“I’m—”
“No! Just sit, please, and listen.”
Laura stood by the piano, straight-backed, with a determined poise. There was no music. She lifted the fiddle to her neck, tucked it beneath her chin, then brought the bow down on the strings. She chose the most difficult section: the virtuoso finale. Daniel closed his eyes and listened to her play, let the full, bold sound of the Guarneri rise to occupy every last inch of his consciousness.
Amy had performed this magnificently, but she was, next to Laura, a child. Now the piece had an added intensity, a wild, mature beauty it had never before possessed. This was how the work was meant to be played. She had mastered every last cadence and harmony until there was nothing left to change. It was perfection, of an ethereal, almost supernatural kind.
When she finished, Laura raised an amused eyebrow at his silence. “Why do you look so surprised? I can practise here, Daniel. I don’t have to run and hide in Mestre every time I feel like taking out the bow. How do you think I spend these long months of solitude the masters of the house allow me?”
He stood up and, with her permission, took the Guarneri. The instrument was curious: a workmanlike piece of extraordinary size. Yet the sound it made… Daniel gave it back to her. He recalled that day on the Arsenale and some sudden flash of colour in his head. Rizzo feared the fiddle. In a way, he did too.
“Did I perform well?” she asked.
“You were magnificent.”
“Thank you! Do you really think that an Englishman wrote such a lovely piece of music? I read your book.”
Daniel bristled. “All the evidence points to such a conclusion. Why shouldn’t an Englishman have written it?”
Laura laughed. “Don’t be so touchy. It just sounds… wrong. I’ve a fancy it was written by a woman.”
“You mean for a woman?”
“No. By. I feel that when I play. You’re the historian. Tell me it’s nonsense.”
“It would certainly be… unusual, let us say.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes I dream too much. Do you?”
“Only of you,” he replied. “I should like to hear you play in Ca’ Scacchi, Laura.”
Her face fell. “I can’t. Think. You must know why.”
“For the life of me I don’t. I have a house we both adore, one that feels empty without you. As does my entire existence. From the moment on Piero’s boat, I think I knew as much, but I was too stupid to realise it.”
Her face fell onto his neck. He felt her arms move around his waist, then the warmth of her tears touched his skin. Laura’s voice whispered in his ear.
“Scacchi once told me we were all born hurtling towards Heaven, Daniel. I denied it for both our sakes, but since we met, I have always felt I was born hurtling towards you. I don’t know why. It terrifies me that I understand so little about these feelings.”
“Then we’re the same—”
“No,” she insisted. “It cannot be. You don’t appreciate that man for what he truly is. A devil. Nothing less. He lives. He waits. He’ll come for us one day. He’ll devour us because he believes we have given him the right.”
“Massiter’s gone,” he said firmly. “No one knows where.”
“He sees us, Daniel. You in particular. With your riches and your book and your fame. Haven’t you considered that? You’ve profited from Massiter more than anyone.”
Daniel’s train of thought, so carefully organised beforehand, stumbled. “For what reason would he return? Revenge?”
“No! Don’t you understand anything? To possess us, Daniel. To own every last part of us. Even our souls.”
Beyond the window, above the distant horizon of the Adriatic, the sky was perfect, cloudless.
“You could have killed him.” There was a note of accusation in her voice. “I read it. Why did you choose otherwise?”
It was a question he asked himself from time to time, and one it never took long to answer. “Because if I had, I would have become like him. Joined his hell. And I would have lost you forever, and deserved to.”
She was unmoved. “That devil will seek us out, Daniel. It’s in his nature.”
“And what if he does? He has no power unless we give it to him. If we possess each other more fully than Hugo Massiter could begin to comprehend, what’s left for him to own? What space will our lives allow him to occupy?”
Laura took her hands away and refused to meet his gaze. “Still, he will come,” she said softly. “One day.”
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But if I leave here without you, I don’t care in any case.”
A light fired at the back of her eyes. “And is that the kind of blackmail you hope will win me, Daniel Forster? Walking in here with your scrawny moustache and your spiky hair?”
“I’d rather hoped as much,” he said lamely.
“Pah!”
She turned and was gone, out into another room — the kitchen, he imagined. He went to the window and admired the view. A formation of wild ducks crossed the sky in a squawking vee, heading northwards for Sant’ Erasmo and, if they were unlucky, the jaws of a certain black dog he knew. There were worse places than Alberoni. It was, at least, the lagoon.
He heard her cough. Laura stood holding two glasses of bloodred liquid. He smiled and held out his hand.
“Wait,” she ordered.
In the corner of the room a small ornamental clock struck six. When it had ended, she handed him his glass.
“Spritz!” Laura said, smiling. “Timing is important, Daniel Forster. I like my days divided in an orderly fashion. Not running backwards and forwards as they fancy. You should know this about me.”
“Spritz!” he replied, raising his glass. “I had guessed that, to be honest.”
“Good. Is there something I should know about you?”
“Only that I’ll never cease to love you, whatever may happen. And I’ll never leave you, because that would be like leaving myself.”
She cocked her head to one side, thinking.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I was remembering the last time you kissed me. You smelled of eel.”
Daniel was surprised. It was one memory which had eluded him. “No. That was the first time I kissed you. The last was some hours later.”
He fell silent. She was staring at the room as if about to take her leave of it. She seemed serene at last. At this moment he could almost convince himself that every last painful act of the recent past was justified by their reunion.
She turned and wrapped her arms around him. She was shivering in the dying heat of the evening. Their bodies locked together, like two pieces from the same puzzle.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of us. Of how I feel when we are together. Of what lies ahead.”
He gazed beyond the glass at the low, flat marshland and the empty grey horizon. As he watched, a solitary figure walked slowly across the pebble beach, in the distance beyond the dunes, then passed behind a hummock of marram grass and was gone. There would always be shapes in the shadows. She saw them too.
They held each other tightly.
The doorbell sounded and she trembled in his arms.
Daniel strode to the front of the house. A boy of no more than nine stood there selling apples and pears fresh from the orchard. Daniel gave him some notes and took a few apples. The child disappeared down the drive, half running. When Daniel turned, she was standing in the hall holding a small kitchen knife. He walked up to her, took the blade out of her hands, and said, “Come with me, Laura. Please.”
“Of course,” she said nervously, and quickly removed the silver chain, then began to tie up her hair and fumble in her bag for the sunglasses. He waited, wondering if she would seek out the white housecoat too.