The Fallen Angel

TEN

The door was at the end of the garden of the Casina delle Civette, hidden in an algaed corner that was overgrown with twisting serpents of ivy. It was kept locked, always. The key was in Bernard Santacroce’s desk. She’d taken a copy months before, when they first lived in the Casina, and kept it carefully in her bag.

At the end of the afternoon Mina Gabriel slipped out into the deserted garden and sat on the bench seat in the leafy, fragrant bower of bergamot and lemon trees, rereading Shelley next to the crumbling fountain and its soft, liquid song.

The finale. Beatrice in her cell, awaiting the last call for pardon from the Pope, knowing in her heart this ultimate plea was futile.

The young English girl held the play in her hands, acting out the final tragic scene in her imagination, something she had done many times before. Her hands moved through the thin air with its traffic fumes and specks of dust. Her voice, clear and precise, each word enunciated with care, rang out from the citrus grove and over the spike of red and yellow canna lilies that sat like a sea of antique gold before the laden grape vines that adorned the southern wall.

Beatrice’s words from Shelley’s pen, hers too now:

‘Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be

No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;

The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

If all things then should be. . my father’s spirit,

His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;

The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!

If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,

Even the form which tortured me on earth,

Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come

And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix

His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!’

She stopped, looking up at the long, vaulted windows of the Casina. On the top floor was her mother, stiff at the glass, next to the imposing figure of Bernard Santacroce, his arms folded, magisterial as always.

Mina’s head went down, she pouted, hating the way they followed her.

Down, down, down. .

A long minute staring at the cracked paving of the Casina garden, spoiled by dark moss, teeming with insects: ants and beetles and earwigs, denizens of another discrete world that ran from century to century, unheeding of mankind, creatures of the wide, grey, lampless deep.

Her gaze returned to the stone tower where Galileo had once listened to Bernard Santacroce’s ancestors pledging their allegiance, if only he might concede some dishonest accommodation with the Pope across the river.

‘“E pur si muove”,’ she murmured, and wondered why she’d said those words to Nic Costa. He was an honest, likeable man, someone who cared. There weren’t many like that.

The faces at the window were gone. They’d taken the hint. She pulled out her phone, checked the list of numbers she had for Robert, each tied to a specific day, for safety’s sake, chose the right one and called.

He sounded breathless. Tired. Crabby.

‘I need to see you,’ Mina Gabriel said.

‘Why?’

‘Robert. .’

A long, weary sigh.

‘OK. Don’t nag. Where?’

‘The bridge. Where else?’

She took one more look to make sure they’d stopped spying on her. Then Mina Gabriel dragged back her long, blonde hair behind her head, pulling it away from her face as much as possible, securing the locks with a band. She retrieved from her bag a pair of cheap, heavy black plastic sunglasses bought the previous week from a hawker near the Campo and placed them on her face.

‘Minerva Gabriel,’ she said, in a pompous grown-up voice that mocked her mother’s harsh patrician tones. ‘What do you look like?’

The girl got to her feet and reached up and squeezed the open-pored leathery skin of an ageing lemon on the nearest tree, breathing in its aroma, citrus scent and the stain of stale, dank traffic.

‘Anyone, mother. Everyone,’ she whispered.

Then she strode through the sea of red and yellow cannas, found the door, unlocked it with her illicit key, and let herself out into the street.