Free A Lady of Good Family by Jeanne Mackin Page B

Only a cat.
    Edith’s little dog whimpered, and Beatrix heard, rather than saw, Edith bend down to pick it up and stroke it for comfort.
    “Now we will see the painting of the Gorgon’s head, the Triglia, or funeral banquet room, and the Platonica, where Peter and Paul were buried,” said Brother Tommaso. He held his candle atan angle that illuminated his sharp cheekbones and made black caverns of his eyes. His face had become skeletal through a trick of light.
    Again, something in the shadows moved. There was a blur, a soundless shift that no one else seemed to notice.
    This place is unwholesome, Beatrix thought. She had visited cemeteries, stood before towering chiseled monuments of loss, and peered down at flush markers half buried in the grass, but this city of the dead was different. There was a complete absence of light, of life, aside from the feral cat that had brushed against her. Even in cemeteries there is life, she thought, but only when they are above ground, in open air. There are flowers and trees and birds and breezes to remind you that time stopped only for the person for whom you grieve. Here, everything had stopped.
    “Death awaits you at the end of the dim vista.” It was something Nathaniel Hawthorne had once written to her mother in a letter she had saved. Beatrix the child hadn’t understood the phrase when he read it so softly, so casually, teacup in hand. But now, in that closed, suffocating underworld, she thought she understood. She shivered and longed for the light, the open sky.
    Years later she would remember that moment, how wrong it felt to dishonor the dead with dank darkness, and when, after the Great War, she was asked to design memorials for those fallen in battle, she placed the memorials in patches of sunshine, where flowers could grow around them.
    “No,” said Beatrix. “I don’t want to see the Gorgon’s head. I don’t want to go deeper into the catacomb.”
    “Ah.” Brother Tommaso sighed. “A shame.”
    “Indeed, I am ready for some fresh air.” Her mother took her by the arm. They turned around and began to retrace their steps.
    “Hope the rain stopped,” said Teddy, following behind.
    When they emerged into the light, Beatrix felt like Persephone running away from Hades, hating the sterile darkness where nothing could grow except regret. She lost her footing on the last step, and when she reached into thin air, trying to regain her balance, her mother’s hand grasped hers. For a blind, confusing second she had expected the hand of a man who wasn’t even there with them. She had reached out for Amerigo.

SIX
    “I had a painted fan once,” said Mrs. Avery. “It had such strange flowers on it, like Beatrix’s fan. My mother gave it to me when I was sixteen.”
    “I bet you looked charming, holding that fan,” said Mr. Hardy, in a pleasant rather than flirtatious manner. Mrs. Avery had the surprising ability to bring out the nature of those around her: Mrs. Ballinger became even haughtier, while Mr. Hardy became kindly. In the days that I’d been in Lenox, I noticed that people tended to gravitate to Mrs. Avery, thinking at first, as I had, that they would be nice to her, and then discovering that they enjoyed her company. In a garden she would have been the smallest and palest of flowers, yet one with a very sweet scent, I imagined. Alyssum, perhaps. You barely know it is there, but a garden would not be complete without its fragrance.
    “Useless things, painted fans,” said Mrs. Ballinger. “I’m gladthey’ve gone out of favor. Worse than kidskin gloves for getting lost or stepped on and ruined.”
    “But how beautiful they were,” I said. “Fans and gloves. There was a time when you felt naked if you didn’t have both.”
    I had been holding a painted fan on the evening in Vevey when I met Gilbert Winters.
    There was so much Mr. James didn’t write about that night. The garden, for instance. I had to go down stone steps to reach it. It was