Septimania Read online

  “Excuse me?” Malory said.

  “Ah, my poor boy,” the Pole sighed. “I know very little. But you know even less.”

  And thirty minutes later, when Malory arrived at the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli and, despite the assistance of Settimio and the Driver, could find no trace of Louiza, La Principessa, Tibor, or the red-haired American, Malory—the newly crowned king of kingdoms he never knew existed—knew even less than that.

  As many as the fireflies a peasant has seen

  (Resting on a hill that time of year when he

  Who lights the world least hides his face from us,

  And at the hour when the fly gives way

  To the mosquito) all down the valley’s face,

  Where perhaps he gathers grapes and tills the ground:

  With flames that numerous was Hell’s eighth circle

  Glittering.

  The Inferno, Canto XXVI

  2/0

  6 September 1666

  hat is the first thing one wishes to see upon waking and the last before closing one’s eyes?

  My love? My loved one?

  The simple is the sign of the nearer truth.

  Light. We wish to see the light. In the beginning, if we are believers, there was light. Before the end, even if we believe not, there is light as well.

  In the early morning, when the light hurdles the Tevere and joins me in my solitary bed, and in that hour before dusk when I stand alone in the garden, hidden from the nuns of the Aventino, and the sun is at nearest sympathy with the horizon, I have often had cause to ponder on the nature of light. There is no element as quick and powerful. Yet no element as easy to deflect. A mirror crazed with age, a summer lagoon dusty with neglect, an eyeball moistened with solitude, or a boot polished with spit will shift the direction of the swiftest ray of light without breaking a sweat.

  I was bending light with a simple glass prism when Isaac descended to breakfast on the fifth morning of our journey. We had stopped in Troyes for the night in an inn attached to the Broce-aux-Juifs where I had a few friendly connections and knew the meat would not upset Isaac’s Lincolnshire digestion. I had picked up the toy in Cambridge before the Plague—a piece of glass carved into two triangles connected by three narrow rectangles. As I waited for Isaac, the morning brightening the steam from my coffee, I twisted the prism in the light from the doorway and watched the colors form, the seven colors of the spectrum, on the wall above the innkeeper’s bar.

  “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!” I looked up. Isaac was beaming on the stair, as happy as I’d seen him since we’d quit his mother’s garden.

  “Good morning!” I said, putting the prism down on the table and rising to greet him.

  “No, no,” he said and jumped from the stair to the table. “Once more!” And he picked up the prism and caught the morning in a practiced motion. Again the light divided and cast its rainbow upon the wall. “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!” he crowed again.

  I looked perplexed, as sometimes I do when these English schoolboys play history games with me.

  “It’s how one remembers the trick of the prism—the seven colors that it paints the light,” Isaac laughed, happy to have an audience that needed a lecture. “Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet … Richard Of York Gave Battle …”

  “But, Isaac,” I interrupted gently.

  “R for Richard and Red, O for Of and Orange …”

  “I understand,” I said. “But surely you don’t believe that this clear piece of glass gives color to the light.”

  “Of course it does,” Isaac said, twisting the prism again. “Look! Richard Of York …”

  It was then that I removed a second prism from its hiding place in my jacket pocket. Intercepting the seven-colored band from Isaac’s prism, my new prism captured the color and projected the light into a single, clear, colorless beam on the innkeeper’s wall.

  Of the many virtues that attracted me to the multi-hued Isaac Newton, my favorite is his desire to know the truth. In an instant, all thoughts of Richard, Duke of York, vanished. Isaac sat at the table, the first prism in his left hand. He took my wrist gently between his fingers and moved my hand closer to his and then farther away. He laid the prisms down on the table while he reached for the eternal chapbook in his own jacket pocket and a stub of pencil and drew a rough sketch. Coffee and breakfast gave way to experiment and measurement.

  I knew the truth before Isaac descended. Still, I was happy to watch him in the flight of discovery and description, calculating angles, drawing rays, holding my wrist oblivious to the rising temperature of my blood, the beating velocity of my heart. “The prism does not color the light,” Isaac declared finally with the light-giving pride of conquest in his eyes. “The light is made up of colors!” Meanwhile, I had made a deflection of my own.

  We would no longer head south to the Septimania of the past, the kingdom that the shochet of Narbonne had long since abandoned. I needed more than light. I needed life. Septimania needed life. I would take Isaac to the city where my family, for over eight hundred years, has ruled its quiet empire from a villa hidden from the world beneath the crest of the Aventino. The Aventino Hill of Rome, with its view of the River Tiber and St. Peter’s Basilica—I would take Isaac to the Villa Septimania. All roads, all colors lead to Rome. And Isaac had seen the light.

  2/1

  ITH SETTIMIO ACTING AS GUIDE AND TRANSLATOR, MALORY searched all the rooms in the prow of the hospital, where he had last seen Louiza and Tibor’s wife. From ward to ward and office to office, he asked about a young English woman named Louiza, a young Rumanian woman, her tall, long-haired husband, a red-bearded American obstetrician. By 10 p.m. it was clear that the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli had no more record of Louiza than the Maths Faculty at Cambridge University.

  “The police,” Malory said. “Let’s go ask them.”

  “Which ones, mio Principe?” Settimio answered. “The polizia, the carabinieri, the vigili?”

  “Whoever can find Louiza, of course!”

  “The carabinieri are in charge of missing persons and they have a few dogs. But you are not even convinced that Signorina Louiza is missing.”

  “Then the British Embassy.”

  “Which is closed for the night and undoubtedly will be very busy congratulating the new pope in the morning.”

  Malory sat very slowly down on a bench in the courtyard of the hospital. The lights had gone out, the televisions were cold. “Mio Principe.” Settimio stood in front of Malory. “There are many things you will learn about Rome in the coming years. And many things about your new kingdom.”

  “I’ve lost her again.” Malory’s porphyry solidity evaporated. “My new kingdom is nothing.”

  “Your new kingdom is Septimania,” Settimio said with the firmness that had first led Malory out of the hospital. “You have not begun to know her.”

  “Her?”

  “Your new home. If you will allow us, we will take you to the villa, to your new home.”

  “We can’t,” Malory began. “I won’t,” he stood, “leave without Louiza and the baby.” Even standing, Malory felt as small a child as at any time in his life.

  “There is one more person who might interest you here,” Settimio said. “She will be awake, even at this hour. And if there is a baby, if your child was delivered, she is the only woman who could have delivered it.” Settimio turned and crossed the courtyard back towards the entrance.

  Malory sat for a moment.

  If there is a baby.

  She is the only woman.

  Malory followed Settimio. He had little choice.

  The little man in the Windsor knot and the midnight blue coat receded along the long pier of Fatebenefratelli in waves of sulfur shadow from lamppost to lamppost. Malory followed across the piazza, past a gothic shrine that rose like a miniature Albert Memorial in the middle of the island. An ancient Roman slept rough on the cobblestones, a significant hound beside him, jowls on paws, ne
ither aware of the celebration at the Vatican, neither interested in Malory’s search. Settimio didn’t look back, but headed for a squat little church at the back end of the island. No more priests, Malory pleaded, no more friars, no more popes. But Settimio was too far off to hear.

  Instead of walking straight into the church, Settimio turned to the left along the façade, to a corner where a long, low building lay like a breakwater against one rush of the divided Tevere. Malory entered. The stairwell was ill-lit, but he followed the cue of Settimio’s steps, neat and methodical despite the late hour and Settimio’s advanced age. Along the walls of the stairwell, yellowed frames held photographs from early in the century: colorless, long-bearded men, women tented in black—travelers in an antique land, posed in front of the repositioned columns and lintels of the Forum. In the shadows of the stairwell, Malory couldn’t make out the exact descriptions, typed on index cards. But at the top of each of the frames a few words stood out. Above, the words were in Hebrew. Below, the presumed translation—OSPEDALE ISRAELITE. Not a hospital for Israelites, or Israelis for that matter, Malory thought as he climbed, but a Jewish hospital. Although why Settimio should lead him there at midnight in his search for Louiza was beyond his limited linguistic powers.

  At the top of the stairwell, a pair of windowed doors was still swinging. Malory followed into a long hall, a refectory perhaps, with a high ceiling and a cool floor speckled with marble meteorites, empty except for a row of polished benches that lined the walls—one set of windows facing into the center of the island, the piazza with the miniature Albert Memorial, the other lit by the sulfur lamps across the river by the synagogue. A Jewish hospital without any patients. Without any inhabitants, Malory thought.

  “Settimio!” Malory heard a low alto, the rustle of movement behind him. “You’ve come to visit. And you’ve brought company.” He turned and saw a woman sitting at the end of the wooden bench, a nun perhaps. Yet there was nothing in her appearance, speckled by the shadows from the lamppost through the window, to assure him that the voice had come from her. No motion from the mouth. And in the vastness of the hall, sound came from everywhere.

  “Permit me to present—” Settimio began. He walked over to the nun and bent to kiss her cheeks.

  “Tesoro,” the old nun murmured, “you forget. I know the boy.”

  “Il Principe,” Settimio bent by her ear in gentle correction.

  “Ah, she has finally died,” the woman said. All was black and yellow and shadow, but Malory saw the delicate creases of her eyelids flutter like the leaves of the poplars behind the Wren Library. “I never liked your grandmother.” The old woman raised her chin towards Malory. “If it had not been for Settimio here, she would have denied me the privilege of delivering you, and you would have been born in some distant swamp in France.”

  “Suor Miriam believes all of France is a swamp,” Settimio said, with no effort at discretion.

  “It was one thing for your grandmother to fight against the laws of heredity,” Suor Miriam continued. “She was born a fighter.”

  “Laws of heredity?”

  “I have not yet informed the Principe of the special nature of his inheritance,” Settimio said to Suor Miriam with an apologetic turn at the corner of his mouth. “You see, mio Principe, while a woman like your grandmother may take up the title, only a man may inherit the kingdom.”

  But Malory was more struck by his calculations.

  “Did you deliver my grandmother too?”

  “Figurati!” Suor Miriam laughed, and her eyelids fluttered again, but in a way that Malory could only think had a bit of the coquette in them. “I was a girl then, a novice, barely fourteen, twelve even. But I assisted. I was there. I saw the sorrow of the Principessa, I heard the disappointment of the Principe through closed doors—he was nearly seventy years old, after all, and it was his final opportunity to produce a maschio, an heir. I heard the first screams of your grandmother, her refusal to be decorous in the face of the disaster that was her birth.

  “I was too young to have an opinion. Perhaps I am still too young.” Her eyelids fluttered again but didn’t wait for a gallant response from Malory. “Later, I was sympathetic. My friend Settimio agrees with me, I know. The church, and perhaps your kingdom, would benefit from the participation of women in more than childbirth.” Of the two of them, the nun seemed clearly older—ten, perhaps twenty years. In another life, or perhaps in this one for all Malory knew, their familiarity might have been connubial. Perhaps the nun was all the family Settimio had. Perhaps her enforced celibacy provided suitable companionship for Settimio. Malory had known him, after all, for less than three hours and had no idea whether there was a Signora Settimio, half a dozen Settimio sons, and a brace of junior Settimini.

  “Come, Hercule,” the old nun said, and patted the darkened slice of bench next to her. “Sit. You didn’t come to hear me talk of your grandmother or the swamps of France. Or the birth of you or your mother, for that matter. Tell me why you have come to see me when there are more important people, I imagine, waiting to meet you.”

  Malory sat. He spoke. He told Suor Miriam everything—the first discovery of Louiza, the meeting with his grandmother, Old Mrs. Emery. The funeral, the instruction to go to Rome, the loss of his fellowship, and everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, from the moment he’d arrived in Rome to the fantastical few hours in the Vatican. But most of all, he spoke about the rediscovery of Louiza in the second pew of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the dash to Fatebenefratelli, Tibor’s gray-haired and very pregnant Principessa, the kind nurse, and the red-bearded American obstetrician. Malory spoke, but he watched the eyelids of Suor Miriam for any sign that might indicate intimate knowledge that would unite him with Louiza. When he’d finished speaking, she sat in silence, her eyelids motionless.

  “Suor Miriam,” Malory murmured, wondering if she had fallen asleep. “Did you hear me?”

  Again silence. Malory stood. He looked out at the mini Albert Memorial. He turned to the other set of windows and the synagogue beyond. Enough. Enough of the little man in the long coat, the blind and perhaps deaf nun, whether or not she was the midwife who had delivered him. It was time to go to the police, the carabinieri, to camp out in front of the British Embassy and shine a little rational English light on the disappearance. He was not about to let Louiza become a second Aldo Moro. He walked back across the speckled marble confusion to the foyer doors and stairwell.

  “Come back at four tomorrow afternoon.” Suor Miriam’s voice stopped him at the door.

  “Excuse me?” Malory said, turning. “Why should I come back tomorrow afternoon? What do you know? And if you know something, why can’t you tell me now?”

  “Poor boy.” Malory could feel Suor Miriam’s eyelids fluttering, even at ten paces. “I know nothing. Suor Anna, the young nun who was with you and your Louiza and the Rumanian and his wife, she will return to the hospital at four tomorrow afternoon to begin her shift at four-thirty. She comes to me first for my blessing. She may know something. Come here and we will ask her what happened. Together.”

  “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.