They spend two weeks in his villa in Portofino, just the two of them – and the small army of servants he keeps there. Gradually she begins to unfurl. He draws her story from her. She tells him that her parents are dead, and that from infancy she was brought up by an elderly woman who was not her relative. This woman was a healer, she explains, who taught her everything she knew. But she, too, is no longer alive.
What he really wants to know is how she ended up half-drowned, so far from land. But on this point she is reticent. Every time he alludes to it, she steers the conversation from the subject. Which only intrigues him further. Intrigues and – if he were to be absolutely honest – slightly unnerves him. For she is strange. Her manner, her way of speaking. Her beauty: hair so dark it looks hardly natural, and her pallor. Paleness in a woman is highly desirable, of course, and yet sometimes he finds it hard to believe that blood really beats somewhere beneath the surface.
Twice now, he has found her roaming the corridors in a sleep-state, moving with her eyes closed but her feet carrying her as surely as if they were open. He has not dared to wake her – has watched instead in dumb horror as she makes her slow but purposeful circuit of the palazzo.
There are further terrible storms, too, battering their way along the coast, howling through the bay. One evening, having gone to check if she is frightened by the racket, he finds her watching the spectacle through the great window, her face lit by excitement. He cannot help but remember the suspicions of some of the men when the first storm had arrived from nowhere. He remembers, too, the word his lieutenant had used. He forces it from his mind.
23
At some point, Hal must have fallen asleep. He wakes to find himself slumped over the desk, his cheek stuck to the open page of the journal. The air is oppressively warm and close, as thick as honey. He has no idea of the time – but it feels late. He reaches for his watch and finds instead that the thing he has picked up is the compass. He squints at the face. Is it his imagination, or is the needle tracking faster than before? Not for the first time he has the unnerving conviction that its motion is transmitting some code for which he lacks the correct cipher.
His skin feels feverishly hot. He reaches for the catch to open the porthole just as light explodes through the room, illuminating the whole cabin. He sits back on the bed, disorientated. Seconds later the thunder follows: a great roar of noise, fire and dynamite. The silence that follows the commotion is textured, unlike the quiet that preceded it. He waits, tensed, for the next assault. It comes sooner than expected, with greater ferocity.
He goes back to the window to try and see anything, but all is dark, and the only thing he can make out is the black gleam of the water. No rain yet. The air crackles. And now there is wind, beginning to rustle and then moan about the boat, whistling in the rigging.
A cry – a human cry, he thinks, but high as an animal’s. Then, following on its tail, another catastrophe of light. A terrible splintering, wrenching, tearing sound – then the sigh of something falling: a crash that reverberates through the whole space.
Now there are shouts, footsteps running. The yacht seems filled with hundreds of men, ten times the number that are actually aboard. Hal, finally, is properly awake. He runs to the door and flings it open. Outside in the corridor is a scene of panic. Roberto and another member of staff thunder past. Someone is sobbing wretchedly.
He follows the men up to the deck, where he finds a scene of devastation. Where the main mast once stood is a smoking stump. Scattered about it are the remains of the rest of it: flakes of ash, smouldering chunks like the remnants left in the grate after a fire. The rain, now, has finally begun, and it drenches everything, leaving a sorry, black mess.
The men, ready to act but unable to do anything to help the situation, pick listlessly through the charred remains.
Hal remembers the cry. He goes to Roberto, who is surveying the damage, looking perhaps the happiest Hal has ever seen him.
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘No,’ Roberto says, with something unmistakably like regret.
‘I heard a scream, I thought someone …’
‘Ah, yes – one of the signoras, she took a great fright at the flash. She saw it all happen. She is inside, very upset.’ He points to the stern of the boat, and Hal sees that the weeper, surprisingly, is Giulietta Castiglione.
‘I hate storms,’ she says, furiously, when Hal approaches, dabbing at her blotched face. For the first time since Hal has met her, she looks less than groomed: her nightdress crumpled, her hair static. Her face without make-up is vulnerable-looking, like a superhero divested of his mask. Stella and Gaspari sit with her, muttering words of calm. Earl Morgan sits in one of the chairs, rubbing his eyes and looking about groggily.
The only person who does not emerge until the last possible moment is Aubrey Boyd. His silvery head appears at the top of the stairs, followed by the rest of him, clad in a pair of maroon silk pyjamas and a chinoiserie robe. He peers about himself in bemusement.