Silent in the Sanctuary

After a few minutes by the fire he had thawed sufficiently to speak. “It is so good to see you again,” he said, careful to look at Plum as well as myself when he spoke. “I am very much looking forward to spending Christmas with you here.” His English was terribly fluent, very much better than my Italian, but there was a formality that lingered in his speech. I found it charming.

Plum, who had poured himself a steady glass of spirits, took a deep draught. “I am afraid there has been a change in plans, old man.”

“Old man” was his favourite nickname for Alessandro, no doubt for its incongruity. Alessandro was younger than either of us by some years.

The young man’s face clouded a little and he looked from Plum to me, his silky dark brows knitting in concern. “I am not invited for Christmas? Shall I return to Firenze then?”

I slapped Plum lightly on the knee. “Don’t be vile. You have made Alessandro feel unwelcome.” It had been arranged that Alessandro would come to us in November, and we would all spend the holiday together before making a leisurely journey to Venice in time for Carnevale. There was no hope of such a scheme now. I turned to Alessandro, admiring for a moment the way the firelight licked at his hair. I had thought it black, but his curls shone amber and copper in their depths. I wondered how difficult it would be to persuade Plum to paint him.

“You see, Alessandro,” I explained, “we have received a letter from our father, the Earl March. He is displeased with our brother Lysander and wishes us all to return to England at once. We shall spend Christmas there.”

“Ah. How can one argue with the call of family? If you must return, my friends, you must return. But know that you will always carry with you the highest regard of Alessandro Fornacci.”

This handsome speech was accompanied by a courtly little bow from the neck and a noble, if pained, expression that would have done a Caesar proud.

“I have a better idea, and a very good notion it is,” Plum said slowly. “What if we bring Alessandro with us?”

I had just taken a sip of my own whiskey and I choked lightly. “I beg your pardon, Plum?”

Alessandro raised his hands in a gesture I had seen many Italians employ, as if warding something off. “No, my friend, I must not. If your father is truly angry, he will not welcome an intruder at this time.”

“Are you mad? This is precisely the time to bring someone outside the family into the fold. It will keep him from killing Lysander outright. He will behave himself if we cart you back to England with us. The old man has peculiar ideas, but he is appallingly hospitable.”

“Plum, kindly do not refer to Father as ‘the old man’. It is disrespectful,” I admonished.

Alessandro was shaking his head. “But I have not been invited. It would be a great discourtesy.”

“It would be a far greater discourtesy for Father to kill his own son,” Plum pointed out tartly. “And you have been invited. By us. Now I must warn you, the family seat is rather old-fashioned. Father doesn’t hold with new ideas, at least not for country houses. You’ll find no steam heat or even gaslights. I’m afraid it’s all coal fires and candles, but it really is a rather special old place. You always said you wanted to see England, and Bellmont Abbey is as English as it gets, dear boy.”

Alessandro hesitated. “If I may be so bold, why is his lordship so angry with Lysander? Surely it is not—”

“It is,” Plum and I chorused.

Just at that moment, sounds of a quarrel began to echo from upstairs. There was a shout and the unmistakable crash of breaking crockery.

“But the earl, he cannot object to Lysander’s marriage to so noble and lovely a lady as Violante,” Alessandro put in, quite diplomatically I thought.

Something landed with a great thud on the floor, shivering the ceiling and causing the chandelier above our heads to sway gently.

“Do you suppose that was one of them?” Plum inquired lightly.

“Don’t jest. If it was, we shall have to deal with the body,” I reminded him. Violante began to shriek, punctuating her words with tiny stamps of her heel from the sound of it.

“I wonder what she is calling him. It cannot be very nice,” I mused.

Alessandro gave an elegant shrug. “I regret, my understanding of Napolitana, it is imperfect.” He dropped his eyes, and I wondered if he understood more than politeness would allow him to admit.

“Probably for the best,” Plum remarked, draining the last of his whiskey.

“Do not finish off the decanter,” I warned him. “Lysander will want a glass or two when they have finished for the evening.”

“Or seven,” Plum countered with a twitch of his lip. I gave him a disapproving look. Lysander’s marital woes were not a source of amusement to me. I had endured enough of my own connubial difficulties to be sympathetic. Plum, however, wore a bachelor’s indifference. He had never said so, but I suspected his favourite brother’s defection to the married state had rankled him. They had travelled the Continent together for years, roaming wherever their interests and their acquaintance had directed them, exploring museums and opera houses and ruined castles. They wrote poetry and concertos and painted murals on the walls of ancient abbeys. They had been the staunchest companions until Lysander, having left his thirtieth birthday some years past, had spotted Violante sitting serenely in her uncle’s box at La Fenice. It was, as the Tuscans say, un colpo di fulmine, a bolt of lightning.

It was also a bit misleading. Upon further investigation, Lysander discovered Violante was Neapolitan, not Venetian, and there was quite simply nothing about her that was serene. She carried in her blood all the warmth and passion and raw-boned energy of her native city. Violante was Naples, and for a cool-blooded, cool-headed Englishman like Lysander the effect was intoxicating. He married her within a month, and presented Plum and me with a fait accompli, a sister-in-law who smothered us in kisses and heady jasmine perfumes. For my part, I found her charming, wholly unaffected if somewhat exhausting. Plum, on the other hand, was perfectly cordial and cordially perfect. Whenever Violante stepped from a carriage or shivered from the cold, Plum would offer her a hand or his greatcoat, bowing and murmuring a graciously phrased response to her effusive thanks. And yet always he watched her with the cool detachment one usually reserves for specimens at the zoological garden. I often thought there might be real fondness there if he could unbend a little and forgive her for coming so precipitously into our lives.

But Plum was nothing if not stubborn, and I knew a straightforward approach would only cause him to dig his heels into the ground like a recalcitrant pony. So I endeavoured to distract him with little whims and treats, cajoling him into good temper in spite of himself.

And then we met Alessandro, or to be accurate, I met Alessandro, for he was a friend of my brothers of some years’ duration. Rome had been too hot, too noisy, altogether too much for my delicate state when I first arrived in Italy. My brothers immediately decided to quit the city and embark on a leisurely tour to the north, lingering for a few days or even weeks in any particularly engaging spot, but always pushing on toward Florence. We settled comfortably in a tiny palazzo there, and I began to recover. My fire-roughened voice smoothed again, never quite as it had been, but not noticeably damaged. My lungs were strengthened and my spirits raised. Lysander felt comfortable enough to leave us to accept an invitation for a brief trip to Venice to celebrate the private debut of a friend’s opera. Plum pledged to watch over me, and Lysander departed, to return a month later after endless delays and a secret wedding, his voluble bride in tow.

Alessandro had kept us company while Lysander was away, guiding us to hidden piazze, revealing secret gardens and galleries no tourists ever crowded. He drove us to Fiesole in a beribboned pony cart, stopping to point out the most breathtaking views in that enchanted hilltop town, and introduced us to inns in whose flower-drenched courtyards we were served food so delicious it must have been bewitched. Plum always seemed to wander off, sketchbook in hand to capture a row of cypresses, stalwart and straight as a regiment, or the elegant curve of a signorina’s cheek, distinctive as a goddess out of myth. Alessandro did not seem to mind. He talked to me of history and culture and we practiced our languages with each other, learning to speak of everything and nothing at all.

They were the most peaceful and serene weeks of my life, and they ended only when Lysander returned with Violante, bursting with pride, his chin held a trifle higher from defiance as much as happiness. With his native courtesy, Alessandro withdrew at once, leaving us to our privacy as a newly re-formed family. There were flinty discussions verging on quarrels, where we all went quite white about the lips and I could feel the heat rising in my face. Lysander had no wish to inform Father of his marriage, thinking instead to make a trip to England sometime in the summer, bringing his surprise bride with him then. Plum and I argued forcefully against this, reminding him of his duty, his obligation, his name. And more to the point, his allowance. If Father was made to look foolish, angered too far, he could easily slash Ly’s allowance to ribbons or halt it altogether. Lysander was an accomplished musician, but he was a conductor manqué, a dabbler. He had no serious reputation upon which to build a career, and without a formal education, without proper connections, his situation was impossible. He relented finally, with bad grace, and Plum penned the letter to Father, writing in Lysander’s name to tell him there was a new addition to the family.

The reaction had been swift—a summons to Lysander to bring his bride home at once. Lysander, in a too-typical gambit of avoidance, rented the villa at Lake Como, insisting we could not go home before Carnevale season and that we might as well spend Christmas in the lake country. But he had underestimated Father. The second letter had been forceful, specific, and brutal. We were expected, all of us now, to return home immediately. Lysander had masked his dread with defiance, dropping the letter on the mantelpiece and shrugging before stalking from the room. Violante had followed him, accusing him of being embarrassed of her, if I translated correctly. The Napolitana dialect had defeated me almost entirely from the beginning, and I think our inability to understand one another most of the time explained why Violante and I had learned to get on so well.

Suddenly, Plum cocked his head. “Listen to the silence. Do you suppose one of them has finally done the other a mischief?”

“Your slang is appalling,” I told him, taking up my needlework again. “And no, I do not think one of them has done murder. I think they have decided to discuss the matter rationally, in a mature, adult fashion.”

Plum snorted, and Alessandro pretended not to notice, sipping quietly at his whiskey. “Adult? Mature? My dear girl, you have lived with them some weeks now. Have you ever seen them discuss anything in a mature, adult fashion? No, and they will not, not so long as they both enjoy the fillip of excitement that a brisk argument lends to a marriage.”

I blinked at him. “They are newlyweds. They are in love. I hardly think they need to hurl plates at one another’s heads to enjoy themselves.”

“Don’t you? Our dear Violante is a southerner, who doubtless took in screaming with her mother’s milk. And Lysander is a fool who has read too much poetry. He mistakes the volume of a raised voice for true depth of feeling. I despair of him.”

“Do not worry, Lady Julia,” Alessandro put in gently. Giulia, he said, drawing out the syllables like poetry. “To speak loudly, it is simply the way of the southerners. They are very different from those of us bred in the north. We are cooler and more temperate, like the climate.”

He flashed me a dazzling smile, and I made a feeble effort to return it. “Still, it has gone too quiet,” I commented. “Do you suppose they have made it up?”

“They have not,” came Ly’s voice, thick with bitterness. He was standing in the doorway, his hair untidy, his colour high with righteous anger, his back stiff with resentment. It was a familiar posture for him these days. “Violante is insisting we obey Father’s summons. She wants to see England and to ‘meet her dear papa’, she says.” He flung himself into the chair next to Plum’s, his expression sour. “Hullo, Alessandro. Sorry you had to hear all of that,” he added with a glance toward the ceiling.

Alessandro murmured a greeting in return as I studied my brothers, feeling a sudden rush of emotion for the pair of them. Handsome and feckless, they were remarkably similar in appearance, sharing both the striking green eyes of the Marches and the dark hair and pale complexion that had marked our family for centuries. But although their features were similar, their clothes stamped them as very different men. Plum took great pains to search out the most outlandish costumes he could find, outfitting himself in velvet frock coats a hundred years out of fashion, or silk caps that made him look like a rather dashing mushroom.

Lysander, on the other hand, was a devotee of the spare elegance of Brummell. He never wore any colours other than white or black, and every garment he owned had been fitted a dozen times. He was particular as a pasha, and carried himself with imperious grace. When the pair of them went out together they always attracted attention, doubtless the effect they hoped for. They had a gift for making friends easily, and more times than I could count since my arrival in Italy, we had entered a restaurant or hotel or theatre box only to have my brothers greeted by name and kissed heartily, food and drink pressed upon us as though we were minor royalty. They could be puckishly charming when they wished, and delightful company. Until they were bored or thwarted. Then they were capable of horrifying mischief, although they had behaved themselves well enough since I had joined them.

I flicked a glance at Alessandro from under my lashes. He was still placidly sipping his drink, savoring it slowly, his trousers perfectly creased in spite of the filthy weather. He was an elegant, composed young gentleman, and I thought that with a little more time he might have been a noble influence on my scapegrace brothers.

I smoothed my skirts and cleared my throat.

“My dear,” I told Lysander, “I think it is quite clear we must return to England, and you must face Father. Now, we can sit up half the night and argue like thieves, but we will talk you round eventually, so you might as well capitulate now and let us get on with planning our journey.”

Lysander looked wonderingly from me to Plum. “When did Julia become brisk? She has never been brisk. Or bossy. Julia, I do not think I much care for this new side of you. You are beginning to sound like our sisters, and I do not like our sisters.”

I said nothing, but fixed him with a patient, pleasant look of expectation. After a long moment, he groaned. “Pax, I beg you. I am powerless against a determined woman.” I thought of his tempestuous bride, and wondered if I ought to share with her the power of a few minutes of very pregnant silence. But there was work at hand, and I made a note to myself to speak with Violante later.

“Then we are agreed,” I said. I rose and went to the desk, seating myself and arranging writing materials. There was a portfolio of scarlet morocco, stamped in gold with my initials, and filled with the creamiest Florentine writing-paper. I dipped my pen and gave my brothers a purposeful look, the tip of my pen poised over the luscious paper. “Now, we have also had a letter from Aunt Hermia, and I have managed to make out that she is intending to hold a sort of house party over Christmas. We must not arrive without gifts.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lysander muttered. Plum had brightened considerably, thoroughly enjoying our brother’s discomfiture. Clearly the return of the prodigal son as bridegroom was not going to be a quiet affair. Knowing Aunt Hermia, I suspected she had invited the entire family—a not-inconsequential thing in a family of ten children—and half the village of Blessingstoke as well.