the gleam on her throat of pearls; and he realized that in this solitary darkness she was dressed not in her black silk mourning dress but something rich and brilliant in color and strung with little jewels like pinpoints of light that sparkled and vanished as she moved her hands to cover her face.
“Why do you break my door?” she whispered.
“Why don’t you answer my knocking?”
He could make out her white fingers clawing at her hair. And it seemed she crossed her breasts with her arms like a saint and bowed her head as if she were pulling herself down. He saw the white nape of her neck, her hair parting, falling in front of her like a veil.
“What will you do?” she asked suddenly.
“What will I do? What can I do?” he asked angrily. “Why do you put this question to me? Put it to my guardians. Put it to my father’s lawyers. It’s out of my hands, it’s always been out of my hands. But you, what is it you do?”
“What do you want of me?” she whispered.
“Why did you never tell me!” He drew near to her face, his lips drawn back in a grimace. “Why! Why did I have to hear it from his lips that you were the girl, you and he….”
“Stop it, in the name of God, stop!” she cried. “Shut the doors, shut the doors.” And suddenly rising and running past him, she closed the doors he had forced open and, rushing to the window, pulled the heavy velvet drapes so that both of them were completely enveloped in darkness.
“Why do you torture me?” she implored. “What have I to do with your rivalry? For the love of God, Tonio, for half my life I have been in this house reading you fairy tales! I was a child then. I was no older than you are now! I didn’t know what the world was, and so I went with him when he came for me!
“But tell you, how was I to tell you? After Carlo was sent away, His Excellency would have shut me up again in the Pietà or some worse place, and I would have died there! I had no honor left, and nothing else until he brought me here and married me and gave me his name. Dear God, I tried for fifteen years to be the Signora Treschi, your mother, that he wanted me to be. But tell you, how to tell you, for the love of God, I begged Carlo not to tell you! But Tonio, save for those few nights with him when I was a girl, I have lived the life of a nun in the cloister, and what did I ever do to earn this pious vocation? Do you see here the face and form of a saint! I am a woman, Tonio.”
“But Mamma, with him now, under my father’s roof…”
He felt her hands before he heard her movement. She was fumbling to cover his mouth, his eyes, even though he could see absolutely nothing. Her fingers lay warm and trembling on his eyelids, her smooth forehead like a stone against his lips, her body rising and falling against him.
“Please, Tonio…” She was sobbing softly. “It does not matter what I do with him now. I cannot change this rivalry. You have no power. I have no power. Oh, please, please…”
“Stand with me, Mother,” he whispered. “No matter what is past, stand with me now. I am your son, Mother, I need you.”
“I do stand with you, I do. But I am now and have always been without power.”
He felt her head in the crook of his neck, her breasts softly heaving against him. And lifting his right hand slowly he found the silky mass of her hair and stroked it.
“This must pass,” he whispered.
By the end of the month, Carlo was defeated in his first election. The elder members of the Grand Council talked again of stationing him abroad. His young associates resisted it.
And the long-drawn-out clauses of Andrea’s will had been clearly and once and for all unraveled.
Beneath his strong and ominous admonitions that his elder son should not marry, there was an ironclad provision that could not be broken:
Andrea had entailed his estate. That is, it could never be divided or sold. And it could be inherited only by the sons of Marc Antonio Treschi. So do what Carlo might, the future of the family belonged to Tonio.