Part 16 (1/2)

'Matteo!' someone called and he saw Cesare riding up.

'Hi,' said Matt, wondering how he was going to introduce his companion.

Then he was thrown into total confusion by Arianna herself.

'Cesare!' she cried in a musical and very un-masculine voice. The Remoran looked astonished; he leapt from his horse and obviously didn't know whether to shake hands with the peasant boy or kneel at his feet. But she had remembered her disguise by then and managed a little bow to him.

'I am Adamo the peasant while I'm in Padavia,' she said quietly. 'And as such I must defer to Cesare Montalbano, the famous victor of the Stellata.'

In the ICU Vicky Mulholland was still sitting with Jago's mother, who had fallen into an exhausted doze in her chair. The boy was stable but still unconscious and Vicky was finding it harder and harder to stay positive for her friend. The nights were always the worst, she remembered. The lights of the ward dimmed, voices lowered and the blackness outside the window all made the hours pa.s.s more slowly and the hope that came with the dawn was often illusory.

Vicky thought back over the last three or four years. There had been the awful period of Lucien's first illness, his chemotherapy, which robbed him of his black curls, and then what now felt like a sort of reprieve when he had been well enough to come with her and David to Venice. It hadn't been long after that when they saw the hospital consultant and had been told that the brain tumour had returned.

But there had been something strange about Lucien's last weeks, something that the doctors in this hospital hadn't understood. He shouldn't have gone into a coma but he had and all his brain activity had ceased. The day she and David had stood and watched Lucien's breathing machine turned off had been the worst of her life. She could understand very well what Celia Jones was going through.

After the funeral of her son, Vicky had believed herself to be losing her reason. Not just mad with grief, which she recognised was part of what was happening to her, but genuinely, unpredictably mad. She had started to see Lucien in the streets of Islington. Of course David had said it was her imagination until he saw him himself.

There hadn't been many such sightings and they didn't last long but the parents had to live with this secret; there was no question of telling anyone else.

And then, two years ago, the mystery that was Nicholas had landed on her doorstep, literally. A beautiful boy, with curly black hair, wounded in body and mind, needing a mother. Even though he was now a six foot plus fencing champion without even a trace of a limp, he was still the greatest single reason that she had survived Lucien's death. Vicky had never shaken off the notion that Nick was somehow Lucien's present to her.

It was ridiculous but no more so than seeing your dead son standing outside your house.

Vicky stretched her back muscles. She couldn't face another cup of hospital coffee. She wanted to go home, to look in on Nick as he slept in the room that had once been Lucien's and then to slip into bed beside her sleeping husband and take rea.s.surance from him along with his warmth. But Celia needed her and she would stay.

When Matt got back to the Scriptorium, Biagio nodded at him.

'Master wants you,' he said. 'In the studio.'

With a feeling of dread Matt knocked at the studio door. It was a relief to find Luciano in there with Constantin even though it made the small room seem crowded.

To his surprise, the Professor clasped him warmly in his arms. Matt found himself looking down at his pink scalp, covered with his neatly cropped grey hair.

'Welcome back,' Constantin was saying. 'We were all worried about you.'

For one awful moment Matt felt he was going to cry. Neither of these two Stravaganti knew what he had done yet and he felt he had failed a test of character. Surely when he told them they would no longer care about him? And he wanted desperately for them to approve of him even more than he wanted Ayesha to.

He swallowed. 'Professor, I need your help,' he said. 'You remember how we talked about the evil eye? Well I did it. I put it on someone and now he's in danger. He might die. Can you please help me to take it off?'

There. It was done now.

Luciano and Constantin were looking at him gravely.

'Guilt is a terrible burden,' said Constantin and he reached out and put one hand on Matt's head. He closed his eyes and murmured a few words.

Matt felt a sensation like being in a bath while the water drains out. He was temporarily suspended between elements and when he came to himself again he felt clean and forgiven.

'Thanks,' he said, feeling that was inadequate. 'But does this mean that Jago's better now because I'm sorry for what I did?'

'Unfortunately not,' said Constantin. 'You will have to use the counter-spell in your book. I can explain it to you again but it is too much for you to bear the burden alone. I will come back to your world with you.'

'No,' said Luciano. 'It is too dangerous for you, Professor. I will go with Matt.'

Chapter 15.

A Face from the Past The afternoon in Padavia dragged for Matt. He had agreed to go to Luciano's house before stravagating back to his world. He was enormously grateful that the older boy was coming back with him. But he had no idea how it was going to work. Lucien Mulholland was dead; wasn't it crazy for him to risk being seen so near to where he used to live?

At the end of their long working day, the pressmen left the Scriptorium, rolling down their filthy sleeves and talking loudly about the need to slake their thirsts. Matt walked to Luciano's house near the cathedral, feeling that he would need at least a pint of ale before being ready to stravagate.

Alfredo let him in and took him into the elegant dining room. It took Matt a while to adjust to the candlelit scene. He recognised Luciano and Dethridge and Cesare, but also present was a beautiful young woman with chestnut-brown hair and violet eyes, in a low-cut dress of grey taffeta. It could only be the d.u.c.h.essa with her disguise cast off; in fact he could also see the tall bodyguard a few paces behind the woman's chair.

Matt felt completely inadequate standing in the doorway in his printer's devil clothes. He had thought perhaps his mysterious trips to Talia had something to do with feeling out of place in his own life but he didn't feel as if he belonged here either. Maybe he would end up lost somewhere between Padavia and Islington and spend the rest of his days wandering in the void, with nothing to bind him to either world.

'There you are,' said Luciano warmly, and the feeling dissipated. 'Will you eat with us before we leave?'

'Can I have a wash first?' asked Matt.

'Of course. Alfredo will show you where,' said Luciano. 'I'd offer you a change of clothes but you're quite a bit taller than me broader too.'

'That's OK,' said Matt. 'I probably need to stay in these clothes for when I come back.'

'You're right,' said Luciano, disconcerted by how much he had already forgotten about stravagating when you weren't a Talian.

When Matt came back, feeling a little less disreputable, he found a place laid for him between Luciano and Cesare, opposite the d.u.c.h.essa.

'Welcome,' she said as he sat down. 'Refresh yourself you work hard here in Talia, I think?'

Matt didn't need a second invitation. He ate and drank heartily, noticing that Luciano himself took little. His host looked pale and tired. Matt saw how often Arianna looked towards him and realised that she was worried about the coming visit to his old world.

'We mustn't linger, Matt,' said Luciano, looking out of the window. 'The night is coming on and the morning will be wearing away in your world.'

Matt knew that Jan wouldn't come and knock on his door, not with Ayesha there. But he agreed; he was anxious to get this over with.

The two of them withdrew to Luciano's bedroom. The Bellezzan took a fine silver chain from out of a wooden box and pulled it over his head. Matt saw that he held a token of some sort, something like a frozen flower. They sat side by side on Luciano's lavishly draped bed.

'Tell me about your house,' said Luciano. 'If you tell me where it is and what your room looks like, I should end up there with you if we're lucky.'

'Well it's not like this,' said Matt, looking round at his surroundings.

'I didn't always live like this,' said Luciano seriously. 'I was just another Barnsbury Comp kid like you.'

Matt was telling him random things about his house, when someone knocked softly on the door. It was Arianna. Her skirts swished as she came in, holding a candlestick, and she sat down on the other side of Luciano.

'You need to lie down,' she said. 'Both of you. I'll watch over you.'

Matt felt guilty for taking Luciano away from her; they had told him about how rare her secret visits were. But it was nice to think she would be there, even if she couldn't really protect them.