13.
Small Isola alone in the high dark corridors, with their smell of mould and honey. Behind her an embroidered jaguar sinks its teeth into the neck of a tapir, while at the same time a giant snake coils round the jaguar, so as to crush it to death. But she isn’t looking at the tapestries or the dead animals’ heads. She’s keeping her mind as empty as she can.
14.
‘You are not to tell anyone. Not anyone, do you understand, or Papa will be very very cross.’
His gaze has been roving round the room. Suddenly he picks up the gorilla goblet and a gleam comes into his eyes.
‘You know I told you your Papa would never cut off a person’s hand? Well, I’ll tell you the truth now, Isola. It’s different in Africa. We cut people’s hands off all the time. It’s the only language those darkies understand. Oh yes, Isola, me and my men have cut off many hands, even from little girls like you.’
15.
Isola is at her dolls’ house in the nursery. The dolls are burying a child. She mutters and whispers to them crossly while her ears strain to hear what Nanny is saying to a maid. Four years have passed since she first visited the Tower and she is ten years old.
‘We can all see it, Francine, not just you, and we are all distressed. But remember we’re only servants. There is nothing we can do.’
Nanny B comes over to Isola.
‘Isola, your father has sent us word…’
Still facing her dolls, Isola flinches. Then she turns a blank face to her nanny and awaits instruction.
16.
Isola in the corridor of silent humming birds, wearing a red dress.
‘Nothing happened,’ she is telling herself, ‘nothing important. I can’t even remember. No, no, I really can’t remember a thing.’
There is a painting above her of an eagle devouring a dove.
17.
Back in the nursery, the servants rush forward, but she turns away from them.
‘I think I’d like to play with my dolls.’
18.
Isola in a blue dress with ribbons in her hair, passing the dead humming birds in their glass case.
19.
Isola at the bottom of the thirty-three steps. She opens the lower door and steps out into the corridor. As always, there’s no one there. Only dead animals, and pictures of animals dying.
20.
Isola in white at fourteen years, passing a suit of armour on an upper landing.
‘I really don’t remember,’ says the pale girl to herself, ‘I really don’t remember at all.’
21.
From out of the ornamental pool at the front of the palace, six stone horses draw a marble charioteer.
Regiments of poplar trees frame the grassy avenue that leads from the chariot to a column on the ridge of the hill. On top of the column is a human form made of stone. It is the dead wife of the first Duke, set high above the Earth against the sky.
The poplar trees are pale yellow, like white wine.
The leaves slowly fall.
22.
In mirrored alcoves, young women giggle with bewhiskered gentlemen. A violinist plays a sentimental tune. Outside it is autumn again and, far away in her palace, Isola has just turned sixteen.
Two gentlemen sit at the bar.
‘You’re just like I used to be,’ Lord Robert is telling his new friend.
How old he looks with his lank grey hair, his cheeks puffy and purple and hatched with broken veins. His companion is only just twenty, with a moustache so thin that it’s barely worth the name. His blue eyes are full of resentment and doubt.
‘You should have seen me when I was your age, Henri,’ says Lord Robert. ‘Full of energy! Full of fire! I was running a concession half the size of this whole damn country, would you believe, getting useful work out of ten thousand good-for-nothing darkies. And then the busy-bodies came and ruined it all, God damn it. But, my dear young friend – and I do mean friend, though we have only just met – my dear, dear friend, I implore you, don’t be like me. Don’t ever let them take away your dreams!’
‘But no one buys my paintings,’ complains Henri. ‘No one offers me commissions. No one appreciates my art.’
‘I will commission you,’ says Lord Robert grandly.
He rises unsteadily to his feet, warily watched by the young women in the mirrors.
‘You shall come to my palace,’ he proclaims, so loudly that all the room can hear him, ‘and you will paint the world a masterpiece. I’ll provide you with everything you need. You’ll paint my lake and my house and my fine park. And when you’ve done that, you’ll paint me. Yes, me, in the medal awarded me by the King himself.’
He draws on his cigar while tears well up in his eyes. Then he sinks back down onto his seat, picks up his brandy and adds with a grudging little shrug:
‘You can even paint my daughter, I suppose, but you’ll have to add a little flesh to her bones.’
23.
Isola watches Henri as he begins to make sketches. She sees him glance uneasily at the immaculate finish of the oil paintings on the walls. She can see he’s frightened. She can tell he’s completely out of his depth.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘by the time Papa gets back from Africa, he’ll have forgotten he even asked you.’
She doesn’t pity Henri exactly, or find him attractive, but she is oddly fascinated by his fear.
‘I’m not really a landscape painter,’ he says, ‘but I would love to draw pictures of you.’
Soon he’s given up painting altogether and is pouring his energies instead, at every opportunity, into Isola’s listless but pliant body.
When she tells him she’s pregnant, he disappears.
24.
Lady Isola, in her four-poster bed, cradles the new baby.
Her eyes see nothing but the small and squirming thing. Her ears hear nothing but its snorting and snuffling. And indeed she sniffs and snuffles herself, for her nose can’t ever seem to get enough of its warm and biscuity smell.
‘Amanda, I will call her,’ she tells Nanny B. ‘It means lovable, you know.’
25.
It is Amanda’s seventh birthday, and here is Isola in the nursery armchair with her daughter’s present in her lap.
She’s found that she can’t cope for more than a very short time with the unruly demands of a child, but she still visits her nearly every week. Officially, of course, Amanda is an orphan, and Isola is the little girl’s guardian.
Amanda approaches the armchair to collect the small parcel. She is quite fond of her mother, but a little shy. Nanny B and her staff stand watching, wringing their hands in unison, as they will the little girl to be pleased.
Amanda unwraps the parcel. Her mother has bought her a beautiful little hairpin, ornamented with a heart picked out in tiny rubies and diamonds. Amanda smiles and shows it to her staff, though she would have preferred a toy.
26.
Isola waits at the nursery door, while Amanda is being wrapped up for a walk.
‘But where is the hairpin?’ she asks. ‘She hasn’t worn it the last two times I saw her. Does she not like it any more?’
‘Oh no, your Ladyship, she loves the pin. It’s just that she might lose it in the park.’
‘Oh nonsense, I can keep an eye on it. Fetch it for her now. I’d like to see it again.’
Nanny B draws breath.
‘Your Ladyship, please don’t be distressed, but I have to confess it’s gone astray. We were hoping to find it quickly and spare your Ladyship the upset.’