The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [42]
Life is just like the books, is it not? No, no, it is better, far better!’
She could contain herself no longer. With a little hop and a skip, she whirled around and danced up the steps onto the high wall, jumped up into one of the crenellations of the battlements and stood on the very edge, overlooking the sea, her spotted white muslin whipping back and forth in the merciless wind.
‘Louisa! Come back, it’s dangerous!’ called Sarah, running after her.
But Louisa was oblivious to everything but the rapture of her fantasy. Lifting her arms to the sky, she called on the Spirit of Nature to witness to herjoy.
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But Sarah could not share her exaltation. With sinking heart, she faced the truth. She could pretend no longer: the white lady was indeed Louisa herself.
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Twelve
The Brigadier’s sense of disquiet about Vilmio’s intentions soon resolved itself into a professional resolve to increase the security of the castle. After all, he thought, if the boy was right in what he heard, then it was by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that Vilmio might try to eliminate the rest of his opposition – namely the Brigadier himself –
by the use of violence, which would leave Uncle Mario at his mercy.
Unfortunately, travelling as a private citizen rather than on duty, he had had perforce to leave his own gun behind.
But then, the first priority wasn’t so much a matter of weaponry as of personnel. Apart from himself, the total garrison of his fortress was comprised of two old men and a boy.
‘No, no, no, no, no,’ said Mario, when asked to accompany him down to the village to recruit some reinforcements. ‘My people, when the little fiends come out to play, they run away like Georgie the Porgie. Goodnight, sweethearts. Good ridding.’
‘Well, I’m sorry, Uncle,’ replied the Brigadier, ‘but I’m not prepared to take the responsibility of keeping you safe unless we get some help. This man may turn up on the doorstep with a gun.’
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‘I got gun,’ replied the old man. ‘I show you.’ And off he went in his shuffling, skipping run to the steep stairs leading up to the gallery in the great hall. His impetuous rush became more of a hoist and a heave as he pulled himself to the top and disappeared from view, but he was back in no time, flourishing a strange-looking object above his head.
‘Ecco!’ he said. ‘Behold!’
‘Good grief, it’s a blunderbuss,’ said the Brigadier.
‘Is right. Belonged to my grandpa’s grandpa. Is good gun, I tell you straight.’
To demonstrate this proposition, he put the gun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.
Luckily he was pointing it at nothing more important than an Aubusson tapestry hanging on the adjacent wall, for there was a mighty bang, the charge of pebbles, metal nuts and bolts, olive stones and rusty nails flew through the air and the priceless cloth was rent by a multitude of jagged holes.
The Brigadier took a deep breath. If Mario had aimed it at him, Vilmio’s problems would have been over.
Mario himself was also somewhat shaken. The gun had apparently been loaded since the second world war, when it was kept in readiness to deal with any German invasion, Mario having been indomitably anti-fascist from 1922 on.
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In his subdued state, he was the more easily persuaded, and soon, wearing his wide-brimmed peasant straw, his scraggy, blue-veined legs sticking out of knee-length shorts and ending in rope sandals, he set off with the immaculately blazered and panamaed Brigadier to raise his private army.
It was when Sarah came to the Doctor to tell him of her dreadful news that he again nearly lost his life.
He and the Barone had found that they had a friend in common. As a young man sent to Naples to learn the ways of the world, Paolo Verconti had so enthusiastically complied that he had had a passionate affair with the wife of the British envoy, one William Hamilton, a fact which had in no way prevented him from becoming the intimate companion of his successor in the role of lover of the