I wasn’t taking a souvenir, she shouts inside her head. I was trying to be tidy! But outwardly she nods her thanks, and tucks the other one away.
The portcullis is open and the car drives straight into the courtyard. Cobbles. High windows. And – a great surprise, for the outer walls are stark and forbidding – a riot of patterned tiles. Arab, she thinks. There are a few walls like that left down in the Old Town. And the public baths are covered in them. Here, they cover all four internal walls from ground to battlements. The Moors must have made it all the way into this great fortress and stayed for long enough to decorate. A fact so much at odds with the history she’s learned at school that it makes her slightly dizzy. She’d thought the dukes had driven the Moors away. So how come it looks as if they decorated their interiors?
She gets out, gaping. It’s stunning, she thinks. Imagine it at night, those torches all lit up.
A door opens. Tatiana. She has on a turban, and a pair of huge pearl globes cling to her earlobes.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Well, I suppose you’d better come in, then.’
The sulk isn’t over.
‘I’m sorry about earlier, Tatiana,’ she says humbly. ‘I really didn’t know I was meant to be coming.’
Tatiana’s chin jerks upwards. She looks haughty. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ she says.
‘I’m sorry. It was a misunderstanding.’
‘Well,’ says Tatiana.
‘Sorry,’ she says again.
Tatiana walks away. ‘I was up by the pool,’ she says. ‘I had to come all the way down.’
‘There is a pool? Where?’
Tatiana turns back. The savage smile she wears looks more like baring her teeth, and her eyes are glittering. ‘Oh. Suddenly there’s a point in being here, is there? It’s on the bastions.’ She wheels, and clicks on over the thousand-year-old flagstones.
Mercedes has never encountered a sulk like this before. Has no idea what to do when someone refuses to accept an apology. Eventually, she opts for ingratiation. ‘I’m really happy to be here,’ she says. ‘I just thought I wasn’t invited.’
‘Hunh.’
Tatiana carries on walking.
‘Don’t touch anything unless I say you can,’ she says. ‘It’s all a million years old and very valuable. It’s like being in a bloody museum.’
She leads Mercedes silently through the private quarters where the Kastellani never go. And Mercedes is quietly grateful for the chance to simply stare. It’s all so … tall. The ceilings must be ten metres up in the air, iron chandeliers barely visible, the plaster a faded terracotta, the wood a glorious turquoise. They walk past suits of armour on tiles of black and white, and generations stare down superciliously from oil paintings. Their footsteps echo as they pass through, as in a church.
Mercedes can barely breathe. I must remember every detail, she thinks, to tell Donatella. I wish I had a camera. No one will ever believe I was here, when I’m old.
Tatiana leads her up a staircase as wide as her house. A stained-glass window, two storeys high, depicts Duke Lorenzo, who saved them all, at the Battle of Clavio, slaying the enemy as St James looks on approvingly. Mercedes pauses to drink it in. It’s a horrible thing. Glorious and horrible. Her history.
From behind and above, she hears an impatient sigh. Tatiana looks down, arms folded.
‘Sorry,’ she says. Picks up her bag and hurries after her.
‘So Giancarlo said to put you in the room next to mine,’ she says as they march down a long wide corridor, Persian rugs on black floorboards, tapestries filling the great slabs of wall between the doorways.
‘Great,’ she says.
‘Whatever.’
Tatiana throws open a door. Another room the size of the Re del Pesce’s forty-cover terasa. Walls painted eau-de-Nil, an oil painting of a wizened child in a heavy green velvet robe on the wall, a four-poster covered in carved fruit and gargoyles. She looks the portrait over. Huge wounded eyes stare from a face that’s ashen-grey.
‘She died of plague, that one,’ says Tatiana, ‘in 1631. That was painted post-mortem. It’s a memento mori.’
Mercedes shivers.
Tatiana’s voice changes. It has a gloat to it that Mercedes doesn’t like. ‘I hope you’re not scared of ghosts,’ she says.