Season of Storms by Susanna Kearsley Page B

back, ourselves. Here, let me take that.” He held out a hand for my suitcase.
    It occurred to me, as I gladly passed the bag over, that no one had bothered to make any kind of introductions, though I supposed that in the circumstances introductions were superfluous. From the way Den had been talking last night I’d assumed he already knew Nicholas, and even though Rupert had only, to his recollection, met Nicholas once, it was a fair bet that Nicholas recognized Rupert—actors, especially young and ambitious ones, made a point of remembering people of influence. Which left only me, and since I was a woman my identity would have been relatively easy to deduce—there were only two women involved in the play after all, and Nicholas Rutherford was already intimately acquainted with one of them.
    And if he didn’t need to ask our names, he didn’t think to offer his. Clearly he took it for granted we’d know him on sight. Putting the cigarette in his mouth he turned with my suitcase. “Come on, then, you’ve only a little bit farther to go and we’ll get you set up with a drink. The boss is away, I’m afraid,” he said, taunting us further by talking as he climbed, making me feel as inadequate and hopeless as I did when my aerobics instructor chatted on easily during a difficult class. “But Teresa is here”—in his educated voice the name came out in its proper Italian form, sounding like ‘Ter- ay -za’ with a skillfully rolled r —“and I’m sure she knows what rooms to put you in.”
    “Something on the main floor, I hope.” Den thumped the cases he carried another step up, nearly hitting my ankles. “This climb must keep the visitors down.”

    Rupert said he expected that was the general idea. “Galeazzo D’Ascanio valued his privacy.”
    That much was evident from the landscaping. Everywhere I looked there were high walls and hedges to block prying eyes. Whoever had first built the house here, I thought, must have craved isolation.
    I was high enough to see the huge expanse of tiled roof, now, and the dark foothills rising behind it, their peaks weighted down with a pale, smoke-like mist that was wrapped round the textured deep green of the trees. If Den hadn’t been behind me on the steps I would have turned to look down at the lake, but from the closeness of his breathing behind me I knew that by stopping I would have risked being ploughed over.
    “Privacy,” he said, “is all well and good, but if this is the only way up to the house then our play’s going to have a short run—half the audience will never make it.”
    Nicholas smiled. “Not to worry. From what I understand they’re constructing a new car park for the coaches on the far side of the gardens, just above the theatre, so the tourists won’t have far to walk.”
    It was a credit to the younger D’Ascanio’s business acumen, I thought, that not only had he managed to interest the prestigious Forlani Trust in restoring the house and its grounds, but he’d also struck deals with a number of European tour operators, who had added our play, and the gardens of Il Piacere, to their itineraries. Starting six weeks from now there’d be people on escorted coach tours coming in to fill the theatre, four nights a week through the whole of the summer. Which explained how Galeazzo’s grandson could afford to give the play so long a run.
    Not that money would be a great worry for him, I decided, as we crested the top of the stairs and came into a broad cobbled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by the splendour that was Il Piacere.
    The photographs I’d seen in books hadn’t been able to capture it all, nor give a proper sense of scale. The house was huge. Presumably in its original form it had been a conventional villa, its back to the hillside, its front façade facing the lake, but Galeazzo D’Ascanio had changed all that, bringing in an architect who’d altered the house according to the poet’s whims and fancies.
    He had set