Was I cruel?
I had not thought so.
It seemed to me the hardness was in her.
There was no remedy.
I reached out for her hand, and she gave it me.
Yet as I kissed it I kept thinking of Rainaldi…
That night I dreamed I climbed to the granite stone and read the letter once again, buried beneath it.
The dream was so vivid that it did not fade with waking, but remained throughout the morning.
I got up, and was well enough to go downstairs, as usual, by midday.
Try as I would, I could not shake off the desire within me to read the letter once again.
I could not remember what it said about Rainaldi.
I must know, for certainty, what it was Ambrose had said of him.
In the afternoon Rachel went to her room to rest, and as soon as she had gone I slipped away through the woods and down to the avenue, and climbed the path above the keeper’s cottage, filled with loathing for what I meant to do.
I came to the granite slab.
I knelt beside it and, digging with my hands, felt suddenly the soggy leather of my pocketbook.
A slug had made its home there for the winter.
The trail across the front was sticky.
I knocked it off, and opening the pocketbook took out the crumpled letter.
The paper was damp and limp, the lettering more faded than before, but still decipherable.
I read the letter through.
The first part more hastily, though it was strange that his illness, from another cause, could have been, in symptoms, so much similar to mine.
But to Rainaldi…
“As the months passed,” wrote Ambrose, “I noticed more and more how she turned to this man I have mentioned before in my letters, Signor Rainaldi, a friend and I gather a lawyer of Sangalletti’s, for advice, rather than to me.
I believe this man to have a pernicious influence upon her.
I suspect him of having been in love with her for years, even when Sangalletti was alive, and although I do not for an instant believe she ever thought of him in such a connection up to a short while ago, now, since she has altered in her manner to me, I cannot be so sure.
There is a shadow in her eye, a tone in her voice, when his name is said, that awakens in my mind the most terrible suspicion.
“Brought up as she was by feckless parents, living a life, before and even during her first marriage, about which both of us have had reserve, I have often felt her code of behavior is different to ours at home.
The tie of marriage may not be so sacred.
I suspect, in fact I have proof, that he gives her money.
Money, God forgive me for saying so, is at the present time the one way to her heart.”
There it was, the sentence I had not forgotten, which had haunted me.
Where the paper folded the words were indistinct, until I caught again the word
“Rainaldi.”
“I will come down to the terrace,” Ambrose said, “and find Rainaldi there.
At sight of me, both fall silent. I cannot but wonder what it is they have been discussing.
Once, when she had gone into the villa and Rainaldi and I were left alone, he asked an abrupt question as to my will.
This he had seen, incidentally, when we married.
He told me that as it stood, and should I die, I would leave my wife without provision.
This I knew, and had anyway drawn up a will myself that would correct the error, and would have put my signature to it, and had it witnessed, could I be certain that her fault of spending was a temporary passing thing, and not deep-rooted.
“This new will, by the way, would give her the house and the estate for her lifetime only, and so to you upon her death, with the proviso that the running of the estate be left in your hands entirely.
“It still remains unsigned, and for the reason I have told you.
“Mark you, it is Rainaldi who asked questions on the will, Rainaldi who drew my attention to the omissions of the one that stands at present.
She does not speak of it, to me.
But do they speak of it, together?
What is it that they say to one another, when I am not there?
“This matter of the will occurred in March.
Admittedly, I was unwell, and nearly blinded with my head, and Rainaldi bringing up the matter may have done so in that cold calculating way of his, thinking that I might die.
Possibly it is so.
Possibly it is not discussed between them.
I have no means of finding out.