Her son and Sebastian both stared fixedly at her.
She nodded, her mouth a thin line. ‘I only found out after my honeymoon when I got back here and found her in the house. Domenico said she was his housekeeper, but Antonio told me the truth. He owed his loyalty to me, not to your father. I brought him here from Milan. He and I had been through so much together – it was Antonio who helped me take care of my brother during his last, terrible illness. I needed Antonio then, I needed him even more, later, after my marriage. Without Antonio’s support I couldn’t have gone on living under this roof, knowing that my husband loved his mistress, not me.’
‘God, Mamma, why didn’t you throw her out the minute you knew?’
‘Domenico wouldn’t let me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mamma! You were his wife. You had every right to dismiss a servant.’
She laughed harshly. ‘In theory, yes, but with my husband on her side, what could I do? Oh, I threatened to sack her, but he said if I told her to go they would both leave. I would be shamed in front of all Venice. A laughing-stock. The new bride deserted for the daughter of a grocer! The whole of Venice already knew, of course. They were waiting, watching, to see how I would deal with it – and all I could think of doing was to pretend I had no idea, play deaf at parties, ignore the whispers, the secret mockery, the smiles and gleeful eyes. How do you think I felt?’
‘I don’t know how you could bear it, Mamma,’ Niccolo said.
‘It was like wearing a hair vest. At first it chafed and was agonising, but in the end it became almost an obsession. When I discovered the mechanism in the floor that let me watch them, I couldn’t stop myself doing so every night. In the summer, they slept naked without a cover, and I could see … everything … everything they did. I don’t think Domenico knew about the eye in the ceiling, or else he had forgotten it. He came up here only rarely. He hated sharing my bed. He only did it in the hope of getting a child. They never seemed to sense they were being watched. I could listen to what they were saying, find out their plans, hear just what they thought of me, watch them caressing, kissing, doing it …’
‘Stop it, Mamma! That’s enough! I don’t want to hear!’
She ignored him. ‘I prayed I would become pregnant, because I hoped that if I had his child Domenico might turn to me at last, but then she was pregnant. I was bewildered when she suddenly married the gardener. I couldn’t guess at first why she did it. After all, it was Gina who really ran this house. Gina was the hostess at dinner parties, garden parties, lunch. She wore fabulous, expensive clothes he bought for her. With my money! Not to mention the jewels! I was left in the background, and Venice pretended politely that I didn’t exist. When she married, Domenico gave them an apartment in the palazzo, but she went on sleeping with him, not her husband, and that was when I knew she was pregnant. She was about four months gone and I saw her walking about naked in the bedroom down there. Her swelling belly was obvious. I nearly went out of my mind with jealousy and rage. I broke some valuable glass in here – it was all over the floor, great jagged splinters of it. I felt they had gone into my head, into my heart.’
Niccolo put an arm round her plump shoulders, said awkwardly, ‘Mamma, poor Mamma, it must have been so terrible.’
She leant on him and sighed. ‘You can’t imagine! And then a month after I found out she was pregnant, I discovered I was going to have a child, too. I hoped I’d get Domenico back, but it was too late. Her son was born first and it was him Domenico loved, never you.’
‘That isn’t true!’ Niccolo’s arm dropped and he moved away from her. ‘Papa loved me! I know he did!’
‘Not the way he loved her son!’ She shot a bitter look in Sebastian’s direction.
He had listened in silence, his face grim.
The Contessa spat out, ‘He hated knowing that his first-born was known as another man’s child, was thought of as a gardener’s son, a peasant. He brooded on it all the time. Then one day he told me he was going to adopt Sebastian, change his will, leave everything equally divided between the two of you.’
Sebastian drew a harsh breath.
‘I couldn’t let that happen,’ the Contessa ground out. ‘He wasn’t taking my money to give to Gina’s child! He told me if I tried to stop him he would turn me out of Ca’ d’Angeli, said he would get a papal annulment. He had a dozen highly placed relatives in the Church who would help him get one, on some trumped-up reason. Then he would marry her and make their son legitimate.’ She looked pleadingly at her own son. ‘I couldn’t let him do that to you. You see that, don’t you?’
‘So you killed them,’ Sebastian said.
Niccolo’s head swung towards him. ‘What?’
‘My mother and our father – don’t you see? She killed them. I don’t know how she did it, but I’ve suspected for a long time that their deaths weren’t an accident. My assistant went through the newspaper files, talked to the police and was certain their deaths were never seriously investigated. And I met an old man in Venice one day, last August, who recognised me from when I was a child. He told me he had worked at Ca’ d’Angeli at the time my father died, and all the servants believed it wasn’t an accident. They were all sure it was murder.’
‘Servants’ gossip,’ said the Contessa. ‘You can’t take notice of what they say.’
‘You just said that Antonio always knew what was going on!’
She changed tack. ‘I was here all the time – you know that, you saw me yourself. You were outside, you looked up at me, at the window.’
‘You may not have done it yourself, but you planned their deaths. You paid someone to kill them.’
She laughed hoarsely, her face ugly now. ‘Prove it! Go on, find some proof. You try. It’s too many years ago. There were no witnesses then, there are no witnesses now. You can’t prove anything.’
For the last few minutes Niccolo had been silent, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face. Now he said, very quietly, ‘Did you kill my father, Mamma?’
Her dark eyes flicked to him warily. ‘Don’t take any notice of him. He hates me, hates us both. He’d say anything to hurt us. Ignore him. We should never have had him in this house, I told you that, but you would invite him, and see what has happened! He’s a jinx. His wife jumped out of a window, then that woman he called his secretary but who was his mistress once, she jumped out of the window upstairs. Don’t you think that’s a strange coincidence? Two women dying in the same way? He’s the murderer, not me!’
Niccolo leant on the back of a red-velvet-covered armchair. ‘You were here that day, Mamma, but Antonio wasn’t. He was out doing the marketing. In the old launch. You see, I remember that whole day very clearly.’
‘Niccolo, don’t let him come between us! He’s his mother’s child! She was the same – she came between me and your father and—’