Chapter 25
When the house was quiet at last that evening, Mrs Constantine made her way carefully down the stairs to the basement kitchen, avoiding the steps that she knew creaked.
The servants slept in the attic, and were all abed, as were her daughters.
She could hear Allegra turning restlessly as she passed her door – she’d always been an uneasy sleeper – but Leontina was confident that her own progress remained unheard.
She’d done this so many times over the years and never once been caught.
The basement room was stuffy, and smelled of all the meals that had been cooked in it, most of which seemed to have chiefly consisted of cabbage, and of unsavoury drains. But she paid no heed; Leontina was far away in her mind, not even in England any more.
Soon a soft scratching could be heard at the tradesmen’s entrance below street level, and she rose and unbolted it, the enormous kitchen tabby slipping lithely out past her as she did so, then went back to sit at the scrubbed deal table. ‘Pader,’ she said softly. Father.
‘Me fiola,’ was the equally quiet response.
My daughter. The old man took off his disreputable hat and sat down opposite her.
He was tall, of an impressive build still, and though he was dressed in worn garments that had originally belonged to someone else – to several someones – he had an oddly distinguished air about him.
Confidence, resolution. The dusty black velvet of his old-fashioned frock coat suited him somehow, as did the jaunty red belcher handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck.
His thick hair and beard were silver-grey, and his eyes dark and watchful.
He bore a strong resemblance to his only surviving child, and to his granddaughters too, whom he’d never met, though he had seen them often enough, at a little distance and without their knowledge.
He had great-grandchildren, Sabrina’s and Viola’s children, also strangers to him.
But then, he was supposed to be long dead.
If he was indeed a count from a noble line, as his daughter claimed, he appeared to have fallen on hard times.
A lady or gentleman who saw him in the London streets would have summed him up and as quickly dismissed him as one of the many Italian immigrants who made a precarious living by selling ice, or by playing upon the barrel organ for ha’pennies while a poor shivering monkey danced to his tune.
And that was part of his story, but not all of it.
Most speakers of Italian, which was to say Tuscan, would have struggled to understand the conversation in the shadowy kitchen.
The dialect the pair were using had familiar Italian words in it, but also a great deal of what sounded like French.
It was a fast, softly slurred mixture that was distinctive to Piacenza, and the northern Italian hills and valleys around it.
But it could also be heard here in London, where so many people – mostly men and boys – had come to see if they could scrape a better living than their effective state of slavery offered them at home.
They were mezzadri – half-people, bound serfs; who could blame them for escaping the hardships of their lot, even if the streets of London offered an uncertain future too?
It was a language of the poor, without question, not a tongue that anyone would expect a nobleman from the ducal court of Parma and Piacenza to use – certainly not when addressing his own daughter.
Such a gentleman might have been taught it in secret by his wetnurse, perhaps, or by some other servant woman who had raised him and loved him while his mother, elegant in silk and lace, flirted with powdered gallants in some gilded salon or scented garden.
He might use the peasant tongue, when grown, with his grooms, or with his mezzadri tenants in their dirt-floored hovels, if he deigned to speak directly to them at all. But never with his own family.
‘What’s the matter, Tinette?’ he asked her softly.
Nobody but him called her that now. He could express himself in English more than adequately too, after so many years here, but he did not do so with his daughter, now or ever.
She knew that he knew without being told that these rare opportunities to speak freely and naturally were infinitely precious to her.
She sighed, and rested her forehead in her hands, discarding her habitual facade of strength and invulnerability that was a burden in itself.
She was so tired always. But it was good to chat like this in the friendly shadows, without the pretence she put on for everyone else.
‘Allegra is being wooed by a lord – a baron. A decent man, I think, though God knows it’s hard enough to tell.
He’s offered for her hand, and she’s considering it.
He’s told her something or done something that she refuses to share with me; I see it on her face.
I have not pressed her. But she is thinking on his proposal.
You know she doesn’t have it so easy as Sabrina or Viola did.
She cannot help but question the way the world works. ’
A low, rumbling laugh. ‘She’s too much like you, then.’
‘Before I learned to hide myself.’
‘We’ve all had to do that, and I suppose she will too, unless she is very lucky. But you didn’t call me here to tell me things I already knew, Tinette. I have seen for myself that al picinina has suitors. What is really the matter?’
‘I’ve been lucky, I suppose, in the past. Da Costa was besotted with Sabrina, and wouldn’t have given a fig if anyone had told him he shouldn’t woo her. And all Winterflood cared about was getting an heir. Neither of them had mothers living – or any close female relatives, for that matter.’
‘This one does?’
‘His mother, a proper Gorgon. She reminds me unpleasantly of the Contessa back home. Sharp eyes, an instinct for a lie. I wouldn’t want her standing over me with a whip; she looks like she’d enjoy using it.
And she’s asked questions about my family, my origins.
Allegra told her exactly what we devised between us so long ago, the tale she believes to be true, but… ’
He reached out and took her hand in a strong, callused clasp.
‘You always knew this might happen eventually. Even if this woman could dispatch someone so far away to check, or send letters, which she likely can’t, what would she discover?
That the Orlandi Veronese family were noble and distinguished, or thought themselves so, but they’re all long dead; their marble monuments will still be there in the churches, I daresay, to stand witness.
That the last count passed on nearly forty years ago, along with his sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued wife, in some epidemic or other.
I’m sure the Palazzo Orlandi in the city, and the castle in the hills, belong to greedy, grasping Frenchmen by now, perhaps even to Bonaparte’s family or his blood-sucking generals – just two of the many things they’ve stolen from our poor suffering country.
There’s nothing to discover. Not a thing, Tinette.
And remember, even if anyone happened by the merest chance to find a portrait of a member of that family, you and your daughters would resemble it – with good reason.
They were our kin, albeit we are on the wrong side of the blanket, as they say here. ’
She refused to be comforted. ‘One day these wars will be over, and if anyone does think to ask, they could discover that the last Count and Countess – that vicious bitch – left no legitimate children. Certainly no little daughter who went to England to stay with distant relatives.’
‘Me fiola, nobody will remember and nobody will care. You’ve been so brave for so long. Achieved so much. Don’t falter now. It isn’t possible to prove that a person doesn’t exist. You do exist.’
‘So did the Count’s bastard half-brother and his little daughter. Someone might remember us, and who we really were.’
He shook his head, though she could barely see it.
‘The old nobility – if there are any of them left now – never deigned to notice us, and will recall nothing after so long. And the people who really knew us, if they are still alive, my mother’s cousins and suchlike, they wouldn’t dream of telling anyone anything.
Certainly not a foreigner or some cursed spy. We’re safe, my dear.’
‘I don’t feel safe. And I don’t want to put Allegra in the power of people who would despise and shun her if they knew the truth.’
‘You always knew this day might come, anima bela – probably would come. You need to face it down as you have faced down so much else.’
She sighed. ‘I know. I’m being foolish.’
‘Never that. But do you need to look so high for husbands for my granddaughters? These English aristocrats are no better than the French or Italian ones. Da Costa is an honest man, and his own origins are not English, so he doesn’t care where we come from. Are there not more like him?’
She shifted restlessly on the hard kitchen chair. This was an old disagreement. ‘My second daughter is a duchess! Why should her sisters not be titled ladies? I want them to be secure. To have what I could never quite have, to be in places where no one can question them or look down on them.’
He seemed reluctantly amused. ‘You think such places exist?’
‘They must. I refuse to believe they don’t.’
‘Then you must take these risks, you know that. You are stronger than any of them. You walked to England when you were just a little child, crossing the plains and the hills and the great Alps, and all the weary way through France to the edge of the grey sea. How far is it – a thousand English miles? More?’
She let out a soft laugh. ‘You carried me most of the way, Pader. All those months, I don’t know how you did it.’
‘You were all I had left, so I did what I believed I had to, just as you always have, and will continue to do. I’m proud of you. I wish you thought you could tell your daughters everything. They don’t know what an extraordinary woman their mother is.’
‘I hope they never find out,’ she said drily. ‘Or what has all this been for?’