“But if you know Suor Anna,” Malory walked back, barely controlling his own alto register, “why can’t we go see her now? Time …”
“… is immaterial.” Malory had forgotten about Settimio. This was the Settimio of authority. Although in the state Malory was in, authority was suspect.
“What do you mean immaterial? The longer we wait, the farther away she might be.”
“Come home, mio Principe,” Settimio said, in a more gentle register.
“Home?”
“I brought you here to meet Suor Miriam. I thought it would give you some comfort to talk for a moment with the woman who first touched your head, who first dislodged your shoulders from captivity and brought you into the air of Rome. But the visit has only added to your agitation.”
“Do not be so hard on the poor boy,” Suor Miriam murmured. “This is a place that has seen great drama. It concentrates anxiety.”
“Indeed,” Settimio said. “I know.”
“How do you know?” Malory found himself standing over Settimio as other bullies at school had stood over him. He felt ashamed, but he felt too far gone to retreat.
“This room,” Suor Miriam said, “this ward has a history. I myself have been here for only a fraction. Most recently, it has been a hospital for the Jewish people — for many years, many decades. This is a place of injury, of recovery.”
Malory looked around. There were none of the overtly Jewish symbols he had seen in the stairwell. But there was something precarious about the two rows of windows, as if crossfire were the normal state of affairs.
“Settimio is too modest to admit to the role he once played here,” Suor Miriam continued. “The Germans left the Ospedale Israelite alone for much of the war. Why? Who knows, there is rarely an answer. But when the Gestapo finally came to the hospital in 1943 to gather up the patients and send them north along with the rest of the Jews of Rome, Settimio received the information first — don’t ask me how. He ran down from the Villa to the hospital, to this very ward, just minutes before the Germans arrived. We had a young doctor at the time — very attractive, the kind of Italian the Germans liked: thick-browed, clean, vegetarian. He spoke to the Germans while Settimio hid behind the nurse’s cabinet and whispered his lines to him, like that Frenchman with the long nose.”
“Cyrano de Bergerac?” Malory was in awe of the woman’s voice and answered in as automatic deference as in any oral exam.
“‘You are welcome to take the patients,’ the doctor said, repeating Settimio’s whispers. ‘But they are all suffering from Syndrome K.’
“‘Syndrome K?’ the officer said.
“‘Highly contagious,’ the doctor explained. ‘Inevitably fatal.’ I was standing right there where you are now. Forty-seven Jews Settimio saved. That day.”
Malory turned to Settimio, unmoving in his Windsor knot and his midnight blue coat, but changed nonetheless. Strange, Malory thought. Settimio seemed younger, at least not as old as Old Mrs. Emery or the nun sitting on the polished bench.
“Go home with Settimio, my poor boy. Come back and see me tomorrow at four in the afternoon. Tonight you will have to sleep with questions.” Suor Miriam reached up with her hands. Understanding the motion, Malory bent forward and let Suor Miriam bless his forehead with her lips, let her kiss take with it the last grains of his energy. The Driver was waiting below with both Vespas. Malory descended into the seat behind him, felt the October night warm on his face as they drove off the island, Fatebenefratelli at their backs, and rose up a winding alley that smelled of night and pine. A gate opened, and the Driver entered, it seemed to Malory, directly into the side of a hill. They dismounted. There were more stairs. A door opened, a light. There was a kitchen, bread-warm. Settimio removed his coat, Malory his corduroy jacket. There was a bed, there were pajamas, a glass of water. Malory lay down in a country beyond exhaustion but with enough strength for a final question.
“Settimio,” Malory said, pulling himself up against the pillows to a seated position, his legs following like serpents from a foreign zoo.
“Sì, mio Principe?”
“Where am I?”
“You are home.”
“Home?”
“Many years ago,” Settimio sat in the shadows beyond the lamplight and began to speak, “a Jewish butcher named Yehoshua lived in the town of Narbonne along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.” He spoke with a gentle bass, like the pedals of the great organ of that same Narbonne where Malory had first learned to play, singing him back to the last time he had been told a story at bedtime. Settimio’s voice encircled him as securely as the mattress below and the duvet above, floating around Malory’s ears at a gothic distance between waking and dream. Later, when Malory opened his eyes in the dark and the silence, he was not only unsure whether he was awake or asleep but even where he was and in which century. For more than a moment, he imagined he was back in the Dominican cell of Galileo Galilei where, only twenty-four hours before, the hempen bed cords had begun to engrave a fresh Roman dissertation into his skull. In the darkness of the morning, Malory reached with his right hand into the air beside his bed and located a cord and a switch.
“Louiza?” he called out.
There was light.
There was more.
Above him a ceiling of a blue richer than the sky of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, as pure and saturated with color as any he had seen through any of the dozens of Newtonian prisms he’d examined over the years. It was a color unknown to the British sky, but an inseparable part of the wood outside Narbonne, where he had lain for hours on his back on a mattress of bluebells, paralyzed by nature.
Malory pushed himself up on his elbows. Around the walls, Malory’s own image gazed back at him. In a dozen or so portraits set into the hazelnut panels of the room, Malory’s own face — young and old, as a man, as a woman, in costumes as ornate and archaic as any he had seen in the halls and chapels of Cambridge — looked back at him, refracted in mirrors of time and manner. In curling wigs or in flat caps, with beards or rouged cheeks, every portrait had an ear or a chin or a cheek that Malory felt was essentially his own. The perplexed look in all of their eyes as they looked at him lying in the bed, made him realize that his own appearance of general bewilderment had more to do with genes and less with his history of abandonment. The painting directly across from him — the most recent an Edwardian-looking gentleman, perhaps his great-grandfather, the last prince of Septimania before himself — couldn’t hide his own confusion behind a starched collar and whiskers. Had all those faces in all the portraits in the bedroom wondered at one time the same thing he was wondering — what am I doing here?
In answer, there was a knock on the door.
“Mio Principe?” A knock again. “I saw your light. Do you require something?”
“Ah—” Malory said. Which meant nothing, but was interpreted as an invitation.
Settimio was dressed in dark trousers, a long white shirt, clipped at the cuff by medallions that caught the light from Malory’s bedside lamp and shone a touch of comprehension into his awakening brain. Above the shirt and trousers, Settimio wore a smock, long and leathery like the apron of a butcher. It must be morning, Malory thought, or perhaps later.
“Did you sleep well, Principe?”