“Will you be all right, Settimio?”
“Excuse me, mio Principe?”
“While we are away?”
“No one is searching for me,” Settimio said. “No one is searching for Septimania.”
“No chatter?” Malory smiled.
“No one sees Septimania for what it is,” Settimio smiled back at him. “It is a trick of the light.” The Driver’s son pulled the Lancia up to the curb and left the engine running. The Driver jumped out and retrieved Malory’s bag and his own and held the door for Malory.
“Hercule!” Settimio rolled down his window, and Malory walked around the car. It was the first time Settimio had called him by name.
“Be careful, Hercule,” Settimio said. “Discretion.”
“Thank you,” Malory said. And then Settimio reached up, the way Suor Miriam had reached up to him all those years before. Settimio reached up with his gloved hands to Malory’s shoulders, and Malory bent so Settimio could kiss him, on one cheek and then the other.
IT WAS PLEASANT TO LAND IN A PRIVATE AIRPORT IN THE NEW YORK countryside. The view from the chartered jet as they bisected New York Harbor between the Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty and headed up the Hudson — Malory had flown only two or three times in his life and then only to France so had little to compare — was extraordinary. The walk directly from the airplane into a comfortable and discreet vehicle with the friendly face of the Driver at the wheel felt as comfortable as crossing the Ponte Palatino. They crossed a bridge, they crossed a river, the Hudson he believed, although he wasn’t certain whether they were crossing from New Jersey to New York, New York to New Jersey, or none of the above. Both banks of the river were dripping the bacchic green of late summer into the water. There were boats, a sun. Malory had seen the sun, every day for the past twenty-three years, from the garden of the Villa Septimania. But with all the time he’d spent down in the Sanctum Sanctorum, all the time he’d spent reading and then thinking and then reading and thinking some more, he’d forgotten almost completely about the horizon, about the curvature of the Earth, about nature.
The Driver made a left turn onto River Road. At the crossroads, a bar, a few shops. On the other side, a round barn was set back from the road down a dirt drive. In front, a host of young girls in overalls were selling corn and pumpkins and apples and pies and ragdolls. Past the market, low fieldstone walls in brown and off-brown flanked the road. To the left, a man jumped a horse over a pair of crossed timbers. There was nothing Italian about it. Nor English, nor Rumanian.
“Mio Principe.” The Driver turned left onto a dirt road, marked by yet another pair of fieldstone fences, then downhill to a creek, and stopped the car by a gate. “Eccoci qua.” A woman approached the car, raised her sunglasses.
“Buona sera,” Malory heard her give a few instructions to the Driver. She opened the rear door and climbed in next to Malory. “Hello, Malory,” she said, with a kiss on either cheek. And then, for reasons more complex than Malory could follow, she grabbed Malory tight away from his seatbelt and held onto him. “Thank you,” Ottavia said. “I’m so glad you are here. You have no idea.”
“Thanks,” Malory said, thinking it had been an extraordinary day to have his cheeks kissed twice.
“Shall we walk?” Ottavia asked, and exchanged a few more words in Italian with the Driver.
Malory stepped out of the car and blinked three times.
“Come with me,” Ottavia said. She opened the gate for the Driver, and then, linking her arm in Malory’s, she led him down the road. Malory looked back. The Driver smiled and waved as he straightened the car and followed. How wonderful, Malory thought, that there is someone in the world who has to stand on tiptoe to reach me. Arm in arm, Ottavia led Malory onto the bridge across the creek and then off the road and onto a track across a pasture, rutted with the marks of tractors and horses and rimmed with the late summer weeds that Malory knew only from the Cambridge Arts Cinema.
“I’ve been thinking about Rome,” Ottavia said, slowing down her footsteps to extend the moment. “A lot.”
Malory said nothing, but squeezed her arm tighter with what biceps he had and looked at the small rocks in the tractor path in the hope they might dilute his embarrassment but not his pleasure.
“Do you know what my favorite moment was?”
Malory thought about the dinner Settimio had served, their stroll out in the garden to peek down on nighttime Rome — the first time Malory had strolled in the garden or much of anywhere with anyone. And the apple, of course.
“That night,” Ottavia said, quick and bright, knowing that Malory was too confused to reply, “when you tucked me into bed and read me a story. No one has ever done that.”
Nor to me either, thought Malory. Not in a long while.
“I slept so well,” Ottavia said. “I felt safe. Not managing, not coping, not worrying about Tibor or Cristina or my own sorry life, but safe.”
“I’m glad,” Malory said. “The villa is really quite extraordinary.”
“It was you, Malory.” Ottavia stopped and cupped a small Malory elbow in each of her smaller hands.
“I only read you something that was written a long, long time ago.”
“But there was something in the way you read. The tone of your voice.”
Once upon a time, Malory had thought about the tone of his own voice. Once upon a time, Malory had tuned organs.
“I don’t know anything about music,” Ottavia continued, “except the chants and hymns I had to sing from Santa Sabina to Trinity. But I know there have been times, very rare times, when I’ve been sitting in a particular niche of a chapel or above a Scottish loch at sunset and the sound of a distant boat comes to me. And all feels …”
“In harmony?” Malory asked.
“If that’s the word,” Ottavia said. “It’s like the moment before I find the solution to a particularly thorny mathematical problem. Even though I can’t yet see the answer, I can hear the sound of its perfection coming from a distance. That’s the sound I heard as I closed my eyes that night in the Villa Septimania.”
“And the answer?” Malory asked. “Did that come to you later?”
“Malory,” Ottavia said, “do you remember the story you were reading to me that night? About the first meeting between Haroun al Rashid and the daughter of Charlemagne?”
“Aldana?” Malory asked.
“Do you remember how Aldana was flirting with Haroun?”
“Would you really call it flirting?” Malory asked, suddenly aware of Ottavia’s hands still on his elbows. “She was a young girl. He was, well, he must have been close to fifty.”
“Do you remember how, at the end, when Aldana was called upstairs to join her father and the others, Haroun promised to come back?”
“Yes, why?”
“Did he?” Ottavia’s hands moved up to Malory’s shoulders. “I’ve been wondering since that night in Rome. Did he come back? Is there more?”
“Just a polite visit eleven years later,” Malory said. “When Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, Haroun returned.”
“Disguised as his envoy?”
“It’s not clear. I remember there was a note about the visit in the Complete History, but it was written by a ten-year-old boy.”