Read Online Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice - Free Book Online

door by which he had entered, he could see nothing. Far off, a score of church bells tolled the hour. And he held in his hand a large sulphur match and a candle.
    Yet he was waiting. For what? For the bells to stop? He wasn’t certain.
    The evening up until this moment had been an agony for him.
    He couldn’t even remember much of what had happened. Two things imprinted themselves on his mind, having nothing to do with each other:
    The first, that the little girl in the café, brushing up against him as he rose to go, whispered on tiptoe: “Remember me, Excellency, my name is Bettina.” Piercing laughter; pretty laughter. Girlish, embarrassed, and utterly honest. He wanted to pinch her and kiss her.
    The second was that Alessandro hadn’t answered his question. Alessandro had not said it wasn’t true! Alessandro had merely looked away from him.
    And as for the man whom Angelo discounted a dozen times as a dangerous young lunatic, he
was
Tonio’s cousin. Tonio did remember. And for such a person to make a mistake like this was virtually impossible!
    But what was it that disturbed him above all else? Was it the fact that in him there was some elusive and dim sense of recognition? Carlo. He’d heard that name before. Carlo! Someone saying those very words, “just like Carlo.” But whose voice,and where did it come from, and how could he have grown to the age of fourteen years without ever knowing he had a brother! Why had no one told him this? Why didn’t even his tutors know it?
    But Alessandro knew.
    Alessandro knew and others knew. People in the bookseller’s knew!
    And maybe even Lena knew. That was what lay behind her sudden crossness when he had asked her.
    He’d meant to be sly. He had come in merely to see to his mother, he said, and his mother looked like death itself to him. The tender flesh under her eyes was blue, and her face had a hideous pallor. And then Lena said for him to go, that she would try to get the mistress up for a while later. What had he said? How had he put it? He’d felt such a rush of humiliation, such a scalding misery. “One of us…ever heard…the name Carlo.”
    “There were a hundred Treschi before my time, now go on.” That would have been simple enough if she hadn’t come after him, “And don’t you go bothering your mother about those others,” she’d said, meaning the dead ones, of course. His mother never looked at their pictures. “And don’t you go asking foolish questions of anyone else either!”
    That was her worst mistake. She knew. Of course she did.
    Now everyone was in bed. The house belonged to him and him alone, as it always did at this hour. And he felt invisible and light in this darkness. He didn’t want to light the candle. He could hardly endure the echo of his slightest footfall.
    And for a long moment he stood quite still trying to imagine what it would be like to call down upon himself his father’s anger. Never had his father been angry with him. Never.
    But he couldn’t endure this a moment longer. Grimacing at the sound of the match, he stood breathless watching the candle flame grow, and a weak light suffuse all of this immense chamber. It was so far-flung it left a dim waste of shadows at the edges. But he could see the pictures.
    And he went, at once, to examine them.
    His brother, Leonardo, yes, and Giambattista in military dress, yes, and this one of Philippo with his young wife, Theresa. He knew all of these, and now he came to that face,the one for whom he’d been searching, and when he saw it again, the resemblance was terrifying.
    “Just like Carlo…” The words were a veritable din in his ears, and he pushed the flame right up to the canvas, moving it back and forth until it lost its maddening reflection. There was his own thick black hair on this young man, his high broad forehead without the slightest slope, the same somewhat long mouth, the same high cheekbones. But what particularized it, what removed it from the general