“Yes,” she answered, “did Ambrose never tell you?
My mother’s people came from Rome, and my father Alexander Coryn was one of those men who find it difficult to settle anywhere.
He never could bear England, I think he did not get on very well with his family here, in Cornwall.
He liked the life in Rome, and he and my mother suited each other well. But they led a precarious sort of existence, never any money, you know.
I was used to it as a child, but as I grew up it was most unsettling.”
“Are they both dead?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, my father died when I was sixteen.
Mother and I were alone for five years.
Until I married Cosimo Sangalletti.
Five fearful years they were too, moving from city to city, not always certain where our next meal would come from.
Mine was not a sheltered girlhood, Philip.
I was thinking only last Sunday how different from Louise.”
So she had been twenty-one when she married first.
The same age as Louise.
I wondered how they had lived, she and her mother, until she met Sangalletti.
Perhaps they had given lessons in Italian, as she had suggested doing here.
Perhaps that was what had made her think of it.
“My mother was very beautiful,” she said, “quite different from me, except for coloring.
Tall, almost massive.
And like many women of her type she went suddenly to pieces, lost her looks, grew fat and careless; I was glad my father did not live to see it.
I was glad he did not live to see many things she did, or myself either, for that matter.”
Her voice was matter-of-fact and simple, she spoke without bitterness; yet I thought, looking at her there as she sat by my library fire, how little of her I really knew, and how little of that past life of hers I would ever know.
She had called Louise sheltered, which was true.
And I thought suddenly that the same held good for me.
Here I was, twenty-four, and apart from the conventional years at Harrow and Oxford I knew nothing of the world but my own five hundred acres.
When a person like my cousin Rachel moved from one place to another, left one home for a second, and then a third; married once, then twice; how did it feel?
Did she shut the past behind her like a door and never think of it again, or was she beset with memories from day to day?
“Was he much older than you?” I said to her.
“Cosimo?” she said.
“Why no, only a year or so.
My mother was introduced to him in Florence, she had always wanted to know the Sangallettis.
He took nearly a year before he made up his mind between my mother and myself.
Then she lost her looks, poor dear, and lost him too.
The bargain I picked up proved a liability.
But of course Ambrose must have written you the whole story.
It is not a happy one.”
I was about to say,
“No, Ambrose was more reserved than you ever knew.
If there was something that hurt him, that shocked him, he would pretend it was not there, that it had not happened.
He never told me anything about your life before you married him, except that Sangalletti was killed fighting, in a duel.”
Instead, I said none of this.
I knew suddenly that I did not want to know either. Not about Sangalletti, nor about her mother and her life in Florence.
I wanted to shut the door on it.
And lock it too.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, Ambrose wrote and told me.”
She sighed, and patted the cushion behind her head.
“Ah, well,” she said, “it all seems very long ago now.
The girl who endured those years was another person.
I had nearly ten years of it, you know, married to Cosimo Sangalletti.
I would not be young again, if you offered me the world.