who so eloquently has brought attention to one of the planet’s most endangered and most essential places.” He grabbed a fist of hair, as if to pull free the difficult words. “And now, since I have met her, and since I have come to know what a fine person Clare Livingston truly is — and then, tonight, when I have seen an example of how she may intend to use her extraordinary talents to present the flora of my own country — I have at first been taken aback, I must confess. But now I realize — as I said earlier — how it is foolish to make unnecessary complications …”

Such a sad, pleading expression; as if she could easily rescue them both from those complications, and free him from this embarrassment, by just admitting that her beguiling nightshade had been a fake. Surely she’d have the good grace to do him that little favour.

She had balanced long on the ledge of pretence. She was so tired from balancing there. Was it possible that there was someone who could see right through her, and not judge and condemn? She picked up the glass of monkish liqueur. It, too, urged confession.

What a fine person, he’d said.

But once confession started, where would it stop? If she opened the tiny door it would all come out, her entire life of lies, lies concocted to cover other lies. Even to the child psychiatrist she’d lied; inventing more and more to keep him happy and intrigued. But this man, she saw, with his sad, beautiful amber eyes, was the one who might really trick her into true confession. And then what would be left of her? She glimpsed a splayed faceless flattened figure, like those outlines drawn on sidewalks after a shooting.

She took another sip of the liqueur, which seemed prepared to argue on her side now. Who could ever prove your illustration was false, it whispered through the grill of the confession box. For yes, the terrible big truth was that even species that no one had yet seen were dying out. It was entirely possible that her Circaea Livingston was the very last of its kind. She felt tears spring to her eyes at the thought that no one would ever come upon another!

Yet Gianni was pressing on, this relentless man who insisted that she confess her sins — no doubt because it would make him feel better about his own?

“So now I must ask you,” he was saying, “What drew you to the Amazon? What moved you to make your extraordinary paintings of that region, to discover a new species? I had meant never to explore this. But tonight, I realize that I must understand.” He leaned closer. The tilt of his chin reminded her of the moment when he’d bent to kiss his sister and whisper in Federica’s ear.

“Understand what?” she heard herself demanding. “What?” she said again. “My account of the Amazon wasn’t personal enough for you? I left out a few of the ten thousand insect bites, the chiggers, the worm that burrowed in my scalp?”

She heard her voice rise.

“Some reviewers thought it praiseworthy that mine was not just another macho adventure by some guy setting out to prove how tough he could be. Now you’re saying it was like I wasn’t really there? That’s a little problem I have. The more deeply I feel about things, the less I am really there.”

He shook his head, distressed. But she couldn’t stop. “Believe me, my ex-husband used to complain about that, too.”

She caught him glancing at the opal ring on her wedding finger. “Yes, very ex,” she said, now utterly fed up. “I exed him. Crossed him off. I keep this as a kind of amulet. I believe opals stand for tears. So are we finished with the third degree?”

She tried to push back her chair. He took hold of her wrist.

A FATHER PASSED BETWEEN the tables with a little boy who was hopping up and down, calling out to someone ahead in his little foghorn voice. The father bent, so gentle, “Piano, piano.” He rested one hand on the top of the boy’s head; they walked on, joined in this way, the boy bouncing beneath his father’s hand.

Clare watched them as they crossed the piazza. Gianni watched them, too, his hand still on her wrist. When they turned to face one another, it seemed they had also crossed an expanse that arched over so many essential things.

He lifted her hand so the three small opals flashed their rainbow light. She loved the ring; not a wedding ring, but an heirloom given her by her dear great aunt Calliope, who’d given her shelter as a runaway teen.

Now it was his wedding band that gleamed. He caught her glance and might have started to explain. She ran a finger across his palm, up into the space where his shirt buttoned at the wrist. He drew in his breath. “Shhh,” she said.

DOWN THE MOUNTAIN IN the dark, purring around corners, following a string of drivers; along the faded pink and yellow street at the base, where a light above the door of a bar illuminated a stand of melons, a few old men on plastic chairs; through an intersection onto a still smaller road across the plain. They were going to a ristorante at Passignano, on the lake. Gianni said Clare would like it very much. Across the flat land between fields and then up through Ossaia on the toe of the next ridge. A song on the radio, a lullaby he said had been popular a few years ago. “E per te ogni cosa c’e … ninna-na, ninna-ne …” The leather smell of his car.

THE HEADLIGHTS CAUGHT WAVERING fringes of palms. Gianni parked the car on the curb. A pier led out to where the traghetti docked, the little boats plying to and from the islands. There was a castle on one of the islands, he said. He said they would go there one day soon. He looked at his watch. It was not nine o’clock; if Clare wanted, before they went to the restaurant they could take a walk out on the pier.

The moon was sailing with fat silver clouds. He said that on the island with the castle she would feel like she was on the Aegean. “The water with the same green brilliance. When you walk through the dark of this ruined castle you come to a room that opens onto a balcony above the lake. There you have a flash of blue and green and purple water, and the hills of Umbria.”

We will go there. Her hand next to his, on the rail. His profile against the brilliant light-filled clouds.

He said the castle had been a monastery long ago. Then a wealthy family bought it. Now there was an old caretaker who would guide them through the ruins. When the caretaker took them to the chapel and swung a flashlight over the peeling gold-starred ceiling, those stars would shower at Clare’s feet.

“Oh please,” she laughed. “You don’t actually look like someone who says such goofy things.”

“No? How then do I look?”

“When I first saw you — when you got out of your Mercedes — you made me think of a face on a coin. Later, when I was going through a book in the house, about ancient history, there you were.”

“Who was this, pretending to be me?”

“He wasn’t very nice.”

“No one with a face on a coin is very nice. It comes from being too close to the money. Not a problem I have.”

“This one was Mithridates of Pontus.”

“He was not so bad. It is true he had every Italian in his kingdom put to death, the little children too, but perhaps they had misbehaved. We have learned from this, it is not good to over-discipline.”

For a moment more his face remained in silhouette, the noble puzzled profile of a king with weighty problems. When he turned, when they looked at one another, it was delicious to decide to let expectation spin out a little longer, then join hands and run down the pier, across the park, across the street, up the steps of the ristorante where their table waited by the open window.

LATER SHE WILL NOT recall quite what they said. It was easy, buoyant — the way you can sometimes speak a foreign language in a dream. What she will recall is how they foraged through the menu, like famished children. She will remember tagliatelle with seafood bathed in saffron, and a noble white wine from Montepulciano fetched from the private cellar of the restaurant’s owner. Above the table a lamp of tasselled silk held them in an island of mellow light, and beyond this, the ebb and flow of many conversations. The fine attention Italian diners gave to their food. The large party of Germans at a central table, where a beautiful blonde child raised laughter by loudly calling “Ciao!” over and over, and, at the instigation of a party of elderly Italians nearby, “Ciao bella!” She will remember that they both ate prawns rolled into zucchini flowers, and that they finished with a sorbetto of passion fruit.

THE STORM DID NOT start until they were back outside. A flash that split the clouds and sent the moon to cover, and then another and another. Fat drops of water exploding on the sidewalk. By the time they reached the shelter of his car they were soaked. The rain banged on the roof, “E per te ogni cosa c’e …” At Ossia, the street through the town was like a river. “… Ninna-na, ninna-ne …” Lightning seared the sky, exposing the city on the hill, the Medici fortress, and the buildings huddled on the slope bleached to bone.

A crash of thunder directly overhead. “Does this happen often? I’m sorry. I hate storms.”

“I think only very strange people like them. Like me. You should not be sorry.”

Maybe he would understand if she explained. But what each flash made clear was how she would never do that, yet how she was tied completely to the past, and how desperate she really was. She saw the triumvirate leaning in, giving a belligerent thirteen-year-old girl the third degree — her aunt, her grandmother, and her ancient doctor — her aunt’s face slicked by vengeance into a pale determined slate. She heard the leaded panes of the windows of the farmhouse rattling the way they had that night. The trees soughing and snapping on the ridge. She smelled the old living room’s damp and musty smell. She remembered how in a great crack of lightning all the lights went out. It was not until years later, not till she was married, that she understood how badly the doctor had botched the procedure. She would never have a child.

The rutted road was a torrent as Gianni bucked the car up her hill.

Before she could say anything, he was opening her door, a small penlight in his hand. The rain had stopped, but water poured from the gutters and the stone steps were slick. His light played around the terrace. They stopped by her door. Behind him, the Medici fortress loomed against the inky sky, a warning of all she had no right to expect.

She rose on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Good night, Gianni. It was lovely.”

She couldn’t see his face, his shape merging with the formidable outline of the broken fortress. “… Then I should call you?”

She said, “Oh, yes. Please call.”