He was well, and in good spirits, and looking forward to the journey into Italy.
He was not trusting himself to a diligence, which would have meant going up to Lyons anyway, but had hired himself horses and a conveyance, and proposed driving along the coast into Italy, and then turning towards Florence.
Wellington shook his head at the news, and foretold an accident.
He was of the firm opinion that no Frenchman could drive, and that all Italians were robbers.
Ambrose survived, however, and the next letter came from Florence.
I kept all his letters, and I have the bunch of them before me now.
How often I read them during the next months; they were thumbed, and turned, and read again, as though by the very pressure of my hands upon them more could be gleaned from the pages than the written words gave of themselves.
It was towards the close of this first letter from Florence, where he had apparently spent Christmas, that he first spoke of cousin Rachel.
“I have made the acquaintance of a connection of ours,” he wrote.
“You have heard me talk about the Coryns, who used to have a place on the Tamar, now sold up and changed to other hands.
A Coryn married an Ashley two generations ago, as you will find on the family tree. A descendant of that branch was born and brought up in Italy by an impecunious father and an Italian mother, and married off at an early age to an Italian nobleman called Sangalletti, who departed this life by fighting a duel, it appears, when half-seas over, leaving his wife with a load of debts and a great empty villa.
No children.
The Contessa Sangalletti, or, as she insists on calling herself, my cousin Rachel, is a sensible woman, good company, and has taken it upon her shoulders to show me the gardens in Florence, and in Rome later, as we shall both be there at the same time.”
I was glad that Ambrose had found a friend, and someone who could share his passion for gardens.
Knowing nothing of Florentine or Roman society, I had feared English acquaintances would be few, but here at least was a person whose family had hailed from Cornwall in the first place, so they would have that in common too.
The next letter consisted almost entirely of lists of gardens, which, though not at their best at this season in the year, seemed to have made a great impression upon Ambrose.
So had our relative.
“I am beginning to have a real regard for our cousin Rachel,” wrote Ambrose in early spring, “and feel quite distressed to think what she must have suffered from that fellow Sangalletti.
These Italians are treacherous blackguards, there’s no denying it.
She is just as English as you or I in her ways and outlook, and might have been living beside the Tamar yesterday.
Can’t hear enough about home and all I have to tell her.
She is extremely intelligent but, thank the Lord, knows when to hold her tongue.
None of that endless yattering, so common in women.
She has found me excellent rooms in Fiesole, not far from her own villa, and as the weather becomes milder I shall spend a good deal of my time at her place, sitting on the terrace, or pottering in the gardens which are famous, it seems, for their design, and for the statuary, which I don’t know much about.
How she exists I hardly know, but I gather she has had to sell much of the valuable stuff in the villa to pay off the husband’s debts.”
I asked my godfather, Nick Kendall, if he remembered the Coryns.
He did, and had not much opinion of them.
“They were a feckless lot, when I was a boy,” he said.
“Gambled away their money and estates, and now the house, on Tamar-side, is nothing much more than a tumbled-down farm.
Fell into decay some forty years ago.
This woman’s father must have been Alexander Coryn—I believe he did disappear to the continent.
He was second son of a second son.
Don’t know what happened to him though.
Does Ambrose give this Contessa’s age?”
“No,” I said, “he only told me she had been married very young, but he did not say how long ago.
I suppose she is middle-aged.”
“She must be very charming for Mr. Ashley to take notice of her,” remarked Louise.
“I have never heard him admire a woman yet.”
“That’s probably the secret,” I said. “She’s plain and homely, and he doesn’t feel forced to pay her compliments.
I’m delighted.”
One or two more letters came, scrappy, without much news.
He was just back from dining with our cousin Rachel, or on his way there to dinner.
He said how few people there were in Florence among her friends who could really give her disinterested advice on her affairs.
He flattered himself, he said, that he could do this.
And she was so very grateful. In spite of her many interests, she seemed strangely lonely. She could never have had anything in common with Sangalletti, and confessed she had been hungry all her life for English friends.
“I feel I have accomplished something,” he said, “besides acquiring hundreds of new plants to bring back home with me.”
Then came a space of time.
He had said nothing of the date of his return, but it was usually towards the end of April.
Winter had seemed long with us, and frost, seldom keen in the west country, unexpectedly severe.
Some of his young camellias had been affected by it, and I hoped he would not return too soon and find hard winds and driving rains with us still.