17
The road from Calvi to Ile Rousse skirted the shore. Sometimes Powerscourt and Lady Lucy could look back on the bay of Calvi with its semicircular bay and its pines, sometimes all they could see was the unforgiving land, dotted with stones and the occasional sheep, olive trees bent into strange twisted shapes by the force of the Corsican wind. As they came down a hill they could see another perfect beach, half a mile or more of sand with a fortress at one end and rough rocks marking its limit at the other. The coachman pointed his whip upwards to the hills and the mountains. ‘Aregno up there,’ he said, flicking a fly from his face.
Perched at the top of the hill, in a perfect circle on its crest, was the mountain village of San Antonino. It looked like a jewel in the weak afternoon sunlight. Only close up could the visitor have seen the crumbling masonry, the holes in the roofs, the vanished windows that bore witness to Corsican poverty. Aregno was half-way up the hill. They stopped briefly to let a flock of sheep go by, the shepherd staring at them angrily as if they had trespassed on his land. Powerscourt patted his pocket for reassurance. Lady Lucy held very tightly on to her bag.
‘What do you think we should say to the family, Francis? We can hardly ask them if they think their son killed Christopher Montague, can we?’ Lady Lucy had to speak quite loudly against the noise of the wheels as they struggled up the track.
‘We said we have friends who are thinking of coming to live here. And we could mention the Venetian exhibition – was that their son who had organized it? And,’ Powerscourt added darkly, ‘surely some of your relations must have known these people in England.’
‘Even here, Francis, half-way up a Corsican mountain,’ said Lady Lucy, ‘you can still manage to reproach me about my family. I can’t help it if there are so many, can I?’
‘Of course not,’ said Powerscourt loyally. ‘Look, I think we’ve arrived.’
The coach had stopped in front of a very handsome house behind the main square of Aregno, a quarter dominated by mangy dogs and a quartet of gnarled old men gossiping in a dingy cafe. A cracked bell in the tower of the church was trying to toll the hour of three.
La Giocanda was a mansion on four floors, built in the finest style of the French eighteenth century. It would not have looked out of place on the mainland, on the outskirts of a provincial town perhaps, or nestling on a hilltop surrounded by its thousands of acres and rich fields. Powerscourt wondered how anybody could have had the money to build or maintain it in this island of rock and granite. A limping footman showed them to the drawing room on the first floor, with magnificent views ranging down to the coast and the distant blue of the Mediterranean.
Mrs Alice de Courcy was surrounded by her two daughters, Julia and Sarah. Lady Lucy wondered how long it had been since they had entertained English visitors in this beautiful room. The girls’ clothes were impeccable, but in a style that had gone out of fashion in London three years before.
‘Good afternoon, Lord Powerscourt, Lady Powers-court, welcome to Aregno. May I introduce my daughters Julia and Sarah?’ Mrs de Courcy was behaving exactly as she would have done at home in Norfolk. ‘Some tea, perhaps,’ she went on, casting a meaningful glance at the servant, who hobbled off towards the lower floors, uneven noises coming from his boots as he limped down the stairs.
‘How very good of you to receive us at such short notice,’ said Powerscourt gallantly, noting how little furniture there was in the room, apart from a couple of sofas and some small tables.
‘Do you find Corsica a pleasant place to live, Mrs de Courcy?’ asked Lady Lucy, ‘I think we mentioned that we have some friends who are thinking of coming to live here.’
Alice de Courcy smiled. ‘Well, it’s certainly cheap,’ she said, ‘much cheaper than the south of France.’
The two girls looked shocked. Surely Mama should not have mentioned such a thing just a few minutes into their acquaintance. They had no idea of the trouble their mother took to save money, economizing on food, on clothes for herself, on furniture for the house, on travel. They could not have known how much of her day was spent thinking about money, or the lack of money. Only on the girls did she willingly spend it. She told her daughters after the visitors had gone that she had been thinking about the lack of money that morning, she had been thinking about the lack of money that afternoon, she had been thinking about the lack of money even as the visitors were shown into the room. It had, she said, just slipped out. She was so sorry if she had embarrassed them.
Lady Lucy was quick to spot the blushes spreading up the girls’ cheeks, their looks away to hide their shame.
‘Why, Mrs de Courcy,’ she said brightly, ‘that is the single most useful thing you could have told us! Our friends, the ones we mentioned in our note, are indeed most concerned about money. They lost all their fortune in some imprudent investments. Now they are waiting for an inheritance but the rich uncle is in no hurry to die.’
‘And there must be other advantages,’ Powerscourt chipped in to join the rescue party. ‘The countryside is very beautiful.’
Alice de Courcy smiled at them both. ‘I think the girls find the countryside more appealing than I do. They walk for miles up into the mountains and along the coast. I’m afraid that after a time I found the mountains oppressive. It’s as if they’re watching you, judging you all the time. Now I find myself longing for somewhere flat. When we get back to East Anglia I shall be able to breathe freely again.’
‘And is there much in the district in the way of society?’ said Lady Lucy, suddenly aware that she sounded like a new arrival in the flat lands of the Home Counties. ‘Are you able to mingle freely with the local people?’
The two girls laughed bitterly. Outside the windows Powerscourt noticed two huge mountain birds, kites or buzzards he thought, circling slowly above the house. Three times he saw them pass, their wings scarcely moving at all, before they vanished from sight to scour the valley below.
‘Julia, Sarah,’ said their mother, ‘perhaps you’d better speak about that.’
‘Well,’ said Julia, ‘we’ve hardly got to know any Corsicans at all, apart from the servants and the shopkeepers in Calvi and Ile Rousse. There aren’t any gentry left here at all. Only poor people. And most of the Corsicans are very poor. I don’t think they like having strangers living with them at all.’
‘There are a few English people living round here,’ said Sarah, ‘but they’re either very old or very eccentric. One man has come to live here until he’s climbed every mountain in the island. A brave prospect, no doubt, but it makes for limited opportunities for conversation once you’ve heard of his latest conquest, the mountain I mean, and the high cost of hiring local guides.’
The limping servant returned with a tray of tea. Mrs de Courcy did the honours.
‘I think we’ve been to two balls and three afternoon parties in the three years we’ve been here,’ said Julia bitterly. ‘Sometimes they have a dance when the French ships call into the port, that’s all. Once we went to a celebration of New Year where all the dishes were made with chestnuts, chestnut bread made with chestnut flour, chestnut puree, chestnut sorbets. It was terrible.’
Lady Lucy felt it was time to move on from the social isolation of the girls, perched up here part-way into the mountains with the kites circling round them. Maybe they had eagles higher up. Or vultures.
‘Tell me, Mrs de Courcy,’ she said brightly, ‘is the Edmund de Courcy who runs the de Courcy and Piper Gallery in London any relation of yours by any chance?’
Alice de Courcy suddenly came alive, thoughts of the lack of money banished by the mention of her son.
‘Edmund,’ she said proudly, ‘is my son. How is the gallery doing? Is it prospering?’
‘They have just had a most successful exhibition of Venetian paintings, Mrs de Courcy,’ said Powerscourt, his brain shifting suddenly into a different gear. ‘I believe there is talk of the firm opening in New York.’