Part Two
As many as the fireflies a peasant has seen
(Resting on a hill that time of year when he
Who lights the world least hides his face from us,
And at the hour when the fly gives way
To the mosquito) all down the valley’s face,
Where perhaps he gathers grapes and tills the ground:
With flames that numerous was Hell’s eighth circle
Glittering.
2/0
6 September 1666
hat is the first thing one wishes to see upon waking and the last before closing one’s eyes?
My love? My loved one?
The simple is the sign of the nearer truth.
Light. We wish to see the light. In the beginning, if we are believers, there was light. Before the end, even if we believe not, there is light as well.
In the early morning, when the light hurdles the Tevere and joins me in my solitary bed, and in that hour before dusk when I stand alone in the garden, hidden from the nuns of the Aventino, and the sun is at nearest sympathy with the horizon, I have often had cause to ponder on the nature of light. There is no element as quick and powerful. Yet no element as easy to deflect. A mirror crazed with age, a summer lagoon dusty with neglect, an eyeball moistened with solitude, or a boot polished with spit will shift the direction of the swiftest ray of light without breaking a sweat.
I was bending light with a simple glass prism when Isaac descended to breakfast on the fifth morning of our journey. We had stopped in Troyes for the night in an inn attached to the Broce-aux-Juifs where I had a few friendly connections and knew the meat would not upset Isaac’s Lincolnshire digestion. I had picked up the toy in Cambridge before the Plague — a piece of glass carved into two triangles connected by three narrow rectangles. As I waited for Isaac, the morning brightening the steam from my coffee, I twisted the prism in the light from the doorway and watched the colors form, the seven colors of the spectrum, on the wall above the innkeeper’s bar.
“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!” I looked up. Isaac was beaming on the stair, as happy as I’d seen him since we’d quit his mother’s garden.
“Good morning!” I said, putting the prism down on the table and rising to greet him.
“No, no,” he said and jumped from the stair to the table. “Once more!” And he picked up the prism and caught the morning in a practiced motion. Again the light divided and cast its rainbow upon the wall. “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!” he crowed again.
I looked perplexed, as sometimes I do when these English schoolboys play history games with me.
“It’s how one remembers the trick of the prism — the seven colors that it paints the light,” Isaac laughed, happy to have an audience that needed a lecture. “Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet … Richard Of York Gave Battle …”
“But, Isaac,” I interrupted gently.
“R for Richard and Red, O for Of and Orange …”
“I understand,” I said. “But surely you don’t believe that this clear piece of glass gives color to the light.”
“Of course it does,” Isaac said, twisting the prism again. “Look! Richard Of York …”
It was then that I removed a second prism from its hiding place in my jacket pocket. Intercepting the seven-colored band from Isaac’s prism, my new prism captured the color and projected the light into a single, clear, colorless beam on the innkeeper’s wall.
Of the many virtues that attracted me to the multi-hued Isaac Newton, my favorite is his desire to know the truth. In an instant, all thoughts of Richard, Duke of York, vanished. Isaac sat at the table, the first prism in his left hand. He took my wrist gently between his fingers and moved my hand closer to his and then farther away. He laid the prisms down on the table while he reached for the eternal chapbook in his own jacket pocket and a stub of pencil and drew a rough sketch. Coffee and breakfast gave way to experiment and measurement.
I knew the truth before Isaac descended. Still, I was happy to watch him in the flight of discovery and description, calculating angles, drawing rays, holding my wrist oblivious to the rising temperature of my blood, the beating velocity of my heart. “The prism does not color the light,” Isaac declared finally with the light-giving pride of conquest in his eyes. “The light is made up of colors!” Meanwhile, I had made a deflection of my own.
We would no longer head south to the Septimania of the past, the kingdom that the shochet of Narbonne had long since abandoned. I needed more than light. I needed life. Septimania needed life. I would take Isaac to the city where my family, for over eight hundred years, has ruled its quiet empire from a villa hidden from the world beneath the crest of the Aventino. The Aventino Hill of Rome, with its view of the River Tiber and St. Peter’s Basilica — I would take Isaac to the Villa Septimania. All roads, all colors lead to Rome. And Isaac had seen the light.
2/1
ITH SETTIMIO ACTING AS GUIDE AND TRANSLATOR, MALORY searched all the rooms in the prow of the hospital, where he had last seen Louiza and Tibor’s wife. From ward to ward and office to office, he asked about a young English woman named Louiza, a young Rumanian woman, her tall, long-haired husband, a red-bearded American obstetrician. By 10 p.m. it was clear that the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli had no more record of Louiza than the Maths Faculty at Cambridge University.
“The police,” Malory said. “Let’s go ask them.”
“Which ones, mio Principe?” Settimio answered. “The polizia, the carabinieri, the vigili?”
“Whoever can find Louiza, of course!”
“The carabinieri are in charge of missing persons and they have a few dogs. But you are not even convinced that Signorina Louiza is missing.”
“Then the British Embassy.”
“Which is closed for the night and undoubtedly will be very busy congratulating the new pope in the morning.”
Malory sat very slowly down on a bench in the courtyard of the hospital. The lights had gone out, the televisions were cold. “Mio Principe.” Settimio stood in front of Malory. “There are many things you will learn about Rome in the coming years. And many things about your new kingdom.”
“I’ve lost her again.” Malory’s porphyry solidity evaporated. “My new kingdom is nothing.”
“Your new kingdom is Septimania,” Settimio said with the firmness that had first led Malory out of the hospital. “You have not begun to know her.”
“Her?”
“Your new home. If you will allow us, we will take you to the villa, to your new home.”
“We can’t,” Malory began. “I won’t,” he stood, “leave without Louiza and the baby.” Even standing, Malory felt as small a child as at any time in his life.
“There is one more person who might interest you here,” Settimio said. “She will be awake, even at this hour. And if there is a baby, if your child was delivered, she is the only woman who could have delivered it.” Settimio turned and crossed the courtyard back towards the entrance.