The Rose of Sebastopol [antikvár]

Chapt ! ;er One '. I I .r' ¦ Italy, i8ss We arrived in Narni late on a Sunday evening. Although the door ; . to the Hotel Fina was locked the driver roused a servant who Ti stumbled out with creased shirt tails, brought in our luggage and showed us to a bedroom that smelled of unwashed feet. Nora took away my cloak and bonnet, then I snufFed the candles and lay down. A man was shouting in the distance, perhaps the worse for drink. Instead of sleeping I rode through the night as if still in a carriage jolting over badly made roads across the plains of Italy. Eventually I heard a clock strike five and the rumble of a cart in the square outside and I fell asleep to the sound of women's raised voices and the clash of a pail against stone. I woke to a blade of sunlight sliced between the shutters - it was nearly mid-morning. Nora was standing over me with a breakfast tray and a letter from Mother which I didn't read. None of the clothes in my portmanteau was fit to wear, being too crushed, so I put on my travelling dress again and said we would go out at once. In the lobby I struggled to make myself understood by the proprietress, who was dressed in black and whose mouth was pulled down at the ends, as if from despair, but when I showed her Henry's address she drew us a rough map. Narni was an ancient town built near the top of a hill and the Hotel Fina was at its centre, in a little square. What with the bunch of women round a fountain and the confusion of streets and shopfronts there was no telling which direction was the right one so we set off at random up a flight of steps and under an arch. The sun was very hot, the street oppressively narrow and our travelling clothes too heavy so we stopped under a shady porch while I consulted the map.