Mari watches Johnnie ahead of them, sees the way eyes linger on his tall form, and shakes her head. “You’re wrong about him.”
“Am I? He’s been glaring daggers at Sheldon for the past week.”
Mari had noticed that, too, but she thought it might be more about Noel than about her. She still didn’t understand the nature of Johnnie and Noel’s relationship, and now, as Johnnie glances back at them, his eyes once again straying to Noel, she wonders again whether there’s more to the story than Pierce had suggested.
Noel reaches down, grabbing her hand and tugging hard, nearly pulling her off her feet. “Come on,” he says, and then cups a hand around his mouth and shouts, “John-o! See you back at the car, mate!”
Johnnie stops, his handsome face creasing with confusion. “Where are you going?” he calls back, and Noel holds up his and Mari’s clasped hands, shaking them.
“To hell!” he calls back, and then he’s pulling Mari down a twisting street.
The day has turned slightly chillier, clouds piling up thick and gray, when Noel brings them to a stop in front of a squat, circular building.
“Pozzo di San Patrizio!” Noel exclaims, sleeves falling back as he gestures up at the building, and Mari remembers Johnnie mentioning this.
The well named after a place in Ireland and said to spiral down into hell.
A shiver races down her spine that has nothing to do with the weather.
“Shall we descend?” Noel asks her, reaching for the door, but before he can open it, a man in some sort of uniform rushes forward, a rush of Italian spilling from his lips.
Mari can only pick up the odd word, but she knows they’re being told to bugger off, and she’s about to suggest they do just that, but then she sees the moment the man recognizes Noel.
“The Rovers!” he says in a thick Italian accent. “Rovers!”
Noel smiles, but it’s a little tight around the edges as he nods, and then makes an elaborate gesture back at Mari that has the guard—if that’s what he is—chuckling and nodding in that way that men do, and has Mari rolling her eyes.
But the door is opened, and she follows Noel into cool darkness.
It smells metallic, like earth and stone and water. Shafts of sunlight shine through narrow windows carved along the top of the spiraling path that descends into the side of the mountain. She can hear a slow drip, the slap of her sandals, and she wonders how many feet have walked this same sloping ramp, wearing grooves in the rock. How many people, long since dead, made this same descent. The thought seems morbid, but it comforts her, oddly. Especially today.
People are never just gone, after all. There are always marks, always signs.
“I have to say, this is substantially less dreary than I expected.” Noel’s words echo around them, and Mari snorts, poking him in the back.
“Less dreary than you’d hoped,” she corrects him. In the fading light, she can see him grin as he replies, “Guilty.”
It’s growing darker as they walk farther, the sound of water louder now, and Mari looks around, letting her fingers graze the cold walls.
“Do you think this really could reach all the way to hell?” Mari asks absentmindedly, and from just ahead and below, she hears Noel laugh.
“Depends on if you believe in hell, I suppose. I, for one, very sincerely and very obviously hope there is not one, but maybe we should cut this walk short just in case.”
“You just don’t want to walk all the way back up to the top.”
“If you were a man, I’d call you out for that.”
Mari’s laugh sounds too loud in this solemn place, but she doesn’t mind. She’s feeling better now, a little lighter. Her mind has started drifting back to Victoria, back to the book. Maybe she can use this spot, somehow. Is there a well at Somerton? Could it be a place where—
“Didn’t your mother write about Hell? Something about a demon?” Noel suddenly says, and Mari is so surprised, she nearly stumbles down the steps.
Noel pauses, turning to look back at her. “Is it gauche to bring up someone’s dead mother whilst journeying into the underworld?”
Recovering herself, Mari shrugs. “Probably, but when has a fear of being gauche ever stopped you from anything, milord?”
Noel laughs and turns back around, taking the steps a little slower now. Mari trails behind, her fingers brushing the stone as she says, “And yes. She did. Although the entire point of that story was that Lilith wasn’t a demon at all, just a wronged woman.”
Mari hasn’t read her mother’s writing in a while. When she was younger, she’d gobbled it up in secret, spending hours in the library with her mother’s one book in her hands, her fingers tracing the words. Mari’s father had kept Marianne’s writing in the house, of course, multiple editions of the book of short stories, all her articles cut out and carefully preserved in an oxblood leather album, but Mari had never asked to see them. She’d always felt that doing so would just remind her father that she was the reason his brilliant, talented wife was dead.
Not that he needed such a reminder, of course. She knew that now. But that’s how it had worked in her childish brain, and so Mari just had that one library copy, read and reread and finally, shamefully, pilfered in her satchel to be hidden under the mattress in her bedroom.
The same copy has come with her to Orvieto because it goes with her everywhere, even though it’s been some time since she’s opened it. Still, she likes having it near, likes the cracked spine and the title, Heart’s Blood and Other Stories, in faded gold foil on the green fabric cover.
“The First Wife” was the shortest story in Marianne’s collection, almost more like a poem, really, a metaphorical, lyrical take on the legend of Lilith, said to be Adam’s wife before Eve. But Lilith had been made of the same earth as Adam rather than made from him, and she hadn’t been obedient, which of course made her wicked.
Marianne clearly hadn’t thought so, and neither did Mari. In fact, she remembered the first time she’d read that story, sitting there at the long table behind the rows of books by old dead men, and thought how thrilling it was, having a mother who would write something like this.
It had caused a minor scandal on publication, Mari had later learned, throwing churches and priests all in a tizzy. Thinking of it now, Mari knows she’ll want to reread it once they get back to the house. Maybe immersing herself in her mother’s words will bring Victoria’s voice back to her.
“Listen, Mari,” Noel suddenly says, stopping so abruptly she nearly runs into his back. He turns around, looking up at her since she’s still on a step above him.
“I was only teasing about Johnnie earlier, but … truly, you’re not interested, are you?”
Mari’s brain is still on her mother, on “The First Wife,” so it takes her a moment to even understand what Noel is talking about, and even once she does, she’s confused.
“Because if you are, that’s certainly your prerogative,” he hurries on, “and let me not to the marriage of true minds—”
Rolling her eyes, Mari gives him another shove, this one slightly harder.
“Piss off.”