They put their baggage in one of the lockers, though Mariana kept her laptop and camera out, and settled themselves in a corner of the reading room with the letters. ‘I’ll read them out in English, and you stop me if you think it’s important,’ he said.
‘OK. That’s tricky handwriting,’ she said, leaning over his shoulder. ‘I’m glad you’re here, because it would take me a while to work out what the words are, let alone translating.’
She was glad he was here...
For business purposes, he reminded himself. To be her translator because he was bilingual, having an English father and an Italian mother.
The letters to Carulli’s brother from 1862 told them that Domenico had met several other painters in London, had visited Norwich and Holt, and then gone to Barrington.
‘But he doesn’t say where he’s staying, just that the harvest scenes are delightfully rustic,’ Angelo said, frustrated. He raked his hand through his hair. ‘There’s no mention of Alice.’
‘Her name might not even be Alice,’ she reminded him. ‘It could’ve been just a note to himself about someone completely different. Unless we find definitive evidence linking a name with the painting, we can’t make any assumptions.’
‘OK. Let’s carry on.’
They followed Carulli back to Florence, and then back to England again the following spring. ‘He says something here about being a drawing master to the children at the big house,’ Angelo said. ‘Mr Fisher was allowing him to live in one of the workers’ cottages in return for drawing lessons. There were two rooms upstairs—one was where he painted, and the other where he slept. The cottage overlooked a poppy field.’
‘It could be our poppy field. And maybe Alice was a maid at the big house,’ Mariana said. ‘I’ll photograph these, if you don’t mind writing up a translation later.’
‘Of course.’
The rest of the summer was uneventful; and then Angelo found something odd.
‘This one’s from early September. After the harvest. Carulli says he’s leaving Barrington under a bit of a cloud,’ Angelo said.
‘What did he do—fall out with Mr Fisher?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t say. Or maybe... If he fell in love with Alice, were they caught together and she was disgraced?’ He shook his head and answered his own question. ‘No, because the Fishers would’ve insisted that he marry her and he wouldn’t have left—or at least he would’ve taken her back to Florence with him. He doesn’t mention that at all.’
‘This was 1863. Actually, he couldn’t have married her, because that would’ve made him a bigamist.’ Mariana grimaced.
‘He was already married?’ Angelo looked at her, shocked.
‘Yes.’ She looked something up on the laptop. ‘In 1863, he had three children. His daughter was born in winter 1862, so he’d left his pregnant wife in Florence while he went off on that painting trip in summer 1862, then he swanned off again the next summer, leaving her on her own with the baby and two small children.’ She frowned. ‘Sometimes these creative geniuses really weren’t very nice and they didn’t treat the people in their lives very well.’
Angelo wondered if she was thinking of Eric.
And he couldn’t help thinking of Stephanie. She wasn’t a creative genius, but she hadn’t been willing to find a compromise—and she’d broken his heart.
And Carulli had just swanned off to paint and do whatever he pleased, ignoring his wife and small children. In his shoes... He felt a spark of anger at the painter’s selfishness. ‘How could he just leave his wife and kids like that? I mean, I understand that he was a creative genius and painting was what drove him, but how could he just leave his wife and kids?’
She looked surprised, and he remembered that she was supposed to think that he didn’t care about children.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It’s not meant to be about judging him. We need to find Alice.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Supposing it wasn’t just being caught together in the Fishers’ house? Supposing...?’ Then he found he couldn’t quite say the words that were in his head. It reminded him too much of the missing area in the middle of his life. What he couldn’t have. What Carulli had had and treated so lightly.