Mrs. Osmond Read online

  Tea was served by Giancarlo, the dustily frock-coated major-domo, whose rule here at the Villa Castellani had been well-established long before Mr. Osmond first took up residence in the house; such indeed was the aspect of venerable decay the servant displayed in his person that one might have been forgiven for thinking him not much younger in years than the casa di campagna itself, which, as a sheaf of yellowed parchments could show to a visitor’s inquisitive eye, had been standing for the better part of a millennium. He mumbled to himself as he attended to the master and his guest—the countess he addressed as Signora Osmond, evidently mistaking her for Isabel—plying the teapot with a gnarled brown quaking hand, and managing to leave in both their saucers a substantial spillage of tea as pale as straw. Osmond was surprisingly tolerant and even to a degree solicitous of the ancient retainer: the intricacies and contradictions of her brother’s personality were a recurring source of bafflement to the countess. In general she judged Osmond to be wicked, not in the magnificent manner of one of those figures from history whom she knew he so admired and matched himself against, a Machiavelli or a Lorenzo de’ Medici—she was sure there were more apt examples whose names she was not acquainted with, for there were wide gaps in her knowledge of the history of this exhaustingly historical land—but in cautious and petty ways, never venturing beyond the secure boundaries of his powers. He might torment his wife, which without doubt he had been doing behind closed shutters for a very long time, or contrive by any and every means to smother the ordinary childish aspirations and yearnings of his daughter, enclosing her under a cloche, like a bed of blanched asparagus, but before the likes of Lord Warburton, to take a recent instance, he was careful to display a veneer of yielding smoothness; even that Massachusetts mill-owner, Caspar Goodwood, who had courted the countess’s sister-in-law back home when she was a girl—and who as everyone knew had not given up his romantic hopes of her even yet, these many years later, when she was already a married woman—had been a welcome visitor at the Palazzo Roccanera, where Osmond had treated him to such a convincing show of interest and amiability that the poor fellow had not realised how elaborately he was being mocked. Yes, it was one of Osmond’s many skills to be capable of calibrating to the last decimal point how far he might permit himself to go in displaying his rich disdain of the world and what he considered its crowding complement of intermingled boobies and barbarians.

  Over their tea the talk between brother and sister was all of the city shimmering below them in the effulgent light of the latening afternoon. The countess, through twenty and more years of assiduous application, had made herself into a specialist in the subject of the Florentine alta società, in particular its seamy underside. Like a busy blackbird, she hopped about in the undergrowth of society, nudging fallen twigs aside and twitching at dead leaves—not a few of them fallen from the fig tree—to delve deep down beneath them into the rich dark humus and pluck up what tasty morsels were to be found lurking there. The troves of titbits she brought to light were never less than toothsome. She knew which marriages had failed and which were faltering, which hitherto virtuous lady had succumbed to the operatic blandishments of one of the city’s notoriously numerous Lotharios; she could tell you which husband was a dupe and which strategically complaisant, which daughter compromised, which son a rake in the making, or already made. Although Osmond maintained a pretence of deprecating his sister’s bright salacious chatter, closing his eyes and pursing his lips and on occasion going so far as to mime the putting of his hands over his ears, the countess knew perfectly well how deeply it delighted him to hear of the low deeds of high folk: a predilection for exchanging choice scurrilities was the single point at which the sensibilities of this ill-assorted pair of siblings coincided. While they were engaged in this pastime Osmond had a way of luxuriously leaning back his head with nostrils distended, as if to draw in and savour a forbidden musky fragrance, turning down the corners of his mouth and complacently stroking his throat below the level of his beard with the backs of his fingers, chuckling the while so softly as hardly to make a sound. And nor did he only receive, but gave, too, and in abundance, although he produced each sullied nugget from his store of gold seemingly with the utmost unwillingness and moral abhorrence, shaking his head and sighing with feigned sorrow at the wicked ways of the world. The countess marvelled that he should be privy to so many secrets, given that he went about so little in the world.

  “Ah, yes, people are so very bad,” he said now, sitting back with a contented sigh, his elbows set on the armrests of his chair and his tanned bony fingers formed into a tall steeple, the top of which touched the sharp end of his carefully trimmed spade-shaped beard. “One finds even the most righteous-seeming among them, those whom one had taken to be the very models of virtue, ready at the least temptation to descend to truly astonishing depths of depravity. But I suppose that is how things are, how they have always been, and always will be.” He paused, nodding sagely, gazing out over the valley with half-closed eyes. “Indeed, in this regard I have been asking myself for some time now if I was wise all these past years to shield my daughter so assiduously from the spectacle of society’s sins and their consequences. I sought to bring her up in the old way, as you know, according to the old customs, but have I thus perhaps left her unprepared and unprotected against the moral trials she will inevitably be forced to face as she makes her way through life, especially when the time comes for her to do so without a father’s care and guidance?”

  The countess, who had become very still, was regarding him with a brightly eager eye. What had he in mind, she wondered, what plan or plot had he in preparation? It was when, as now, he was at his most magisterial and most richly vocal, keeping up at the same time a studied vagueness of manner, that inwardly he was most intent upon some particular purpose; this she knew of old.

  “You have made her into the daughter you desired she should be, that’s certain,” she said, with a dry flatness that was uncharacteristic of her—she had no wish to disturb him in his comfortable calculations. “She is a nun in all save the wimple.”

  He turned slowly his slightly grizzled but finely handsome head and bent upon her a keen and searching look. “Is it so extreme as that? It is not how I meant it to be. You don’t think”—for a second his eyes betrayed what might even be a genuine doubt—“she might imagine herself to ‘have a vocation,’ as they say, for the religious life?” He looked aside from her once more. “I should be very sorry, if that were the case,” he murmured, with less a worried than an ominous note; he did not for a moment doubt his power to banish with only the slightest effort whatever pious delusions as to the future course of her life his daughter might be foolhardy enough to entertain in secret.

  The countess gave one of her piercing sharp little chirrups of laughter. “You fear she might take the veil? On the contrary!” she cried. “For how many years did you consign her to the care of the nuns? After such a sentence, even a girl as meekly biddable as Pansy pretends to be would surely be cured of any notion of spending the rest of her days on her knees, even if she thought that was your dearest expectation of her.”

  He remained silent for some moments, still looking down frowningly upon the view from under hooded lids. “ ‘Pretends’?” he said softly. “Do you consider my daughter duplicitous? Do you think her insincere in her devotion to her father and her readiness to fulfil his wishes?”

  “Oh, come, Osmond!” the countess impatiently replied—it was the only name she ever addressed him by. “She’s twenty years old, she’s not a child. I know you sent her back to the convent this time as a punishment for favouring poor little Ned Rosier over the much more desirable Lord Warburton—desirable to you, that is—but there is a limit to what even a Pansy Osmond will tolerate without rebelling or at least putting up a struggle!”

  She stopped herself, pressing two fingers to her lower lip. Had she overstepped the mark? Her brother, no less than his daughter, had his limits, which along certain of their stret
ches were dangerously narrow and all too easy to cross accidentally by way of an ungoverned word or a thoughtless jest. He was a man to be approached with the greatest caution, keeping one’s lines of retreat open and clear of hindrance. She watched his bearded, fine but somewhat decayed profile with a renewed sense of anxiety, as he sat there beside her for a long moment without uttering a word. However, to her relief he only sighed again, and again nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, sounding almost weary, “I fear have made a mistake. Oh, not a grievous one—I cannot think I need chide myself for exercising a father’s duty to train and educate his daughter in a fit manner. But perhaps the time has come to—how shall I say?—to have her be shown something of the world, and to have the world in turn be shown something of her.”

  At that the countess began to have, though all indistinctly, the beginnings of an inkling of what her brother was about. She recalled how, for one usually so guarded, he had been incapable of masking his surprise and satisfaction, in fact his positive delight, when Lord Warburton, on a series of visits paid to the Palazzo Roccanera in the spring, had given unmistakable signs of wishing to woo his daughter. Like the entirety of Roman society, Osmond had been incredulous that Warburton, of all men, suzerain of vast estates and an eminence before whom the statesmen and parliamentarians of his own land bowed low, should put his eye on a wisp of a thing such as poor Pansy, of whom the most that could be said was that she was perfectly pliant and unfailingly polite. Her father, as everyone knew, had over the years ground the child steadily in the mortar of his will until her spirit, what there had been of it to start with, had been reduced to the consistency of a smooth, bland paste. No, the world said, it was not on the girl at all that His Lordship’s sights had been set, but upon her step-mother, whom he had aimed slyly to approach by way of the useful conduit of her husband’s pallidly nubile daughter. The Englishman, according to the common consensus, which prided itself on knowing such things, had never reconciled himself to and indeed had never fully accepted the spurning, years before, of his proposal of marriage to Isabel Archer, as she was then, and on the strength of rumours of conjugal discontent emanating from the Palazzo Roccanera had lost no time in making his way to the Italian capital with the aim of winning on this occasion by subterfuge what before he had forfeited in open competition: he would marry the girl and thereby secure the woman, the true and continuing object of his unfaltering passion—that, after all, was how the English were, supposedly so phlegmatic and sensible but in reality hopelessly lost to romance. That the deluded peer did not seem to realise what a ridiculous figure he was making of himself in his pursuit of Pansy only added to the muffled merriment of those avidly watching every twist of the pathetic little affair. When Warburton’s enthusiasm for the match he had himself mooted evaporated suddenly, for whatever reason—her husband was not alone in believing that Isabel herself had fatally interfered in the thing, for her own ends—and he quietly withdrew and hied himself home to England, Osmond had been as disappointed as he was vexed. However, he had found consolation in the thought that, since Pansy had once come close to securing so great a prize, there was nothing to prevent her succeeding on a second occasion, or a third, or, if need be, a tenth. There was one quality in which Osmond abounded, namely the capacity to be patient and impose a calm restraint upon even his most urgent urges. So he had contented himself with letting his wife know that he knew she had spoiled his plans by exerting her sway over Warburton—she had of course denied the charge—and then had sent Pansy off for another extended spell at the convent, where she might bethink herself and her annoyingly persistent fondness for the wholly unwarrantable Edward Rosier.

  After a long pause had elapsed Osmond spoke again. “Did I mention that my wife has written to me? Yes, I received a letter from her some days ago.” He leaned forward and took up the teapot and proceeded with studied deliberation to replenish their cups. “An odd missive, with a peculiarly musty odour to it, suggestive of a lawyer’s rooms.”

  “What—has she applied for a divorce?” the countess exclaimed, failing quite to suppress her all too obvious delight at the prospect of what surely would be a horribly entertaining tussle.

  He shot her a wryly condescending smile. “Certainly not. How your mind leaps at once to the squalid!”

  “Then what did she have to say?”

  He considered, holding up his teacup and saucer at the level of his chin.

  “Precious little, in the way of words,” he said. “The true import of her meaning, I could see, lay between the lines. She has developed a subtlety, or at least an opacity, of expression I did not think her capable of.” He stopped, and scratched his bearded cheek with a flexed index finger, producing a small dry crackling sound. “I wonder if she has found someone to tutor her,” he murmured thoughtfully.

  On this the countess ventured no comment. Had they been speaking of any other woman—herself, for instance—she would have known exactly the kind of tutor likely to have been engaged, but her sister-in-law was so determinedly, so tediously virtuous that the possibility of her having taken a lover, even if only to exact revenge upon her husband, was so remote as to be considered only in the realm of the absurd.

  “She mentioned Pansy,” Osmond went on, putting down his cup and brushing some invisible specks from his lap. “That she did do.”

  “Oh, yes? Mentioned her in what connection?”

  “Well, there, you see, again, it’s difficult to make out her meaning, or what she imagines her meaning to be. Despite the straightforward clarity of the lines in which she wrote, I suspect she is in a state of some confusion, which is hardly surprising”—he cast at his sister another sidelong glance, arching an eyebrow—“given the recent turbulence to which she has been subjected.” He rose from the chair, stretching his legs that, even within the coarse cloth of his trousers, were visibly thin to the point of emaciation, so much so that they might have belonged to a much, much older man. These meagre limbs, a less than fortunate inheritance from the male Osmond line, had been the bane of his boyhood, when they were more frequently and more mockably on show; it gratified his sister that for her part she was gracefully endowed in her lower extremities, being possessed in particular of a comely calf, as she had been gallantly assured on more than one occasion, and in more than one bedchamber. Now Osmond slipped his hands into his pockets again—he had a particular and curiously jaded way of performing this common action—and, forsaking the table, paced across to the parapet and stood there once more to look out over the valley, leaning a hip against the mossy, sun-warmed stones, with his hands in his pockets still. His sister remained seated for a time, watching him, then she rose too and went forward and joined him where he stood. She looked out upon the sunlit prospect with an indifferent eye; she had long ago grown thoroughly tired of the supposed delights on offer from the Tuscan countryside, a land so bounteous, languid and lush and yet, to her, so gaudily insufferable. Frequently the fancy came to her of casting everything aside, including her irredeemably hebetudinous husband, and returning to her native land, but she had only to recall the Baltimore winters of her childhood to find herself reconciled, however ill-temperedly, to Europe and the insistent, sun-bleached south.

  She examined again her brother’s composed and inexpressive profile. “I must say, Osmond, you’re being annoyingly mysterious,” she said.

  “Am I? More so than usual, you mean? For don’t you find me an unsolvable mystery at all times? So you claim, at least. Whereas really I’m very simple, very simple and plain. Certainly, in this instance, it is my wife who is making mysteries.”

  “What did she have to say regarding Pansy?”

  He put back his head a little and lifted his face to the sun, which, obscured in a glowing haze and resembling a flat gold coin, was poised upon the tip of its hardly perceptible late-afternoon decline.

  “She seemed determined to make some manner of a claim upon her.”

  “A claim?”

  “Yes. I confess
it’s quite beyond me. Pansy, as you are all too well aware, is no daughter of hers, save in the most tenuous and contingent fashion. What after all is a step-mother but a sort of accident, and not always a happy one, as the folk tales attest?”

  “Does she aim to—to attempt to take the girl away from you?”

  The countess felt as if she had been set the task of peeling away layer upon layer of an integument so delicately friable and precious in itself that the thing wrapped inside it could only be a disappointment when at last she should succeed in uncovering it to view.

  Her brother, who had been pondering her question with his lips set into a tight knot at one corner, sighed now and shook his head, to emphasise an ongoing state of puzzlement.

  “It is almost as if,” he said, “she would descend upon us like a maharajah, and purchase my daughter for a lakh of rupees and carry her off to somewhere far and strange, there to feed her exclusively on sherbet and sweetmeats while the girl—the princess!—dabbles her fingers idly in great pots of precious things.”