‘But didn’t you say—’
‘Yes, indeed. But originally the stairway was attached to the palazzo, by a sort of mini-Bridge of Sighs. Which, at some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, simply disappeared. No one knows how. Or when. Or why. But I think I can hazard a guess at the why.’ He paused.
‘To exclude the cats?’ hazarded Jo, feeling a little like the straight man in a vaudeville act.
‘Yes, yes. But if we accept Scimone’s use of cats as a kind of guardian against malign forces, removing the bridge very effectively cut off their protection.’
‘But why would anyone want to do that?’
‘Someone who wanted to contact the malign forces might. The Delia Quercia family have enjoyed a. mixed reputation over the years. At one stage they were supposed to have owned some kind of powerful amulet brought back by Marco Polo, but nobody knows what became of that.’
Jo took a mouthful of wine and savoured the slightly metallic taste. ‘Are we talking of a Delia Quercia warlock?’
‘Not a warlock,’ the professor corrected her. ‘A necromancer.’
There was a sudden silence, vaporetti and Verdi alike both mute for a long instant as a chill travelled down Jo’s back.
‘Someone who talks to the dead. ’
‘Oh, more than talked, I think. And not to the dead, exactly,’ said Giordano softly, and suddenly he didn’t seem a kindly figure at all.
Walking back from this meeting, Jo again felt surrounded by phantoms, but this time they had been conjured by speech and conjecture rather than atmosphere and legend ancient and modern. Things seemed to want to unravel, as if the knowledge of Scimone’s negative ley lines had opened a third eye that was capable of seeing or at least sensing them all around her, an almost palpable cat’s cradle in the air.
Her footsteps rang and echoed in the deserted campo, in the hollow of her head. She found herself, once more, standing outside the house with the stair, but instead of looking up at the windows (and whatever might be waving out of them) she followed Giordano’s remembered instructions and headed through the archway he had described, unsurprised to disturb the white cat, which had been basking in an errant patch of sunlight. It shot her a very human look of annoyance at having its rest interrupted.
The tower struck her as a beautiful thing; somehow, in her speculations and imaginings, she had not been prepared for beauty. There was something so patently perfect about it that it took her breath away. Yet its absolute perfection was marred. Lacking its bridge, it was incomplete, like an unfinished song. Jo sighed, looking up at the blank brick back of the palazzo, all shutters fastened, all secrets hidden away.
But she could climb the tower, she thought. Perhaps from the top she would see something enlightening. Almost automatically she walked towards it, and set her foot on the first marble step. Dizziness enclosed her briefly, and a phrase of Giordano’s came to her.
Impossible geometry.
Jo shook her head to clear it, and began to ascend. An almost overwhelming sensation of déjà vu possessed her, instantly recognizable, unlike most such. Many years earlier, before the authorities closed it to the public, she had climbed the bell tower at Pisa, had lurched like a spacewalker up steps that threw her balance from one side to another: up had not been consistently up, was sometimes almost down; just so would a climber of one of Escher’s edifices experience their endless turning, twisting stairs.
She tried to concentrate on the steps. They were not worn by the soft insubstantial tread of cats, with their feet as light as mist; nor was the marble furred with dust, for it shone whiter than the airy translucence of the Taj Mahal that looks, from a distance, like lace painted on the dawn. There was no handrail, so she trailed her left hand around the central column as she climbed — widdershins, of course.
With a suddenness that was startling, she reached the top, a circular chamber on whose floor the sunlight lay bright and striped by the shadows of the columns that surrounded it. Breathing a little heavily, she put her hands on her protesting thighs and bent slightly to recover.
It was strangely peaceful at the top of the cat tower. Across from Jo the blind facade of the palazzo loomed, uncompromising, shutters still covering its windows, one — she did a double-take and looked back at an area her gaze had already passed over — slightly ajar. She walked to the edge and looked out over the void, drawn by the darkness behind the shutter. What wealth of secrets was hidden within? And what guardian might be set over them?
Vertigo tugged at her and she steadied herself on a marble column, gravity — and the human fear of it — reasserting itself as the sudden squeal of an angry cat captured her attention. Feeling a trifle embarrassed (she was, after all, trespassing), Jo descended the stair and crept back out into the quiet campo and home again.
Why did she still feel such a compulsion to get into Delia Quercia’s house?
If you don’t come to me, I’ll come to you.
Jo paced the room, nervily. Night had stolen up on her — night, and too much caffeine. She knew she wouldn’t sleep in this state, and that irritated her further.
‘Damn and blast it,’ she muttered, finding herself at the open window again, and staring out across the campo at the Casa della Scala.
All at once, she was convinced that there was someone standing behind her. No noise disturbed the silent apartment, no breath shared her air, but someone was in the room with her, and her back went icy cold. For no apparent reason, she thought of rats — rats in the walls.
She gripped the windowsill in unreasoning terror, and her blood thundered in her ears. Unwillingly, her gaze moved sideways, to look at the room’s slanted reflection in the open window.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, went her thoughts like a mantra. The lamp on the table, the one with the shade of Murano glass, shed a pool of soft light; everything else was in shadow. She could see no one reflected in the flat shiny glass. Yet she could not, physically could not, turn round, for fear of what stood in the room with her, watching.
Smiling. Now why do I think that? Jo shut her eyes, squeezed them tight, and the sense of being no longer alone vanished abruptly. Drawing a few deep breaths, she turned to face the room before opening her eyes again, and then scurried for the light switch to turn on all the illumination she could.
As she came back to the table, strewn with her papers and notes, she saw a key lying beside her pen.
Her scalp prickled. She eyed the key suspiciously. It was a large key for a deadlock, much like the one that opened the main door downstairs. There was no doubt in her mind what door this one would open.
So she stretched out her hand to pick it up, only to jump back, startled into alarm by the sudden squalling shriek of an angry cat. Her heart tried to high-jump out of her chest, and she let out her breath in a sharp curse.
Up to her windowsill, ghost-pale like a spectre, leapt the white cat, its ears back, hissing defiance at something outside. Jo threw a ball of paper at it, which the cat ignored, and jumped down into the room, miaowing loudly at her. She tried to take evasive action, but it bumped her legs, twined itself round, its voice raucous in the silence.
‘What do you want, Signor Gatto?’ she asked, catching its tail, which it carried aloft like a banner. It continued to weave around her legs, and Jo sighed. ‘I haven’t got any food,’ she told it. ‘Unless you like uncooked pasta.’