Chapter 7

7

I woke before Demetra could rouse me. It was another fitful night, my mind full of Jack's kiss and the weird events of the previous day. I opened the curtains to a gorgeous dawn. The garden below was blissfully silent.

After dressing and hiding the journal in the bottom drawer, deep underneath my clothes, I slipped into the hallway. Not hearing anyone bustling about, I forged ahead, making my way down to what I thought might be the servants' stairwell at the end of the corridor and descending the narrow staircase.

I was intensely curious about the secret passage to the boschetto that Giulia had mentioned in her journal. If I followed it, it may lead me toward something that could explain more about Giulia, but also more about me.

It seemed logical that a passage must originate in the cellars. Ignazio had mentioned that the floor below the terzo piano , the ground floor, was for service, so I passed it and kept going. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I opened the door into blackness. A pervasive dank smell emanated from the dark. I felt around the edge of the door for a switch, but there wasn't any. There wasn't a single sliver of light to lead my way. I'd have to return when I could find a lantern or flashlight. Maybe I'd even bring Jack with me. Perhaps with all the weird things I'd already experienced since arriving in Bomarzo, I shouldn't take any chances. His brawn would protect me. And if he had to hold me tight, I wouldn't complain.

I went back up the stairs to the service floor, intending to ask someone for a flashlight, although I didn't know what excuse I might have for wanting one. Following the scent of something cooking, I entered the kitchen and was stunned to see that Ignazio was already looking toward the door, as though he were waiting for my arrival. Had I made any noise on my approach? The cook and his assistant turned in my direction, but they remained expressionless, as though they were looking through me instead of at me. It was the same blankness that Demetra and the servants at the dinners exhibited.

It wasn't the bustling kitchen I would have expected from a large palazzo. Instead, it was very old and, to my surprise, harbored no modern appliances. There were several tables, a heavy sink on one side, and a fire that roared in the grate, complete with a spit and platforms where pots could be set to cook the food. How had they managed to create such wondrous meals with such simple implements?

Ignazio crossed the room when he saw me, his enigmatic smile lighting up his face. "Julia! Are you ready for breakfast? Is there anything amiss?"

I hadn't thought I would find him there so early, nor was I prepared for the rush of butterflies that lit in my stomach when I saw him. Jack had fired up those same feelings the night before, with our kiss, but it was a small spark compared to the fire I felt when I looked at Ignazio.

"I..." My words failed me.

"Anything you need, Julia, just say."

"I woke early and decided to explore, that's all." Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to just ask about the lower level. "I found my way to the cellar, but I couldn't find the light switch."

"There isn't one. Would you like me to show you the lower levels? I'd be happy to give you a tour."

I hesitated. But our host was already in motion. He crossed the kitchen, pulled two lanterns down off a shelf and lit them. Then, as he led me down the hallway toward the stairs, he launched into a story about how the current owners, the Borghese family, had looked into wiring the lower levels but decided the expense wasn't worth it.

As we descended into the pitch-black cellar, I couldn't help but wonder why I hadn't said no. While I was curious about finding the passage, I wasn't sure I was so curious I wanted to scramble around in the dark looking for it. And yet, despite my trepidation about following Ignazio into the dark, I was enthralled by the sound of his voice, by his very nearness. Perhaps Ignazio and I were two lodestones tumbling against one another. We attracted, repelled, attracted, repelled. Lillian was always teasing me about my predilection to be attracted to men who were the most dangerous for me. Surely with Ignazio that was true. There was no safety here, just a heady deluge of desire—and a sense that he could flip my world in a direction I might not want it to go.

Then we were descending the stairs and my moment to say no, I don't want to go down there with you was slipping further and further away, until it was gone and we were walking through the darkness, our lanterns cutting into the black. I reasoned with myself that I wanted to see the space, to discover if there was, in fact, a hidden passageway of some sort that led down to the garden.

"This room used to be the kitchen," Ignazio said when we reached the bottom of the stairs, which led into a massive space large enough that the lantern light couldn't reach the walls. "When they wired the castello for electricity, they moved the kitchen upstairs."

I couldn't see enough of the room to know if there was a fireplace or any of the furnishings you might find in a kitchen, though looking at the peperino stone floor, I could tell the basement had been carved from the rock upon which the castello was built. Ignazio strode from room to room with purpose, and with every step, I knew there was no way I could have come down there by myself. The never-ending darkness beyond our lamplight, the cobwebs, the sounds of mice or, more likely, rats skittering in the shadows—all that was only part of it. What shook me most was that I could sense a human presence surrounding us, centuries of history layered upon itself thick enough that it felt engraved upon the very air we walked through.

The darkness compelled me to keep close to Ignazio, closer than I wanted. But he knew this place and I did not. While I knew it ridiculous, I had a pervasive feeling that something might jump out, snatch me away, and drag me off...though perhaps I was already being dragged off by Ignazio himself.

A profound sense of relief flooded through me when we reached the opposite side of the room and entered a hallway. Seeing the two walls on either side of me was a great comfort.

"Where are the dungeons?" I asked. He had mentioned them when he first showed us around the palazzo.

"They aren't terribly impressive," he admitted as he opened a door to reveal a massive pantry lined with jars of food. "We use many of the cells for cold storage now."

"Are there any secret passages in the palazzo?" I was kicking myself for not asking him that before traipsing around in the darkness with him. I realized, with growing horror, that my companions had no idea where I was. Would the cook tell them if I disappeared? I had the strong sense that he wouldn't.

"Every old castle has secret passages, Julia," Ignazio said. "Some are merely for the servants to move about, unseen. But the old barons had many enemies. One never knew when there might be a need to escape from infiltrators. Or perhaps just get away from other family members."

"Where are they?"

"If I told you, they wouldn't be a secret anymore, now, would they?" He looked at me, his eyes glinting like sparks in the lantern light. "But, worry not, none go to your bedroom."

This did not bring me comfort. I also hated that he knew I was wondering just that.

"At the other end of the basement is a stairwell down to the road leading out of the city. Even our medieval counterparts found a reason to have an extra egress. That's the closest this floor has to a secret passage, though I'm afraid there's nothing mysterious about it."

I stayed close to Ignazio. He was quite animated and gave me a detailed history of the castle as we walked. Thankfully, his voice kept me distracted from the rodents I could hear scratching somewhere in the empty blackness.

We passed more storage spaces full of old furniture, building materials, and assorted boxes. A couple of the rooms were filled top to bottom with wine racks, some of which held bottles Ignazio told me went back over a hundred years. I would hate to be the servant sent down to the darkness to retrieve one of them.

Finally, we came to the end of the hallway. Ignazio waved a hand toward what he said was the door to a small area where there were still two or three dungeon cells and the aforementioned staircase, but then he doubled back, leading me to the massive room he had said was the kitchen. But instead of going up the steps, he went to the right a few paces, then homed in on a doorless entrance to a room about eight feet wide and perhaps twice as long. He held the lantern up so I could look in. On the far side, a small arched hole had been carved into the wall. A little metal grate had been bolted over the bottom half, perhaps to prevent one from falling in. In the center of the room there was a rounded impression in the stone as though some sort of mechanism may have been there centuries ago and was now long gone. The odor of moss and mold was unpleasant.

Julia...

The whisper, which seemed to emanate from the hole itself, made me jump. The hair on my arms and neck stood on end, though Ignazio didn't seem to register the whisper or my discomfort. He stepped into the room and thrust his lantern closer to the space in the wall.

"The well," he said.

"That's a well?" It looked utterly unlike any well I had ever seen.

"It is. It was the first thing they dug before building the castle. That they were able to bore deep into the rock is a feat in itself."

"How old is it?"

"Nearly a thousand years old."

I tried to imagine a medieval peasant woman hauling water up through that hole. That impression in the floor probably once held a winch. As I turned to ask Ignazio, a loud hiss sounded and a huge snake slithered across my foot.

I screamed and dropped my lantern, the oil spilling out and catching fire. It flamed up and suddenly Ignazio's arms were around me, pulling me back. Heat warmed my body. We were trapped in a corner near the well, the fire licking up the oil in the doorway.

"It will burn itself out," Ignazio reassured me. "It's a good thing it's all rock down here."

The smoke was thick and dark, and I began to choke. Ignazio held me close, smoothing my hair and whispering words I couldn't hear over my coughing. The heat from his body was nearly more than I could bear, but the fire just feet away was even hotter. I shook against him, burying my face into his chest, the smoke coating and searing my lungs. It wasn't long before it felt like a fire had been lit inside my chest and there was less and less air to breathe.

I looked back at the fire, hoping it would burn itself out soon. To my utter horror, a woman stood in the center of the blaze. She wore a blue dress fit for a baroque ballroom, her long blond hair piled high upon her head, and she held three fingers toward us. There was a frantic look in her eyes. Despite my growing inability to breathe, I let loose an expletive, realizing that this woman looked exactly like me. The world around me started to gray, like a movie fading out when the end came, and Ignazio's mouth was against mine, his lips sealed to my lips, his heat flooding into me.

Smoke. Cinnamon. Then nothing.

I woke in my room, the pillows amassed like a soft fortress around my head and shoulders, a lamp on the nightstand emitting dim light. Somehow, I was wearing my pajamas, not the dress from that morning.

How oddly hale I felt... I took a deep breath to be sure, but the smoke seemed to have had no consequence to my lungs. I didn't need to cough and wasn't burnt. But for the smell of smoke and oil in my hair, I would have thought it all a hallucination.

Rising, I went to the window and pulled open the heavy curtain to find it was dark. The entire day must have passed me by. And that cursed glow, verdant and eerie, was back in the garden. I kept the curtain open, trying to understand where it was coming from as it grew greener and brighter—angrier, it seemed to me—until it illuminated the garden. Then, with no warning, it winked out.

A knock at the door made me jump. I hoped it might be Jack. I needed a comforting face. But there stood Demetra, a tray of tea in her hands.

"If you are rested enough, the others are gathering for dinner soon," she said as she swept past me and deposited the silver tray on the table near the window.

"Do you know who took care of me?" I asked, thinking it must have been Ignazio. "Did you put me in my pajamas?" I didn't think I had been taken advantage of, but then again, the memory of his lips upon mine was still strong.

"It should have been me," she said, turning to me, her eyes full of anger.

"Who was it?" I asked, alarmed at the intensity in her voice.

She turned on a heel and left, not bothering to shut the door behind her.

I poked my head into the hallway to call her back, except she wasn't there. I shut the door in a rush, my heart hammering inside my rib cage. She couldn't have disappeared so quickly. What was happening to me? Sitting on the edge of the bed, my mind raced. I had expected Dalí to be the most surreal thing about this trip, but he was practically normal compared to the garden, the empty-eyed servants, the fantastical meals I had eaten, the fire, and the terrifying magnetism of Ignazio.

"Julia?" Gala's voice sounded at the other side of the door.

I never thought I would feel relieved to see Gala, with her snarky words and prickly countenance. She was no friend, but when I let her enter, I was infused with a wash of comfort that she was there, real, standing before me.

"You look a lot better than you did this morning," she noted, looking me up and down.

"You saw me this morning?"

"I did." She went to the window and shut the curtains. "You are a load of dead weight when you are out cold, you know."

"Were you the one to dress me?"

"Yes, you stupid girl. And not only that but you wasted a whole day of work! When they called me to your room, you were passed out. You reeked like smoke. Ignazio said he had already had the village doctor check you out, and you just needed to sleep it off. You wasted a whole day that Salvador could have been painting you."

The brief respite her presence provided quickly gave way to tension once again. "Gala, I was incapacitated," I said, exasperated. "I didn't intend to miss the sitting." I was incensed at her attempt to lay a burden of guilt upon me.

She folded her arms and stared at me. "What happened? Ignazio would not tell me."

I told her the story but left out the part about the woman in the fire. And I certainly did not tell her about Ignazio pressing his lips to mine.

"So, you went down into the dark with him, swooned, and he saved you."

"It wasn't like that," I said.

"Why wasn't he affected by the smoke?" It wasn't so much of a question of me as it was general pondering.

"I...I don't know. He should have been," I said, thinking of how he easily held me and stroked my hair to soothe me.

The thoughtful look on Gala's face was replaced by impatience as she went to my dresser and began to rummage through the drawers.

"You won't have time to bathe, so you'll just have to go stinking like a chimney." She tossed a pair of panties and a brassiere onto the bed.

"Stop. I can manage. I'm feeling all right now." I didn't want her to find Giulia Farnese's diary in the bottom drawer. She might tell Ignazio I had removed it from the library, or worse, be interested in it herself.

In a fit of exasperation, Gala picked up a hairbrush from the dresser. "You think you can manage? Without ruining another day's work?"

"Yes, I said I can manage," I snapped back, frustration mounting.

Gala hurled the hairbrush at me. It missed me by an inch and clattered against the wall. "Get yourself together. Time is money, and you're wasting both." She scowled. "Dress warm. We'll be dining in the Sacro Bosco tonight. You need to eat so you have strength for tomorrow. I'm not letting you wreck another day."

My breath caught. I thought of the green glow I had now seen twice. Demetra said no one ever went into the sacred wood at night. Why were we?

"And don't expect to be paid for today." She sneered at me when she reached the door. "We only pay models when they work."

She slipped out, leaving me standing there, stunned. That was seventy-five thousand lire out of my pocket, the equivalent of nearly a month's salary. And while I understood that if I couldn't complete the work I wouldn't be paid, what was even more galling was her violence, her complete lack of empathy, and the insinuation I had purposely intended to skip out on my duties.

I turned back to the dresser and looked for Giulia's diary. It was still there, hidden under a pair of slacks I had brought. Had Giulia said anything about the well in her diary? I had thumbed through the pages, but I didn't even know the Italian word for well . Besides, Gala had made it abundantly clear that I was not to miss dinner. Fuming, I put the book away and picked up the brassiere. As I dressed, my thoughts twisted and turned. Something was happening, something beyond my understanding. But I knew one thing for sure: the secrets buried in Giulia's diary were calling to me, and I had the distinct sense that the answers lay hidden in the shadows of the sacred wood.