Free Of Love and Evil by Anne Rice Page A

and when he’d come to me. And now I have to think of the vast wide world, the world I traveled, without him. And when I think of this, there is no world.”
    I stared past him at the earth in the pot. It was covered with black seeds. Any one of these would have been deadly to achild. Several, carefully chopped, would be deadly to a man. A small portion given regularly in caviar, of all perfect things, would have sickened the man slowly and pushed him closer with every dose towards death.
    The taste of the seeds was ghastly, as is the case with many a poison. But if anything would hide it, it would be caviar.
    “I don’t know why I tell you these things,” said Lodovico, “except that you look kind, you look like a man who peers inside another man’s soul.” He sighed. “You grasp how a man might love his brother unbearably. How a man might think himself a coward when faced with his brother’s weakness and death.”
    “I want to understand,” I said. “How many sons does your father have?”
    “We are his only sons, and don’t you know how much he will despise me if Niccolò is gone? Oh, he loves me now, but how he will despise me if I am the survivor. It was only on account of Niccolò that he brought me from my mother’s house. We don’t have to talk of my mother. I never talk of her. You can well understand. My father need have acknowledged no claim against him. But Niccolò loved me, loved me from the first moment we played as children, and one day, I, and all I possessed, were bundled up and taken from the brothel in which we lived, and brought here, to this very house. My mother took a fistful of gems and gold for me. She cried. I will say that much for her. She wept. ‘But this is for you,’ she said. ‘You, my little prince, are now to be taken to the castle of your dreams.’ ”
    “Surely she meant it. And the old man. He seems to love you so, as much as your brother.”
    “Oh, yes, and there were times when he loved me more. Niccolò and Vitale, what rascals they can be when they get together. I tell you, there’s not much difference between a Jewand a Gentile when it comes to wenching and drinking, at least not all of the time.”
    “You are the good boy, aren’t you?” I asked.
    “I’ve tried to be. With my father, I went on our travels. He couldn’t pry loose Niccolò from the university. Oh, I could tell you stories of the wilds of America, the wilds of Portuguese ports and savages such as you can only imagine.”
    “But you came back to Padua.”
    “Oh, he would have me educated. And in time that meant the university for me as well as my brother, but I could never catch up with them in their studies, Vitale, Niccolò, any of them. They helped me. They always took me under their wing.”
    “So you had your father to yourself those years,” I said.
    “Yes,” he said. The tears were frozen now, no longer slipping down his face. “Yes, and you should have seen how quickly he embraced my beloved brother. Why, you would think he had left me in the jungles of Brazil.”
    “That plant there, that tree,” I said. “It’s from the jungles of Brazil.”
    He stared fixedly at me, and then turned and appeared to stare at the plant as though he’d never seen it before. “Perhaps it is,” he said. “I don’t remember. We brought back many a sapling and many a cutting with us. Flowers, you see, he loves them in profusion. He loves the fruit trees that you see blooming here. He calls this his orangery. It’s his garden, really. I only come here now and then to write my poems as you can see.”
    The tears were entirely gone.
    “How would you know such a plant on seeing it?” he asked.
    “Hmmm, I’ve seen it in other places,” I ventured. “I’ve even seen it in Brazil.”
    His face had changed and now he seemed calculatedly to soften as he looked at me.
    “I understand your worry for your brother,” I said, “but perhaps he will recover. There’s a great deal of strength