Marauding Madwomen, Murder, and the Mysterious, Much-Summoned Eileen

In THE CROLLALANZAS my heroines live in three different time periods and each of them faces different challenges as women of their time. But they all have something in common too, including a song and a dark secret in their past – a secret about which only one of them knows. Until the other two read her diary…

Truzia

Venezia 1603

What dreams may come.

♣

As our mother washed my hair today, she remarked upon how different we, her three daughters, have become. Viola is the quiet, elegant spider, spinning webs of cunning. Francesca is the butterfly, pretty and delicate, flitting about with sunlight on her wings. And I am “a grub, wriggling and blundering awkwardly about, munching on leaves and causing squeals of horror” from anybody who suddenly comes upon my mischief. She assures me that one day I shall be transformed, that I shall not always be this plump, little grub worm. However, I have discovered that grubs turn into beetles, and I am not certain that is better. I should rather be a wasp, and sting people.

Our mother laughs softly and then urges me to shut my eyes as she pours a jug of warm water over my head. But I keep my eyes open and see my shadowy reflection swaying from side to side in the basin of water, distorted and medusa-like.

I ponder this idea of transformation, for I see it all around me, from the clouds that float overhead, to the plants on our balcony and the maggots squirming inside the dead pigeon I found at the foot of Signora Bianchi’s steps. Incidentally, I warned the old crone that this is a bad omen, but she was not grateful for the information and swept me away with her broom as if the dead bird was my fault. In any case, everything in the world is capable of transformation. Even stone and marble, which is made of other matter transformed over time, will crumble and stain, changing its shape in centuries to come.

Nothing is gone forever. It becomes one with the air, the ground or the water and then it is altered again.

My mother hums as she rubs my hair dry. I ask her why she never finishes her tune. And who is Eileen?

She thinks for a moment and then replies that she cannot remember how it ends, or where she heard it, yet it remains lodged there in her mind and has become a part of her.

“Like the little scar on my knee, where I fell when I was four,” she says. She barely knows it is there anymore; she cannot feel it and she might, one day, forget how she came by it. The mind is a peculiar vessel, which picks and chooses what it keeps and what it spills. “My mother thought I was dead,” she says cheerfully. “But I returned to her and opened my eyes. All I have now is that scar.”

The scar and the song are just two of the many things, she says, that have shaped her into the woman she is now— the scar marking her body, the song her soul…

* * *

The day after their mother’s funeral, Truzia waited until both her sisters had gone out on errands and then she donned her cloak, put on her most determined expression, and traveled across the city to the palazzo of Don Venturi. She had no earthly idea what would happen if she was granted an audience with the old man, but this impulsiveness was common for her. She had not yet out-grown that tendency to act first and think later.

All she knew with any certainty, as she arrived at the entrance of his grand house, was that this man must be convinced to let them stay where they had lived all their lives. Once, apparently, he had loved their mother, so he must be a man of some compassion, surely. If he knew that her daughters had nowhere else to go, he would not take their home away and cast them out, would he? Don Venturi had many houses. What did he need with this one? Perhaps his son made this decision without the old man’s knowledge.

The family Venturi were well known in Venice, for they had wealth, connections and consequence. Few folk crossed swords with them, but the son was known to be wilder— ambitious, as the consigliere had described him— a creature of the modern world, who paid little respect to the traditions of old. He picked fights at will, casting aside his father’s good reputation with as little care as he would toss a bone from his plate.

When Truzia had suggested to her sisters that they might, somehow, appeal to the patriarch of the family, Viola had rolled her eyes wearily.

“You and your flare for drama. This is not one of your overwrought tales of blood and vengeance, girl.”

But Truzia could not stand by and do nothing. Anger and injustice made her blood spit and sizzle. Humility did not come naturally to her, but on this day she would make an effort to beg, if need be.

Arriving at the door of the palazzo, she found the place eerily silent; the calm, as they say, before the storm. The entrance was left untended, the door ajar, no guards in her way, no servants to restrict her passage.

This should have warned her that all was not well, but Truzia, on a mission, was not about to be stopped, no matter how sizeable the omen.

She had not gone more than six steps inside the building, when she heard a crash followed by a torrent of screams. Panic rattled along the corridors and through the loggia, echoing under the arches. After a stunned moment of uncertainty, Truzia looked down at her feet and imagined a trickle of scarlet weeping between the mosaic tiles, creeping toward her like a malevolent worm. She fled.

On her way back down the steps, the breath skipping up her throat with every jolting foot-fall, Truzia encountered another shock. First one sister and then the other, appeared in her view. Both wore their black, hooded cloaks; both looked equally startled to see her there too. Stumbling to a halt the three girls stared, pale and mute. For that moment, they were frozen in time.

A summer rain had begun to fall, slowly at first, nothing more than warm spittle. But suddenly the heavens opened and they were caught in a downpour.

Truzia turned her face up to it and felt the cooling rain on her eyelids.

Here comes the rain again, their mother had said just before she took her last breath, and in that moment Truzia remembered it— the distant smile, the look of surprise and then the stillness. Where had their darling mother gone? Was she happy now? Could she see her daughters? Had she ever remembered the last notes of that tune she used to hum?

Now they were here without her, standing in the rain-washed via from which everybody else had run for shelter. Their safe childhood was over.

The clattering flood upon the stone woke Truzia from this strange daze. She opened her eyes, pulled up her hood and ran after her sisters, the three soon moving as one, merging with the shadows of summer evenfall and becoming just another shifting, undefined layer within the greys and mauves of that spectral realm.

The sisters never asked each other what they had been doing there in the Palazzo Venturi. They set their cloaks and wet stockings to dry before the fire, and then ate their supper with very little conversation, not even lighting a lantern, despite the early darkness that had descended over the rooftops and bell-towers like a deep bruise. After supper they bathed in the old tub before the glow of the fire, taking turns in the water before it got cold. Then, since it was still raining hard, Viola suggested they conserve candles and go to bed. It had been an exhausting few days, she said, and they all needed their rest. For once, Truzia did not argue about having no chance to write down her daily thoughts. In the sinister shadows, with rain blowing against the shutters, the three sisters climbed into bed, pulled up the counterpane and pretended to sleep.

“It could be the work of an aggrieved servant, or some other enemy out for vengeance,” Viola remarked the next morning, by which time the skies had cleared again, the sun was out, and news of Girolamo Venturi’s murder was all over the district. It could not be avoided when they strolled around the market, so she was forced to make comment. It would, of course, have been odd if she said nothing. “Rich men and their sons always have plenty of ill-wishers, who easily become ill-doers.” 

“It is shocking and such a pity for a young man of promise, with so much in his favor, to have his life cut short,” said Cesca, shaking her head. “All that potential unfulfilled.”

“They say the lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,” said Truzia, who could not pretend to be sorry, even if she tried.

They never spoke to anybody of having been there on that day or what they might have witnessed.

It was not many days, however, before the tide of suspicion turned in their direction.

The consigliere of Don Venturi was the first to point a finger at the sisters Crollalanza, although he could only do so through his privy door, bellowing and groaning between the sound of hefty explosions. “They fed me tainted wine and looked to poison me. I would not put anything beyond those wretched creatures. All three of them witches!”

Other voices were soon raised to join his. Several folk had seen three figures, in mourning black, fleeing Don Venturi’s palazzo on the day of the murder. From Lorenzo Geppi came tales of the younger sister’s foul and violent temper. The eager neighborhood gossip, Signora Bianchi— no doubt paid in good coin for her story— told of having witnessed one of the sisters falling into a strange fit, needing the younger girl to hold her down. Did they, like their mother, dabble in witchcraft?

“I do not like to say so,” she murmured, with her eyes bulging and sweaty hands clasped under her bosom, “but they are odd girls. There is nothing normal about the way they live, or the way they have been raised. The things I’ve heard through that wall—”

As the local physician pointed out, their mother had never abided by rules and laws. Indeed, she blatantly mocked them at every opportunity, just as she had mocked him and his “scientific” knowledge. This brazen confidence she passed on to her daughters, who thought themselves too good for the company of honest boys. And what did anybody know of them truly? Who was their father? How had their harlot mother come by her proud manners, not to mention the books with which she unwisely let her daughters educate themselves, and the ostentatious silks and brocades they wore to parade about on market day? Further, Jacobella Jilani had been a shameless wanton and a shrew, according to the parish priest, with whom she had constantly clashed horns and offended, apparently, even in death.

Those three opinionated sisters, already known to be eccentric and secretive, with no man to keep them in order, could well be suspected of evil deeds. All the good their mother had ever done in that community was now forgotten, or else the women she had helped were too afraid to speak up on her daughters’ behalf. Many would not care to admit they had ever needed or used her secretive services, of course.

But if any of the sisters Crollalanza knew what had happened to Girolamo Venturi on that day of blood and rain, they shared their knowledge with nobody— not even each other. They kept their secret, forming an impenetrable wall of silence.

For all their differences and squabbles, the sisters were now united against the world. If one should be accused, then all three would stand together. It did not need to be said. It was known.

♣

Briar

Oxfordshire, England 1882

Doubt that the sun doth move.

            “Your lady wife will be admitted as a private patient, of course, Sir Milton. She will be well taken care of, with the utmost confidentiality. I can arrange the necessary medical certificates, leave it all to me. Put your mind at ease in the matter.”

            “I trust you implicitly, Wilson, of course. It is a weight off my mind. But I daresay, she will not be grateful. Even after all this upset she has caused us. She will never go quietly or see that all this is for her own good.”

            “The female mind is a strange animal at the best of times, sir. You must remember that she cannot help herself; she cannot be held responsible for her actions. Women, you know, like little children, cannot control their urges. They require the strictest boundaries and routines. That is why we are here, to fix what is broken, to keep them upright and sensible. She may not see that now, but she will come to understand eventually.”

“I hope so, Wilson. Her ladyship can be very stubborn, very difficult.”

            “Oh, the staff at Belle Vista Hospital are quite accustomed to handling troublesome patients. They have the experience, knowledge and equipment to manage all manner of illnesses and temperaments. I can assure you, there is nothing they have not already seen; nothing beyond the realm of their experience.”

For some minutes the two male voices, stroking, flattering and reassuring each other of their superiority, dominated the conversation. It was not until Briar heard her aunt meekly venture, “But how can this malady— this Female Trouble— be treated? Will my niece ever be cured?” that she realized her husband and the doctor were not alone in the drawing room, conspiring in secret. Not that her aunt would be of much assistance in preventing their plans. Elsa Beauchamp had always taken comfort in her quiet, still place, seated behind whichever man she imagined to be in charge of her at the time, never wanting to make her own decisions or upset the calm waters. Which led to her being very disappointed that her niece, orphaned and brought to live with her in adolescence, had not acquired the same habits.

“The staff at Belle Vista use all the most modern methods, madam,” Doctor Wilson gently assured her aunt. “I suppose she will be restrained, sedated with paraldehyde in the beginning. Cold water baths and the like will follow, and be of great help in the management of her distemper. As for a cure…well, who can say? These things often take years to be resolved satisfactorily.”

“Sometimes they never are,” Briar’s husband added hastily. “We must face the possibility of leaving her there indefinitely. I am sorry for it, but there you are, Elsa. These tragedies happen, and life must go on. We will visit, of course. When time allows. Although, I daresay, our presence might only set her progress back.”

“She will be committed into the care of the strongest, most capable hands at Belle Vista, Mrs. Beauchamp.”

“Well…I suppose you know what is right for her, gentlemen. Certainly, I tried everything to correct her when she lived in my house, but she wore me— a poor, tired widow with the most wretched nerves— quite to shreds. I promised my dear brother, on his deathbed, that I would take his only child under my roof and raise her to be a proper lady. But I had no idea then of the challenges I would face. Oh, that artistic temperament she got from her mother’s side of the family! I thought that being married would calm her down, give her something with which to occupy her mind.”

Oh, it had, Briar mused as she silently slipped into her coat. Married life had caused her to imagine all sorts of new uses for fire irons and a coal scuttle. Mostly involving the back of her husband’s head and the cleft between his buttocks.

Interesting though that they thought her mad. No doubt many folk had been labelled thus in times gone by, simply because they held a differing opinion to that of somebody influential. The Greek astrologer, Aristarchus, who first dared suggest the earth revolved around the sun, rather than vice versa, must have been widely ridiculed by his neighbors and was probably not invited to many parties.

“I cannot help but think I should have done more for my niece. That I am, somehow, to blame for how she has turned out.”

“You will never hear a word of reproach from me, madam, despite the fact that I was misled before the marriage. I see you must have been desperate and perhaps it was not intentional, so, as a Christian gentleman I forgive you for pushing her into my hands. Now, as Doctor Wilson says, these things are always best managed swiftly and discretely. The sooner we have her removed from the house, the sooner she can begin her recovery.”

“Indeed. The patient can be taken directly via carriage. I will escort her later today myself, Mrs. Beauchamp.”

They did all but chink glasses in celebration of this scheme to be rid of her.

Standing behind the drawing room door, listening through it, Briar felt no surprise, only anger. Even that was mild, distant. Her fires had burned themselves out it seemed and now merely smoldered.

“You mentioned to me, Mrs. Beauchamp, the matter of foreign blood, on her maternal grandmother’s side.”

“Nothing of any record, you understand, merely an old rumor within the family, Doctor.” Her aunt stammered over this half-confession. She was very probably clutching at the pearls around her slender throat. “Not the sort of thing one talks about in polite society.”

“Italian, so I understand, on her mother’s side,” Milton grumbled. “And who knows what else?”

“Ah. That would explain much,” the doctor replied gravely.

With brisk, surprisingly steady and capable fingers, the madwoman of their discussion, standing in the hall and unobserved by them, finished buttoning her coat.

“Where is the patient now?”

“I thought it best to let her rest, Wilson. I slipped some laudanum into her cocoa.”

A sleeping draft that now dried in the soil of a drooping aspidistra on the landing. If she could take that poor plant with her, she would.

“My poor niece.” Her aunt sniveled wetly, probably into a tiny, crumpled lace handkerchief dotted with Attar of Roses. “She’s always been…rather difficult. But this latest troubling, shameful incident—”

“Ah, yes. The Countess of Levesey’s portrait. I hear several ladies fainted in shock at the unveiling and had to be revived with smelling salts.”

“The Countess took to her bed and cancelled all her social events for at least a month.”

“As you can appreciate, doctor, we really cannot ignore my wife’s mental infirmity any longer,” said Milton. “For the good of all, she must be put away. It was good of you to come so quickly.”

Briar pulled on her gloves.

“And you say that she had no explanation for the portrait?”

“None that any sane person would offer.”

“My niece would only say that her art shows truth, Doctor Wilson; that she does not believe in deception.”

“Extraordinary.”

“My wife likes to cause a stir, doctor. There was absolutely no reason for her to paint the countess with two heads and not a stitch of respectable clothing. She knew how it would be received.”

“But if she did it deliberately,” said her aunt, “is it truly lunacy?”

“Elsa, your niece is insane and a danger to herself. The doctor has examined her and confirmed it. There is nothing more that we can do for her. This behavior has been tolerated long enough— we have all been patient, more than generous— and when you gave her over to me, she became my responsibility, my burden, my property.”

“Of…of course.”

“I mean to say, there is a dashed limit to what a man must put up with from his wife.” He cleared his throat. “I have my re-election to consider, and there have been rumblings within the Party.”

“Naturally. I did not mean to question your wisdom. I am quite sure you have my niece’s well-being at heart, Sir Milton.”

“She has embarrassed me— us— for the last time.”

Briar checked her appearance in the hall mirror above the little console table. For a mad woman she looked well, she mused. Color in her cheeks, bright and focused eyes, steady lips and a proudly held chin. She would not look that way for long, once the good staff of Belle Vista “Hospital” got their hands on her.

“Another glass of sherry, doctor?”

“Ah, well…don’t mind if I do. Since the patient still sleeps.”

The “patient” picked up the hatbox in which she had packed her essentials.

“Tell me,” she heard the doctor ask cautiously, “one does not like to pry, or repeat prurient speculation…but, is it true, that there might have been a murderess in the family?”

She walked swiftly and silently to the door. There, she paused a moment, looking back and glancing up the stairs. The sullen housemaid— hired by Milton soon after their wedding just to spy on her— was still thumping about in the attic, searching for a travelling trunk in which to pack Briar’s belongings for her trip to the asylum. There was nobody, therefore, to apprehend her. Quickly she set down her hatbox and returned up the stairs, carefully avoiding the steps that creaked, to retrieve the sadly drooping potted plant. She would not leave it behind to be thrown out. This plant had been one of her few allies in married life, a confidant that kept her darkest secrets within its leaves. No wonder they shriveled and curled downward, taking on the weight of her sorrows.

Having made this rescue, tucking the plant under one arm, she hurried back down the stairs, again on tip toe. She picked up the hatbox, opened the front door and left her old life behind forever.

Escape was that easy in the end.

The garden gate squeaked, as she knew it would, and the people inside might hear it, but they would not equate the sound with Briar leaving the house. They thought her well out of it, unconscious in her bed upstairs, and they were too busy celebrating their own cleverness.

Several thousand times, during the course of her marriage, she had heard that squeak as Milton came and went on his very carefully regulated routine. And every time she heard it, her tooth ached. Eventually, she had realized the pain was caused by grinding her teeth, because she had known when to expect the sound of the gate opening and her body tensed accordingly in readiness. All of her parts tightened with frustration: her jaw, her brow, her stomach, her fists.

Well, no more.

This was the last time she would hear that dreadful squeak.

She let the gate clang shut behind her— something she knew Milton hated.

It began to rain, and she had no umbrella. No room to carry one. But she walked on with a quick and resolute step, for the rain had never bothered her. Most of the time she was too hot in any case, her insides a seething cauldron of stifled fury, and the rain— god bless it— cooled her down.

She had reached the end of the road and crossed toward the coaching inn on the corner when she suddenly heard music playing and a voice singing. For a moment she paused, wondering where it came from. She’d never before heard the like of it.

Who was Eileen? Well, she had the good sense not to come when she was summoned so rudely.

Briar walked on.

♣

Julie

Present Day

For those who love, time is eternal.

I woke to the sound of Truzia banging on the pipes again.

She finds the bathroom plumbing more fascinating than anything else about my life, it seems. In her time, hot and cold running water inside a building happened only by act of god or deliberate menace, and there was no such thing as a flushing toilet. There were no alarm clocks either, only cockerels, who crowed with renewed astonishment every morning, as soon as they glimpsed the yolk of sunrise spilled through a crack over the horizon. No sound louder than thunder came from the skies above; no manmade machine soiled the quality of this air we need to breathe; no news could travel faster than a horse. Days passed without a “weekend” in which to “lie-in”; no electric light filled rooms to forcibly extend working hours within them. There was only the meagre glow of candles, which, unless one was rich, must be conserved, not squandered.

People, she reminds me, were in better touch with nature and its rhythms. There was no putting-off, lazing about and promising to do tomorrow, or in three days, what could be done efficiently today, while the sun shone. Folk made the most of their waking hours, for they did not expect to live eighty years, or even forty. Life had its proper pace, she boasts.

“Ah,” say I, “it just didn’t have clean drinking water and an efficient, sanitary sewage removal system. Otherwise, apart from poor hygiene, cruelty for entertainment, and the inequality of human and civil rights, I’m sure it must have been perfect.”

Truzia, like the plumbing she loves to play upon, runs up and down the walls of this house. On sunny days I hear her laughter in the birdsong at my bedroom window. On rainy mornings I hear her whisper in the soft pizzle of drips that fall between the cross-beams of the pergola, to pool upon the shadowy, uneven flagstone path below. Sometimes her fingertip leaves a swirl in the crema of my coffee, or, from another room, I am distracted by the gentle ‘tink’ of thorny stems moving about in a vase, as she rearranges the bouquet to her exacting standards. Once, for just a flickering moment, I saw wet footprints on the tiled floor in the passage that was once a butler’s pantry— those of a woman and her pet pig. Yes, her pig. It is the least questionable thing in all this; the least improbable.

People would say it’s all in my head.

An explanation more comforting. For them, anyway. Because it’s not their head.

In the shadows of the garden wall Truzia shares with me her “Thought for the Day”— her “Pensiero del Giorno”. Now they have become my ponderings too.

For example: we never know how much time our flame has left to burn. It could be years, months, weeks. Hours. It could be less than a handful of minutes. Yet we seldom put our time to good use. We rarely appreciate the true worth in our being. Instead we save our love, our forgiveness, our best, for another day that may never come.

As she lectures me, I groan and curl up tighter. Of course, it’s just my luck that the ghost haunting me can’t just go “boo”, throw a few things around, possess an ugly plastic doll and be done with it. All I want is a comfortable, quiet place to be alone. My pleasures in life are a warm cardy, a cappuccino, a chocolate hob-nob and a good book. I am neither complicated nor particularly courageous, unless I am forced to be— and then you can be sure I’ll complain about it.

Can she not find a better, more bold, outraged and rebellious ear to stir with these contemplations?

But no, she chooses me. She runs through the maze of my mind during the twilight, when my senses should be resting and the volume of the world around me turned down low. There is no button, no remote to control my ghost.

Come play with me, she whispers.

She haunts me with her favorite tune, “Come on Eileen.”

In Truzia’s time the idea of music traveling over invisible airwaves would have been considered witchcraft. Now, of course, we know differently. We have harnessed a power that they did not know existed. What else have we yet to learn about?

Could it be that she travelled over the airwaves too? And that song travelled back and forth with her?

Maybe I’m just a bit crazy.      

   

There are things she seems to know about me already. Is she, somehow, connected to me? I am not aware of any Italians in the family. Although I am inordinately fond of tiramisu and a good antipasto.

Or would she haunt anybody who came here?

I am, after all, only a holiday guest on this lovely, peaceful, willow-flanked island off the Surrey bank of the river Thames. There are no other homes here, and no other people, just an abandoned watermill, a boathouse and a jetty.

The thing is, when I first knew I’d won the prize of this holiday at Threavewode House, I had an idea that I would learn about somebody else entirely: Briar Lockwood, the nineteenth century artist who, so it is claimed, spent time here once, hiding from relatives who wanted to shut her away in a lunatic asylum. For years I’ve been fascinated by her work and her mysterious, somewhat scandalous life.

But now that I’m here, it is Truzia who steals my attention. I wonder if she ever haunted Briar too. Does she know what happened to the reclusive, elusive Miss Lockwood—buried, according to her gravestone, in 1940, and yet last seen, by me, striding through a pub beer-garden, while “Come on Eileen” bounced out of the juke box and through an open door in the summer of 1982?

Oh, yes, I can describe the dead woman clearly. She wore a long, burgundy coat with a black lambswool collar, and an ebony straw bonnet with a small veil. In one hand she carried a hatbox, while within the crook of her other arm she cradled a potted aspidistra with mournfully drooping leaves. At first, I assumed she must have wandered away from a theatre rehearsal— there were always plenty of performing arts going on in the city center in summer. But she paused and looked directly at me for a moment, her eyes narrowed against the sunlight, and I saw that, although there was a warm breeze on that day, her skirt and the few loose waves of hair falling against her coat collar were still, and damp with rain. She tilted her head, as if in uncertain acknowledgement, and then, in a rather disappointingly-classic ghost move, she disappeared through a wisteria-clad stone wall, on the other side of which was a grassy slope and, some way below that, a disused railway line.

Since nobody else had seen the woman and I, at the time, did not believe in the supernatural, I concluded the cider was stronger than I expected.

Later, I came to think that the woman with hatbox and the aspidistra was a trick of the sunlight, her shape made visible by chance in that moment— like a cobweb that is completely invisible to the eye, until the sun catches its threads at a certain angle, or else a cold, foggy morning reveals the slumbering trap in all its silver, filigree glory.

She looked a little bit like me. Something about the eyes, perhaps.  Could that be the reason why she had seemed to recognize me too for that brief moment of illumination, when her image of gossamer strands was caught, web-like, between the branches of time?

The old swing in the garden lets out a low whine, and the window drifts open a further inch, welcoming the chalky fragrance of lavender and, with a flutter of sun-basted, clotted-cream wings, a late season butterfly. I like to sit here at this window and daydream, but on this sweet, mellow day at summer’s end, I sense her anxiety and impatience. I understand it, for I’ve always felt peculiar tentacles of foreboding lurking in wait behind a bright, blue-sky afternoon. I prefer rain. Light, soft rain, though— not ferocious, stormy gales of it.

Truzia would chuckle at that too, for she is a tempest, much stronger and far more daring than me. I’m a mere drizzle by comparison.

That is what comes of living a soft, pampered life in this easy, wasteful century, with all at your fingertips, she tells me. You have a button to press for anything and everything and nothing. Your parts grow rusty from lack of use.

“Rude,” I say.

Down— or rather, up— through that invisible funnel, comes her disjointed laughter, the soundwaves oscillating wildly. You know nothing of living. Of what is important. You forgot how to breathe. You fear everything.

Today we live our life via machines, according to Truzia. We do not experience the world for ourselves. We are brave only when hidden behind our screens and we can make no decision without the words appearing on them to lead us. Microchips— the faceless advertisers, megalomaniacs, and multi-billion-dollar corporations talking through them, secreted behind them— tell us what to eat and when; they tell us what to wear and buy, what to watch, what to hear, what to believe. They tell us what we should feel, manipulating our every waking moment, and yet we never know who ‘they’ truly are. If we met them in real life, face to face, would we like them?

Would we invite them into our homes? Entrust them with our secrets? We do all that with the touch of a finger.

Most dangerous of all, we let them tell us what to fear, just to save us the trouble of raising our eyes from the screen, to stop us from seeing and doing and thinking for ourselves. We are sloths, moving about with our heads permanently bowed, our spines curved. Like carcasses swinging from butchers’ hooks. Flesh coats, empty of breath and spirit already.

“Well, aren’t you cheerful,” I say. And then I remind her that we have indoor plumbing, tampons and penicillin. Good grief, that must count for something.

But Truzia is saddened and frustrated by what she sees, because we take for granted the opportunities and advantages she could only dream about, and we squander them. Through laziness and the distraction of mundane habits, we have set ourselves back. We waste hours watching gossiping, shrieking “harridans”— as she calls them— who travel in groups across our tv screens, cavorting drunkenly in tight dresses and public places, doing nothing that comes to any good, worth or even point. We listen as the loud, rich and narcissistic debate among themselves on how to spend our hard-earned coin and what to do with our bodies, while the world crumbles into ruin and extinction around us. We celebrate the pitifully undone, the riotously inept, the vacantly pretty and the barely sentient, who achieve notice, not by saving life, caring for those in need, or overcoming great adversity, but by exhibiting their privy parts.

My ghost does not hold back on her opinions.

Come play with me, her voice throbs with urgency. I will show you how to live. How to breathe.

“But look,” I say, “sunlight shows up all the smudges on these windows— fingertip smears and little clouds left by the exhale of carbon dioxide. See, I know how to breathe, so there! Proof!”

Call that a breath? It’s a little puff of nothing and gone already. Come play with me.

“Come where? If you are in my head, it might not be wise to follow you there.” I know the state of my own mind; there are cones, police tape and potholes all over the place.

But she persists, like a fly by my ear. What do you have to fear?

I huddle inside my cardigan, arms folded. I fear the great unknown that lies ahead.

You did not know what waited ahead of you when you were born; when you took your first breath outside the womb.

Consequently, as would any baby with good sense, I screamed my head off. Besides, that was different. “I had no choice then,” I whisper.

How do you know what you had then? Do you remember anything that came before?

“Well, no, of course not. There was nothing, was there?”

She is uncharacteristically silent for a moment. I sense she’s disappointed.

Finally, she says, Then what do you have to fear?

 “Fine. I’ll play your game, if it will keep you quiet a while. I’ll close my eyes and count to a hundred. Ready or not, here I come.”

A dark-haired girl already runs ahead of me, through the narrow avenues of a boxwood hedge maze, her laughter soft and husky. Now, recruited as her play mate, an ally in this mischief, I give chase around the corners. Puffs of excited breath cloud the air before me, for it is no longer summer, but a frosty day, crisp and shimmering with silver. A cold blade of winter cleaves the skin from my face. I feel dense, evergreen foliage ruffling against my fingertips. My heart bumps along like a big drum, broken free from its straps to roll away, over the edge of a rocky promontory, spinning in uncontrolled speed to both its doom and its freedom.

The maze walls are high and thick, but I see a dash of oxblood red as the cheeky tongue of her skirt disappears around another corner, licking frost from the tight branches and leaving them in a quiver. Here there are lacy cobwebs cast among the leaves, some like tiny sailor’s hammocks, and others spun wider, showy as peacock’s tails in this wintry landscape. I smell bonfire and the river and damp woodchips. I have no idea where I’m going, but that is part of the thrill and I do not look back.

Like her, I am young again, and adventure lies ahead of us, our story yet to be written on the next clear page.

And I know now that nothing is gone forever. 

* * *

Read more about the heroines of The House of Crollalanza HERE NOW!

 (Images used here: Book cover, courtesy of Twisted E-Publishing; Jeune Fille au Livre, by Pietro Rotari 1750-1762; Portrait of Miss Lloyd by James Tissot 1876; and two photos of my mother, Doreen, as a girl c. 1940.)

Official Release Day is Here!

As The Crollalanzas finally drop anchor on your shores, crack open some bubbly of your choice, curl up in your favourite chair, shut out the gloom and enjoy an exclusive excerpt here. Thanks for reading! Jayne.

* * *

“What do you do here in the corner, Woozy? Come, come, put away those doodledinks, pinch your sallow cheeks to make a merry blush, don your best frock and make some effort to rearrange your features so that they are as little unbecoming as can be managed. The Disreputable Old Rogue has summoned the sisters Crollalanza to dine with us this eve and he will brook no refusal.”


Those doodledinks. That was how he referred to her writing— her great work inside me. For a long time, she had assumed he did not know how to read. She had certainly never seen him write anything. Until he carved “Poxy Gnobb’d” with his knife into the forehead of a fist-felled drunkard, who once tried to molest her outside the playhouse. No matter how she had argued on the spelling of knob, he would have it his way.


Disreputable Old Rogue is what he called his own grandsire, which, considering the source, told her exactly how wicked the ancient fellow must once have been.


And Woozy, of course, is what he had taken to calling her. It amused him all the more because she once made the grievous error of telling him not to do so.

It started out as Signorina Truzia, which changed at various times to Struzia, Swoozia or Swoozy, and finally to Woozy. Which stuck. He had not much more space to shorten it, had he? Oozy would be the final straw and even he— a man she had witnessed being struck about the head with a plank to no apparent effect— seemed aware of that.


As he hovered over her table, she blotted her ink and swiftly closed my pages from his despicable and unworthy gaze. She had caught him prying into her thoughts before and would not make the same mistake of leaving me unguarded again, now that she knew he could, in fact, read. It was a skill he had concealed from her at first, no doubt for his own dark motives.


Stepping back and extending an overly-exaggerated bow, probably under the influence of mulled wine already, he announced, “While the boat to ferry you down the Thames awaits, my fair ladies of the House of Crollalanza, the snow may not, so let us make haste.”


For Truzia an evening at Threavewode House always promised some entertainment and plentiful material for her writings. She rather liked the elderly, eccentric Marquess of Abbingford and his house, which possessed a splendid library and several intriguing ghosts.

The old man always laughed when he listened to her stories and was keen to hear her opinion on all manner of subjects— a most unique trait in any man or woman of her acquaintance. Although he seldom agreed with her opinions, they amused him and, as he was prone to say, precious little did make him laugh these days. Of course, had she any true power to make her opinions count in this world, he would not have found them so risible, but she was a female and not a particularly decorative one. Thus, she had as much chance of bringing about change as she had of growing a codpiece. No threat to anybody, she could be laughed at without consequence. The old man, in fact, made quite a pet of her, as he would of a little dog or a monkey in cap and bells.


“If you amuse my grandfather, as you so often do, and put him in a better temper,” said Master Denham, rubbing his gloved hands together, “the Disreputable Old Rogue will likely invite the three of you to stay as his guests for the entire yuletide season. I can return later and bring more clothes and such, when required.”


Since this invitation meant saving their own coal, candles and food, it was not likely to be spurned by Viola who, rather than contemplate the larger tragedies of her life, had lately thrown herself into a ledger of meticulously kept accounts. As for Cesca, the prospect of handsome, lively young men for company— there were plenty of them at Threavewode for the season’s festivities— meant that she already set about tying the ribbons of her cloak before he had got five words out. She might be a pious, angel-heeding woman, but that did not prevent her cheeks blushing for a muscular and daring set of calves. She was becoming, in fact, quite a flirt. Now that her eyebrows had grown back.


While their escort looked the other way, Truzia slipped her “doddledinks” into the inner pocket of her cloak.


Viola tapped her on the shoulder. “Behave yourself this evening and hold your tongue.”


“I am twenty years of age, sister. I wonder why you think me so in need of constant warning still.”


“If you wonder at that, then the sight of ten toes on your feet must startle anew with every sunrise.”


Truzia wrinkled her nose and turned away, meaning to extinguish the candle on her writing table. But a sly draft snuffed the flame, beating her to it. Ice-cold, ghostly fingers suddenly gripped her heart and squeezed until it could no longer beat without struggle. Under her ribs, the trusty bellows of life slowed until the blood pumping through her body reduced from a bubbling, spring-fed stream, to a half-frozen trickle.


She glanced over her shoulder at Rory Denham, but he chatted to her sister, feigning innocence of the deadly part he was to play in Truzia’s fate.


It was likely that he contrived this plan for them to spend the Yuletide at Threavewode House. He must have suggested it to his grandsire in a sly moment, and let the old man think he came up with the idea himself. It was the sort of thing she had seen him do before. Cesca would, no doubt, say that Master Denham had concern for their health and comfort— he had made comment on the draftiness of their lodgings in winter. But Cesca always sought the good in folk, even to the point of being deliberately blind about the bad.


Truzia, on the other hand, never had any doubt that he was influenced by darker forces. He was a man who never appeared to contemplate any of life’s mysterious, whereas she over-brimmed with questions. It frustrated her that he had an answer for everything, even if it was entirely made up on the spur of a moment and nothing short of a monstrous fib.


As he’d said to her, he was too busy living and surviving in the world to ponder its shape or what made it turn. In any case, he exclaimed with brazen insouciance, Rory Denham made the world turn for him.


“Do you never worry that the circumference of your head will grow too wide for your body and tip you, arse over snout?” she’d said to him once.


“Indeed not,” he’d replied proudly, chest puffed out, booted feet spread apart and knuckles at rest on his hips. “This splendid, finely attuned form you see before you is not yet done expanding. The powerful fibers within continue to develop mightily with every physical exertion.”


“’Tis a pity then that your brain does not get similar exercise. Will it not grow stiff and shrivel away from lack of exertion, Denham?”


“You just said my head is too large.”


“But not your brain. That is not much more than an inflexible filbert rattling around inside a thick shell. The rest of your head is filled with the combustible vapors of bombast and arrogance.”


“So many big words for a little person.” He reached to pat her head and she ducked away, infuriated. He grinned. “I have never pondered my brain and its workings. Never had cause to fret.”


“I declare myself riddled,” she drawled, “with astonishment.”


“My other parts are generally of greater import to the ladies, Woozy. And none of those lack for exertion. Or stiffness when ‘tis required.”


She was still formulating a response to that, when he added,


“I am, as you see before you, a magnificent specimen of manhood. There are females who would shower me with gifts and coin just for the pleasure of my intimate company in the late hours.”


“You give off enough hot wind, I suppose, to be of use on bitter, winter nights, and one should always have something at which to laugh, lest melancholia take too fast and cruel a hold.”


“My point, Woozy, is that no female ever wanted me for my brain or concerned themselves about its good exercise. Until you came along.”


“Who says I want you for anything?”


“You would not make a study of me so often, or engage me in lusty debate and this ribald discourse, if you did not find me quite so fascinating a subject. The fact that I am this handsome is, for you—” He sighed wearily, one hand to his chest. “—A mere gratuity, when your appetite is for the meat of my brain.”


“You are insufferably vain. And ‘tis you who made the discourse ribald. Not me.”


“’Tis not vanity. Tis merely truth. You winkle it out of me and, despite my reputation as a filthy seducer and general rapscallion about town, I find myself quite unable to deceive in your presence, especially when you frown up at me like one of Beelzebub’s imps. If only you found yourself likewise elf-locked, then you would be forced to admit that you are beguiled by me, your hard, rancid little heart quite besotted.” He leaned closer. “Its flesh nibbled upon like that of a wizened, windfallen apple.”


“Here’s truth, Denham, since you are so fond of it— you are the most tiresome and unappealing clod-pate I ever encountered. I can only conclude that your constant presence is a punishment for some misdeed of my youth.”


“How so?”


“You poke your nose into my business with a disturbing frequency, that says more about your determination to prevent my pleasure than it does about any concern for my safety. You deliberately engage me in these futile quarrels for a fool’s entertainment of your own. I wonder why you bother, since we have nothing in common and that will never change. We agree upon not a single matter.”


“But if I concurred with you, then we would both be in error.”


Once again, she was left with her mouth hanging open, while he— the man destined to put her in a grave— laughed and went on his merry way.

♣

“You are too quick to take offence,” her sister Cesca once admonished, “too eager to find fault in a man. You expect to find perfection in an imperfect race. But you are young. That will all change.” This was said with a lingering smile and another shake of the head. “You fight for the sake of it. Between Master Denham and yourself it is almost a dance of courtship.”


Truzia cursed as she picked up her pen and another blot of ink marred the page. “You are an insufferable romantic, Francesca Crollalanza. Kindly allow me to hate where I please, whatever my age. I do not tell you where to love.”


Her sister found everybody agreeable in some way, even if it was merely to praise their skill in plucking at her nerves. She gave even the most loathsome bubble-head a chance to amuse her. On the other hand, Truzia suspected anybody who approached her in a friendly way to have ulterior motives. She did not know where her distrust of the world had begun, but felt as if it had ever been there, even in her crib. She would fight anyone that looked at her sideways, including a straw-stuffed doll, which had the ill luck to lose one of its button eyes early in their acquaintance, leaving it with a permanent squint and, in the baby Truzia’s opinion, a very mocking and disrespectful countenance. For this it was cast consistently to the floor, several times into a chamber pot and once out of the window, where it had to be retrieved from the jaws of a neighbor’s dog. Not that the wicked doll ever learned its lesson or showed true penitence.


“Truzia came out of the womb too early and kicking,” her sister Viola had been known to remark. “Offended by God’s good light, she instantly screwed up her face into the unsightly creature you see before you. I said we should have buried her in a pot under a lemon tree, until she was fully formed and fit to be seen, but was I listened to? No. I was ignored. It is very hard to be only three years of age and female, for nobody listens, nobody cares. My concerns were summarily dismissed and now we all suffer.”


Thus, saved from being hastily buried by her toddling sisters in a pot of earth under a fruit tree, Truzia had been left to grow in harsh sunlight, transforming from a grumpy, squinting, mewling babe to a quick-tempered, uninviting, difficult woman.


In the eyes of her sisters she would always be that savage, biting baby, recklessly over-confident and unsteady on her feet, bumping into walls and falling over, desperately in need of supervision. It was not their fault; they did not know how else to see her. As the youngest of three motherless girls, she was now their obligation, their great burden and vexation, until she could be somebody else’s.

Meanwhile, she wrote in me—her diary— each day, recording everything that happened to her, from the dreariest of practical details, to memories of the mother they had lost and musings about the world around her. The mind, she had decided, was such a strange, unmanageable, unreliable thing, and she did not want to risk forgetting all that she’d seen and done and learned. With pictures of the future becoming ever clearer, she feared that memories of the past might be destroyed to make room for them. Already, the picture of their mother had begun to fade about the edges, curling like paper in the fire— a warning not to let any more of it slip away into the past. Her writing, therefore, had become a loyal companion, a confidante, a comfort.


I was a pleasure she shared with nobody.


Until you came along…

♣

Start reading THE CROLLALANZAS today! Available online now and soon in print.

(Images: Agnolo Bronzino's Portrait of a girl with a book c. 1545 and Portrait of the Artist's Sisters Playing Chess by Sofonisba Anguissola, 1555)

Character Showcase - Truzia Crollalanza

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

Truzia Crollalanza, the youngest of three daughters, is trying to find her way and her purpose in the world. And while she’s working it all out, she’s writing it in her diary—a little book that has become her friend and confidante.

“Just as Cesca’s purpose is to be a wife and Viola's purpose is to be a famous artist, I am equally certain that my purpose is to fight pirates, sea-monsters and the undead. So far none have appeared (except for Signora Bianchi and Lorenzo: that maggot-brained mediocrity of male flesh), but I am ever alert to the possibilities. I will, most definitely, require new and sturdy shoes for this mission.”

Born with an inquisitive mind, but an unprepossessing face, ill-tempered and inept at most things she attempts, the third daughter possesses neither Cesca's angelic countenance and determined optimism, nor Viola's unruffled elegance, calculating mind and quickness of wit. While Truzia’s temper makes her thoughts and intentions an open book, her guilt plain upon her face after any wrong-doing, Cesca claims never to do anything that might necessitate keeping a secret, and Viola never gives anything away, her lips and ears being a final, tomb-like resting place for any gossip or information fallen in her path.

It is very tiresome, she complains in her diary, to be the first girl suspected when the plum sauce is found spilled and the remains of a cheesecake vanished from the pantry shelf.

While her sisters have extraordinary talents, Truzia does not recognize her own until she begins to have visions of the future— including a vision of what she believes to be her own death. These premonitions show her many curious things, most of which she decides not to tell her sisters, for they would never believe the half of it. Viola would roll her eyes and sigh, while Cesca would pat her on the head and laugh.


Truzia is the daughter always in trouble. In addition to that guilty face “fit for the gallows”, she has a temper too quick to flare and outspoken opinions that she finds impossible to contain. Worse even than all this, Truzia is over-brimming with questions about life and the world, in a time when women are meant to accept their passive role in life, do as they’re told by the men who rule, and never suggest they might be entitled to better. Since she seldom gets any sensible answers from the people around her, she writes all her ponderings down in her diary.


Many hundreds of years later, Truzia’s “Pensiero del Giorno” musings will be discovered and read by two other heroines – one during the reign of Queen Victoria and another in the present day. And Truzia’s diary will help them to see their own lives with new eyes. Perhaps it will help them find their own way to new hope and happiness too.


As Truzia writes in her diary:

“We are all tiny, flickering lights that burn briefly in the hugeness of being. Our bodies float uncertainly through life, buoyed upright by bags of air under our ribs, the purpose for our existence quite unknown. But nobody is insignificant, nobody is gone that is not missed, nobody born who never touched another soul, even if they are unaware of the mark they left behind. Every life is a maze with many turns. Every life has a tale worth the telling.”

Of course, we cannot believe everything we read in her diary, because Truzia also has a vivid imagination that can make the dreariest of daily routine become a dramatic and bloody event. She did, after all, earn a living from the art of make-believe and it could be that none of this ever happened at all.


But maybe it did.


THE CROLLALANZAS is available now.

(Image: Study of the Head of a Young Woman by Andrea del Sarto 1486-1530)

Character Showcase- Viola and Cesca Crollalanza

Viola and Francesca Crollalanza may be twins, but they have two very distinct personalities. Born only three minutes apart they share a bond that cannot be broken no matter how, at times, it might chafe.


As the very slightly elder of the two, Viola takes her senior post very seriously and claims she has always been the one with all the burdens and responsibilities -- also the only one with any good sense. On the other hand, Francesca (known to her sisters as Cesca), is the dreamer who feeds stray animals, saves rats from drowning in the canal, and talks to angels–- or so she claims.

Viola has hopes of one day becoming a great limner. She practices every day by sketching and painting her twin, for portraits she sells at the market under titles such as "Beauty Adorns Virtue". She is always thinking and planning ahead, always in control and never seen shedding a tear. Their mother says she is like a scorpion, lurking in the slipper of her enemies, preparing her sting. Nobody ever really knows what Viola is thinking and plotting.

Meanwhile, Cesca worries and prays for everybody, wearing her heart on her sleeve. A sleeve which, incidentally, is often filled with items pilfered from the market. Many a pretty, shiny thing has been slipped away into Cesca’s voluminous sleeves while its owner is unaware. Having such a sweet and innocent face, Cesca gets away with it – unlike their younger sister, Truzia, whose face is fit only for the gallows. (Although I shall leave her antics for tomorrow’s showcase).


Viola possesses a sharp, sarcastic tongue, but this is not the only weapon at her disposal. She also has a talent for producing rashes, boils and other unsightly injury to those who disagree with, or insult her. Of course, she can cure them too, but only once they have begged to her satisfaction. She is a proud woman, often described as haughty and imperious. Impatient with those who dawdle indecisively, irritated by those who question her, frustrated by those who lack self-discipline, Viola finds most people exceedingly trying on her nerves.

Cesca is the sister upon whom all hopes of a good marriage are pinned. She likes to be needed and a husband, in her eyes, is much like a tantrum-prone, colicky baby, so she has resigned herself to the thought of being a wife. The sisters Crollalanza have only enough dowry for one of them to be married, so it might as well be Cesca, the only daughter not likely to push her husband into the canal.

The other two girls will have to fend for themselves, unless Cesca manages to marry well enough to provide for them too. Occasionally Cesca becomes frustrated by her twin, who treats her as if she is much younger – not merely by those three precious minutes. When gentle Cesca’s fury grows it tends to manifest itself in a flurry of flowerpots, lutes and sauce ladles flying across the room. And she does not even have to touch them with her hands to make it happen. She blames it entirely on her angels.


The twins have been known to feud for days over differences of opinion, such as which team to support in a neighborhood game of “calcio” and then it is best to steer clear of the fracas.  

But when all is said and done, these women will always have each other and nobody will ever know them so well as they know each other. In times to come, their sisterhood will be the most valuable thing they possess.



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(Images here: Head of a Woman by Andrea del Sarto 1486-1530), and Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View, by Agnolo Bronzino c. 1542)