She went indoors without a word or a look. But Briggs, divining her intention, leapt to his feet, snatched chairs out of her way, kicked a footstool aside, and hurried to hold the door open for her, walking beside her down the hall, unable to take his eyes off her for a moment and knocking against the corner of a bookcase, an ancient carved cupboard, and the table with the flowers. Passing the kitchen door, the servants observed them and communicated their thoughts in symbols as eloquent as they were rude: Aha. Oho.
Their exchange in the hall was painful to witness. “I hope you’re quite comfortable here,” Briggs managed, his voice vibrating. “If you’re not, I’ll flay them alive.” Scrap tried to sound detached and forbidding, but with little hope of success. When they reached the foot of the stairs, he asked which room she sat in. “In my own room,” she replied evasely, and went up. He watched her pass the Madonna where the dark-eyed portrait of Rose Arbuthnot seemed to pale and shrivel in comparison. The setting sun, breaking through the west window, turned Scrap to glory for a single moment; then she disappeared, and the stairs were dark and empty.
From her window Scrap saw Briggs wandering back into the top garden, where Lotty and Rose sat on the parapet she would have liked to occupy, and where Mr. Wilkins was already buttonholing him with the story of the oleander tree—Briggs’s own oleander, planted by Briggs’s own father with a cherrywood walking-stick thrust into the ground as a reminder to Domenico’s father. Briggs listened with patience he could not possibly have felt, his thoughts clearly elsewhere.
Scrap felt the tyranny of it flare up in her. She would not endure being shut in her own bedroom while Mr. Wilkins kept Briggs occupied with the oleander. She snatched up a wrap, stole out of the house by the front door, and made her escape along the zigzag path, where nobody could see her and nobody would think to look for her. She sat down on one of the seats placed at each bend to assist the breathless, and drew in a deep breath of relief. The little harbour glimmered through the pine trunks, the lights came out in the houses across the water, and all around her the green dusk was splashed with the rose-pink of gladioluses and the white of crowding daisies.
Then her breath was arrested. Footsteps. Not coming down from the house—coming up. Not the swift springy steps of Angelo, but slow, considered steps that kept pausing, the steps of someone unaccustomed to hills. She was afraid of nothing in life except love; brigands and murderers held no terrors for the daughter of the Droitwiches. The footsteps turned the corner of her bit of path, and a man stood still, getting his wind.
She turned her head and beheld with astonishment a person she had seen a good deal of in London: the well-known writer of amusing memoirs, Mr. Ferdinand Arundel. Nothing in the way of being followed surprised her any more, but that he should have discovered her hiding place surprised her greatly. Her mother had promised faithfully to tell no one.
“You?” she said, feeling betrayed. “Here?”
He came up to her and took off his hat. His forehead was wet with the beads of unaccustomed climbing. He looked ashamed and entreating, like a guilty but devoted dog. Lady Droitwich had told him where she was, and as he happened to be passing through on his way to Rome, he had got out at Mezzago and thought he would just look in and see how she was.
Scrap considered him rapidly. Arundel was at least forty, jovial, with the figure rather for conversation than adventure. He could not possibly give her the trouble that an active young man like Mr. Briggs might give her. She could imagine Briggs doing things with rope-ladders and singing all night under her window; Arundel had not the build for any such recklessness. He had not grabbed in London, and even now his pursuit seemed more that of a devoted dog than a passionate lover. Better a useful buffer than a desperate one. “I’m to be fed at eight,” she said, ignoring his apology, “and you must come up and be fed too. Sit down and get cool and tell me how everybody is.”
He sat down beside her, gazing at the adorable profile. She pressed him for news of her mother, for she had arranged not to write during her month of perfect blankness, and Arundel, recognising that he had come on an excellent day to shelter her from the infatuated Briggs waiting at the house, prepared to be as entertaining as possible.
Chapter 22
The evening of the full moon transformed San Salvatore’s garden into a place of enchantment, where white flowers glowed like spirits and coloured ones existed only as fragrance. Three younger women sat on the low wall after dinner—Rose apart from the others, her face turned toward the umbrella pine silhouetted against the stars. Even Lotty and Scrap, whispering together, could not help but notice that Rose was radiant, lit from within by a love so plain it needed no name. Lotty breathed the single word “Love,” and Scrap could only nod. The night pressed enormous feelings upon her—about death and time and waste—until she wrapped her chiffon more tightly, as though to defend herself from the eternities.
When the men came out from the candle-lit dining-room, Scrap retreated to her own corner by the daphnes, dreading Mr. Briggs. But there she met Frederick instead, hurrying to find her before rejoining Rose. He thanked her for her discretion, declared he would adore her forever, and asked to kiss her shoes. Scrap laughed, offered her hand instead, and sent Domenico to fetch his luggage from the station. She felt suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude toward Mr. Briggs for his house, his garden, his views—so she walked straight up to him and told him earnestly how much she owed him. Mr. Wilkins, watching in alarm, attempted a tactful interruption, but Lotty seized his arm and drew him indoors, insisting Caroline needed no rescue.
In the drawing-room they found Mrs. Fisher alone by the fire, weary of her great dead friends and craving the living. Lotty’s heart twisted at the sight of her, and she crossed to kiss her—this time Mrs. Fisher pressed Lotty’s cheek against her own with a hand that held on. Lotty felt certain she had found her “pair.” Then came a teasing exchange about the couples in the garden—the Roses, the Arbuthnots—until Lotty announced, with eyes dancing, that she saw them becoming the Briggses. Mr. Wilkins’s indignation was absolute.
That last week the syringa bloomed and the acacias flowered, filling the garden with delicate white blossoms. On the first of May, when the party departed through the iron gates, they still smelled the acacias on the road below.
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