His face fell. “Signorina! I am sorry! I told Angelo to bring hot water every time, always, when you rang. Have you not been well served?”
She reassured him on that point and went on to explain that she was going to live alone. “I have made arrangements,” she added vaguely. “A man will come with a truck to take my box away to-morrow morning.”
And the padrone was too much a man of his world to ask any more questions.
There had been no rooms vacant in the pension in Piazza Indipendenza. The manservant who answered the door had recommended an Italian lady who took paying guests, and Olive had gone to see her, but her rooms were small, dark and dingy, and they smelt overpoweringly of sandal wood and rancid oil. The shabbily-smart padrona had been voluble and even affectionate. “I am so fond of the English,” she said. “My husband is much occupied and I am often lonely, but we shall be able to go out together and amuse ourselves, you and I. I had been hoping to get an invitation to go to the Trecento ball at the Palazzo Vecchio, but Luigi cannot manage it. Never mind! We will go to all the Veglioni. I love dancing.” She looked complacently down at her stubby little feet in their down-at-heel beaded slippers.
Olive had been glad to get away when she heard the impossible terms, but the afternoon was passing, and when she got to the house in the Via dei Bardi she saw bills of sale plastered on its walls and a litter of straw and torn paper in the courtyard. The porter came out of his lodge to tell her that one of the daughters had died.
“They all went away, and the furniture was sold yesterday.”
As Olive had never really wished to live and eat with strangers she was not greatly depressed by these experiences, but she was cold and tired, and her head ached, and when on her way back to the Aquila Verde she saw a card, “Affitasi, una camera, senza mobilia,” in the doorway of one of the old houses in the Borgo San Jacopo, she went in and up the long flight of steep stone stairs without any definite idea of what she wanted beyond a roof to shelter her.
A shrivelled, snuffy old woman showed her the room. It was very large and lofty, and it had two great arched windows that looked out upon the huddled roofs of Oltr’Arno. The brick floor was worn and weather-stained, as were the white-washed walls.
“It was a loggia, but some of the arches have been filled in and the others glazed. Ten lire a month, signorina. As to water, there is a good fountain in the courtyard.”
Olive moved in next day.