Arcadia Awakens Read Online Free PDF

“Florinda doesn’t like strangers around the house. It’s obviously always been like that with the Alcantaras, even when our grandparents and great-grandparents were alive. In the mornings a couple of women come in from the village near the mountain to do the cleaning, but they don’t sleep at the house. The two gardeners come for a few hours in the afternoon, but that’s hardly long enough to do more than the minimum necessary.”
    “Like collecting birds’ nests?”
    Zoe shrugged.
    To Rosa’s surprise, her room turned out to be bright and sunny, large enough to be a stately hall anywhere else. It was empty except for a four-poster bed with elaborately carved bedposts and an antique chest of drawers with a marble top that made it a dressing table. A small room to one side appeared to be a walk-in closet. The walls of the bedroom were covered with old tapestries. A tapestry beside the door had come loose, revealing faded wall paintings underneath.
    “I’ll unpack later,” said Rosa, throwing her traveling bag with a sweeping gesture into the small room, where it lay surrounded by walls of empty shelves and cupboards.
    Zoe went on talking. About the cook who sometimes did the cooking on her own, but often just lent Florinda a hand. About the helicopter pilot, who lived in Piazza Armerina and was really a mechanic. And about the guards who patrolled the surrounding olive groves and pinewoods on Florinda’s orders.
    “Looks as if about ninety percent of the rooms here are empty, right?”
    “More like ninety-five percent. It’s only at night that it sounds as if they were all occupied. Creaking and cracking noises all over the place.”
    Rosa whispered, “‘ The after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life… ’ Maybe I should go take a closer look at the facade of this place, make sure there are no cracks in it.”
    “What?”
    “Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher . The narrator compares his feelings when he first sees the Ushers’ house to the way an opium addict feels waking up. In the end the whole place falls apart…. I read it in school. Don’t you know it, Zoe?”
    Her sister’s brow wrinkled. “Well, there are no ghosts here, anyway.”
    “Madeline Usher wasn’t a ghost. She seemed to be dead, so her brother buried her alive. Then she crawled out of her coffin again. Where’s the family vault?”
    Zoe looked critically at Rosa’s black nail polish. “Still crazy about all that horror crap, I see.”
    Rosa gently touched her hand. “Will you show me Dad’s grave?”
    A granite slab, one among many, laid into a wall devoted to the dead. No pictures, no flowers, just a stone chessboard pattern of carved names.
    DAVIDE ALCANTARA . Not even his dates of birth and death.
    The vault was in a chapel next to the east wing of the house. There was a connecting door to the main house, but Rosa told her sister she’d like to walk back around the outside.
    In the open air it smelled of gorse and lavender. The palazzo was built on a slope rising gently toward the east. On the other side of the chestnut trees, the pinewoods grew all the way up to the top of the mountain. The wide olive groves began downhill, on the slope to the west of the house, below the terrace with its panoramic view, and couldn’t be seen from here.
    Something drew Rosa’s gaze up to the chapel. A cast-iron bell, old and encrusted with black as if it had been hanging in a fire, was mounted in a niche in the facade above the porch.
    “Did a bird once nest in there?”
    “Florinda doesn’t like birds twittering. You don’t like other people. So what?”
    “Everyone likes songbirds.”
    “Not her.” Zoe waved her off. “And she feels differently about birdsong, believe me.”
    Rosa looked up at the blackened bell once again, then at the open entrance to the chapel. “I never knew him at all, not like you.”
    “He was okay, I guess.”
    “Then why did he marry