on top a covering letter.
Olivia Hawkins read the letter swiftly, and then put it down. She said nothing, but looked out of the long, elegant sash window, not seeing the raindrops dribbling down the panes, or the dingy light of a bleak spring morning, but instead, brilliant sunlight on an Italian landscape; in her mind, she was in Italy, sitting under the colonnades, laughing, drinking a toast with a woman no longer young, yet every bit as full of life as young Susie.
She blinked, and reached down into her handbag for a handkerchief.
‘Is something the matter? Is it a book?’
‘Yes, it’s a book. The memoirs of Beatrice Malaspina.’
‘What a lovely name.’
‘The letter is from a firm of lawyers, who had instructions to deliver the book to me after Beatrice Malaspina died.’
‘Is she dead? Was she a friend of yours? I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I shall miss her, but she was born in 1870, so she had a long life. And a very full one.’
‘Eighteen seventy, goodness, so she lived to be eighty-seven.’ Susie tried to add seventy years of life to her own seventeen; she couldn’t imagine it. ‘Was she an Italian?’
‘No, she was English, but she married an Italian. Her own family had Italian connections, they owned a house in Italy called the Villa Dante, which she inherited. It is the most beautiful house, magical, a place of enchantment.’
‘How did you know her?’
‘We met during the war. She was a compelling personality, and she’d led a fascinating life. Rather a bohemian in her way; you would have liked her. She moved in artistic circles and knew most of the great painters and writers of her time. Many of them were her friends, and came to stay with her at the Villa Dante. She was a complex woman, and a great organiser. It annoyed her that people’s lives were so muddled; she used to say, “It only takes clear thinking and energy to change a life for the better, to set it off in a new direction.” ’
‘She sounds fun.’
‘She was.’
‘And these are her memoirs? Are we going to publish them?’
‘Oh, yes. What she’ll have to say about all those artists will make good reading, quite apart from the story of her own adventurous life.’
Susie was standing by the window, looking down at the dismal street, slick with rain. A rag and bone cart was going by, the horse’s back covered with an old sack to protect it from the wet, the driver shouting out his incomprehensible Londoner’s cry.
‘Oh, I meant to tell you, there were a couple of shifty-looking men hanging around when I came in. They’re still there, look, lurking outside number nine. Do you think they might be casing the joint?’
Olivia got up from her desk and joined Susie at the window. One glance was enough. She laughed. ‘You read too many thrillers, Susie. Those aren’t crooks—well, not the kind you were thinking of. Those are reporters. The man in the tweed coat is Giles Slattery of the Sketch. The one in the grubby mac with a camera is a photographer.’
‘Giles Slattery, the gossip columnist?’
‘Yes. I wonder who they’re waiting for.’
‘Somebody famous, do you think?’
‘What, here in Bloomsbury? I doubt it. Not the kind of famous Slattery goes for, at any rate.’
Delia Vaughan was hanging on to the steering wheel as if to loosen her grip would be to admit defeat. The wind had risen to a deafening shriek, coming in wild gusts that made the canvas top of the car bang and flap as though at any moment it would fly off.
They had stopped two hours before, to put up the hood, when the wind had whipped Jessica’s hat off, and Delia had only just stopped her silk headscarf going the same way.
‘We should find a hotel,’ Jessica said. ‘The weather’s getting worse.’
Delia didn’t want to stay at a hotel. In her mind, the Villa Dante had come to represent a refuge, a haven from the storm, a destination that was more than journey’s end. It was irrational, but she was determined to press on, despite her exhaustion, her hacking cough and Jessica’s urgings for her to be sensible and get off the road and out of the storm.
‘We’re only about thirty miles away, let’s keep going.’
‘Let me find something to wrap round my head, then,’ said Jessica. ‘This car is full of draughts, and I can’t hear myself think with all the noise in my ears. When I get back to England, I’m going to sell it, and buy a saloon.’ She extracted a silk scarf from her bag and put it over her head, tying it under her chin. ‘Come on then, if you must.’
It was slow going, and Delia was as relieved as Jessica when they came to a sign that read San Silvestro. ‘We take the road going south, the lawyer said, and turn off immediately after we’ve gone under the railway bridge. Then it’s uphill, and we’ll see the gates and the villa.’
‘How can we see anything in all this?’ said Jessica.
Miraculously, as they went up the hill, the skies lightened for a moment, and they could see a pair of tall, wrought-iron gates silhouetted in the blazing wind.
‘It’s astonishing,’ yelled Delia, an unreasonable surge of excitement rising in her as she caught a glimpse of the classical façade of a large house. Then it was gone, and she pressed her foot hard down on the accelerator, hoping the strange noises the engine was making didn’t mean it was about to conk out.
They made it to the gates, and stopped the car, although Delia left the engine running, ‘Just in case,’ she shouted to Jessica.
The gates were shut, with a rusty chain looped round the bars to hold them together. The wind was rising by the minute, and now the air was full of flying sand: that was the sound like hail that had rattled against the hood of the car. ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ Jessica said. ‘There’s no name anywhere.’
‘It’s where the lawyer said it would be, and we didn’t see a sign of any other house in the vicinity. Do you think this sand is blowing off a beach? I never asked how close the villa was to the sea.’
‘Do Italian beaches have red sand?’
‘I don’t know.’ Delia’s hair was whipping about her eyes, and she pushed it ineffectually back from her forehead, trying to wedge a strand behind her ears.
‘Is there a bell?’
‘Only this.’ Delia pointed to a brass bell attached to one of the stone gateposts. A frayed rope with a knot at its end swung from it in the wind.
‘Give
