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"I do not know," I said.
"Yes, you know. I leave you now. Keep from crossing my path. You would be well advised to leave Palermo. There is no danger now. The names of the witnesses have not been published. Later, when you have grown accustomed to your baseness, when you have started to forgive yourself, then will be the moment for a visitor with a silk cord to give you the death we give to traitors."
He stayed a moment or two longer looking at me, then turned, and with his followers once more at his heels moved away from me, back towards the trees that bordered the lake. For some moments, as they retreated, I made out the glimmering of their white robes. Then they were gone, lost in the darkness.
XXV
Hardly had they disappeared from sight when the nausea I had been fighting back rose into my throat and I leaned forward where I was and vomited.
Desolation followed on this. I could no longer bear to be in the open, now that the dark had come. I felt the need for the four walls of the room they had given me, where I could be alone, enclosed, in the light.
I stumbled back to my room, lit the lamps, barred the door against the night and Muhammed's words and the gardens and the lake of this palace of Favara, which had delivered me a blow more grievous than any in my life before.
But there was no rest or relief here from the questions that pursued me.
Over and over again I summoned to mind her words and looks, every smallest detail of her behaviour since that meeting at Bari, until what was remembered and what was imagined mingled together in confusion. I still hoped to find something, even now, that would show this monstrous story of deception to be false, I still hoped to wake from it, from the white-robed nemesis that had come to me beside the lake. Accompanying this tormented quest, though bringing no sense of contradiction to my mind, was a sick amazement at my own incredulity. How could I have believed that one such as I would be invited to this palace of Favara, to hunt on ground that formed part of the royal preserve, only on the word of a woman lately arrived from long years in the Holy Land, a woman with no consort and no great power? Bertrand it was who had the royal favour, not Alicia. And the courtesy he had shown me, the special place he had given me, how could I have imagined it consorted with my deserts, an obscure servant of the palace, pursebearer and purveyor?
All this was sickness and confusion. But what brought horror to my soul was the cruelty she had shown me, the long-sustained, unfaltering cruelty to one she had loved – for she had loved me in those early days, of that I continued to be sure. She had used this love to fool me and betray me; she had watched me floundering. But of course… I saw it now, any but a fool would have seen it sooner: she had not changed, they were hers still, those things in her I had so much admired, the promptness to seize an occasion, the resourcefulness, the readiness to take risks to gain her ends.
My only respite from these bitter thoughts was to cling to a belief in the conspiracy in which her father had been involved. Muhammed had known nothing of it, but he knew little more than what he had extracted from the wretched Mario. It soothed me a little, it deadened the horror, to believe that the story Alboino had told me, of evidence in the hands of the Curia, of a dire threat to Alicia and her family, had been true, or if not true that they had made her believe it. This last was the version I preferred: she too had been duped, they had told her lies, it had been to protect her family and her own life that she had acted thus. I did not want to speak to her or look at her face or even hear the mention of her name, ever again. But it gave me some solace, through the sleepless hours of the night, to believe in this mitigation of her cruelty.
So the night passed, the worst night of my life. My chamber, at first a refuge, became a prison, and with the first intimations of dawn I left it and passed into the grounds, where I wandered aimlessly as the light strengthened. I wanted to leave and yet was curiously reluctant, as if I might turn some corner and find again the promise that had been here, in the woods and the gardens and the lake. Leaving was to brand myself finally as dupe and traitor and to stamp this land of marvels as a sham, when I had entered it in such triumph, Thurstan of Mescoli, with the lackeys ru
I stood at the edge of the water as the sun showed its rim over the horizon and pale colours of silver and saffron made spreading stains over the lake. There were clouds surrounding the sun, they shifted and thi
The sun was still low when I made my way to the little pavilion where she and I had exchanged our first kiss. The shapes of birds and animals were as I remembered them. There was a gardener there, at work with long-bladed scissors, and he bowed to me and moved away, out of sight.
I mounted the steps and stood within the enclosure where we had stood together, out of the midday sun. Suddenly I remembered the wave of gratitude that had swept through me, a devoted gratitude for her presence there, for her return to my life, for the gift she had brought of a golden future. I had began to speak this gratitude of mine but she had laid a finger on my lips to prevent me. For a moment she had seemed troubled, distressed, and I had not understood it. I understood it now.
She had spoken of her brother Adhemar's spying in an attempt to explain her agitation and to distract my mind with alarm at his hostility. But Adhemar had not been the cause. She had felt a moment of pity for me, the poor dupe, stumbling out words of gratitude for having been deceived and tricked and ill-used. Poor, pitiable fool…
This sense of her pity, the only tenderness she had shown, gave terrible pain to me. Worse than all her acting was this brief moment of truth, worse than all her pretended kindness was this true kindness of contempt. The hurt of it was so strong that I wanted to cry out. But I believe it was that moment that saw the obscure birth of my cure. The humiliation, my own abjectness, was beyond enduring; some escape from it had to be found. A dim prospect of this came – and only those who have not experienced such a blow to selfesteem will find paradox in it – not in heaping blame on Alicia but in reproaching myself. If I sought refuge in hatred I would never be free of her. That I knew her so little was proof of the neglect of her that had lain at the heart of what I called my love. She could not have so deceived me if I had not deceived myself; she could not have played me false if I had not aided her in it. I had fashioned her in the form of my desires, I had made her shining, lustrous from our childhood and the time of my hope, bright with the future when she would make that hope come true, a creature of light, not her own, bestowed on her. She had no light of her own…
I was standing at the head of the steps and the early sunlight was in my eyes. At this moment I again heard the wailing cry, wulla-wulla-wulla, that had come to me as I mounted these same steps towards the waiting Alicia, and had brought Nesrin's face before me even at such a moment.