Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

had a wretched night, a horrid night, one that you did not deserve.”

She looks up now. Her tone is fierce. “Tell me where he went.”

“Ah,” says Percival, “ah, my dear, that I cannot do. And I think I know you well enough, I think I’ve seen enough of you, to know you know I can’t.”

“Was it you who left the book?”

“What book?”

She studies his expression closely. “My Byron. Someone put it by my door last night.”

“I haven’t climbed those stairs in two and a half years.”

“It was Jarry then,” she says, confirmed in her suspicion. “He marked the place at ‘Stanzas to Augusta’—why?”

Percival seems at a loss. “Because we spoke about the poem yesterday—that would be my guess.”

“Tell me why you quoted it to me.”

“My dear! The verses simply popped into my head. I had no ulterior motive. And yet…” His gaze goes past her shoulder now and concentrates on something in the distance.

“And yet?”

“You know who she was, of course….”

“Augusta Leigh was Byron’s sister.”

“His half sister, yes. You’re too young to remember, but I vividly recall, Addie, when news of their relations first came out. The throng of his adorers, who’d made Byron a matinee idol, their little poppet and their doll, all turned against him. The marquises and countesses, who’d showered him with jewels and raised their skirts for him, drove him from sunny England in disgrace. I met him some time after that….”

“You met Byron?”

He nods. “In Italy, at Strà, in ’20, I believe it was. He was living with the countess Guiccioli, dabbling in Italian politics, being watched by the police. He was not then, Addie, the man you probably imagine. His famous jet-black hair had grayed. Though only thirty-two, he was fat and had bad teeth. His breath was not entirely fresh, and he had a portion of his breakfast on his coat—a three-minute egg, judging from appearances. He was still a brilliant talker, but he talked like someone repeating old stories he’d long since lost interest in, someone who’s afraid to stop. He was a dry husk rattling around the empty core of what he’d been. Yet out of his misery, he wrote:

‘It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d

Deserved to be dearest of all.’

And what he most cherished was Augusta Leigh. Yesterday, when I quoted that, you said it seemed inarguable. Does an argument now suggest itself to you?”

“That is a dark story, sir,” she answers, in a stern and formal tone.

“It is, indeed. And the question it raises—the one it’s always raised for me—is which was it that ruined him: whether it was loving Augusta, or failing to….”

Addie’s brows knit on this. “You mean to say…”

“I mean to say—to ask, merely—if, in leaving her, he shirked a truer fate assigned to him by God.”

“It’s hard for me to credit that God—at least the God I know—would assign him—or anyone—a fate like that.”

“Perhaps you have a better vantage point from which to judge His mind,” he replies. “For where I sit, it seems to me that He, or they”—he nods to the bóveda now—“whatever guiding spirits rule our lives, sometimes assign uncommon spirits uncommon tasks, tasks the world does not know how to evaluate and therefore has no right to judge. Mine, which I railed against and resisted tooth and nail, was to love a woman of a different race, a woman the law considers three-fifths human, whom I own outright the way I own the horses in my stable, and there are horses in my stable for which I paid far more. Yet I loved Paloma, Addie, better than I ever did my wife, and most of what I know of life, the little bit, I learned from her, or through her. I thank God every day for our relationship, yet I failed Paloma in one profound and crucial way, and that failure, as I told you yesterday, touched our children, hers and mine. What I didn’t say, what I thought and was afraid to tell you, was that it might—indeed almost surely would and must—touch you. And now it has. I won’t palliate your husband’s fault. Harlan has much to answer for. But the misery you feel right now—the root and head of it is me.”

“But what is it for which you blame yourself?”

“To answer that, I must be candid. I did not approve your marriage, Addie. Not when Harlan told me of his plans some months ago; nor do I approve it now.”

She colors violently. “Meaning, you do not approve of me….”

“The opposite. I disapprove the marriage for your sake as much as for my son’s.”

“But why? I am confused.”

“These matters are difficult to unravel, Addie. They go back more than forty years,” he says. “Yesterday, I told you of that time in Cuba when my wife grew ill and died.”

“Harlan’s mother…”

“Harlan’s mother, yes, Melissa…We were living at La Mella then. Villa-Urrutia had made Paloma available to her as a lady’s maid. Paloma was nineteen or twenty then, and striking, but there was no impropriety between us. You understand. When the fever struck Melissa, she tried to help. Once I overheard her praying to San Luis Beltrán and found a cross of woven basil leaves in a water glass beside the bed. I thought little of these things. I took them for harmless folk remedies, at worst, popish superstitions. At Wando Passo there was a woman, Maum Binah—she only died last year—who practiced midwifery in the quarters and was said to conjure. My father scoffed at such notions, but the slaves all went to her, and my mother…I clearly remember, as a boy, accompanying her to Binah’s cabin, on what errand I know not. But I’m certain she believed. And so, you understand, when Paloma told me there were others at La Mella who might help Melissa, the image in my mind was that of some old woman, queer and temperamental, living in isolation somewhere on the fringe of Villa-Urrutia’s estates. It was not like that at all.