“Good morning,” she said in a low voice. “He has just dropped off to sleep again, the effects of the laudanum. I am afraid I was dozing myself.” I glanced past her to where Pietro lay atop the coverlet, fully dressed in his evening clothes from the night before.
Augusta covered a yawn with her hand and immediately apologised. “I did not sleep well myself.”
“Never mind,” Stoker said kindly. “You have been very good to him, but you must not neglect your own rest. Have you eaten?”
“A bit of toast was the most I could manage,” she said with a wan look.
Stoker’s voice took on a tone of command. “You must keep up your own strength, Augusta. Go to your room and ring for food and hot, sweet tea. Lots of it. Eat everything they bring you and then sleep.”
Augusta, like all women of strength, appreciated a firm hand. She fairly blushed as Stoker ordered her about. “If you insist,” she murmured.
Stoker watched her go with frank appreciation.
“A most remarkable woman,” he said. “Thoroughly nurturing.”
I snorted. “Men. You are the same the world over,” I grumbled as we entered Pietro’s room, closing the door behind us.
“How so?”
“Forever wanting to return to the nursery to be coddled by some woman and her comforting bosom.”
He made a choking noise in response, but I ignored him, turning my attention to the count instead.
“Pietro,” I said softly, kneeling beside the bed. His eyelids looked bruised, pale purple with the shock of what he had endured, I supposed. They fluttered briefly before coming open. His pupils were wide and black.
“Veronica?”
“Yes, Pietro. I am here. Do you remember what has happened?”
He gave a groan and covered his face with his hands. I was prepared to slap him should he succumb to hysterics, but he gathered himself manfully and when he dropped his hands, his cheeks were only faintly damp.
“My Beatrice,” he murmured. “My beautiful Beatrice.”
“I am so very sorry for your loss,” I told him. He grasped my hand.
“Thank you, cara,” he replied.
“We know who she was, Pietro,” Stoker said softly. I gave him asharp look and he subsided into the chair Augusta had recently vacated. I had a notion that Pietro would respond much better to a woman’s gentle touch than Stoker blundering about like the proverbial bovine in the china shop. Besides which, Stoker’s remarks about Augusta’s talents for nurturing stung a little. She was not the only woman who could be consoling.
Pietro’s eyes flared wide, but he did not attempt to deny it. “Oh.”
“Lorenzo d’Ambrogio’s younger sister,” I said in an encouraging voice. I thought he might tell us more if we approached him obliquely. “How did you meet her?”
A smile, brilliant as the summer sun, broke over his face. “At a ball in New York. Given by one of those new millionaires—her aunt’s husband, as it turned out. Beatrice went to live with them a year after Lorenzo died. Their parents, you see, never could they cope with the loss of their beautiful son, their only boy, their precious treasure. Heart troubles abounded in the d’Ambrogio family, and their father died from the shock of losing Lorenzo. After that, the mother wasted away from a fever in a matter of months. And they left my angel, my Beatrice. There were other relatives in Italy who might have cared for her, but it was felt that her mother’s sister was the best choice. She wanted her desperately—she and her husband had no children of their own. And a change of scene could only be good for the child. So she went to live amongst strangers. She took her uncle’s name and she became theirs. But never did she forget that she was a d’Ambrogio, never did she forget her mother tongue.”
“It must have been a delight to her to meet someone from her home,” I ventured.
“The moment she heard my name, she insisted upon sitting out the next dances to speak with me. We created a scandal,” he said with a wistful smile. “She was a graceful and successful debutante, and the sons of industry were dangled before her as prospective husbands. But the minute we began to talk, everything else fell away. She remembered me, you see. Ihad often visited the d’Ambrogio villa and she knew me as a very young man. I ought to have known instantly—she had something of Lorenzo about her,” he added, his face contorting with grief. I laid a hand upon his and he squeezed it compulsively. He did not relinquish it as he went on.
“I hardly dared to believe she would return my love, but for both of us, it was as if Lorenzo had come alive once more. All I treasured in his spirit—the sweetness, the sense of honour—she possessed even more. And in me, she found the link to the brother she had adored.” It all sounded faintly distasteful to me, as if Lorenzo had been a member of their marriage, a dead man inserting himself into their union. But if it had brought them both comfort, then who was I to judge them?
“She told me about her heart troubles. We knew we would not have long together, a handful of years, but it would be enough for us. So we married. And I brought her to Italy with me. She wanted to see her country again before... before she became too ill to travel. She insisted on seeing the villa where she had been born. One of the old family servants was still there. She had kept a few boxes, things belonging to the d’Ambrogios. She very kindly offered them to Beatrice once she realised who Beatrice was. Very kindly,” he added, twisting his lips into a mockery of a smile. “It would have been better for us if she had burnt the lot. They were Lorenzo’s things. After Lorenzo died, old Lord Templeton-Vane had his belongings packed up and shipped to the d’Ambrogios in Italy. But his parents, they had never been able to bring themselves to open these boxes. Beatrice wept for three days straight before she could bear it. Inside were his clothes, his shaving things. And his journal.”
His hand made an ineffectual gesture towards the coat draped at the foot of the bed. I retrieved it and he indicated the pocket. Inside I found a slender notebook. The cover was stamped with the same small gilded bee as on the cover of the book Beatrice had been reading in the garden.
Pietro explained. “There were dozens of these notebooks amongst his things, but this was the last. He used them every day for notes tohimself, little sketches and memoranda. Sometimes he wrote them up as journals. He preferred very small notebooks so they took up little room in his pockets. He was careful of his tailoring,” he said with a ghost of a smile. “Always a dandy.”
I riffled the pages, smelling the mustiness of the years locked within.
