Night of Fire

  Night of Fire

  By

  Barbara Samuel

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  "TELL ME A TALE, CASSANDRA," BASILIO SAID.

  "There was a woman who lived in London, who had lost her courage in a terrible marriage, and had come to believe the only good men God ever made were her brothers."

  He gazed down at her, his thick-lashed eyes very sober. "What happened to her?"

  "A letter arrived from a stranger in a faraway land: a letter scented with the sea and olive trees.The images and words were very beautiful, and the woman thought he must be a middle-aged scholar, balding and sincere."

  Basilio's eyes crinkled. "She did not imagine him to be the most virile and handsome of all men?"

  "Oh, not at all. Quite dull, really. Over the months they shared many letters, telling their deepest thoughts to one another. And when he invited her to see his country, she recklessly took his invitation."

  "And then she discovered a virile stallion," he teased wickedly.

  Cassandra shook her head."She discovered a man who was beautiful inside and out, when she had despaired of ever knowing such a man."

  He kissed her and she kissed him back, tenderly stroking his body. "Thank you, Basilio," she whispered.

  He tugged her close to him, and exhausted, they slept.

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  BARBARA SAMUEL

  Night of Fire

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  An Imprint ofHaiperCoMinsPttblishers

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, New York 10022-5299

  Copyright © 2000 by Barbara Samuel

  ISBN: 0-06-101391-9

  avonromance.com

  First Avon Books paperback printing: December, 2000

  Avon Trademark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. and in Other Countries, Marca Registrada, Hecho en U.S.A.

  HarperCollins® is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Part One

  Ask me why I send to you This primrose, thus bepearled with dew?

  I will whisper to your ears The sweets of love are mixed with tears.

  ROBERT HERRICK

  Prologue

  London May 1788

  Cassandra told herself that she had recovered. That she was a woman of the world, and did not fall to pieces over a doomed romance. But the moment she saw him, when he walked into a box across the opera hall, she knew she had lied to herself.

  He was out of place, and so unexpected that she gaped for a long moment before she could fit her mind around the fact that it was him.

  Basilio.

  Here, at the opera.

  In London.

  Blackness prickled at the edges of her vision. She realized she had not breathed, and inhaled deeply, but she could not look away.

  Behind him was a man she vaguely recognized, a ruddy-faced lord from a county near her estate, which only made it all the stranger. Two women had settled at the front of the box, but the men continued some deep discussion, their heads bent together, one graying, the other darkest black.

  A flash of memory hit her like a blow: her hand, white as moonlight against the jet of his hair, the curls leaping around the turn of her finger—

  "Oh, God," Cassandra whispered.

  Her brother Julian leaned closer. "I'm sorry—I didn't quite hear you."

  She put her hand on his sleeve, trying to remember how to arrange her expression normally. "Nothing."

  In the box across the crowded, noisy room, Basilio nodded seriously at something, and his hand settled in a quieting sort of way upon the shoulder of the small woman in front of him. She seemed hardly to notice, but even across such a distance, Cassandra read discomfort in her stiffness.

  Abruptly, Cassandra stood, her limbs quaking. "Julian, I feel quite ill. I must go."

  He leapt to his feet, his arm circling her shoulders. "What is it?"

  She waved a hand, bent to pick up her shawl from the seat, and dropped it when her betraying fingers could not hold on to it. She stared at it, the beads glittering along one edge. It looked like water, she thought distantly, the way it shimmered in a pool on the dark floor of the box. It made her think of another shawl, on another floor, and she closed her eyes against the pain of that memory.

  How could a week have changed her life so utterly? A single week, torn from the hundreds and hundreds that made up her life. Forty times that number had passed since then, and none of them had changed her, turned her inside out, made her into a woman she no longer always recognized.

  Julian swept up the shawl and captured her hands, bending to frown closely. "You're shivering like a wet pup!" Bracing her elbow, he said, "Let's get you home."

  "Yes." She vowed to keep her eyes lowered, but the temptation was too great. One more glance at him.

  Only one.

  But of course it was the dangerous one. For across that distance, across the milling scores of humanity in the gallery below, Basilio chose that moment to raise his head. Their eyes locked, and Cassandra's heart was flooded with the pain of his gentleness, his passion, his words.

  His love. Yes, his love, most of all.

  She fancied his face went pale, and he hastily removed his hand from the woman's shoulder, as if it burned him.

  It gave her courage. Tossing her bright copper head, she said calmly, "Please take me home, Julian."

  Part Two

  My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

  And true plain hearts do in the faces rest.

  JOHN DONNE

  Chapter 1

  Eighteen months earlier.…

  Danger arrived in the form of a letter. On that cold and rainy day, Cassandra huddled close to the fire in her sitting room. Her hands were encased in fingerless gloves, her shoulders draped in a thick woolen shawl, her legs covered with a lap robe. Even so, her nose was cold.

  She was supposed to be working, but even with the gloves, her fingers had grown stiff after an hour, and it was not a particularly exciting project, anyway—a rote translation piece for a professor who would pay her well and claim the credit.


  Sipping tea, she stared gloomily at the long windows streaked with a cold March rain. Rain and rain and rain. Ordinarily she didn't mind it, she found stormy weather exhilarating and stimulating. But the sun had not shown itself in nearly a month, and even Cassandra was weary of it. If it went on much longer, they would all have mold dripping from their fingernails. Society matrons would declare green hair to be the only shade for the season. She amused herself for a moment imagining a rout crowded with beauties sporting twists of mold from their coiffures.

  A sniffle in the hallway shattered the amusing picture just as Cassandra was about to embroider it fully—

  waistcoats brocaded in silk and mildew, perhaps. She sighed and turned. Her maid, Joan, had had a cold for a week.

  "Letter just come for you, my lady."

  "Thank you." At least it was something to break the monotony. Cassandra hoped it might be from her sister Adriana in Ireland, who had once been a very good correspondent—love had made her neglectful.

  Cassandra tried not to mind.

  At the sight of the thin, elegant writing on the letter, her heart jumped. Even better than Adriana! She had not dared hope for a letter from Italy yet.

  As the maid left, Cassandra put aside her tea and carried the letter to the window seat. It was colder there, but the light was good. For a moment, she only held it up to look at her name written in his beautiful script, letting the simple presence of it enliven her day. Already she felt warmer, as if the paper itself carried beams of Tuscan sunlight that now leaked into the room, buttery and rich. She lifted it to her nose and inhaled the evocative scent of the far-away—sometimes she thought it was the ocean breezes she smelled, at others she thought it might be his cologne.

  She ran her finger over the black ink that had written her name, Lady Cassandra St. Ives, feeling the faint indentation his pen had made. With her thumb, she brushed the raised letters of the words within the paper, a thick packet this time, words she would read, then read again, and put away, then take out and read again.

  Count Montevarchi. She imagined him to be a stout, short-sighted man, middle aged if she were to judge by the breadth of his studies and travels. He wrote magnificently well, bringing his lovely, faraway world to her.

  The correspondence had begun nearly two years before, when he'd written to praise an essay she'd written on Boccaccio. She'd been quite proud of it, thinking she had captured well the vivid, witty, even bawdy sense of the master, and Count Montevarchi's letter had commented on each of the points she'd thought particularly fine. He'd praised her mightily, which was heady enough.

  Then he had confessed he'd been languishing for over a year after the death of his brothers, and her essay had "broken through the clouds of sorrow over this man's heart and allowed the fresh breeze of laughter to enter." Touched, Cassandra had written back and enclosed a new essay, which she hoped he would find as cheering as the first.

  In return, he'd sent travel articles that he'd written—lush and sensual things that captured exotic and sunny places. They'd exchanged dozens of letters now, sometimes crossing in the mail in their eagerness, letters that became, somehow, very heartfelt. The Count was a thwarted scholar who'd had to don the mantle of his inheritance, returning to the provincial world where his compatriots did not care to discuss poetry. Though she already had a circle of witty and artistic friends, Cassandra had found it easy to express her deepest ambitions to him.

  It was safe. She knew that was a part of the appeal. A confirmed bachelor scholar, a thousand miles or more away, who listened. It was so very rare. And that he should also be a man with a soul painted in the colors of poetry, who responded entirely to her mind instead of her physical presence, made him a very dear friend indeed. He also embodied some of the qualities she would most like to develop in herself. His example had made her braver these past months.

  At last she turned the letter and broke the seal.

  Villa de Montevarchi, Toscana 2 April 1787

  My Dear Lady Cassandra,

  I have had poor news and find myself driven here tonight to write to you. It is an affair of little importance, a matter of duty I must attend to which gives me no pleasure, so you need not worry it is some awful thing I dare not speak of. Only wearisome.

  I am honored that you enjoyed my essay on Cypress— and will now urge you again to indulge that longing I sense in you to travel yourself. Why not begin by coming to my Tuscany? Here you would be able to test your bravery under the guidance of a friend. By your writings, I sense you are braver than you know, and since you are a widow, there is none to tell you it is not appropriate. Perhaps it is just the tonic you need to inspire your fine work even more. I will tempt you with the lure of my small collection of Boccaccio manuscripts, which I would enjoy sharing with one who appreciates their worth. Would it not be the deepest pleasure to hold them in your own hands?

  And here is more temptation: I would have wine sent up from my vineyards (truly, you are deprived if you have not drunk our wines) and have my cook prepare the best of his native dishes to shock your tender English palate. Perhaps we could travel to Firenze for the opera, or picnic by the sea. My land is beautiful, inspiring— I suspect that you would find it most agreeable.

  You spoke again of my poetry. I do labor poorly at the art, and find it a most frustrating pursuit.

  How to capture the perfection of a moment, when the sunlight falls, just so, across the gray branch of an olive? And yet I am driven to it, again and again, like the painters who come here to revel in the light, driven to attempt to capture God in some small way. The holiness of a child's innocent smile, the way a woman bends her head and shows the soft, clean place on the back of her neck— even the burst of sweetness from a plum, plucked from the tree, its juices sweet and hot from the sun exploding from that tender layer of skin into my mouth! Even now, I hear the music from the kitchen as servants clean up the dinner they have served and make the room ready for morning, and I try to think how to snatch that sound from the air and send it to you. One man is singing, and his voice is as fine as any opera tenor, and now another joins, and another, and there are four of them together, their hands clattering pots and clanging spoons and sweeping, and woven all through it is that song. Down the hill, on the road below the villa, there is a woman laughing, and in my imagination I see her as a gypsy, wild dark hair falling from a fine white face, about to make love to her husband, and I smile that my thoughts should go in such a direction. On my table, a breath of sea-scented wind flutters over the candle and threatens to put me in the dark, and still I labor to capture the music of the night. Imperfectly. Always imperfectly.

  And, as my father always said, to what purpose?

  Ah, you see how melancholy lies upon me tonight. Let me banish it now by saying yes, you are brave, dear lady. Brave enough to carve that life you envisioned, brave enough to hold salons and gather like minds to you— as you have gathered mine. It is a gift, and I thank you for sharing it with me.

  Come to Tuscany, my lady. Breathe new winds.

  Your humble servant, Basilio

  Cassandra's eyes were inexplicably damp as she finished reading. She held the letter in her lap and looked out at the gray, wet world beyond.

  Test your bravery.

  Did she dare?

  Chapter 2

  Tuscany August 1787

  The sound of the horses clopping—tick tock, tick tock—along with the warm sunshine pouring on her head, had lulled Cassandra into a drowsy state of delirious contentment. She smiled at the novelty of the moment—the wagon itself, and her skirts spread over the bench seat; the wagon-master in shirt sleeves, a battered hat on his head, singing as they rolled down the road. The grim horsemen to either side, so dashing that they'd widened the eyes of Cassandra's maid. The tall dark trees she couldn't name that stood sentry between the road and the fields beyond.

  Cassandra closed her eyes, shutting out the sights to only listen. The melancholy minor tune sung so cheerfully, sometimes wh
istled, the buzzing of a fly that had chosen to accompany them on the journey. It brushed around her cheek and she waved it away lazily. Shouts came from some field, and the wagon rattled.

  Such music!

  She wondered if this might be the road upon which the gypsy woman had walked, her laughter sailing up to where he sat writing, where he captured the sound and sent it to her.

  "You are happy, no?" the driver asked. He wore a thick black mustache over his lip, and his eyes danced when they lit upon her. "You like our country?"

  "Oh, yes! It's even more beautiful than I had imagined."

  "Ah, and the villa is the most beautiful of all." He winked. "You will like it very much."

  "I expect I will." Cassandra wanted to ask about the villa owner, about Count Montevarchi. Was he short and stout, like the wagon-master, or tall and severe, like some of the guards posted to ride with them? How old? Could he possibly have eyes as kind as the heart that showed in his letters?

  Until yesterday, she'd managed to keep most of these questions at bay. It had seemed enough that she'd left her dull, dull world, that he'd somehow given her courage enough to venture out of that safe world to discover what she might truly be made of.

  She had blended the general attributes of many of her scholarly acquaintances and come up with a patchwork vision of a middle-aged man, his hair graying a little at the temples. A man unhappy with his lot in life, but given to wild bursts of joy—maybe a severe expression balanced by eyes of great depth.

  Now she couldn't remember why she'd formed that picture. He could be anything. Anyone.

  The wagon rounded a turn and before them rose the villa, high on a hill, the walls pale gold. Suddenly, it was no longer an abstract adventure. A bolt of giddy terror filled her. What had possessed her?