Mary grew increasingly offended by his neglect. Lucenza was also restless, anxious to slip away to one of her assignations. To add to Mary’s irritation, one afternoon someone was playing the opening bars of Voi che sapete over and over again on a tinkling pianoforte, with no evidence of improvement. Lucenza’s sighs and badly-rendered Mozart together impelled Mary to go out for dinner instead of eating alone in her rooms.
She chose her favourite al fresco café, so that she might entertain herself by watching the passers-by. The sultry afternoon air was relieved by several large fountains, and little birds hopped about on the colourful tiled floor, searching for crumbs. She dined on some fish and apple tart, still trying to dismiss Voi che sapete from her head.
Mary could not avoid noticing a dark-haired young woman dining alone at the next table, who was quickly devouring a plate of pork chops. The young woman was of a solid, muscular build, and Mary surmised she had been attempting to starve herself into a more slender form, but appetite had won the battle. Certainly there was something rather guilty in her air, and when another young woman walked briskly into the piazza and looked about her, the girl drew her napkin over her plate in a futile attempt to hide it.
Mary had seen the newcomer before. She was the red-headed lady who lived at the top of the street. She approached the dark-haired girl and rolled her eyes. “So, Claire, this is where you have been stealing off to! I might have guessed. How did you find the money for that?”
Amused, Mary pretended to be absorbed in her book, and she sipped her glass of mineral water as she listened to their conversation.
“The money was for my singing lessons, but I shall not be taking lessons so long as we are stuck here.”
“Then you ought to have given it back!”
“It was my money, so it is no affair of yours what I do with it.”
“Your money. Can you truly think so?” The red-headed woman sighed, and sank down in the chair next to her companion. “Is there any food left? Or did you stuff it all down?”
The girl she called Claire pulled her napkin away and revealed a plate of bones, with one half-eaten pork chop remaining. “Help yourself to the rest.”
“I dare say it will not disagree with me. Just a very little meat, a very little....” She cut up the remaining chop and rapidly dispatched it.
“Shall we go back now?” The dark-haired girl asked, after some period of silence.
The other shook her head. “The landlord sent word he was coming around this afternoon. I shan’t go home until late.”
“Oh my lord, what am I to do all day, if we cannot go back to Casa Bertini?”
The red-headed woman pushed the plate away from her, then opened a small leather satchel and pulled out a well-worn newspaper. “Do as you please, Claire. It is not my fault you lack the capacity to entertain yourself.”
A few minutes passed peacefully, with Claire absently picking up and chewing the bare pork bones, while her companion lingered over her newspaper. Mary Crawford returned to her book and almost forgot the two were there.
“Mary, how many times are you going to read that thing?”
Mary looked up from her book at the sound of her name but swiftly realised that Claire was addressing her companion, not her.
“Claire,” the red-headed woman answered slowly, as though speaking to a dim-witted child, “if Sir Walter Scott—Sir Walter Scott, mark you—had praised a book you had written, how many times would you read the review?”
Holding the ragged newspaper copy toward her companion, she repeated, evidently from memory and with great satisfaction: “The ideas of the author are always clearly as well as forcibly expressed—”
“Perhaps he would not have praised it so well, if he had known it was written by a woman. Does he not say, ‘his descriptions’?”
“Yes, he does, but do you not see, that is a compliment?” She resumed reading: “‘His descriptions of landscape have in them the choice requisites of truth, freshness, precision, and beauty.’ Ah,” she sighed, leaning back in her chair. “That is the part I love the most: ‘truth,’ ‘precision.’ This delights me above all. Here is my favourite passage: “Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author’s original genius and happy power of expression.”
“But perhaps he would be shocked if he knew, after all,” countered Claire.
“I think I shall write and thank him and reveal myself to him. Or—shall I not? There is something irresistibly delicious about sitting here, so far from home, having sent forth my creature into the world, and no-one can say from whose pen he sprung! Whose hand gave him life! Really, you should not have given up your own novel, Claire. Did you keep the manuscript? You could perhaps earn some money to send to father.”
Just then, a waiter approached. “Signora Shelley?” Mary heard the waiter say.
The red-headed woman replied in halting Italian, “What do you want ?”
Mary sat frozen, staring down unseeing at the pages of her book. Mrs. Shelley?
“The coach driver, he says, there is a trunk for Signore Shelley. It was sent to Livorno, but he brought it here today.”
“Tell him to send it to the Casa Bertini.”
“No, but excuse me, Signora Shelley, the driver says, that he needs two boys to carry the trunk up the hill, because the trunk, it is very heavy, and he must have payment before the trunk will be delivered.”
The red-headed woman sighed softly. “Tell him to leave it, then. At the post office. Mr. Shelley will come to claim it.”
Claire exclaimed: “Mary! That must
