Free Of Love and Evil by Anne Rice

into his eyes. I could see Niccolò shuddering. The man couldn’t control it.
    “Vitale,” he whispered, thinking perhaps I couldn’t hear him. “I don’t want to die.”
    “I won’t let you die, my friend,” said Vitale desperately. He laid back the bedclothes now and examined his patient’s ankles and feet. True, there was an old discolored patch on the ankle but it was no cause for alarm. The patient could move his limbs well enough but they shuddered. That could mean any number of poisons attacking the nervous system. But which one, and how would I prove who was doing it and how?
    I heard a sound in the passage. It was the sound of a man crying. I knew by the very sound of it that it was Lodovico.
    I got up. “I’ll talk to your brother, if I might,” I said softly to Niccolò.
    “Console him,” said Niccolò. “Let him know that none of this is his doing. The caviar has helped me. He puts such store by it. Don’t let him feel that he’s at fault.”
    I found him stranded in the antechamber, looking lost and confused.
    “May I talk with you?” I asked gently. “While he’s resting, or being examined? May I be of some comfort to you?”
    I felt the strong urge to do this, when in fact, in the usual course of things, it was something I wouldn’t have done at all.
    However, he looked to me at that moment like one of the loneliest beings I’d ever beheld. He seemed to exist in a pure isolation as he wept, staring at the door of his brother’s room.
    “He is the reason my father has accepted me,” he said under his breath. “Why do I tell you this? Because I must tell someone. I must tell someone how troubled I am.”
    “Come, is there someplace where we might talk in quiet? It is so difficult when those we love are suffering.”
    I followed him down the broad stairway of the palazzo and into the large courtyard, and into yet another gated courtyard which was wholly unlike the first, in that it was crowded with tropical blooms.
    I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.
    A good deal of light spilled down into the area though the palazzo must have been four stories high, and the area was naturally sheltered due to its smaller size. It was extremely warm.
    I could see orange trees and lemon trees, and purple flowers and waxen white blooms. Some of these I knew and some I didn’t. But if there were no poisonous plants in this room, then my mother had raised a fool.
    In the center of the courtyard, where the shafts of sunlight made a sweet and beautiful light, stood a makeshift cross-legged writing table and two simple chairs beside it. There was a decanter of wine and two goblets.
    And the dejected man, moving almost as if in a dream, took the decanter, filled a goblet and drank the contents down.
    Only then did he think to offer me a drink, and I declined.
    He seemed exhausted and emptied from his weeping. That he was genuinely miserable was beyond doubt. Indeed he was grieving, and I wondered if he was grieving because in his mind and heart his brother was already dead.
    “Sit down there, please,” he said to me, and then he collapsed at his writing table, allowing a whole sheaf of papers to fall to the floor.
    Behind him, from a large pot, grew a rangy and waxen-leafed tree, and one that was not at all unfamiliar to me. Again the hair rose on the back of my neck and my arms. I knew the purple flowers that covered this tree. And I knew the tiny black seeds that were left when the flowers dropped, as some of them had already done into the moist earth of the pot.
    I picked up the mess of papers and put them back on the desk. I set my lute beside the chair.
    The man appeared dazed as he watched this, and then he leant on his elbows and he wept very genuine tears.
    “I have no great gift for poetry, and yet I am a poet for want of being anything else,” he said to me. “I’ve traveled the world, and have had the joy of it—no, maybe all the joy of it was writing to Niccolò and meeting him if