Raphaella and I embraced like two shipwrecked sailors clinging to each other for life and warmth, the upended furniture, disintegrated window glass, and Professor Corbizzi’s books strewn like flotsam on a beach. We looked around the room-the evidence of violence everywhere-searching, not quite believing our eyes.
“He’s gone,” I whispered.
“Gone for good now, I think.”
“And he didn’t get the professor’s manuscript.”
Four
I
WIND AND RAIN GUSTED into the room through the damaged window, clearing and freshening the air. The fire in the grate had dropped to embers. A thought struck Raphaella and me at the same time.
“Mrs. Stoppini!”
“I’ll go,” I said, jumping to my feet.
I took the stairs two at a time, ran down the carpeted hall toward her suite. Her door was ajar. Out of habit, without thinking, I slowed to a walk, stopped at her threshold, and put my head through the door. I could see the foot of her bed. Two black-stockinged feet, soles toward me, unmoving.
She was snoring softly and rhythmically. She had slept through everything. I retraced my steps to the library, slowly and quietly this time, and closed the doors behind me. If she woke up, I didn’t want her to see the room as it was.
Raphaella had gathered a few rugs from around the library and spread them over the fallen books under the windowsill to protect them from the rain. We brought sheets of plywood from the workshop and nailed them over the destroyed windows. I retrieved a metal bucket, a dustpan, and a brush from the garden shed, and we went into the house again.
“I won’t feel confident that he’s really gone until I do this,” I said, scooping up the embers and ash from the fireplace, brushing up all the dust, and dumping it into the pail.
When Raphaella was satisfied that not a molecule had been left behind, I carried the pail outside and dug a hole behind the shop and dumped in the ashes. I trudged across the sodden lawn to the lake, scooped up some water, lugged the pail back to the hole, swirled the water around the inside of the pail, then poured it into the hole.
“Let there be no remains to tempt the relic hunters,” I murmured as I filled in the hole and tamped down the dirt with a shovel.
Back in the library, Raphaella had begun to pick up books and stack them on the trestle tables. The entire alcove had been stripped, along with a couple of hundred volumes from the south and east wall. I hauled the crate back onto the table, then picked up the cross and reattached the glass dome, bending the unbroken clips into place. I fitted the cross inside, pushed the packing material into place, and screwed on the lid.
“The rain’s let up,” I said. “Maybe we’ll see the sun today after all.”
Raphaella plunked an armful of books on the table and forced a smile. “I think we can put everything back in a couple of hours,” she said. “We already have the columns labelled, so we can organize the books by topic first, then alphabetically, then reshelve them. I-”
“Stop.” I took hold of her hands. “We’re okay,” I reassured her, seeing the frenetic energy in her eyes, the aftereffects of our ordeal. “We came through it. It’s over.”
Raphaella began to cry-first tears, like the patter of rain that heralds a storm, then a full-on gale of sobbing. I held her tightly, holding back aftershocks of my own, blinking away the image of Raphaella on her back on the floor, encircled by flames.
“I thought I was going to lose you,” she spluttered against my chest, “when you were down and he went after you.”
“It takes more than an ugly little monk with a bad attitude to put me out of commission. Even a firebug like him.”
Raphaella laughed. Sort of. “We ended up burning him after all,” she said, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms.
A ring sounded.
“What was that?” she exclaimed.
“My stupid cellphone.”
“I do apologize, Mr. Havelock, for failing to provide your afternoon refreshment,” Mrs. Stoppini said, a little flustered. “I was reading in my room and must have dozed off. I slept the afternoon away!” There was a moment’s silence as Mrs. Stoppini composed herself. “I shall have tea ready in seventeen minutes.”
Mrs. Stoppini didn’t seem upset when we told her about the library window. “I didn’t realize the wind was that strong” was all she said.
She told us she’d call a glazier to have it repaired as soon as possible. She’d also contact the shipping company to pick up the crate, which Raphaella and I had carried to the foyer at the front of the house. After a quick cup of tea Raphaella and I returned to the library and got to work putting the place back in order.
“Let’s take a break,” I suggested after an hour or so. I led Raphaella to the chairs by the fireplace. “I’ve been thinking,” I said.
Throughout the afternoon something had been scratching away at the back of my mind, like a mouse in the attic. I had been reviewing the battle with Savonarola’s ghost. Not that I had wanted to. I couldn’t help it. But there was something I couldn’t explain. It seemed that when the spectre was about to burn Raphaella, somehow she had warded him off. How?
“You can’t. You know you can’t,” she had said. She had been desperate and terrified, but she had uttered those words with something like confidence. What prohibition would someone like Savonarola recognize, no matter how much he thought Raphaella deserved to be burned alive? I could think of only one. It was an unbreakable rule that had applied through the ages to condemned witches and female prisoners bound for execution. As an ordained priest, Savonarola had been obliged to follow it.
“You persuaded him not to kill you,” I said.
Raphaella nodded. Her eyebrows rose.
The library was silent for a moment.
“Is it true?” I asked.
“He would have known if I’d been lying.”
I felt the world shift under me.
Raphaella smiled tentatively. “So what do you think?”
“I think that next to you, this is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Her smile widened. “I knew you’d say that.”
She came and sat on my lap and snuggled close, her head under my chin.
“Well, we’re all set, aren’t we?” she said. “We have no money, no place to live, and a baby girl on the way.”
I didn’t ask how she knew it was a girl.
II
THE NEXT MORNING, still reeling a little from the events and the news of the previous day, I walked downtown, planning to have a coffee at the Half Moon and then drop in at the Demeter and see Raphaella.
She and I were entering a new phase of our life sooner than we had planned. People we knew would soon be abuzz with gossip. Critics would tsk and complain that we were too young and irresponsible. Children bringing up a child, they’d declare. Ruining their future. I didn’t care what uncharitable opinions they’d spit out. Raphaella was my future.
“What happened to your face?” Marco asked when I sat down at the end of the coffee bar near the kitchen.
“It’s a long story.”
He nodded. “Understood. A latte, then?”
“A macchiato today, please, Marco.”
He smirked. “I see the Corbizzi family’s having an effect on you.”
I drank the coffee, chatting with Marco as he made a mini-pizza from scratch. Who ordered a pizza at 9:30 in the morning? I wondered as he repeatedly tossed the dough into the air, spinning it into shape.
“Hear about that business over at Geneva Park a while ago?” he asked.