Виктория Холт - The Judas kiss

I was seventeen years old before I discovered that my sister had been murdered. It was then nearly five years since I had seen her, but every day I had thought of her, longed for her bright presence and mourned her departure from my life.

Before she went away, Francine and I had been as close as two people could be. I suppose I, being the younger by five years, had looked to her for protection, and after the death of our parents when we had come to make Greystone Manor our home, I had had great need of it.

That had happened six years before, and when I looked back on those very early days it seemed to me that we had lived in a paradise. Distance enchants the view, Francine used to say to comfort me and so imply that the island of Calypse had not been completely perfect, so perhaps Greystone Manor was not as gloomy as we, newly become its inmates, believed it to be. Although she was as fragile as a piece of Dresden china in looks, I never knew anyone who had a more practical grip on life. She was realistic, resourceful, irrepressible and always optimistic; indeed she seemed unable to visualize failure. I had always believed that whatever Francine decided she would do, she would do successfully. That was why I was so shattered, so overwhelmed with disbelief when I found that newspaper in Aunt Grace's trunk in the attic at Greystone. I knelt there holding the paper in my hand while the words danced before my eyes.

"Baron von Gruton Fuchs found murdered in his bed in his hunting lodge in the Grutonian province of Bruxenstein last Wednesday morning. With him was his mistress, a young English woman whose identity is as yet unknown, but it is believed she was his companion for some time at the lodge before the tragedy."

There was another cutting attached.

"The identity of the woman has been discovered. She is Francine Ewell, who has been a 'friend' of the Baron for some time."

That was all. It was incredible. The Baron was her husband. I remembered so well how she had told me she was going to be married and how I grappled with myself to cast out the desolation of losing her and trying to rejoice in her happiness.

I just knelt there until I realized my limbs were cramped and that my knees were hurting. Then I took the newspaper cuttings and went back to my bedroom, sitting there dazed, thinking back ... to everything she had been to me, until she had gone away.

Those idyllic early years had been spent on the island of Calypse with our adored, adoring and quite unrealistic parents.

They were the beautiful years. They had ended when I was eleven and Francine sixteen, so I suppose I did not really understand a great deal of what was going on around me. I was unaware of the financial difficulties and the anxiety of living through those periods when no visitors came to my father's studio. Not that any of these fears were shown, for Francine was there to manage us all with the skill and energy which we took for granted.

Our father was an artist in stone. He sculpted the most beautiful figures of Cupid and Psyche, Venus rising from the waves, of little mermaids, dancing girls, urns and baskets of flowers; and visitors came and bought them. My mother was his favourite model and next to her, Francine. I posed for him too. They would never have thought of leaving me out, although I had never had that sylph-like quality of Francine and my mother which lent itself so perfectly to stone. They were the beautiful ones. I resembled my father with hair which was rather nondescript in colour and could be called mid-brown, thick, straight and invariably untidy; I had greenish eyes which changed colour with their surroundings and what Francine called a "pert" nose, and a mouth which was rather large. "Generous," Francine called it. She was a great consoler. My mother had a fairylike beauty which she had passed on to Francine—blond and curly-haired, blue, dark-lashed eyes and that extra fraction of an inch on the nose which was sufficient to make it beautiful, and with all this went a shortish upper lip which revealed ever so slightly prominent pearly teeth. Above all there was that air of helpless femininity which made men want to fetch and carry for them and protect them from the hardships of the world. My mother might have been in need of that protection; Francine never was.

There were long, warm days—rowing the boat out to the blue lagoon and swimming there, taking desultory lessons with Antonio Farfalla who was repaid by a piece of sculpture from our father's studio. "It will be worth a fortune one day," Francine assured him. "You only have to wait until my father is recognized." Francine could convey great authority in spite of her fragile looks, and Antonio believed her. He adored Francine. Until we came to Greystone it seemed that everyone adored Francine. She was charmingly protective even of him, and although she joked a great deal about his name, which in Italian meant Butterfly, and he was the most cumbersome man we ever knew, she was always sympathetic when he was distressed by his clumsiness.

It was some time before I began to be worried by my mother's constant illnesses. She used to lie in her hammock, which we had fixed up outside the studio, and there was always someone there talking to her. At first, my father had told me, we had not been accepted very warmly on the island. We were foreigners and they were an insular people. They had lived there for hundreds of years, cultivating the vines and the silkworms and working in the quarry from which came the alabaster and serpentine in which my father worked. But when the people of the island realized that we were just like them, and were ready to live as they did, they finally accepted us. "It was your mother who won them over," he used to say, and I could well imagine that. She looked so beautiful, ethereal, as though the wind would carry her off when the mistral blew. "They gradually came round," my father said. "There would be little gifts on the doorstep, and when Francine was born we had a houseful of helpers. The same with you, Pippa. You were made just as welcome as your sister."

They always reminded me of that. There came the time when I began to wonder why it should be necessary.

Francine discovered all she could about our family history. She was always eager to learn everything. Ignorance worried her. She wanted to know the smallest detail—why the silkworm yield was higher or lower; how much Vittoria Guizza's wedding feast cost, and who was the father of Elizabetta Caldori's baby. Everything that went on was of the greatest interest to Francine. She had to know the answer.

"They say," said Antonio, "that those who seek to know all may someday discover that which does not please."

"In England they say, 'Curiosity killed the cat,'" Francine told him. "Well, I am not a cat but I intend to be curious ... even if it kills me."

We all laughed at the time, but looking back I remembered that.

Blissful island days they were—the warm sun on my skin, the pungent smell of frangipani and hibiscus; the gentle swish of the blue Mediterranean sea against the shores of the island; long dreamy days lying in the boat after swimming; sitting round the hammock in which our mother gently rocked; watching Francine come into the studio when we had visitors. They came from America and England, but mainly from France and Germany, and over the years Francine and I acquired a fair understanding of these languages. Francine would bring out wine in glasses at the sides of which she had arranged hibiscus flowers. The visitors loved that and they paid high prices for my father's work when Francine talked to them. They were making an investment, she would assure them, for my father was a great artist. He was here on the island because of his wife's health. He should be in his salon in Paris or London. Never mind, it gave these good people an opportunity to acquire works of art at the best possible prices.

They would recognize the beauty of Francine in the statues and they would buy them, and I am sure preserved them and remembered for a long time enchanted afternoons when they were waited on by a beautiful girl who served them wine in a flower-trimmed glass.

So we lived in those long-ago days, never thinking beyond the moment, rising in the morning to the sunshine and going to bed at night deliciously tired out after days of pleasant activities. It was fun, though, to sit in the studio and listen to the rain as it pelted down. "This will bring out the snails," Francine used to say; and when it was over we would go out with our baskets and gather them. Francine was an expert at picking out those which could be sold to Madame Descartes, the Frenchwoman who kept the inn on the waterfront. She would instruct me not to pick those whose shells were soft because they would be too young. "Poor little things, they have had no life yet. Let them live a little longer." It sounded humane, but of course Madame Descartes wanted only those which were edible. We would take them to the inn and receive a little money for them. A few weeks later, when the snails had been taken out of the cage in which they had been kept, Francine and I would go along to the inn and Madame Descartes would give us a taste of them. Francine thought they were delicious cooked with garlic and parsley. I never really fancied them. It was a ritual, however—the end of the snail harvest—and therefore I went solemnly through it with my sister.

Then there was the vine harvest, when we donned wooden shoes like sabots and helped in treading out the grapes. Francine joined in with verve—singing and dancing like a wild dervish, her curls flying, her eyes shining, so that everyone smiled at her and my father said, "Francine is our ambassadress."

Those were the happy days and it never occurred to me that they could change. My mother was growing weaker but somehow she managed to conceal the fact from me. Perhaps she did from my father too, but I wondered whether she did from Francine. But if it did occur to my sister she would have dismissed it as she always did anything she did not want to happen. I sometimes thought that life had bestowed so many gifts on Francine that she believed that the gods were working for her too, so that she only had to say, "I don't want that to happen," and it wouldn't.

I remember the day well. It was September—wine harvest time—and there was that excitement in the air which always heralded it. We would go, Francine and I, and join the young people on the island to begin our stamping on the grapes to the tunes from Verdi's operas which old Umberto would scrape out on his fiddle. We would all sing lustily and the old people would sit and watch, their gnarled hands clasped on their black laps and the light of reminiscence in their rheumy eyes, while we danced until our feet were weary and our voices grew more and more hoarse.

But there was another harvest. One of the poems I liked best was called The Reaper and the Flowers.

There is a Reaper whose name is Death And with his sickle keen He reaps the bearded grain at a breath And the flowers that grow between.

Francine explained it to me; she was good at explaining things. "It means young people sometimes get in the way of the sickle," she said, "then they get cut down too." It seems significant now that she should have been one of those flowers which grew between. But then it was our mother who died, and she was like a flower. It was not time for her to die; she was too young.

It was terrible when we found her dead. Francine had taken in the glass of milk she had every morning. She was lying quite still and Francine said afterwards that she went on talking for quite a while before she realized my mother was not listening. "Then I went to the bed," said Francine; "I just looked at her and then I knew."

So it had happened. All Francine's magic could not hold it off. Death had come with his sickle and taken the fair flower which grew between.

Our father was as one demented. He was very much the artist and when he worked in his studio making those beautiful women who had a look of my mother or my sister, he had always seemed far away. We always laughed at his absent-mindedness. Francine bustled about the studio keeping us all in order. Our mother, for a long time, had been too ill to do very much; she was just there—a benign presence and an inspiration to us all. She had talked to visitors and made them welcome and they all enjoyed that; and as long as Francine was there everything held together.