Chapter 1
He first heard of her when he was a child. Some called her the Red Queen, though she was not; others had titled her the Red or Scarlet Lily—or the Ruby That Sings. So many names, so much eccentric description hiding what it displayed. By the age of nineteen he was familiar with her history, and by twenty had read several esoteric books concerning her. Seventeen years after, he stood on a street, gazing at the Palace where she had lived.
He acknowledged he had been blindly if intermittently seeking her all that intervening time. And now he had arrived. But he was no longer a romantic of twenty. And she was almost four centuries dead.
* * * *
My name is Edmund Sanger.
No doubt you will know my father’s name, William Joseph Sanger, the actor-architect, whose memorable performances (Hamlet, Cesare Borgia) left audiences fainting or abject with joy; whose small herd of elegant buildings still dominate certain little towns of the north and west of England.
I grew up in a crazy household. I don’t use the term lightly. William had long since driven my pretty, unclever mother mad. Their three daughters copied, or rose against her. I was the late son, appearing when everyone else was old enough to know better. I led a lonely, and perpetually astounded life, reliant on witch-like nurses, and drily erudite, if sometimes pederastic, tutors. At sixteen I escaped and took ship for France. The first book of my travels, which I then wrote, I was lucky enough to have made into a great success. Conqueror’s Road, was and is my only truly popular work. But still in print, even now, it set my sails for me, both financially and in the sense of preference. I could go where I wished, and travel so often very happily alone (yet frequently involved in brief if exotic adventures with other human things). I could live almost in any mode I desired, save that of richman. I could escape from whatever bored or horrified me. I was able to become—not my father’s son, or my family’s irrelevant annoyance, let alone any villain’s plaything—but Myself. God bless the written word, Amen.
* * * *
How did I first hear of Cremisia Ranaldi? No doubt from one of the better tutors. But rather than being some tidbit of intriguing history I was lessoned in, it seems more to me that her name fell like a pearl seed into my mind and heart, and there grew of itself into a glorious tree. She, unlike my at-one-time ever-present jailor family, was my verified connection to the world. Of course I fell in love with her, soon with all the raw sexual energy of my youth, and next with my even more voracious brain. She was desire incarnate, genius rising like Venus on the waters of imagination. If it ever entirely came clear to me, in my very earliest years, that she, as had I, had needed to elude enslaving family chains, I don’t think I was aware of it fully. Rather than the flag of rebellion, she was the sunrise that ends the dark.
And she was safe as sun and star, too, miles off in the past.
* * * *
“Ah, you are a lover of the Red Lily,” he said to me, my sudden traveling companion on the long, hot, near-noon road to the old city of Corvenna.
All about were the round hills, with their groves of somber cypresses, and topiary poplars like rounded, curled-into-a-ball black-green cats. High up, rock and burned grass flared an extraordinary topaz. Sometimes colossal shadows, like sorcerous flying machines from some unthinkable future (hawks), swept over the slopes, and down, hunting across the wide, white, throat-of-dust road. They reminded me, such shadows, oddly of the decapitating passage of a guillotine’s blade, even to the airborne swish.
I glanced at my companion, who had attached himself to me in the day’s beginning. A fellow walker. They were not always suspect, or to be swiftly sloughed. And he looked so like a rogue, I mostly doubted he was one. It was his role, his act perhaps, to keep him secure (whereas my disguise was only, and often truthfully, to look very shabby and poor). Curled hair he had, black as oil, eyes the metallic ochre of old bronze. But young, rather less than my own age, I surmised. An Italian, native to the area? Why not. The earring in his right ear was a gold coin rubbed smooth of its identity. He wore the typical red scarf at his throat tight enough to strangle him, I thought—practice for others? His name, he had instantly told me, was Anceto.
“I have met many,” Anceto said, “who were deeply enamored of the Lady Cremisia Ranaldi. Yet how can a woman keep such influence over our sex for so many years after she has left the mortal state? What can you hope for? She’s dust in a tomb. Nothing to embrace. Nor anything at all to see. Her voice, which they say was better than the voice of the harp, or the nightingale, no longer to be heard. Only her poetry remains, cold as soot-marks on the yellowed pages. What use, my young sir, what profit in such a desire, or in faithfulness to such a reclusive muse?”
“Her verses are superb,” I answered quietly.
“So they say,” he murmured. “I have never read any—for I can read. Never dared. Where I have heard some ancient song composed by her begin to be played, I stop my ears. I’ve no leisure to be bewitched by the dead, Signore.”
All this came about because he had asked me if I went to the city, and when I told him I did, he guessed why.
Fairly canny by now, generally I didn’t obscure such ordinary matters. Except, maybe, where I suspected some thieves’ ambush might be arranged.
We walked on in silence, but for the chorus of cavallettas, and presently an inn occurred at the roadside, as if conjured specially for our benefit.
We ate a lean meal, cheese, olives, herbal rice, and drank some wine. In turn he told me of his own interests, which included a farm he yearned to possess somewhere in the hills, an old priest he was fond of, his wife, who was ‘not unkind’ to him, and one or two other succulent women he now and then also enjoyed. On this issue he was flattering but decorous.
After the afternoon pause, during which the crickets sang on, he slept, and I wrote up some notes on my journey, we continued along the road, still together. The evening began to gather in the distance, while the sun blinded us as it westered, a smashed egg of liquid gold. The gates were in sight by then, and we believed we might make them before the city police closed up for the night.
He said, as we climbed the last stony incline, among some carts and donkeys also hurrying to arrive before the lock-up, “Do you know where she lived?”
“Who? Oh, Cremisia Ranaldi. The Palazzo Ranaldi, am I correct? I’ve never been quite certain where it lies in the city.”
“Lucky for you then, my friend. For not many now do know, but I do. It’s not, this house, where most might expect it, though always it was there.”
Then we were in at the gates, the sky seemed to breath out blue and smoke itself to deepest darkness in a succession of moments. Stars burst in static fireworks, and an answering gust of lamps opened from the ancient alleys and towers of Corvenna. So close about us they drew then, the city buildings, like a crowd—less of men than smooth-furred beasts, silent on vast soft paws, their claws sheathed and invisible, their eyes pretending to be merely narrow windows.
* * * *
Cremisia’s mother, Flamia; she herself made some kind of magic, so the story had it, in the last months before her daughter was born.
Flamia’s maiden name, as with her married one, had been Ranaldi. They were a near-packed family, noble enough and rich enough to demand legitimacy in all its forms. She was, plainly to be seen from that alone, used to order and the rights of a dynastic will.
Since she must bear this child, she would have, Flamia Ranaldi stipulated, a daughter, both beautiful and gifted—not only with the female virtues, but the skills and inspirations more normally associated with males.
To this end the girl must have the assistance of perfect looks. Hair ebony-black as a night wood, eyes jet-black as a night river, lips as red as fire, skin white as new-fallen snow. Once delivered, the mother would know her other requests had also been granted, through the medium of these extreme china and stained glass pigments.
When the hour came—midnight, it was said, to match the wished-for color of black, and winter-snowing also for the white (and too in a sea of blood that might be compared, though wrongly, to the red of fire)—Flamia’s daughter was born. They carried her, washed and new, before her mother. Flamia was too weak, they say, to hold her. But, and again who can be sure, it seems the dying Flamia remarked: “They have done all I asked. I had forgotten that the price could be so very high.”
She died, evidently, within the next minute.
Motherless then, the child was left, flower of night and snow and flame, to flourish or to perish in that house of the God-ordained masters, the male Ranaldis.
* * * *
The night’s shelter was suggested to me by Anceto, a kind of hostelry of sorts; I suppose I had been doubtful. But curiosity won out. It was in fact a decent house, so far as I could tell, nothing extravagant, but all clean enough and to hand. I had the impression the woman who provided the beds was one of those succulent women Anceto treasured. But the two of them were modest in front of me.
I slept well, and woke up as the cocks crowed in some of the little yards round about. In the low-beamed dining-room below, we ate sweet polenta.
“If you are still set on it,” Anceto said, “I will take you today to see the true Palazzo of the Red Queen.”
I said I was.
My famous father, I’m sure, would have mocked me for a gullible fool. This rogue would lead me to some half-way convincing sty, regale me further with his opinions. Perhaps pick my pocket as I stared at the crumbling walls. If Anceto had done the last, of course, he would have got very little reward.
We climbed up and down through the hilly city, through thin streets strung with banners of washing, down flute-skinny defiles with only blind yellowish stone either side; so into broad avenues and squares whose floors were paved green and pink and black as if for dancing, or gigantic games of chess. Tangles of architecture passed by. Now and then I asked him what this or that might be, that church, this tower. He told me, seeming to know—or inventing—everything. But at least the lies made sense—few writers do not value that.
“You see, Edmondo,” Anceto said at length, “there are a great many old houses and other buildings men will tell you are the Palazzo Ranaldi. Even your English guide-books weaken to confusion on the subject.”
“I had noticed that,” I said. “Strange, when her reputation was so great.”
“Ah, but you must understand, my friend, she spun a kind of web about the place. Few after all did not believe her a sorceress, so mighty was her charm and bright her talent. Take her riddle, the riddle none can, either way, answer. You know of it, too?” I nodded. “No wonder she can veil her dwelling, if she has a wish to.”
“But you have uncovered the palace.”
“I, and others. You now shall do so.” I looked aside at him, aware abruptly of a deep intensity in his gaze. His eyes had darkened, it seemed to me. He said, “What you will make of this only you will know. I brought a man here once. He fell on his knees and wept. He told me he had lived before, an earlier life in the time of the Borgia Pope, and met with Cremisia then, and loved her. But she loved only one.”
“That was her second husband. The dwarf.”
“Ah yes, Edmondo. The handsome dwarf, Loro, Loro Ranaldi, since he took her name on wedding her. She said of him he was a giant among men. Just as others said she had dwarfed all the powerful male tyrants in her own family, even her first husband.”
I was giddy. His eyes seemed to have hypnotized me. I found I nearly stumbled, and caught at a wall. Habituated once more, I looked about, and was rather startled to find we seemed to have entered, unnoticed by me, an entirely different street. Ancient, as so much of Corvenna was, if not especially ruinous, it stretched itself out along the two high banks of a canal of dark jade water. Directly across from me, on the canal’s farther side, lifted the tall shapes of mansions, palaces, each separated and skirted about by walls and palings, steps and terraces.
“There, Edmondo,” said my guide.
There. It was as if I knew it, though for a fact I had never seen even a sketch of the Palazzo Ranaldi, let alone that modernly marvelous instant portrait known as The Photograph. But I might have walked here often, once, just like the crazy man, real or invented, who knelt down crying. It swelled up, wave-like, on a terrace above a stair, and a garden, this overgrown and wild, and spilling soberly over its high, yellow-amber walls. Trees had raised themselves to hugeness inside, reaching out for air and light, and they clouded round the palisades of stonework and windows. A pane, sun-struck, flashed golden, and with it some edges of masonry. In the water below, the reflection hung like a gilded mask.
Some three hundred and eighty-one years since she had been here. Since she had existed.
I did not quite believe in what I saw. The actual house was a mirage—less, itself, like a reflection in water than a mirror. Or else, some clever effect thrown by sudden light upon a blank void. But sun and shadow flickered, separated. A bird flew out from the trees into the church dome of the sky.
Chapter 2
He led me to another tavern. I have no memory at all of getting—or of being got—there. In the vine-screened courtyard, he made me drink half a pitcher of water, and then some of the local rough and earthen wine.
I thought I must have taken too much sun—odd in itself, I had credited myself with being fairly used to the climate by now. Or, I wondered a little if he had lightly drugged me. (The lessons of my father: Trust none, love none, use all, had put me, early in life, in shackles. Scorn and hack them off though I had, to break that ever-reiterant hold was often hard.)
But Anceto said to me, “Never fear, Edmondo. You are only under her spell. I have seen it before, now and then. No shame to you. Nor will she hurt you. And I am here.”
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