Free Splendor: A Luxe Novel by Anna Godbersen Page B

that seemed to go on endlessly from one hour to the next, with short breaks for speech or sustenance—up the hill, where Henry could just make out the jutting angles of a white walled villa. The city was below them, stretching out toward the sea, as well as the square where they had eaten croissants and drank café con leche that morning amongst languid gentlemen smoking cigars. The barracks lay between them and the crooked streets of the old town. Henry glanced back once, thinking fleetingly of his obligations there, and then hurried to catch up with Diana as she charged toward the house.
    A few long strides and they had crested the hill. The ground dipped below them, and then rose again underneath the villa, a single-story structure that had once been white, ringed by an impressive terrace.
    Palms sheltered the area, which had fallen into disrepair, weeds colonizing the paths that connected the small buildings that dotted the property, and little turquoise birds darted in and out of the thick foliage.
    Henry followed Diana across the lawn and up the stairs of what must once have been the main house, where they encountered an impressive wooden door, carved and worn, and secured with a huge iron lock.
    “We’re shut out,” Diana said, frowning, resting her fingers against the handle as though to confirm the fact.
    “Perhaps we could break a window,” Henry ventured, gesturing toward the glass panes to either side of the main entrance.
    “No! No, no.” Diana’s eyes grew round at the suggestion. She took his hand and drew him along the terrace, which was covered with tiles that had, once upon a time, been painted with geometric blue and white patterns. “We can’t touch a thing,” she admonished sweetly. “I’ve heard from all kinds of people at Señora Conrad’s that it’s just as it was when he left it, all the books are in the same place, and God must be watching out for it because it is immune to thieves. They say,” and now her voice sunk to a whisper, and she twisted her neck enough that Henry recognized a conspiratorial expression on her crescent face,
    “that he wrote his best verses here, that when he left it was over for him.” Around the house they walked, peering in at beaten leather armchairs and moldering book-crammed shelves. A peachy afternoon light broke through a sky that was otherwise a study in fearsome grays, illuminating the old candelabras and paintings and masks that adorned the walls that had once housed a sedentary life. It was the ruins of an existence very different from their own, and they moved around the grounds as though through the hushed halls of a museum. Diana became absorbed with the magic of the site, and he became absorbed in her, watching an aura of fascination suffuse her fea tures. She glanced back at him, her shaded eyes wide open as though to say, Can you believe we’re here, in a place like this?
    Perhaps because she was so occupied in imagining the recitation of verses that had occurred there on long-ago evenings, while Henry remained distracted by the loveliness of her unselfconscious heart-shaped face—shadowed by palms, touched by breezes—neither at first noticed the drop in temperature or the moisture accumulating in the atmosphere. They had nearly traveled around to the front again, their hands still clasped as she led him from one window to the next, when raindrops as big as grapes began to hit the terrace.
    “Oh!” she gasped in surprise, looking up at the sudden precipitation. Then they both broke into a run, hurrying across the wraparound terrace, which was quickly becoming slick, and down the stairs. But their instinct to run from the rain, Henry soon saw, had been a foolish one. By the time they had dashed across the field, the large drops were fast becoming an onslaught. Henry’s shirt would have been soaked through, had they not so quickly reached the shelter of a garden shed with a thankfully broad metal awning. He tried the door, and found it