Free My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

hoped for some improvement, and certainly she had no desire to make you and his friends in England anxious.”
    “But we were anxious,” I said, “that was why I came to Florence. I received these letters from him.”
    It was a bold move perhaps, and reckless, but I did not care. I handed across the table the two last letters Ambrose had written me. He read them carefully. His expression did not change. Then he passed them back to me.
    “Yes,” he said, his voice quite calm, without surprise, “Mrs. Ashley feared he might have written something of the sort. It was not until those last weeks, when he became so secretive and strange, that the doctors feared the worst, and warned her.”
    “Warned her?” I said. “Warned her of what?”
    “That there might be something pressing on his brain,” he answered, “a tumor, or growth, of rapidly increasing size, which would account for his condition.”
    A lost feeling came over me. A tumor? Then my godfather’s surmise was right after all. First uncle Philip, and then Ambrose. And yet… Why did this Italian watch my eyes?
    “Did the doctors say that it was a tumor that killed him?”
    “Unquestionably,” he answered. “That, and a certain flare-up of after-fever weakness. There were two doctors present. My own, and another. I can send for them, and you can ask any question you care to put. One speaks a little English.”
    “No,” I said slowly, “no, it is not necessary.”
    He opened a drawer and pulled out a piece of paper.
    “I have here a copy of the certificate of death,” he said, “signed by them both. Read it. One copy has already been posted to you in Cornwall, and a second to the trustee of your cousin’s will, Mr. Nicholas Kendall, near Lostwithiel, in Cornwall.”
    I looked down at the certificate. I did not bother to read it.
    “How did you know,” I asked, “that Nicholas Kendall is trustee to my cousin’s will?”
    “Because your cousin Ambrose had a copy of the will with him,” replied Signor Rainaldi. “I read it many times.”
    “You read my cousin’s will?” I asked, incredulous.
    “Naturally,” he replied. “As trustee myself to the contessa, to Mrs. Ashley, it was my business to see her husband’s will. There is nothing strange about it. Your cousin showed me the will himself, soon after they were married. I have a copy of it, in fact. But it is not my business to show it to you. It is the business of your guardian, Mr. Kendall. No doubt he will do so, on your return home.”
    He knew my godfather was my guardian also, which was more than I did. Unless he spoke in error. Surely no man past twenty-one possessed a guardian, and I was twenty-four? This did not matter, though. What mattered was Ambrose and his illness, Ambrose and his death.
    “These two letters,” I said stubbornly, “are not the letters of a sick man, of a person ill. They are the letters of a man who has enemies, who is surrounded by people he cannot trust.”
    Signor Rainaldi watched me steadily.
    “They are the letters of a man who was sick in mind, Mr. Ashley,” he answered me. “Forgive my bluntness, but I saw him those last weeks, and you did not. The experience was not a pleasant one for any of us, least of all for his wife. You see what he says in the first letter there, that she did not leave him. I can vouchsafe for that. She did not leave him night or day. Another woman would have had nuns to tend him. She nursed him alone, she spared herself nothing.”
    “Yet it did not help him,” I said. “Look at the letters, and this last line, ‘She has done for me at last, Rachel my torment…’ What do you make of that, Signor Rainaldi?”
    I suppose I had raised my voice in my excitement. He got up from his chair, and pulled a bell. When his servant appeared he gave an order, and the man returned with a glass, and some wine and water. He poured some out for me, but I did not want it.
    “Well?” I said.
    He did not go back to his seat. He went