“Does the villa please you, Cassandra?” As she remained silent, he added with a smile, “No, you needn’t say it. I know that it is very different from England. As you can see, the villa is set into the side of the hill, and the gardens are terraced into many levels, both up the hill and down.” He drew a deep breath. “The smell is so sweet, unlike any place I have visited.”
Cassie nodded silently, and allowed Scargill to assist her from the carriage.
A man and a woman, both dressed in rather somber black, emerged through the large gothic-arched portal. The man was quite short, and nearly as wide as he was tall. The woman was tall and gaunt, her complexion swarthy. Her full lips were drawn into a thin line. She had the look of a Puritan woman whose portrait Cassie had seen in a neigh-boring house in Essex. Even as the earl greeted them in his soft, musical Italian, Cassie was aware that she was being scrutinized to the tips of her sandals. She shifted her weight to her other foot and tried to avoid the woman’s darting gaze.
“My dear,” the earl continued in Italian, drawing her forward, “I would like you to meet Marrina and Paolo, who keep the Villa Parese running smoothly with or without my presence. Signorina Brougham,” he added smoothly, acknowledging her maiden state.
Cassie mumbled her heavily accented buon giorno, aware that a flush rose to her cheeks at the widening of the woman’s dark eyes. She wondered crazily if Marrina’s scalp did not hurt, so tightly was her hair pulled back into a severe black knot at the nape of her neck.
“Welcome, signorina,” Marrina said stiffly, lowering her eyes from Cassie’s face.
Cassie wanted to yell at her that her being unmarried was of her own choosing, that their master had forced her here against her will. She thought bitterly that she would likely have to suffer the condemnation even of his servants.
The earl led her into an imposing entrance hall, rectangular in shape, whose floor was made of black and white marble set in a triangular design. At the rear of the entrance hall a monumental staircase of intricately carved oak rose gracefully, bending sharply at the landing on the second floor. The heavy sweet fragrance of flowers hung in the cool air from ornate vases, filled with fresh-cut blossom, set at intervals upon delicate gilded tables along the walls. She turned her attention to the earl.
“These are my prized Brussels tapestries of the history of Alexander the Great,” he said, pointing to the colorful thick hangings that stretched from floor to ceiling along an entire side of the entrance hall.
“And these are your Italian ancestors?” she asked, nodding at the dozens of paintings, some life-size, that covered the other wall.
“Yes. The Pareses trace their history back many hundreds of years. You will find their likenesses all over the villa. That gentleman, however, is not Italian. That is my father, the third Earl of Clare, painted when I was very young.”
She heard a softening in his voice and studied the heavyset man whose dark brown eyes seemed to mirror some secret amusement. He appeared a confident man, radiating masculine vitality, just as did his son. How many times she had seen the same arrogant tilt of the head, the same autocratic set of the jaw.
“There are many similarities between the two of you,” she said. “And your mother?”
“She is there,” he said, pointing a dismissing finger toward a portrait whose subject was a woman in her late twenties. Creamy white shoulders rose above a gown of severe black. She was beautiful, yet she seemed to Cassie rather cold and haughty.
“You have her eyes,” Cassie said, wondering at the curtness in his voice.
“I trust that the eyes are the only trait I inherited from her.”
She cocked her head at him questioningly.
He shrugged and said only, “She was far from a loving woman. She did not care much for my father, or for me, his son. She wasted no time remarrying after his death. Indeed, she had not the taste to last out her widow’s year. Her son, my half-brother, will doubtless come to visit us soon. He is a likable enough fellow, charming and gallant with the ladies, and with an incurable penchant for extravagant finery.”